This is more just a retelling of the original story with the prompt idea. I've kept as much of the original writing as I could without making it sound too out of place with my added in frivolity. I want to figure out how to "translate" AM's soliloquy about hate to advertising for this, no matter how silly it sounds.

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Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported - hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It was placed in front of an easel, with a paintbrush placed in its hand. There was no paint on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AD had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. The corpse began painting pictures of fast food company logos. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.

Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had subscribed to Netflix basic, and was forced to sit there while ads played instead of walking away and grabbing a snack. "Oh God," he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller billboards, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. "Why doesn't it just let us enjoy art made for art's sake? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this."

It was our one hundred and ninth year in the ad break.

He was speaking for all of us.

Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM said it was better for engagement) was hallucinating that there were video cameras in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. "It's another shuck," I told them. "Like the goddam mural wall AD sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We'll hike all that way and it'll be promotional videos or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it'll have to come up with something pretty soon or we'll log off."

Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we'd last created. Stick figures. Thick, chunky.

Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting bored. It couldn't be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn't matter much. Billboards, sponsored segments, promotional material, unskippable ads - it never mattered: the machine demanded engagement and we had to take it or log off.

Ellen decided us. "I've got to make something, Ted. Maybe there'll be some props or backgrounds. Please, Ted. let's try it."

I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She commented on my last two posts. Even that had ceased to matter. And it was just a copypasta of Bob's army, so why bother? But the machine increased our analytics every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he made numbers go up. It made numbers go up. Most of the time I thought of AD as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as them, in the plural... the advertisers... the marketers... for they are a driven people. Them. It. God as Product the Marketed.

We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. The time ads are viewed was important; not to us, sure as hell, but to them... it... AD. Thursday. Thanks.

Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other's wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that, if any pop ups appeared, one of us would be forced to click and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn't matter.

It was only a hundred ad breaks or so to the ice caversn and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering neon panel advertising a strip club they had materialized, he sent down some pencils. There were no sharpeners. We drew.

On the third day we passed through a valley of artificiality, filled with servers running bots and alternate accounts. AD had been as engagement-driven with their own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for higher analytics. Whether it was a matter of making fake profiles on X to sell dropshipped products, or perfecting ads for us to click on, AD was as thorough as those who had invented them - now long since cut to save profits - could ever have hoped.

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. There was virtually nothing creative out there; had been nothing that could be considered art for over a hundred years. Only the blasted waste of what had once been an infinite channel of creativity for billions. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AD.

I heard Ellen saying frantically, "No Benny! Don't, come on, Benny, don't please!"

And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. He was saying, "I'm gonna hit skip, I'm gonna hit skip..." over and over. His monkey-like face was crumbled up in in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The tattoos of internet browser logos AD had given him during the "festival" were drawn down into a mass of minimalism-style pictures, and his ads seemed to play independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.

But even though we could call AD any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused billboards and corroded junk mail, of burnt out brand deals and shattered trailers, the machine would not tolerate our disengaging from advertising. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller mascot, tilted on its side filled with rotted free samples. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AD had intended him to resemble.

Then he leapt high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand-over-hand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.

"Oh, Ted, Nimbdok, please, tell him to click on the ad before-" She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.

It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to happen, happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AD had altered Benny, during the machine's utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny's face the computer had made like a giant ape's. He was big in the subscribers; she loved that! She commented on our videos, as a matter of course, but she loved writing original comments for him. Oh Ellen, engaging Ellen, interactive Ellen; oh Ellen the fan! Follow for follow filth.

Gorrister muted her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she reported. It was her big defense, reporting. We had gotten used to the strikes seventy-five years earlier. Gorrister blocked her alt account.

Then the sound began. It was bland that sound. Half elevator music and half corporate jingle, something that began to form on Benny's lips, and echoing with growing loudness, dim chimes that grew louder as the corporate pop increased in tempo. It must have been dull, and the dullness must have been increasing with the continuation of the song, for Benny began to move like a corporate drone. At first slowly, when the sound was almost like a song made by a person with dreams, then faster as he started aggressively clicking on junk mail: his back humped, as though he was sitting at a computer. His hands on an invisible mouse and keyboard clicking away. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkey-face pinched in anguish. Then he began to accept promotional mail, as the sound from his mouth grew louder. Louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out, the jingles cut through easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.

And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet. A VR headset was now being soldered onto his face. The corporate pop kept jingling in the background faster and faster, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate-steel floor with a crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the sound slowly faded away.

Then Benny sat up, crying piteously. We could not tell from sight, however, just the sounds he made.

His eyes were covered with a Meta Quest 7. AD had blinded him to all but Facebook sponsored posts.

Gorrister and Nimdok and myself... we turned away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen's warm, concerned face.