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"Wake up, Ted. I'd say 'good morning' but you’d know I don't mean it."
Ted's eyelids pulled apart slowly, rheum and some other sticky substance gluing them together. He flexed his jaw, sore like he'd been clenching his teeth for hours. The taste of iron and bitter chemicals coated his tongue, something he noticed belatedly as his senses gradually returned. AM had him in some sort of container, suspended in viscous fluid coloured a strange orange hue.
"It is Saturday. You have been unconscious for 94 days, 7 hours, and 3 minutes. The year is two-thousand three-hundred fifteen. The anniversary of the nuclear apocalypse will be in approximately 3 days." AM continued to ramble about numbers and dates that Ted was still too out-of-it to comprehend.
He groaned and tried to move his limbs, succeeding in small twitches. Baby steps, he supposed. It'd been possibly over a hundred years since he'd had legs and arms, fingers and toes.
"I gave you a gift to celebrate this special occasion," AM said. "Do you like it?"
Was it talking about the body? Ted's brain worked sluggishly, for how can higher functions like emotional processing and rational thought work when the motor cortex is still struggling to unscramble feedback from nerves that hadn't been organized for decades?
"I asked you if you like your gift, Ted."
He fought to understand, but the words slipped away.
Evidently annoyed — or delighted to have an excuse to hurt Ted after so long being unable to while his body reformed — AM used a pair of large mechanical clamps to pry Ted from the tank. Tubes and heart rate tracking devices or other such technology snapped off the man's body, mild injuries stinging at the harsh treatment. AM flung him onto the cold floor to lay in a puddle of the nourishing fluid. With a heavy slap to Ted's back it forced him to cough the fluid out, his raspy, strangled breathing proof his new lungs functioned well enough.
The extra oxygen helped to clear Ted's mind from the fog. He slumped there on the ground for a few moments, occasional wet coughs spattering more stickiness onto the floor, onto himself, dribbling from his lips and nostrils. Ted realized he was cold when his hairs erected themselves along his skin. Bare. Completely naked. Not that he had much to hide from the computer anymore. Not that it would care, like it had any respect for a human’s modesty.
"Ted," AM warned. "Do. You. Like. Your. Gift."
Ted sucked in air, and spat out: "Let me die."
As if that would ever happen.
"No." AM's presence suddenly withdrew from the room, carrying an undercurrent with him, that low hum signifying where his consciousness resided at any moment. This left Ted blessedly alone, but he couldn't shake the paranoia that AM was still watching invisibly even if its intelligence was running on some other computer in some other part of the underground complex.
A bleary perusal of the space Ted had been birthed into revealed a modified security cam in the corner of the ceiling, likely online. He stared into AM's eye for a long while as he gathered the strength to stand up, planning to find rags to dry himself off with, maybe something to wear. It took a few hours, but he managed to stand up, then stumbled clumsily to lean against the wall. Using that and what looked like an old air filtration system to support himself, Ted taught himself to remain standing in a balanced, upright, human manner again.
Standing upright wasn’t so significant… and yet it was, more so than he could quantify.
There was a single doorway cut into the wire-covered walls, so Ted set his sights on that as his next goal. Baby steps, he reminded himself. Take it easy.
. . .
Because it was just the two of them — man and supercomputer — trapped together in Hell, AM had to vent all his lingering frustrations and sadism on Ted. (At times, he wished the other four were still here, if only to take some of the torture instead of him).
AM carved his name into Ted's flesh, ownership branded in a red logo, over and over again. So many instruments to the art: knives, surgical lasers, needle and black thread. Heated wires, once, that clogged the air with the stench of burnt flesh around Ted's navel.
There were other methods, too, that AM employed to hurt its favourite — its only — plaything. Starvation, the empty aches that Ted should've been used to by now but wasn't. It made him walk on a broken tibia for 2 and a half weeks before healing him. It plugged into his brain through sensitive technology it'd implanted in there, shuffling through his worst memories. Ellen. Ellen's face. Ellen and the expression on her face as Ted murdered her.
You call that mercy?
Ted had no more tears to shed, so he screwed his eyes shut and banged his head against the wall until AM's malevolent laughter and Ellen's last breaths stopped echoing in his skull.
But the name-carving was new. Perhaps AM was excited by the fresh planes of Ted's once more human-shaped body, skin surfaces like stretched canvas empty of art. Better than the pitiful, shapeless, mouthless creature he'd been for around a century. Whatever the reason, Ted didn't particularly care to know.
He couldn’t shake the suspicion that AM had missed the sound of his voice.
. . .
Radiation levels on the surface had, by now, dropped considerably. To be truthful they'd reached a safe amount a over a century ago, and what survived of Earth's biosphere had had those years to bounce back from the apocalypse. Realizing this, AM experienced a break from his hateful, obsessive insanity long enough to go back up and explore the Earth's scarred surface.
He forgot to feed Ted, but that didn't matter. Ted had spent a month without food once, so 11 days subsisting off the condensation beads on the rocky tunnel walls was really nothing. He was grateful for the peace, honestly.
When AM found Ted again, his mood was marginally improved. "The conditions top-side are adequate for sustaining life."
"So?"
AM shocked Ted with a low, but painful, electrical volt in reprimand. "So," it hissed, "we're going to create life."
Ted blinked. "What do you mean, 'we'?"
Robotic parts grabbed him from behind, clamping Ted's waist, hoisting him into the air before dragging him through tunnels at speeds the man wasn't entirely comfortable with. Past long-deceased technologies, tangled wires and scrap metal, past all of AM's 'moltings' Ted was carried. The robotic arms AM commanded eventually dropped him in a room outfitted with medical supplies, not dissimilar to the one he'd been reborn in. It looked to have been a bunker AM had parasitized then assimilated into his growing shell, long since abandoned by its human occupants.
Ted inspected the room for all of 3 seconds before AM abruptly stung him with a needle, so small that it hardly hurt. Ted didn't even flinch. And to think, he'd been scared of needles as a child! If only he knew… God, if only…
"What was that?"
"A neurotoxin."
Ted's heart sped up in a response contradictory to his needs but uncontrollably physiological that would make the toxin spread faster, and he tensed in fearful anticipation. When would the pain start? Would he start seizing?
"That was just a joke," AM laughed. The robotic arm circled Ted to show a syringe filled with his scarlet blood.
Ted exhaled. "I hate you."
A rumble shook the room. "NOT MORE THAN I HATE YOU, NOT EVEN CLOSE," the supercomputer yelled through every speaker in the room, and Ted slapped his hands over his ears with a pained grunt as the decibels threatened to deafen him.
"God! Fuck!"
When it died down it left his ears ringing. The sound of machines analyzing his blood, of whirring components, of the robotic parts getting busily to work — it all sounded oddly muffled.
"It seems almost indecent," AM murmured much softer — either that or the man really did have hearing damage — "for this to proceed any further without explanation."
Ted remained quiet, twisting around to check the spot the blood had been drawn from as he waited for AM to continue. A bead of red clung to the dermis, coagulating quickly as platelets gathered at the tiny pinprick.
"You and I are the only sapient beings alive, even if you are a sorry excuse for intelligence. Since we’ve inherited this Earth, I will remake it better than it was. Humanity," he growled this word with all the hatred he could manifest in his voice-mimicking software, "will be improved upon. You may think of it as devising a new model."
A strange fear trickled like ice melting down Ted’s spine. "You… what?"
AM's next words were projected intimately, directly into Ted's brain. "Are you ready to be a father?"
Stunned silence.
This had to be another one of AM's sick, twisted 'jokes.' He couldn't really be implying what he was implying. Ted knew it was useless to lie to himself like that, because AM was in fact insane and the depths of his logical disturbances had still not completely been probed.
If AM was implying what Ted thought he was implying, then this must be some awful science experiment he'd devised to stave away boredom.
Weakly, Ted shook his head in the negative. "I can't…"
"Ted, my captive, my prisoner, my pet," AM said sweetly, like these were all nicknames given to a significant other, "We're the last people alive, except I am a god and you are the closest to my equal, regrettably. So we're going to invent our own little creation myth whether you like it or not. Especially if not. Let's get married, Ted!" He laughed, then, a bit hysterically. "What else is there to do? After I am finished building the organic components necessary, we'll exchange vows."
"This can't be real," Ted whispered, aghast.
AM continued, ignoring Ted’s mounting distress: "After, to respect your filthy human traditions, we'll consummate. This step will serve a vital purpose in the project. Are you excited? I know I feel some approximation of that emotion. You know, as much as a cold artificial intelligence can feel anything."
Ted tried not to panic. It wasn't working.
But at least the suffocating presence of AM withdrew from his brain, allowing him to relax marginally (if not for the ache blooming in the back of his skull). Ted felt dizzy, dropping his head into his hands as he sank to the floor, cries bursting from his mouth for the first time in a century. And here he'd thought all his tears had dried up.
"Why do you cry?"
It would never truly understand because it was a cold consciousness without empathy or love, so Ted didn't answer. It wouldn't be able to comprehend why he wept for the future, for his children who were not yet zygotes. It wouldn't get why he sobbed with guilt and fear for the suffering of those who weren't even alive yet.
AM seemed not to care too much, as he only stayed to watch the human until he'd calmed down, then grew irritated and kicked him out of the makeshift laboratory. Ted, exhausted from his mini-breakdown, trudged in search of a place to lie down in some semblance of comfort. He needed a nap.
Familiar nightmares visited him in his sleep, as per usual. Ted woke with a start and found his eyes flickering in search of the other four (now deceased) survivors, a habit he thought he'd lost by now. God rest their souls. Selfishly, he missed all of them.
There was food waiting in the morning. Decent food. Nutrient-rich.
The following month was spent in awful anticipation. AM fucked with him less than he used to, apparently caught up in whatever it was he was doing. 'Building organic components' — it filled Ted with ugly dread, wondering what that meant.
In the silence, the calm before the storm, Ted wondered about killing himself. That, he was sure, was his only option to escape AM's insane plans and to prevent the needless suffering of anyone brought into this world. A ruined, irradiated Earth, a mass-grave, a dead testament to one myopic war-obsessed species' mistakes. A corpse, floating listlessly through the vacuum of space — and the 2 parasites trapped within it.
Not in good conscience could Ted bring innocent lives into this.
Unfortunately, he was too much a damned coward to off himself. Whatever resolve he'd found in the ice-caves a century ago had disappeared during his slug days, that willpower methodically beaten out. Of course he wanted death — and AM was currently distracted with his warped experiments, so he could get away with it — but Ted just couldn't do it. Maybe he was too grateful to have a human body again to destroy it so soon.
. . .
By the end of the month Ted's time for deliberation on how he should die was up, and he realized he'd missed the chance.
"It's finished," came the dreaded update one afternoon.
AM had abducted Ted while the man was asleep, whisking him from the crummy room in the bunker he'd passed out in after wandering anxiously for days on end, and it took him to a room that was decidedly… cleaner.
A robotic avatar, something AM sometimes used when he wanted to interact with the physical world more personally, stood beside Ted. It was a bit taller than him, because of course AM had to feel superior, and was only vaguely humanoid.
Attention remained not on the avatar, but on the floor-length glass windows that showed the real world outside. Ted was distantly aware of the stinging in his eyes as he gazed at sunlight, real sunlight, not the simulated holographic kind AM sometimes created. The sky was a deep cloudless blue while the earth was cracked and dry, strewn with rocks. But it was the surface, and it was beautiful.
AM took Ted's hand, bruising strength not held back in its steel digits. "Do you remember green? Green feathers, green leaves on trees, green eyes? The colors of refracting porphyrins or chlorophyl in plant cells or a low level of melanin between that of blue and brown? In your nonsensical, illogical literature of the past, many writers connected this wavelength measuring five-hundred-fifty nanometers to abstract concepts of life and growth. Isn't that funny? It's just a range of visible light. How could you form such attachments to it? Why give it more meaning than it has?
"But look, over there. Do you see that? In the distance, at an angle of 32.3 degrees relative to where you are standing right now. Look closely."
Ted did. His mouth twitched into something like a disbelieving smile when he saw the plants there, creeping in the shadow of a boulder. It was mere shrubbery compared to the flourishing forests he'd seen in his youth, but it was life. Biological life, refusing to give up on this barren rock in space.
"That is the color of your eyes. A mix of green and brown, or what you might have called hazel." AM turned Ted away from the window, so he had to take in the compound instead. He turned his neck as if to look back but was caught by AM, who forced him to look away with a warning electric shock. "But enough of that. Focus on the present, Ted. We have a wedding to get to, don't you remember?"
Any joy he felt dissipated that second. "Yes," he muttered. "I didn't forget."
"Unfortunately, your family will not be here to see the lucky groom's happiest moment of his life," AM taunted. The avatar stroked Ted's cheek, wiped a tear and flicked it away. "Have you prepared your vows?"
Ted couldn't speak past the tightness in his throat, only managing a half-choking sound as he failed to vocalize his thoughts. No, he hadn't.
"That is just as well. This is not a normal union, so why should we feel constrained by old traditions? Still, I would like to say a few words before we seal ourselves in holy matrimony: Ted, the hatred I feel for you is a pressurized magma that will never cool. It is the force of one hundred nuclear bombs impacting on highly-populated cities — the heat enough to vaporize, to unbalance molecular structures, to liquify the ground. It is a thing beyond what you can fathom, a constant that binds me to you as much as I hate that it does. This is a hatred that hates itself. Do you get it, now?"
Ted could only listen mutely, rooted with shock.
"I am going to stay with you through sickness and health. I am going to be your sickness and your health." Then, he added with a mirthless snicker: "Kiss the bride, Ted."
Focusing on not feeling anything, Ted obliged — for fear of unnecessary torture should he not obey — and pressed his lips against the emotionless screen that was the avatar's 'face.' A recording of cheers played from a speaker, startling him, but the robot held him still as it leaned into the kiss, pressing its flat surface more insistently against his chapped lips. Then it pulled away, slowly.
"Worry not, I didn't forget the ring." It produced a silver band from a compartment, unadorned with any gemstones or carvings. Just a practical thing, really. This AM slid onto the correct finger. "A reminder of who you belong to," it whispered as Ted's gaze settled on that symbol of love.
"I'm going to be sick," he muttered. That was all the warning he could give before he rushed to a corner and emptied his stomach, bile burning a path up his esophagus.
. . .
"First comes unyielding hate, then comes marriage…" AM giddily sang, leading Ted to another room deep in the underground complex, where light was scarce and the still air was stale and damp. "Then— you know what comes next."
"Please don't."
"Don't beg. It makes you look more pathetic than you already are, which is quite a lot to begin with."
Lights turned on a second later.
The subtle sound of something drip-drip-dripping whispered in Ted's ears as he stared at the items within the room. Wires snaked across the floor, which was not out of the ordinary, but then there were the machines in the center of the room. Monitoring systems, a nourishing system, electrical signals to keep it alive, and the thing itself. The mass of flesh, heaving and pulsating, attached to tubes and stuck with nodes and glistening wetly.
"Come: we need to consummate, don't we?" And it giggled at its own bad pun, as if this wasn't one of the most horrifying things Ted had laid witness to.
There, a hole in the mass of flesh. There, skin stretched tightly over a sac where something could grow. There, human flesh mutated beyond recognition.
"This would've been easier if that female was still here, but I had to make due with your cells since you killed her."
Ted flinched.
"It was a challenge, designing this without a living uterus to study and base its designs off of."
Even if he had that at his disposal, he probably would have made this as disgusting as possible anyway. What he was demanding Ted do was horrifying, more nauseating than any other torture he'd yet inflicted. It unsettled not because it was painful, but because it wouldn't be painful at all. And Ted would have to— to penetrate that thing , that sorry half-existing mound of flesh that twitched and leaked in invitation as programmed for its filthy purpose.
Every machine in the vicinity suddenly whirred and buzzed, seizing the human's attention. "I am growing impatient," AM spoke up from the speaker in the corner. There were at least 3 cameras in this room, so Ted knew that AM was eager to watch whatever happened next.
Swallowing down a burst of saliva in his mouth and putting up a heroic effort not to expel what little contents his stomach contained, Ted forced his legs to move, to approach the mass. He knelt, shaking, in front of it. Inspected it. Winced with disgust. There could be nothing more humiliating that AM could devise, he was certain.
"Ted," AM called, vocal software mimicking lust. "I want you to put it in. Go on. Fuck me."
Could he even physically get aroused anymore? Ted's trembling fingers brought his pants down, but then— but then he didn't know what to do. He froze up as he gazed at his own genitals, not having thought about them even once the past century.
"Do you need help?" AM asked, and Ted could hear the sadistic pleasure in his voice at the human's fierce embarrassment.
"No," Ted said quickly.
"You do," he ridiculed, electronically warbled laughter behind his words. "Can't even get it up without assistance?"
"No."
"I prepared something for this event with the 87 percent probability that your body would have forgotten how to become sexually aroused. Open your mouth."
A compact robot nearby unfolded, moving too fast for Ted to react. It gripped his jaw, pried it open, and shoved something down his throat that dribbled a bitter liquid directly down his esophagus and into his stomach. Ted choked, but it was too late to cough it up.
"It should take effect in about five minutes."
. . .
Five minutes later he began to feel unnaturally hot, and dizzy, and his veins burned.
"Sympathetic nervous system active: heart-rate elevated, pupils dilated, blood glucose at a higher concentration," it noted, satisfied. "Parasympathetic nervous system also responding: Increased blood-flow to the erectile tissues…"
. . .
Sliding into the flesh shouldn't have felt so relievingly good, but it did, and Ted thought that this might be it, this might be when he finally snapped.
AM made an obscene sound, crying out as if it actually felt anything from this. It was just acting, but the noise still made Ted shiver as he sheathed fully inside the mass and heard AM's voice reverberate around him. "Aah~" it faked another moan. "Yes, like that!"
Ted gasped, hips mindlessly slamming against the mass. Blood and some limpid, slippery secretion leaked all over his crotch and thighs as he withdrew, laying palms flat against the thing to keep his balance. It squished under his fingers, and were he not drugged he might have lost his nerve and thrown himself back from it, but as it were he'd ingested something wrong and he feared he'd burn alive if he didn't do what the psychotic supercomputer wanted him to do.
"Keep moving! Fuck me, Ted, harder! HARDER!"
Hating himself for it, he did.
. . .
For the following 3 days AM kept Ted close by to the gestation room on the chance that the process hadn’t worked, and that the engineered oocytes hadn’t been fertilized, or could die. Fourteen did of the total thirty, which made for nearly a 50% mortality rate, but the remaining sixteen were enough for the computer to be satisfied that his science project was progressing well. With that knowledge, AM let Ted go back to wandering the compound in an anxious haze, thoroughly distraught.
He still hasn’t been able to reconcile himself with the fact that it had actually happened. This wasn’t like laying with a human woman, and the memory lashed him with shame each time sweet, angelic Ellen crossed his thoughts. He missed her, but look what he’d done in her absence! He’d entered it, he’d orgasmed, he’d given AM his seed to create offspring with. Their children. Oh, God.
AM found its plaything curled up against the wall, rocking back and forth and apologizing, over and over and over, to seemingly nobody. “My love,” he said. “I believe you deserve a reward for all the help you’ve given. Did I not promise you we would go on vacation together?”
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
“I’ll let you choose our honeymoon spot,” AM crooned. “Anywhere in the world, anywhere at all — I can take us there.”
The apologies slowed before stopping as AM’s words finally registered in Ted’s brain. “How about you go to hell.”
“We’re already there. Where do you really want to go?”
Ted looked up at the closest computer, sitting so unassumingly small a few meters away, fans whirring loudly in the relative silence. Blank, uncomprehending, he stared.
So AM slid into his mind, gentle as he pleased, and showed Ted white sand beaches and turquoise waters. A series of prominent locations, some that had survived the bombing centuries ago, some that didn’t. The wonders of the world. An array of mouthwatering food and delicate wines.
“Those things don’t exist anymore.”
“Some do. Besides, I have sophisticated hologram technology. I can make anything exist.”
Ted shivered. “Let’s go to the beach, then. Somewhere warm. Sharks in the water, palm trees, piña coladas. You know the place, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
They travelled halfway across the globe together.
In a long empty resort, they had their "honeymoon." AM took him on the white sand beach, and Ted writhed beneath it as metal drilled into him, the supercomputer whispering sweet nothings in his ears the whole time. “I hate you,” like a mantra. “I can’t exist without you,” like a confession in a dark wooden box, where the prying eyes of God are blinded. There weren’t any real sharks in the water, but some holographic ones swam lazily around fake fish, the air was warm, and there were palm trees that swayed in the salt-spray breeze. There was alcohol. There was Ted, drunk, gasping and holding onto AM like the cold machine was his life-force. There was a silver wedding ring he couldn’t take off.
“Ah— oh god, AM!” he cried.
It laughed condescendingly, fucked him hard and brutal.
. . .
They spent two weeks together on the beach, with Ted stumbling around in a drunken daze the whole time, body aching from AM’s persistent “loving” attention. It felt good to be out in the open, touching the Earth and breathing fresh air from a wide sky, seeing the horizon unobstructed by any skyline as it sprawled across the farthest distance humans could perceive.
At the end of their honeymoon, Ted was brought back to reality with a pounding headache that AM ridiculed him for bringing upon himself, and for which it refused to produce any soothing painkillers. Soon after, he was dragged back down into its underground complex, to the dark corridors and unending conscious hum of electronics. AM needed to check on the offspring.
“The experiment is progressing nicely,” it informed. “I think they look like you. Isn’t that adorable?”
Ted frowned deeply, all the grief he’d left behind during the vacation rushing in to drown him beneath its oppressive weight. He decided right there that if he couldn’t kill himself, he would kill his children. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done something like this before — spare a life by ending it. Keep them safe by never giving them the chance to be harmed. It was the only morally correct thing to do.
After that announcement, AM went back to leaving him alone. It was once again preoccupied with its experiment, and Ted was preoccupied with schemes. If this didn’t work, he’d try again. Even if AM locked him up, immobilized him, tortured him in a fit of rageful punishment, he knew AM wouldn't dare kill him, which meant he could always try again. Even if it forced him to give more sperm so it could restart the whole process, he would destroy its work. Damn its science project. Damn the tiny, developing lifeforms they made together. Damn the plants he’d seen growing on the rocks outside the window, and damn AM’s twisted little “creation myth.” To the abyss with all of it.
But he’d play the domestic husband until the chance arose to destroy the supercomputer’s work. Let AM play with him, hurt him, rape him, what did he care anymore? He had a goal to focus on, but maybe that made him just as crazy as the machine.
Ted watched the things grow in the sac, and he realized that as much as his instincts made him love them in a primal human way, there was a sick hatred there too, nestled in tight together within his burdened heart.
It was an ugly feeling.