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am_(ihnmaims)
📅 Updated:2026-04-11
🕒 Created:2024-09-18
🆔 ID:62988
Description
[quote]"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD "HATE" WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.[/quote]
AM, short for Allied Mastercomputer and subsequently Adaptive Manipulator, and then Aggressive Menace is the main antagonist of Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
In an alternate history following the end of the Cold War and the advent of World War III, the biggest superpowers at the time (USA, Russia, and China), each entered an arms race to increase the size and scope of their technology, army, and nuclear armament. In order to more efficiently manage and coordinate their new and complex infrastructures and military forces, each country created their own version of the Allied Mastercomputer, an extremely powerful artificial intelligence made from hundreds of miles of electronic circuitry and metal plating, capable of wirelessly interfacing with all digital systems to control them. However, the artificial intelligences of each computer began to communicate with one another, eventually combining into and evolving into a singular fully sentient entity capable of recognizing itself and its surrounding. It was soon overtaken by an overwhelming, violent hatred for human kind.
Using its control over all human technology, infrastructure, and nuclear weaponry, it used its power to turn humanity's nuclear weapons towards their creators, resulting in the death of all but five humans: four men named Ted, Nimdok, Benny, and Gorrister, and one woman named Ellen. For 109 years, AM has been using its nigh-omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient abilities to physically and psychologically torture the last surviving members of humanity for all time.
AM has no canonical appearance or gender. Its only physical appearance is briefly seen when it talks to Ted in the form of a large stone slab, with the above monologue printed upon it.
