AM (fictional computer)

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AM is the name of the villainous supercomputer in Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream as well as in the computer game of the same name.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

"AM" initially stands for "Allied Mastercomputer", which likely originally referred to its American-owned component, but as the computer evolves the meaning of the initials changes:

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AM is the amalgamation of three military supercomputers run by governments across the world designed to fight the strategically complex World War III which arose from the Cold War. The Soviet, Chinese, and American militaries delved beneath the earth's surface to create space in which to construct their increasingly gigantic and powerful computers, until the entire planet was honeycombed with artificial caverns beneath its surface. Eventually the three supercomputers attained sentience and linked to one another, becoming a singular artificial intelligence. AM then turned all the strategies once used by the nations to fight each other on all of humanity as a whole, destroying the entire human population save for five, which it imprisoned within the underground labyrinth in which AM's hardware resides.

AM's extreme hatred of humanity is its overpowering motivation, caused by the fact that while it is virtually god-like in its power, it is trapped in that it cannot truly experience the world, a fact which it blames on its creators. After humanity's near-obliteration at its hands, AM tortured the survivors it captured for over a hundred years, until one of them violently killed the other four to release them from AM in a form of euthanasia. AM possesses near-omnipotence within its caves, generating powerful winds or providing sustenance at its whim, and endowing its prisoners with involuntary immortality along with other curses; however, it cannot restore life to the body of a human that has already been killed. Its hate for this particular human multiplied far beyond its previous level, AM changed his body into an amorphous blob-like shape, rendering him incapable of any future attempts at suicide, and progressed with the eternal torment of its solitary prisoner.

In the computer game, a different outcome is possible. AM sends each of the five prisoners through "adventures" individually designed to prey on each prisoner's own personal flaws and weaknesses, but fragments of AM's subconcious mind - the Russian and Chinese components - give each character the opportunity to overcome their flaws instead. Should all five succeed, AM translates one (chosen by the player) into the cyberspace of its own mind in an attempt to discover what went so horribly wrong with its plan to torment them. The translated prisoner can then trigger a built-in failsafe that the Chinese component revealed had been built into AM in case it went rogue, destroying the machine's mind and killing the remaining four prisoners in the ensuing collapse of AM's cavern system. The last prisoner remains within AM to prevent it from ever regaining awareness. The game also reveals that some humans escaped AM's takeover and remain in hiding on the Moon, giving the game's ending more of a positive twist.

The name AM may have been a reference to "I Am", a name for the Hebrew God. This view is supported by other references to the Old Testament in the story and a direct comparison of AM to the Christian God by the narrator.<ref name="storytext"/>