He makes a snap decision to murder his companions in an act of compassion, saving them from eternal torment.
Watching this horrific act, Ted has the epiphany that death is the group’s only escape. Throughout the story, AM starves the group for months and keeps them alive in agony, and Benny cannibalizes Gorrister as a result. In fact, AM frequently inserts itself into Ted’s mind and barrages him with terrible thoughts and sensations that utterly devastate Ted. But the reader can see that this clearly isn’t the case, given Ted’s ever-increasing paranoia and the extreme psychological distress he experiences from AM’s punishments, and so Ted is cast as an unreliable narrator. Ted believes that he is the only one of the five who isn’t crazy or damaged, since AM hasn’t gotten into his head. By his estimation, they are reprehensible and worthless: the other three men are “bastards” and Ellen is a “dirty bitch” whose only redeeming quality is her role as the men’s sex object.
Ted feels alienated from his four companions and grows increasingly suspicious that they all secretly despise him because he is the youngest and least affected by AM. Having been trapped with his companions inside AM and subjected to the computer’s relentless physical and psychological torture for 109 years, Ted has pessimistically resigned to their shared misery. Ted is the narrator of the story, so the reader’s perceptions of life inside AM are filtered through his perspective. Ted is one of the characters stuck inside AM-an enormous, all-powerful, sadistic supercomputer-along with Ellen, Benny, Gorrister, and Nimdok.
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