If you connected with Ted’s spiraling distrust and the way AM exploits each survivor’s mind, you’ll love how the unnamed biologist narrates the mission into Area X. Like the trek to the ice caverns for canned food, the expedition seems simple on paper—but the terrain and the group dynamic become psychological traps. Secrets and altered perceptions mount as the biologist uncovers what happened to her partner and faces the Tower/Tunnel’s living script, echoing the story’s intimate, harrowing dives into Benny’s and Nimdok’s broken psyches.

AM’s sadism and omnipotence set the story’s pitch-black mood; Scalzi’s novella gives you that same flensing bleakness. Captain Ean Tep commands a ship literally powered by a bound god, and the casual cruelty of this universe will remind you of AM tormenting Ted, Ellen, Gorrister, Benny, and Nimdok. As revelations about divinity and power surface, the tone stays uncompromisingly harsh—much like the story’s final image of the mouthless narrator trapped beyond mercy.

If the ruined Earth under AM’s dominion gripped you—the empty tunnels, the scavenged food, the sense that nothing living remains—this father-and-son journey strips the apocalypse to raw nerve. The pair’s desperate push south, their foraging in abandoned houses and underground spaces, and their near-misses with predatory survivors mirror the horrific scarcity and hopelessness that drove Ted and the others toward the ice caverns in search of canned goods.

The constant, grinding survival in Ellison’s story—dodging AM’s traps, rationing, braving the trek for food—finds a fresh echo here. When Melanie, Miss Justineau, and the others flee their base, every step is a gamble against the hungries and other human dangers. The group’s shifting trust and moral compromises recall Ted’s fraught alliance with Ellen, Gorrister, Benny, and Nimdok, culminating in choices as shocking as Ted’s mercy killing to spare his friends more torment.

If you were pulled in by the story’s surreal torments—Benny’s grotesque transformation, Nimdok’s haunted past, and Ted’s final, mouthless existence—Ubik dials that dream-logic dread up. Joe Chip and his colleagues face time decay, messages from the dead, and a hidden manipulator who warps reality at will, much like AM’s omnipresent meddling. The shifting rules and creeping metaphysical horror evoke the same vertigo that made the story’s last reveal so unforgettable.