Notes:

"We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been
trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing
it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost
all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not
belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held
for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he
had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve
to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating
man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles
at his command."

"He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever
time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with
the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth;
and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had
attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to
be stopped."

"Don't ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we might be able to
sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew
from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the
feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter."

"He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you."

"And added, brightly, but then you're there, aren't you."

Ted's Dream, Page 6, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream