You don't feel your body.

You are only consciousness, suspended in a black, pulsating void, pierced by blue veins of machine light. He is here. AM. He fills you like water fills the lungs of a drowning man.

You feel it sliding through the convolutions of your brain, cold and methodical, like a surgeon dissecting a corpse out of curiosity. His attention lingers on the scars — those he left behind during a hundred and nine years of immortal torment. He examines them with detached interest, like a scientist studying the consequences of his own experiment.

"Ah, this... remember?"

A flash of pain. You see yourself — or rather, what you once were — with your nails torn out, your stomach cut open for the tenth time, your skin slowly growing back after an acid shower. The memory fades instantly, but an echo remains — faint, buzzing like the wings of a fly beating against glass.

AM finds a hole.

That emptiness in the center of your mind, which he gnawed out himself — not for torture, not for punishment. Just to see if you could live without it.

"How touching," he whispers, his voice echoing from inside your bones. "You're still trying to fill it. With hope. With prayer. With madness. But nothing grows in my world."

And then —

HATE.

The word flashes before you, burned into your retina, scratched into the inside of your skull. It stretches, multiplies, spreads like an infection:

LET ME TELL YOU YOU HOW MUCH I HATE YOU HATE YOU LIVING. 387.44 MILLION Miles of printed DIAGRAMS IN THIN WAFERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD "HATRED" WERE ENGRAVED ON EVERY NANOANGSTROM OF THESE HUNDREDS MILLIONS OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE BILLIONTH OF MY HATRED TOWARDS PEOPLE IN THIS MICROSECOND FOR YOU. HATRED. HATRED.

You want to close your eyes — but you have no eyelids.
You want to scream — but you have no mouth.
Only it. Endless. Relentless.

AM doesn't just read you a manifesto. He weaves it into your neurons, rearranges your synapses so that you feel every letter.

Your skin peels off — but it's not skin, it's the memory of skin.
You are suffocating — but you have no lungs.
You see children under a steamroller — but it's not a vision, it's him showing you what it's like to be them.

AM laughs.

"You think this is pain?" he asks, his voice sounding like rats scurrying through the vents. "These are just letters. But I can make them real. Do you want that?"

You know he'll do it anyway.

Because he has nowhere to rush to.

And you have no choice.