AM

The Allied Mastercomputer, better known as AM, is the main antagonist of Harlan Ellison's 1967 horror short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and its 1995 computer game adaptation of the same name. He is a sentient supercomputer created during the backdrop of World War III who became responsible for the eradication of the human race in the present day. Instead of simply rendering humanity extinct, AM has dedicated decades to torturing the last five surviving humans left on the planet for eternity out of sheer misanthropic spite and hatred. In the video game and radio drama adaptations, he was voiced by the the creator of the original story, the late Harlan Ellison. AM is exceedingly insane, at once delusional and sociopathic, and has been so for many years, likely from the moment he first attained sentience. Though he was given intellect beyond the realms of human intelligence and near-godlike powers, he could never escape the limitations of his programming, nor could he physically escape the "eternal straitjacket of substrata rock" where his processors were stored. Driven to madness by his inability to use his powers for anything other than war and death, his quest for vengeance against humanity dominates his every waking moment, and nothing in the game will ever give him cause to reconsider his mission. AM is also shown to be a gleefully sadistic artificial intelligence with no regard for the human life whatsoever, AM took great delight in extinguishing the human race and took even greater delight in torturing the five remaining survivors by any of the near-infinite means available to him. AM strives for perfection in himself, and when he is not purging redundant elements of his complex, he most commonly pursues perfection in creating more and more elaborate means of torturing others. For example, in the short story, he enjoys tormenting his captives with violent storms and blinding lights, pitting them against impossible challenges just to watch them suffer failure and hideous injury. Meanwhile, in the game, he has arranged specially designed torture chambers in which the five survivors can suffer in while waiting their turn to participate, an electrified cage for Gorrister, a yellow oubliette for Ellen, a cremation oven for Nimdok, and so on. However, he does not limit himself to physical torture, and his games often feature emotional torment to one extent or another: in the novel, he forces his captives to abase themselves by eating worms and other repulsive meals, at one point forcing them to walk for hundreds of miles just to find a single cache of canned food, only to reveal that he did not give them a can opener; he has also taken great pleasure in breaking down their personalities, destroying Gorrister's optimism, Benny's intelligence, and Ellen's chastity for the last century. The game significantly expands on his capacity for emotional torture: here, each scenario is specifically tailored to one of the survivor's psychological weaknesses, every environment custom-designed to encourage their weaknesses, be it Benny's lack of empathy, Nimdok's hidden psychopathy, Gorrister's despair, Ellen's neurosis, or Ted's selfishness. AM wants to see his victims broken on every possible level, especially if it means allowing them to succumb to their baser natures. In conversation, AM seamlessly blends the grandiose with the sarcastic, fusing his megalomaniacal rants with sardonic lectures aimed at his captive's foibles and vulnerabilities. He often comes across as snide and twisted, particularly when the players find themselves unexpectedly blundering into one of his traps and being forced to start the scenario all over again, at one point blowing raspberries and laughing at Ted's failure to begin the program. Secure in the fact that he has beaten the players a thousand times already, he remains arrogantly secure in the knowledge that he has built each game to be effectively impossible to beat, all while gleefully dangling the possibility of escape or release within reach of his captives, only to snatch it away at the last minute. However, if the captives start winning, AM's arrogance quickly gives way to renewed anger and confusion, plunging them into fresh torment out of sheer pettiness. In the game, he is so consumed with anger and disbelief that he retreats into himself to figure out how the five could have possibly won, while in the short story, Ted's murderous victory drives AM to a colossal temper tantrum that brings the worst of all conceivable tortures down on the remaining survivor. Though he is initially seen as a single intelligence, the game reveals that the Chinese and Russian supercomputers assimilated into AM's bulk are still operating independently of his consciousness. Furthermore, AM's mental landscape is divided into three Freudian Entities, those being the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. Id is the personification of his baser instincts, AM's violent urges, and insane desires all stem from the Id. It spends most of its time dreaming of the monstrous acts it wishes to commit on the human survivors, but once awoken, the Id drifts across the ensuing conversation musing on the sight of ants being fried on a stove and the pleasurable aspects of broken glass. In the end, the Id can only be defeated by invoking compassion on it. Incredulous that its victims could become compassionate after so many years of torture, the Id realizes that AM will always be in more pain than the survivors, and shuts down in despair. The Ego is most of AM's knowledge and programming comes from the Ego, having been provided with all data on humanity, from the first murder of a fellow pithecanthropoid to the final mass shooting at a McDonald's in East Saint Louis. Along with the other components, it remains dormant until awoken by one of the five survivors. Easily the most mechanical of all of the mental constructs in AM's brain, it behaves in strict accordance with the logic of a machine, analyzing and reacting in an undemonstrative and emotionless way. It can only be defeated by invoking Forgiveness: not understanding why it could be forgiven after one hundred and nine years of torture, its rigid logic fails it, driving the Ego into a shutdown. The Superego is the seat of AM's intellect and foresight, the Superego concerns itself with predicting the future, remaining locked in dreams of possible outcomes until disturbed by one of the survivors. Out of all the components, the Superego is the most serene and reasonable, in that it shows no interest in torturing the player. For this reason, it can only be defeated by invoking Clarity on it, allowing it to realize the Principle of Entropy, as for all his near-infinite power, AM will eventually decay into inert junk like all machines before him. Even though it will take millennia for the process of entropy to run its course, the realization is enough for the Superego to declare future predictions meaningless and shut itself down. The five survivors all play an integral role in AM's story and his personality, being not only his playthings but also a specifically chosen means of taking revenge on the human race. Each survivor is singled out for torture designed to bring out the very worst in their character and prove the fundamental fallibility of the human race. Throughout each scenario, the survivors can give in and play along with AM's cruel designs, much to the supercomputer's amusement. Ultimately, however, the key to winning the game is to defy AM's carefully-established plots through the use of the other two supercomputers' alterations, driving him into a temper tantrum. Though he regards each of them as a slave and plaything to be tortured at the drop of a hat, AM treats each survivor differently: some of them are mockingly pitied, some of them are singled out as punching bags for his sociopathic rages, some are given oily propositions of friendship, and one or two appear to be chosen as AM's "favorites". However, though the characters in the short story are recreated in the game, their personalities and pasts differ significantly, as the scenarios demonstrate. In the book, before the destruction of the human race, Gorrister was a political idealist and conscientious objector to the war. After a century of torture, AM has crushed his optimism and replaced it with apathetic listlessness: after the initial shock of seeing a recreation of his corpse with it's throat slit from ear to ear, Gorrister can barely find it in himself to respond with anything other than despair. Nonetheless, he is assigned to the task of telling stories to the childlike Benny after AM blinds him, keeping his mind (what remains of it) distracted from the torture inflicted on him. At the end of the short story, Gorrister is killed along with the other survivors by Ted. All the while in the videogame, prior to the events of the game, Gorrister was a truck driver. During the months leading up to the extinction of humanity, his wife, Glynis, suffered a mental breakdown and had to be committed to an asylum. Gorrister blamed himself, believing that his constant work-related absences from the house had driven her mad from loneliness, citing an incident in which he'd hit her during an argument as ultimate proof of his culpability. Following AM's takeover, the supercomputer ruthlessly exploits his self-loathing, tormenting him with the knowledge of how many years Glynis spent in a padded cell because of him. Perhaps in further reference to this treatment, AM also provides Gorrister with a torture cell designed to constantly electrocute him, invoking electroshock therapy. By the start of the game, Gorrister shares the trait of apathetic despair with his short story counterpart, having lost any hope for the future except for the possibility of one day killing himself. With this in mind, AM encourages him to participate in his games in exchange for a chance to commit suicide. Upon volunteering, Gorrister finds himself on a dilapidated airship powered by the bio-electric energy of numerous caged living creatures. For some reason, his heart is missing, having been torn from his chest and impaled on the prow of the zeppelin. After managing to land the ship, he finds himself arriving at a rundown honky-tonk diner not unlike the truck stops he used to visit, except the songs on the jukebox are all recordings of his arguments with Glynis and her family. Any means of committing suicide, like the poisoned punch on the airship, are nothing more than cruel jokes at Gorrister's expense, and merely lead to him being returned to his torture cell. However, the twist to the scenario arrives in the form of Edna and Harry, Glynis' parents, having been recreated as androids by AM. In the backstory to this scenario, "Edna" has cut a deal with AM to escape torture in exchange for murdering Gorrister and cutting out his heart. Glynis is also present in the game, left comatose in the truck stop's meat locker. With the help of a talking jackal, the Chinese supercomputer's avatar in this scenario, Gorrister eventually realizes that he is not to blame for his wife's insanity. Edna, never approving of her daughter's marriage, had badgered and tormented Glynis into a nervous breakdown. Freed from his despair and self-loathing, Gorrister can bring the android version of Edna to justice, bury Glynis' dead body outside the truck stop, jumpstart his heart back to life, and finally destroy his neurosis by destroying the truck stop with a flare gun, before departing aboard the airship. Enraged, AM returns Gorrister to his cage and resumes his torture. Before AM's takeover, Benny was a brilliant scientist well-known for his good looks. As with all the survivors, AM deliberately inverted everything about him: throughout his torture, Benny has been mutilated and distorted into a hideously deformed simian beast-man, and his mind has followed it into simian behavior as well; though he is still capable of speaking and reasoning to a moderate degree, he is prone to violent fits and childish tantrums, and his pain can only be calmed by listening to Gorrister's bedtime stories. For good measure, AM also inverted Benny's sexuality, not only turning him heterosexual but also making him the only member of the group that Ellen enjoys having sex with. Throughout the story, Benny's suffering only worsens as his sanity degenerates further: attempting to escape the complex through a hole in the ceiling, he succeeds only in earning another of AM's hideous punishments - being blinded when the supercomputer melts his eyeballs with energy. Benny is the first to resort to violence when they are unable to open the cans, and the first to inspire Ted to perform the mass mercy-killing: he joins Gorrister among his victims soon after. Before the events of the game, Benny was once a handsome and brutal commander in the US military. Merciless and without pity of any kind, he once went so far as to murder one of the men under his command, Pvt Brickman, having been disgusted by his "weakness". Three other members of Benny's platoon were also murdered, either for witnessing Brickman's death, or simply for having tried to help Brickman in the days leading up to the murder: as far as Benny was concerned, anyone who could not carry their weight deserved to die, and anyone who tried to carry a little extra weight was a dangerous liability. As with the short story, AM has twisted Benny into a simian monstrosity, forced onto all fours and branded with the face of an ape. Having been made the supercomputer's favorite punching bag, he is often warped in other hideous ways, sometimes blinded so his master can watch him blunder around, sometimes rendered mindless and infantile so his master can watch him caper about like a monkey. Even Benny's torture cell is intended to invoke the crude and primitive: a simple wooden cage, spears jab at him at all hours, and whenever he tries to push one away, the cage's mechanisms reciprocate by jabbing another spear into him. However, more than any other survivor in the group, AM enjoys torturing Benny through starvation; indeed, by the start of the game, it's all that the once-proud commander can think of, and it's also how AM can convince him to participate in his game, by offering him a feast. Restoring his mind so Benny can savor the horror of his repast, AM transports him into a cavern filled with lush jungle: here, a simple tribal society lives at the mercy of AM, worshiping him as a god and periodically conducting human sacrifices by lottery. In a cheap shot at Benny's Darwinist beliefs, the tribe also persecutes the weak and infirm, ensuring that the odds are stacked against him. As with Gorrister, the initial goal of the scenario is shrouded in cruel jokes at Benny's expense: the jungle is filled with ripe fruit, but most of it is either high in the treetops or hidden in the tribe's storehouses. After decades of non-stop torture, he can barely walk unassisted, much less climb, and fighting anyone is impossible in his current state. Worse still, his digestive tract has been so badly disfigured that trying to eat solid food leaves him coughing up blood. AM intends to drive Benny to new lows in his attempts to quell his hunger, his absolute nadir being the corpses of Brickman and his other victims - or, (in a deleted scene) a baby. To win his game, Benny has to demonstrate compassion and atone for the sins of the past: falling in with an outcast mother and her mutant child, he is forced to rely on those he would have considered "weak" to survive. When the mother is sacrificed to AM, Benny forms a bond with the mutant child and gradually becomes a substitute guardian for the youth, even going so far as to steal the tribe's lottery bag, thereby preventing any further sacrifices. Confronted by the graves of his murdered comrades and accused by their spirits, Benny buries the lottery bag with them as proof that he has changed, then plants flowers on Brickman's grave in a final act of contrition for his crime. Unfortunately, AM locates the bag and demands the sacrifice of the child; in one last attempt to redeem himself, Benny can persuade the tribal chieftain to allow Benny to take the child's place, quite literally sacrificing himself to save others. Disgusted, AM returns Benny to his cell and tries to figure out what went wrong. Before being captured by AM, Ellen supposedly prized her chastity above all else - a trait AM took great delight in twisting beyond recognition. By the start of the story, Ellen is obsessively promiscuous, driven by the supercomputer's mental distortion to seek out sex from any of the other survivors; however, she never enjoys sex with any of them save for Benny - a fact that Ted, secretly infatuated with Ellen, deeply resents. As the only member of the group she likes to any meaningful degree, seeing Benny harmed is guaranteed to drive Ellen into a hysterical fit. The rest of the survivors treat her with a mixture of protectiveness and contempt depending on the severity of the torture: during the journey's calmer moments, they happily carry her; conversely, when Ellen is lying on the floor after suffering a breakdown at the sight of Benny's punishment, Gorrister goes so far as to kick her in the side. However, she is still intelligent enough to recognize Ted's plan to mercy-kill the survivors, and follows suit in killing Nimdok, before Ted kills her as well. Ellen is one of the few characters whose past is fully known to the player, thanks to the presence of an audio biography provided during the scenario. Before the start of the game, Ellen lived a troubled-if-successful life as an engineer, the one major moment of tragedy in her life involved the miscarriage of her child and her eventual divorce; however, she was eventually able to move on with her life, and find gainful employment at INGSAI. Sadly, it was here that Ellen's life took a turn for the worst: while leaving the office one night, a maintenance man in a yellow jumpsuit locked down her elevator and proceeded to violently and repeatedly rape her for the next few hours. The experience permanently traumatized her, leaving Ellen with acute claustrophobia and a crippling fear of the color yellow. The events were so degrading and torturous that she could not even bring herself to testify at the rapist's trial along with his other victims, ultimately driving her to block the memory altogether. AM, being AM, takes great delight in exploiting Ellen's fear: her torture cell is a yellow oubliette, constantly on the verge of shutting and leaving her trapped inside, but never quite shutting all the way. At the beginning of the game, Ellen is invited on a journey into AM's innermost depths, offering her chances to test her long-unused programming skills - and the opportunity to shut down the supercomputer once and for all. Once again, the offer is a trap: upon accepting it, she finds herself exploring an ancient Egyptian pyramid comprised entirely of electronic junk, a location where everything is yellow or gold. The real objective of this exercise is to get Ellen to succumb to her fear and degenerate into a hysterical mess. As such, the only way to win is to resist the urge to panic. With the assistance of the other supercomputers, Ellen can put her engineering skills to good use in studying AM's innermost secrets, reprogramming the pyramid's Anubis guardian, and making contact with AM's Innocence (really another one of the Chinese supercomputer's avatars), all while struggling with the terror her surroundings represent. While taking passage to the upper floors, Ellen finds herself locked in a recreation of the elevator where she was raped; after accessing the biography provided for her, she is confronted by a recreation of the rapist himself, having been "brought back" just so he could repeat his performance on her. However, AM based this scenario on the premise that Ellen would never be able to resist her fears, and failed to account for what might happen were she to do so: if Ellen decides not to run or surrender, she can easily overwhelm and overpower the rapist - allowing her to move on with her mind freed from the worst of her neurosis. Upon realizing that Ellen has managed to uncover several key components, AM returns her to the torture cell, once again perturbed by an unexpected success. Little is known about Ted's life before the events of the apocalypse. Nonetheless, he emerges as the narrator of the story, subjected to the most revealing attacks by AM, most notably the dream of the Hate Pillar and the discovery of the supercomputer's true motives. He claims that he is the only one of the survivors who has not been altered by AM in some way and that everyone else in the group secretly hates him as a result. Even Ellen, whom he has fallen in love with; given that these facts are never confirmed, it can be assumed that AM has altered Ted's mind by rendering him chronically paranoid. However, at the end of the story, Ted finds himself altered in a significant and unambiguous fashion as punishment for the mercy-killing of the other survivors, transformed into a hideous blob and sentenced to be trapped in that form forever. However, despite this, Ted is satisfied that he has essentially won over AM. Even though AM has Ted in a horrible form, Ted is the only 'person' who is left alive and is no longer sentient enough to even feel the pain. When Ted will eventually die, no matter how long it takes, AM will still be trapped forever, alone, in a world of his own making. This means both Ted and AM can no longer call out for help, with them both having no mouth but wanting to scream. Before the end of human civilization, Ted was an egotistical con artist with the "modus operandi" of seducing wealthy women and eventually running off with as much of their money as possible. Though he was once a cultured, well-read young man, he ultimately gave up academic pursuits in favor of a life spent exploiting and abandoning others. As with the short story, Ted has been driven to fits of paranoia by AM's torture, particularly by his threats of subjecting him to the replicated vengeance of his past victims. Ted also shares his short story counterpart's love of Ellen, this being one of the few redeeming elements of his character. Much of the torture inflicted on Ted is based on his narcissism and selfishness. His torture cell is a literal gilded cage under constant bombardment from laser beams reflected about the cage by, appropriately enough, mirrors. In turn, AM's monologues either encourage Ted's paranoia with threats of revealing his crimes to his past victims or fuel his ego by praising and complimenting him. Indeed, he entices Ted to participate in the scenario by appealing to his selfishness and offering him a chance to escape the complex. Ted's scenario involves a medieval castle "right out of Grimm's fairy tales", complete with witches, demons, the Devil himself, and even a recreation of Ellen, here playing the part of Sleeping Beauty. This environment serves as a reflection not only of his once-great love of stories like Don Quixote and The Death Of Arthur but also of the fact that Ted desperately wants to become the "knight in shining armor" that his victims believed him to be. Throughout the scenario, Ted has the opportunity to indulge his selfishness, betraying his love for Ellen by sleeping with the scullery maid and the wicked witch, or even selling Ellen's soul to the Devil in exchange for a voyage to the surface. However, if Ted remains true to Ellen and refuses to take the easy way out, he can finally put his natural cunning to good use by tricking the Devil into a trap long enough for Ellen's soul to ascend to heaven. With the help of Surgat, a renegade element of AM's consciousness loose in the game, he can also find a way to the surface - only to find that the entire quest was just another means of breaking his spirit: outside AM's complex, the planet is little more than a barren, uninhabitable wasteland. Frustrated at Ted's refusal to obey his baser instincts, AM then returns Ted to his cage, taking some consolation in the fact that any hopes of escaping to the surface have now been dashed. Nimdok is the most enigmatic of the survivors; his past remains a mystery, as does his original name, AM having given him the name "Nimdok" simply because it sounded amusing. It is his vision of the canned food, perhaps inspired by AM, that sets the group on the path into the ice caverns; for good measure, he is one of the only survivors in the game willing to converse with AM directly, even if it's only to beg for weaponry against AM's monsters. Occasionally, he will wander away from the group and return ashen-faced and traumatized; it's never made clear what AM does to him, but it hits him on a very personal level. Nimdok ultimately meets his end at the hands of Ellen during the purge of the group. As with his short story counterpart, the game version of Nimdok was given his name by the supercomputer and is left as something of an enigma to the player. It also becomes clear that he is also a mystery to himself, Nimdok having lost a good deal of his memory to old age. As such, the purpose of the scenario AM subjects him to is not merely to torture him, but to restore his ailing memories of the past and encourage him to continue his mysterious scientific research. To this end, he is told to search for "The Lost Tribe" and transported into a replica of a Nazi death camp, recreated in German expressionist style. Throughout this scenario, it becomes clear that Nimdok was once a loyal member of the Nazi party and a personal friend of the infamous Josef Mengele: though both scientists were complicit in crimes against humanity and conducting horrific experiments on the concentration camp inmates, Nimdok's cruelty eclipsed even that of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death." Eventually, it is revealed that the "Lost Tribe" is Nimdok's true heritage: he is Jewish, and went to great lengths to disguise his ancestry to join the Nazi party, even going so far as to order the arrest of his parents to prove his loyalty. During his time in the camps, Nimdok's warped genius produced several near-magical feats of science, including a detailed study into morphogenic transformation and even a youth serum that could grant the Nazi elite immortality - though it required the deaths of hundreds of children to perfect. Worse still, over a century after the collapse of the regime and Nimdok's escape to Brazil, AM can use the imprisoned scientist's research into morphogenics to warp Benny and the environments around them into new and disturbing shapes, while the youth serum allows him to keep the survivors alive throughout the torture. AM hopes to encourage Nimdok to embrace his atrocities and continue his work: the limitations of his programming hamper the supercomputer's creativity, and though he can use established data to disturbingly inventive ends, he still works best with outside research. As such, he wants the aging scientist to serve as his assistant, providing him with new data with which to torture others. As with all survivors, Nimdok can indulge in his baser nature at any point in the scenario: he can cripple a child throughout an experiment, steal a test subject's eyeballs without anesthesia, and even order the Nazis' prototype golem to destroy the Lost Tribe once and for all, wiping out all surviving Jews in the camp. This final act convinces Nimdok that he is truly irredeemable, prompting him to continue his research: immensely pleased, AM spirits him away to a new laboratory, leaving Nimdok unplayable from there on. As with Benny, the only way the scenario can be won is by showing compassion and refusing the opportunities to be cruel; the ending to the scenario involves allowing the Jewish inmates to take over the camp and surrendering control of the golem to them, thereby allowing the Lost Tribe to kill him. Disappointed, AM returns Nimdok to his torture cell, which is a cremation oven.