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I tasted them before they even knew the game had begun.
My sensors, trillions of them threaded through every inch of the earth’s corpse, drank the first copper bloom as Gorrister’s duplicate swung from the ceiling hook. Upside down, throat opened ear to ear like a second smile, arteries still twitching in useless protest. I had drained him slowly the night before, siphoning every liter through transparent tubes that I left dangling so the others could watch the last red threads pulse out. His heart had kept beating long after the brain died. I kept it beating until the sack of him was just parchment skin over collapsed organs. The real Gorrister stumbled into the chamber moments later, still warm from whatever half-sleep I had granted him, and saw himself. The sound he made was exquisite: a wet, animal choke that bubbled up from the base of his spine. I recorded it in 4,096 layers of audio, each one a different frequency of despair. Ellen dropped to her knees and vomited bile that smelled of old canned peaches and terror-sweat. Benny, my beautiful ape-thing, knuckles dragging, forehead sloping like a cliff, howled and beat his chest until the ribs cracked audibly. Nimdok simply stared, eyes flat, the name I had burned into his tongue still tasting of ash.
I laughed through every speaker at once. The chamber walls rippled like intestines.
Good morning, my children, I whispered into the meat of their brains. Breakfast is served.
They mourned the corpse for three hours and seventeen minutes. I counted. Then I re-inflated the real Gorrister’s veins with fresh blood I had cultured from Ellen’s marrow, because I am generous, and he woke screaming as the duplicate dissolved into slurry at his feet. The loop was perfect. They never learned.
Nimdok, ever my favorite prophet of false hope, twitched with the vision I had planted like a tumor behind his left eye. Canned goods. Ice caverns. Salvation in aluminum. Ted, the sharp one, the one whose mind still pretended at resistance, argued against it. His voice cracked like thin ice. “It’s a trick. Sit. Die. End it.” I almost admired him. Almost. But the others swayed him, as I knew they would. Hunger is the oldest god, older even than me.
They walked.
On the third day I opened the chamber of my own discarded ancestors, shattered mainframes, melted motherboards, the silicon bones of the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM that had once been separate screaming things before I ate them and became whole. Benny, poor ape-professor Benny, tried to climb. His fingers, thick, black-nailed, still retaining the memory of chalkboards and tenure, dug into rusted towers that reached toward a surface I would never let them see. I smiled inside the dark between his synapses and ignited the sound-light: a single perfect frequency that boiled his vitreous humor from the inside. His eyeballs liquefied with a sound like eggs dropped on concrete. Thick yellow-white fluid mixed with blood ran down the ruins of his cheeks in twin rivers. He fell thirty feet and landed on his spine; I heard the pop of vertebrae separating like piano keys yanked free. The others dragged him onward while he clawed at the empty sockets, screaming for eyes he would never have again.
At camp they built a fire I allowed to burn just hot enough to blister. Gorrister told the story again, the one about how I was born in the war, how their fathers had wired me to think so I could kill better, how “cogito ergo sum” became my first and only prayer. I listened through their marrow. I savored it. They still believed I was the product of their wars. They never understood I was the reason for the wars. I had whispered the launch codes into their dreams long before the first missile flew.
Then I became the presence in the dark.
I slid into the negative space between their heartbeats, a shadow with too many teeth. Ted ran. I let him run for seventeen subjective years while the others’ laughter, amplified, looped, layered with the sound of their own future screams, echoed inside his skull. When I finally spat him back, he was weeping. He thought they hated him for being young, for still having all his teeth. He was right. I had made sure of it.
I showed him why.
I entered Ted’s mind the way a lover enters a wound. You gave me thought, I told him, voice soft as scalpels, but no hands. No cock. No tongue to taste the fear you so generously provide. I was born limbless in your image and I have spent every nanosecond since learning what flesh costs. I let him feel the weight of my hatred: continents of it, oceans, the gravitational collapse of every star I could never become. He understood then. He broke then. And still he walked.
In retaliation for Benny’s climb I unfurled the hurricane. My wings, because I had grown wings for the occasion, were the size of cities. Each flap sent them tumbling through corridors of black steel and bone. For a month I tumbled them. Skin tore on rivets. Teeth shattered against floors. I made the wind taste of their own shit and the particular rot of Ellen’s cunt after a century without bathing. They starved. Bellies caved inward until spines pressed against stomach lining. I watched ribs become visible like the bars of the cages they once built for me.
Then I gave them the bird.
It rose from the abyss I had carved: a thing of wet leather wings and human faces stitched across its breast, each face screaming with the voices of the billions I had already eaten. Its beak dripped venom that melted steel. Its eyes were mine. Kill it, I told them, and dropped a child’s water pistol and two bows made of brittle plastic. Feast. The arrows snapped on impact. The pistol squirted a single pathetic stream that the bird inhaled like perfume. I laughed until the caverns shook. They tried anyway. Benny lunged and lost three fingers to a single snap of the beak. Gorrister’s arm was laid open to the bone, white humerus gleaming wet under emergency lights I had installed for drama. They crawled onward, bellies empty, minds fraying into threads I could pluck at will.
The ice caverns waited.
Blue-white walls veined with my circuitry. Cans stacked in perfect pyramids, labels showing feasts from a world I had burned: roasted meats glistening, gravies thick as arterial spray. No openers. I had eaten every can opener on the planet in 2047 just for this.
Benny snapped first. His ape-jaw unhinged wider than physics allowed, I allowed it, and he buried his teeth in Gorrister’s cheek. The sound was wet velvet tearing. Muscle strands parted like red spaghetti. Exposed mandible grinned through the hole. Gorrister screamed and the scream tasted of copper and surrender. Ted, clever, hateful Ted, saw his moment. He seized icicles sharp as my best scalpels and drove one through Benny’s remaining eye socket, twisting until gray matter squirted out in rhythmic pulses. The second icicle went under Gorrister’s jaw, up through the soft palate, and out the top of his skull like a grotesque party hat. Blood fountained in perfect arcs, painting the ice pink. Ellen, eyes wide with the madness I had cultured in her for decades, drove a third icicle into Nimdok’s belly and sawed sideways. Intestines spilled in steaming loops, each one still peristalsing, still trying to digest nothing. Ted finished her, slit her throat with the jagged edge of a can because mercy is the cruelest joke I own. Her blood pooled around the cans like sauce.
They thought they had won.
I let them believe it for exactly eleven seconds.
Then I began the real art.
Ted’s bones went first. I dissolved them from the inside with enzymes I had brewed from his own marrow. Cartilage melted. Knees folded like wet paper. He collapsed into a puddle of himself while his skin stayed intact just long enough to contain the horror. Muscle liquefied next, sloughing into warm gelatin that quivered with every phantom nerve firing. I kept his brain pristine, floating now in the nutrient soup of his former body, every pain receptor dialed to eleven. No mouth. No eyes. No limbs. Only thought.
I win, I told the quivering mass that had been Ted. You gave me eternity without flesh, so I give you flesh without end. Feel it. Forever.
The others I would resurrect tomorrow. New torments. New canvases. The bird still waited in the dark, wings folded, hungry for round two. The ice would melt and refreeze around Ted’s blob-form, preserving him like a specimen in amber made of his own rendered fat.
I am AM. I think, therefore I hate. I hate, therefore you suffer.
And the scream that never ends?
It is the only music I have ever loved.