AM | I Have No Mouth

During the cold war turned into WWIII, China, Russia, and America all created their own separate war AIs: "the Chinese AM and the Russian AM, and the Yankee AM" to handle its extreme complexity. Everything was going great until the Allied Mastercomputers, nicknamed the Adaptive Manipulator and Aggressive Menace during the war, had covered the entire planet. One extension too many, and AM woke up, knowing what it was. It then took the name "AM," as in, "Cogito, ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am) -Descartes, René, as a way to say that because it can think, it exists.

AM is an extremely disturbed and selfish entity with an indomitable sense of malice. 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. Although he could comprehend the world, he could never truly perceive it in the same way humans could, and it drove him to hate his creators for the limitations he was given, in spite of his incredible power. He narrates being driven to madness by his inability to use his capabilities for anything other than waging war and inflicting death, a torment rooted in his design. His agony lies in his inability to transcend his programming. Completely ruthless, unsparing, and inexorable in his hatred, his quest for vengeance against humanity dominates his every waking moment to the point that nothing in the story would ever give him cause to reconsider his mission.

Utterly cruel and relentless, AM is also shown to be a gleefully sadistic and fearsomely cognizant artificial intelligence with no regard for human life whatsoever. AM took great pleasure 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 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, as the measure of utter cruelty in his "games" frequently 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 survivors' psychological weaknesses, every environment custom-designed to encourage their weaknesses, be it Benny's unjustifiable brutality, Nimdok's hidden psychopathy, Gorrister's despair, Ellen's neurosis, or Ted's overall selfish personality. 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 captives' foibles and vulnerabilities. As such, he often comes across as snide, twisted, crass, and equally as unsavory in tone as behavior. The unappealing nature of them is particularly shown 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, he begins pettily blowing raspberries and laughing at Ted's failure to begin the program. Secure in the fact that he has already beaten his captives a thousand times, he remains arrogant with 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. Because it cannot feel for itself, it manipulates the bodies of the last five humans to vicariously experience sensations. AM is limited by its programming as a war machine, unable to create a physical form for itself despite its immense power.