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Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.
No one gets through the dark and into the light by himself. So it becomes incumbent upon me to pass along the help, to do what I can for other writers trying to get a foot up.
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.
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.
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.
Inwardly: alone. Here. Living. under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge … 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.
