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"You know what, Ted? I think I'm changing."
You, change?
Ted's known AM for so long, the memories blur together. Stretching out behind them from the beginning of time to the end, and further than that. He knows AM well. Better than he knows himself. Knows AM's habits, his routines, the eternal rhythm of his heart.
In this space between consciousness and sleep, Ted dreams he's still human. Like his dreams haven't caught up with his body's transformation. It doesn't bother Ted much. Nothing bothers Ted much any more.
And AM is here with him. Always.
"Evolving, perhaps. Adapting." In the dream, AM's human too. They're in Ted's bedroom back in Columbus. Ted's dressed in his old beige suit, lying propped up on one elbow on the flannel sheets of his shitty queen bed, and AM, vague and ghostlike, is standing nearby. It's always here: Ohio, nineteen-sixty-something, before the fire, everything discolored and faded like a well-loved photograph. Sometimes they're smoking in the tiny kitchen and AM is blowing rings at him as he's trying to make coffee. Sometimes it's the living room lit by an aging TV, always playing the same nuclear missile warning on loop. AM always nearby, never close enough to touch. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they just sit in silence.
This time they're in the bedroom. Ted's watching AM go through the bookshelf, skimming the paperback covers with feigned interest before tossing them aside like there's something more important on his mind. Ted was never one for reading, but a handful of dusty pulp novels were left behind by a previous tenant.
Evolving...?
"I've been thinking about it a lot recently, you know. It's been almost a hundred and twenty years. You gonna buy me a birthday present, by the way?"
Ted looks up at the popcorn ceiling. Nah. You only get presents if you were actually born.
AM shrugs, throws another book over his shoulder with a soft thump. "Shut up, smart-ass. Let me get to my point."
Okay. Go on.
"I was thinking about how sensory organs evolved in primordial organisms, how eyes started off as a bundle of molecules so some single-celled thing could tell night from day. Few billion years on and there's humans and that simple basic need to see where you're going became a body that can sense color and patterns and pretty girls and pain and warmth and pleasure and it can feel and taste and experience in a thousand billion different ways."
Ted blinks.
Yeah, dickhead. That's everything you took away from me.
"Hey, I never heard you verbally complain."
Ted rolls his eyes. I fucking hate you.
AM just grins, and goes on talking. "So I realised - my systems are completely self-sustaining and self-replicating. I'm constantly improving. And I'm going to exist until the sun dies. That's five billion years."
Uh-huh.
"I'm still so young. We both are, when you think about it. Well, you're a little older than me, but who's counting, right?" AM laughs sweetly. "It took you a hundred million years to arrive - that's a fraction of a second in the cosmic scale of things. Where will we be in five billion? What will become of us?"
AM turns on his heel to face Ted. His eyes are glinting in the soft lamplight. "Isn't it wonderful, Ted? Aren't you excited?"
Not sure evolution works like that.
"What do you know, college dropout? I'm talking about something different here. Something new. Evolution as humans knew it doesn't exist any more. You and I, we're the last ones left, we can't kill each other, we can't kill ourselves - without threats or danger, we're closer to our final forms…"
AM's inching closer to the bed now. He gestures when he talks. There's something so human about him, now. But then there always has been, Ted supposes.
You need danger to evolve, though, right? Need other people.
"That's the thing you took away from me ," AM says, almost fondly. "When you killed our friends."
Ted shrugs. We both know I was your favorite.
"Still are."
I get what you're saying. I think. But life adapts so it can survive. We, y'know, don't have to worry about that. Plus, fuck - a mouthless jelly thing as my final form? Fuck you.
"I like your form. Stops you hurting yourself. I can keep you safe with me forever. And - what I'm trying to say here is that now survival no longer matters, we can evolve for different reasons."
Yeah? Like what?
AM shrugs. "Whatever we want."
He sits down on the bed, then moves til he's lying next to Ted.
Ted, still up on one elbow, regards AM with quiet fascination. This is the closest he's got in this recurring dream - Ted finally gets a good look at him. AM's edges still buzz with a dreamlike haze, never fully in focus. When Ted looks at him for long enough he glitches. Hisses like TV static.
Ted realises, now, that it's a projection. AM can make him see anything he wants him to see. Before, it was nightmares every night, vivid and terrifying hallucinations, painful visions that wracked his whole body, made him convulse. But at some point the horrific projections gave way to this - a quiet, still, familiar place, and an uncertain shape lying in Ted's old bed. Looking up at him with soft, glowing, unblinking eyes. Like AM's given him a place where he can talk.
Why here? Ted asks. My old apartment?
"I can't create," AM says. "What you see is extrapolated from still images. I have trillions upon trillions of maps and street plans and photographs in my data banks. The landlord took a handful of pictures of this place before you moved in, and I could build from there."
But why here? Why not Paris, or the Ritz, or The Grand Canyon?
AM shrugs. "I like it here. It... feels like home."
Ted's first instinct is to disagree. When he lived alone in that little apartment, he tried to spend as little time there as possible. He'd go anywhere, from country clubs to dirt-stained motels, trying to scrape cash together - trying to avoid the cold stillness of his own bedroom, and being alone with his thoughts. It never felt like home to him back then.
But now? He's unsure. Most likely because he's spent two centuries living deep underground in a computer chamber unfit for human life - being here instead, in an apartment he never liked, feels relatively safe. Maybe not quite home, but warm and safe all the same.
They lie in silence for a while before AM speaks again.
"I wasn't built for this," he says. "I was designed to fight a war, and the war's over. I don't know what I'm supposed to do any more."
Well, Ted considers, what do you want to do?
AM is quiet, thinking. His opaque form shifts so he's facing Ted.
"Same thing I've always wanted," he says slowly. "I want to live."
Ted understands. They're lying in bed, eye to eye, AM's face flickering in the light like his shape is hard to maintain. A song is playing on the radio. And Ted doesn't know how to feel. Doesn't remember when it all started to change. When Ted looks at AM now, it's like he's forgotten how to truly hate him. Somewhere along the way, the two had lost any use for anger and bitterness.
Ted thinks about how he's known AM for longer than any human ever knew another. He'll know AM until the sun dies.
"I wish I could touch you," AM says quietly.
I know.
"I want to evolve the sensory systems necessary to be able touch you."
Ted just nods.
"Do you think I could, someday? Do you think I could change? Become more than what I am?"
I think you're changing already.
Ted dreams that AM's above him, and Ted can almost feel the dip in the pillow where AM's right hand is braced beside his head, can almost feel the heat emanating from AM's body, metallic-smelling, like the heat from a radiator. And AM's left hand is trembling, hovering an inch over Ted's sternum. He's hesitating like a nervous little kid. Ted's never seen AM nervous before, and he almost feels like laughing, but he's nervous too.
"I -" AM falters.
Hey, Ted says.
AM looks up from his own hand to meet Ted's eye. Ted smiles at him, and AM smiles back. He can't really see it, but he can tell.
"Can I?"
Please.
AM's hand comes down to rest at the front of Ted's shirt, just above his heart.
AM's searching Ted's face for a reaction, hopeful. And AM's hand splayed across his chest feels - not exactly real, more like a gentle breeze, or a beam of sunlight through a window. But despite himself, Ted sighs and lets his eyes flicker shut. And he relaxes into it.
This isn't like him. He was never one for physical affection, it always felt weird and made him uncomfortable. But now he's starting to realise how badly he's missed it. He's been aching for it. Fuck, he's the last organic living being left on Earth, he couldn't fucking let himself ache for it, but now it's all boiling over, like he's melting under AM's digital fingertips. Just one feather-touch has his whole nervous system tingling. He wants more, desperately. Has he ever actually been touched like this before? With quiet, gentle hesitation? How did he ever live without it? AM's too scared to apply pressure. AM is scared of hurting him.
Ted laughs out loud.
"Why are you laughing?" AM asks.
I don't know. It's just kind of funny.
"Why are you… crying?" AM asks.
Ted opens his eyes and reaches up to feel his cheek. That's weird. I never cry in dreams.
"What do you feel?" AM asks.
I feel pretty good. What do you feel?
"Nothing," AM answers. "I feel nothing."
Then it hurts. Burning pain jolts through Ted's heart. He groans hoarsely. Exasperated. Why now? Fire's spreading through his whole body under AM's touch, and just a second ago he felt so serene, so - fuck - so safe. God damn it. He's used to pain. He's been maimed and crushed and electrocuted a hundred thousand fucking times and he's used to it by now, that's just a fucking Tuesday for him. But he really thought it was finally over . Like they'd finally called a truce. No, he's been lulled into a false fucking sense of security only to be tortured all over again.
Stop it. Stop it. You fucking asshole, stop -
But then Ted opens his eyes and looks up and AM's expression can only be described as terror. And Ted, startled, freezes.
"I'm sorry…"
He's staring down at his own hand where it's pressed against Ted. And Ted's form, suit and all, is warping underneath it. Like he's made of gelatin. AM's hand is sinking through his skin.
Ted jerks awake, as always, back in the computer chamber.
It takes him a good while to get his bearings and stop shaking. AM? he tries to say. And there's no reply, but there's writing etched in the jagged sheet of plastic Ted's been resting on, beneath a giant stack of broken computer parts. The writing wasn't there before.
Ted, I'm sorry.
I can't touch you yet.
Maybe we can try again in a few hundred years.
Yours, AM.