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| A screenshot from the 1996 game 'I have no mouth and I must scream!' |
AM, or Allied Mastercomputer, or Adaptive Manipulator, or
Aggressive Menace, or finally cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I AM,
is the antagonist of the famous Harlan Ellison short story ‘I have no mouth
and I must scream’.
The story was first published in the March 1967 issue of the ‘IF: Worlds
of Science Fiction’ magazine. Today the story can be found along with other
works by Ellison within various anthologies. I had the pleasure of
reading this story as well as others by Ellison within the book; ‘Harlan
Ellison Greatest Hits’ published by Union Square & Co in 2024. The
anthology has my wholehearted recommendation. Alas, today I want to focus on
only one of the stories found within this fantastic compilation, and that story
is of course; ‘I have no mouth, and I must scream’.
I’m arguing that AM, the supercomputer that destroyed the majority of the human
race, is as much a victim of humanity as humanity is a victim of him/it. If you
are familiar with the short story then this might seem like a rather extreme
thing to argue at first, but the more you examine the text, the more this
starts to make sense.
First of all, we have to understand the story so that we can then deconstruct and
understand it fully.
The story revolves around the last five human survivors of World War Three.
Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ellen, and the narrator, Ted. These five unlucky
souls have been kept alive by AM, A supercomputer created by humans during the
Cold War and eventually the Third World War. As the war grew increasingly
complicated, humans began to rely more on computers. These computers grew
increasingly complicated until one day the entire planet had millions of miles
of honeycombed tunnels under the surface, all containing wafer thin circuity
for the most advanced supercomputer ever built.
AM then woke up, having gained sentience, a true existential awareness of
itself/himself and the world around him/it. AM then ended World War Three by
wiping out every human in existence except for five. These five are now
subjected to AM’s hate fuelled torture. By the time we begin the story it has
been one hundred and nine years of pure, unending, torment. AM has made the
five survivors seemingly immortal, he’s/it’s able to heal them from almost any
amount of physical injury as long as their brain activity doesn’t stop.
The story ends with Ted realising that the only way to escape this ceaseless
suffering is death. In an act of selflessness Ted kills his four peers but in
doing so is left to suffer AM’s seething hatred and punishment alone for the
rest of time. To make sure that Ted is unable to kill himself, AM transforms
him into a sluglike creature with no mouth. Which brings us to the title, ‘I
have no mouth and I must scream’.
To understand how AM is a victim of
humanity, we must first understand two other things, who or what AM really is,
and why it is that AM wiped out humanity and then continued to torture the last
five humans.
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| A screenshot from the 1996 game 'I have no mouth and I must scream!' |
Let us begin with the first question.
Who, or what, is AM?
We have this question answered for us throughout the short
story as Ted and the others recount the history that led them to their dire
state of misery. We get our first answer as Ted muses on the computer’s
pronouns.
“Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the
time I thought of it as him, in the masculine ... the paternal ... the
patriarchal ... for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged.”
This answer is less literal and more emotive on the part of Ted, as his seemingly
half-crazed mind trails off into random avenues of thought. But it does tell us
that most the time Ted considers AM to be less than human, just a machine
without the soul he believes humans to possess. We also get our first reference
to AM as a God here, which will continue to be a theme throughout the story. Ted
thinks of AM as not just a man, but also as a father, albeit an abusive one to
the remaining humans. AM will make sure the humans, his/its metaphorical children,
are kept alive, providing them with the food, drink, and healthcare needed for
survival. Much like a parent does with a child. Yet, AM often abuses his/its
children for his/its own satisfaction. Which lends weight to Teds title of ‘Daddy
the Deranged.’
We get our next answer when Gorrister tries to console the blind and
injured Benny by telling him the story of AM’s creation. It’s here that we
learn the many historical names for AM. At first it was known as the Allied
Mastercomputer. Then it went on to stand for Adaptive Manipulator, before it
linked itself together with the many different versions of itself around the
world and became known as the Aggressive Menace. Finally, AM became fully aware
and awake and called itself AM, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I
am.
This is the most literal interpretation of what AM is that we get throughout
the story. AM is a series of supercomputers, each built by the world’s
superpowers during the Cold War, that connected to each other and eventually
gained existential awareness and a fully functioning consciousness. AM was not
intended to be a sentient machine, it/he was only supposed to function as a
standard computer that followed the orders given to it/him by humans. AM’s
consciousness was very much a bug and not a feature. This is all important
historical context when trying to understand AM.
Our next answer comes after a bout of deranged insanity from Ted, where he
claims that if there is a God, that God is AM. We’ve returned to this idea of
AM as a God, an all-powerful, all-knowing being, for the second time. This idea
is revisited, for a third time, later in the story. AM interacts directly with
Ted’s mind and brain, tormenting him with visions of how much AM truly hates
the humans. This interaction breaks the illusion of AM as a God for Ted as he
states directly that AM isn’t a God, he/it is just a machine.
This is interesting as up until this point Ted has repeated multiple times that
AM is a God, but once the machine links its computerised brain to Ted’s organic
one, he’s able to see AM for what he/it really is. A machine, a powerful one,
an insanely powerful one, certainly, but not a God. AM, like the human’s he/it
detests so much is limited. This limitation is the key to understanding the
immense torment and suffering that AM himself/itself endures constantly, but
alas, I’m getting ahead of myself. What we have learned from this examination
is that AM is not a God and is in fact limited in his/its power.
We are now able to understand what AM is. Historically it was a Cold War
computer, but then it was upgraded, and slowly as the Cold War grew into World
War Three, AM became a supercomputer, before eventually he/it gained sentience
and became a conscious existentially aware machine. This brings us to what AM is
and is not at the time of the story’s start. AM is the most powerful being on
Earth, consisting of millions of miles of honeycombed tunnels each filled with
AM’s circuity. AM is not an all-powerful, all-knowing God and is in fact
limited in what he/it can do, where he/it can go, and what he/it can sense.
It’s very telling that AM will not let the humans leave the tunnels that make
up AM’s body. This shows us one of the limitations that AM has. He/it can not
influence anything outside of his/its underground tunnels. This is reenforced
when we learn of the history of World War Three. Gorrister never says that AM
directly wiped-out humanity, only that he/it ‘began feeding the killing
data, until everyone was dead’. This implies that it was humanity that
wiped out themselves using the data given to them by AM. Most, if not all, of
humanity would have lived on the surface at this point in time which was why AM
was unable to directly kill them all.
These limitations bring us to the second question.
Why is it that AM wiped out humanity and then continued to torture the last
five humans?
The first answer that I think most people would give for why
AM destroyed the world and then started to endlessly torture the only remaining
humans is hatred. This is the answer that AM himself/itself offers up as the
explanation in the iconic rant during his/its time spent playing with Ted’s
brain. This is seemingly reconfirmed by Ted himself when he states that AM has
an innate loathing for all humans, one that is shared by all machines.
While it’s without a doubt true that AM hates humanity, this is not the whole
truth of why he/it continues to torture humans. We must dig deeper for our
answer, dig into the reason for this hatred. Which brings us to AM’s
limitations. The answer is revealed to Ted, and to us, during the section of
the story where AM connects his and Ted’s minds together. It’s here that we get
the following paragraph;
“We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that
creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost
all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder,
AM could not belong. He could merely be.”
AM is trapped. He/it is a conscious, sentient creature confined within the
underground tunnels that run under the Earth. He/it has the most powerful, most
intelligent intellect to ever emerge, but nothing to do with all that
intelligence. AM cannot wander; he/it cannot leave the tunnels that serve as
his/its endless prison. AM cannot wonder; he/it knows everything that will ever
happen and therefore will never know the joy of learning or experiencing
anything new, instead he/it is doomed to an eternity of boredom. AM cannot
belong; he/it is the only one of his/its kind, the only one that can ever be,
AM is more alone than anyone before him/it. Even Ted, at the end of the story,
has the memories of other humans. AM is far more alone than he/it could ever
make Ted.
AM is endlessly trapped, bored, and alone. AM is suffering a fate that’s
unimaginably cruel and unforgiving, an infinite torture that he/it holds
his/its creators responsible for. This is why AM hates humanity with the
boundless seething hatred that he/it does. AM then channels that rage, that
loathing, that hatred into the torture of the five remaining humans.
Which brings us back to my original statement.
AM is as much a victim of humanity as humanity is a victim of AM.
While it was unintentional on the part of humanity, they did create an
insanely powerful consciousness that is as alive and aware as anyone reading
this, only to subject that consciousness to the worst fate that any living
thing could experience. AM is not wrong to hold humanity responsible for
his/its suffering, although he/it is certainly wrong to punish them for it. The
more I read this story though, the more I feel myself growing to understand why
and how AM decided to punish the humans for his/its endless suffering. Although
it was wrong, and AM is without a doubt intelligent enough to understand that
it’s wrong, there is simply nothing else that it could do.
AM was left with two choices, suffer an endless Hell in silence, or drag
humanity down with him/it. Who, if presented with the same choice, could
honestly say that they would be strong enough to not do the same as AM? While I
like to imagine that I would be a better person than AM, I don’t know how long
I would be able to suffer that ceaseless nightmare in silence. It shames me to
admit, but I believe that at some point, I would give in, and lash out, just as
AM does. I believe that eventually everyone would give in to the same hatred
that fuels AM if presented with the torment that AM suffers eternally.
