Harlan Ellison

As for all the tomorrows: I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I don’t doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling!

Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear:

If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.

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 Big Sam was the only teleport in the crowd. And there was something else; something I’m afraid and ashamed, even today, to say.

I think we were all afraid of losing the business.

We spend billions more on cosmetics each year than education, and if it continues to spiral, soon enough we will come to a time when we may contemplate

First there was love, and then there was no–love. But in its place did not come the absence of love, the emptiness that the going of light and heat had left. Another moved in to take its place.

In its place came hate.

Rung in by a watchful God who allotted only certain amounts of fear and depravity to each sleeptime.

Genesis refers to sin that coucheth at the door, or croucheth at the door, and so this was no new thing, but old, so very old, as old as the senseless acts that had given it birth, and the madness that was causing it to mature, and the guilty sorrow—the lonelyache—that would inevitably cause it to devour itself and all within its sight.

They might have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said, with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.

There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But we didn’t try to crawl up to see.