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Ted couldn’t believe what he’d done. Now, as he faced the punishment that was bound to happen, he regretted it. Why had he killed them? If he’d just left them alive, they could all suffer together, and he wouldn’t be a stupid jelly-slug thing! But that would be selfish, wouldn’t it?
It’d been a while since that happened, so there wasn’t really anything he could do about it. Afterwards, AM went back to the torturing, but it mostly happened in his psychodramas, where the supercomputer either let him cry about not having a body anymore, or just physical torture. But for a while, AM’d just… left him in reality. To exist. He hadn’t tried to stab Ted in ages, and… well, honestly, it felt really weird.
That also gave him a lot of time to think. Time to think about his future, his present, and most importantly, his past.
Just what did he do before he got here? Nothing good, from what he remembered. And his memory of the past never deteriorated, or faltered, all the centuries he was here. He couldn’t say the same about his memory of the time he’d spent in AM’s complex. Though he wasn’t sure just how long he’d been here, he knew he regretted his ‘past life’ (so to speak) with everything he had in him.
He missed the other four. In fact, he spent most of his time now thinking about them. Not just them, really, more about what they reminded him of.
He could slightly recall them sitting around a fire, once. They were talking about their lives before. They were talking about their love lives too, at some point. He’d obviously lied about having a grand house, a wonderful wife, and so on. The rest were fairly normal as well, but he could feel the hint of jealousy and contempt directed to him. Then there was Benny.
Once he found out Benny was homosexual, he’d really not known how to react. Ted was raised in a Christian house. Even though he wasn’t really religious anymore, he’d been taught that liking a boy was bad, and he’d sort of held onto that, though he still couldn’t remember why. When Benny… confessed (it didn’t feel so much ‘coming out’ as confessing), he’d remembered the time he’d told his father he’d liked a boy. He was locked out of the house for a day, until he’d promised to ‘never do something so perverted’ again. So he simply accepted who Benny was. It was post-end-of-the-world, it didn’t really matter that much either.
Nimdok… well, he was sure that wasn’t his name, but it was fine. He couldn’t remember either way. Nimdok was old, German, a scientist, and apparently similar to AM? The supercomputer never really clarified on that, but considering his age, he could guess. Ted didn’t really care about him that much.
Gorrister, he remembered well. Maybe because they were brought up similarly. They were both Christian, actually. The other was a lot more religious though. He remembered seeing Gorrister praying for the five of them, near the start of their torture. Back when they still had hope. He’d stopped praying though, later on. That made sense.
The last one, yet the most important. Ellen… was that her name? Yes, Ellen was the one who made him regret everything. After she’d told him about what she’d been through, that one night, he’d recalled what he’d done. Then, he would quickly change the subject, and brush off any questions about the sudden change in demeanor.
Why had he done that? Well, there was one time, a woman he’d really, truly liked. Not just for her money, no. But something went wrong, then. He remembered finding out he’d be a father, and he remembered the joy in her eyes. And then, he remembered the miscarriage. The children, both of them, died. They were twins, two children who never got to see the light of day, who never got to meet their father. The woman, he couldn’t recall her name, never wanted to see him again. And he couldn’t blame her.
From then on, he’d swore to never love again. And Ellen was a constant reminder of how he’d broken that promise.
And AM was the source of all this extra pain. Anyone could tell AM favoured him, if there was anyone left to witness any of this. He’d told Ted multiple times, and probably teased the others about it. Ted himself could not tell why, for the life of him, but it wasn’t like that made his life any better. In fact, it just meant he’d get tortured and picked at more than the others. Oh, he wished he could’ve died with the others.
But he was also grateful to AM. It’s strange, yes, but because of AM, he wouldn’t have to face his parents, his ex-wife (or was he still with her? They never divorced…), or any of the women he scammed. Because of AM, he found some people he could at the very least be honest with. Even if they were gone now, and he wasn’t always truthful with them, it felt nice to have done something selfless for once in his life.
Back in the real world, Ted snapped out of his little trance. He sorta… slid around the place, looking for a puddle. His body had started stiffening up, a sign he hadn’t drank (and by drank, he meant absorbed through his skin) anything for the past few hours. Seems he’d forgotten while thinking to himself. For his slug-like amorphous ‘body’, that was a death sentence. And for some reason, he didn’t really feel like dying today.