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Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.
None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal …
My mind was a roiling tinkling chittering softness of brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy.
AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the pock marks he had created in one hundred and nine years.
All to bring me to full realization of why it had done this to the five of us; why it had saved us for himself.
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.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time.
He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you.
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
whom we created because our time was badly spent
I have no mouth. And I must scream.
We allow terrible things to happen, and turn our faces away in horror, but we never commit ourselves.
“In the kingdom of the blind, a one-eyed man is God.”
Contrariwise, in a world of absolute beauty, who labels ugliness?
a Land That Never Existed.
“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.”
crumbled, shivered along its width and imploded, plunging in upon itself, dumping jigsaw pieces into the hollow structure.
The wreckers knew nothing of the gas line, which had long-since gone to disuse and the turnoff of a small valve on the third floor, which had originally jetted the vapor to the upper floor. Having no knowledge of the line, and having cleared all safety precautions with the city gas company as to existing
scattered showers.
Forty years past, a billionaire named Rouse. A desire for flaming desserts. A forgotten gas main. A struggle for a used razor blade. A short cut through an alley. Gusty winds …
the sounds of men shackled helplessly to an open coffin)
