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“He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of him, with the all-mind soulless world he had become.” 

There is nothing that drives AM but hatred and the desire for revenge. It plans to keep the humans alive forever, or for however long they last, to satisfy its cruelty. But of course, there is no satisfaction forthcoming. It is an endless loop with no way for AM to decide that it has been avenged enough. And without the humans, AM would be alone with its own mind. There is no growth and no expansion for AM. There is only a relentless and self-defeating hatred at its core. 

“I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be.”

After Ted kills the others, AM wants to make sure that Ted cannot kill himself now that it seems possible to do so. AM transforms Ted into something that cannot act on its own behalf. He leaves his mind intact, but he will no longer be able to do anything beyond thinking. It is telling, then, that AM’s greatest punishment is to remake Ted in its own image. The worst thing that AM can imagine doing is replicating its own immobile being.

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