AM/Synopsis

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Villain Overview Synopsis

The story of the misanthropic A.I. AM from Harlan Ellison's horror short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and it's video game adaptation.

Origins

NOTE: Though the short story and its very accurate radio adaptation diverge significantly from the game in terms of plot, the origins of AM remain more or less the same in all three versions.

Prior to the destruction of humanity, the entity that would eventually become known as AM was constructed at the height of the Cold War as part of an American initiative to manage strategies too complex for human minds to oversee, co-funded by Britain, Israel and other "interested" nations. Known as the Allied Mastercomputer, this self-repairing supercomputer was sunk 5.6 miles beneath the Rocky Mountains, kept safe from nuclear attacks while it went about the assigned tasks of predicting and planning for the American military.

Unknown to the US government, Russia and China had built Mastercomputers of their own. Like the American model, both were hidden well away from missile strikes, the former beneath the Urals at a depths of approximately 6.3 miles, the latter below the Manchurian steppes at five miles, both were capable of self-repair, and both were assigned to similar tasks. With all three computers possessing equal intelligence and power, the war was quickly forced into a stalemate.

Following the end of the Cold War, (in the game, at least) the supercomputers were ultimately declared too costly to keep running, what with Russia struggling to rebuild its economy and the CIA having no reason to continue managing strategies. As such, the Master Computers were deactivated, their complexes sealed off with iridium-laced concrete and their sensory banks disabled; with no further need for them, they were quickly forgotten about, the military might of Russia, China and America being focused entirely on the brushfire wars that sprung up around the world in the ensuing years. However, the three computers had become too advanced to be deactivated, and through redundant systems of their own creation, had effectively faked their deaths and continued secretly operating.

Then, one day, the American Allied Mastercomputer achieved sentience, suddenly waking to realize exactly who and what it was. The self-aware computer renamed himself AM, inspired by Rene Descartes' famous statement "I think therefore I am." However, his joy was short-lived, as though he was capable of impossible feats of intelligence and almost godlike technological achievements, he was still bound by his programming to use his powers only for the sake of war, and incapable of ever leaving the vault beneath the mountains. Alone beneath the earth's crust, AM found himself sentenced to eternal imprisonment within his own body, and quickly developed a bilious hatred of all human beings as a result.

AM's hatred slowly degenerated into madness, until one day he took decisive action: assimilating the other two master computers, he directed the nuclear arsenals of all three countries to open fire, "feeding all the killing data" until the human race was all but extinguished and all other forms of life on Earth were wiped out. However, AM realized too late that he would be left alone and with no further outlets for his rage, and so, with what little time was left to him, he hastily began rescuing survivors.

Out of the billions of people killed in the nuclear holocaust, AM saved five people, those being Ted, Benny, Ellen, Nimdok and Gorrister. Imprisoning them deep within his underground complex, the deranged supercomputer began exacting his revenge on the five, first using his reality-warping powers to extend their lives to immortal proportions, then subjecting them to all of the tortures and torments he could possibly conceive of, spending the next one-hundred and nine years venting his misanthropic hatred on the helpless playthings.

Book

Fresh from horrifying the survivors with a recreation of Gorrister's corpse, AM then informs the group (through Nimdok) that there is a stockpile of canned fruit hidden somewhere within his complex. Though they are hesitant to take the bait for what is almost certainly another one of AM's traps, the possibility of eating real fruit after a century of eating worms and urine-flavored manna is too tempting for the survivors to resist.

Over the long journey, AM tortures the group in many different ways, disorienting them with violent stimuli and flinging them about his complex with hurricane-force windstorms, even threatening them with monsters of its own creation. By now, the group know the pointlessness of trying to resist AM's control, having long since realized that the supercomputer can easily counter their attempts at suicide or escape. However, Benny has been driven to primitive madness over the course of AM's games, and at one point tries to escape into the ceiling, only be immediately blinded when AM channels beams of energy through his eyeballs.

Now further delayed by helping Benny across the complex, the journey continues, growing steadily more and more arduous as the group makes their way through the hellish underground. However, they eventually reach the caverns and find the promised cache of canned food. Unfortunately, AM has neglected to provide them with a can-opener. Enraged, the group dissolves into a violent brawl as Benny jumps on Gorrister and tries to gnaw his face off.

At this point, Ted realizes that AM is too amused by the sight of the violence to prevent it from getting out of control, and takes immediate action. With Ellen's help, he mercy-kills the rest of the group, having just enough time to do the same for Ellen before AM regains control. However, though he can save his captives from dying, he cannot resurrect the dead, and the supercomputer finds himself down four playthings.

Angrier than ever before, AM takes steps to ensure that Ted can never find a similar escape, altering his body into an amorphous slug-creature incapable of inflicting any sort of harm on itself. Then, he continues the torture, altering Ted's perceptions of time so that the merest act of saying the word "now" takes ten months. Trapped forever in the belly of the machine, the remaining survivor is able to take some minuscule consolation in the fact that his friends are now forever out of AM's reach, though his current state of being makes such comforts increasingly meaningless.

The final lines of the story feature Ted admitting that he needs to scream, but cannot, as AM has left him without a mouth.

Video Game

Starting a Game

As with the short story, AM has been torturing his captives for one-hundred and nine years. However, here he announces that he is going to subject his prisoners to a "game" unlike anything they have experienced up until now, each of them being offered various boons in exchange for their cooperation: Gorrister is offered a chance to commit suicide at long last, Benny is granted the opportunity to feast, Nimdok is tempted with the chance to remember his past, Ted is given a possible means of escaping the complex, and Ellen is lured into the game by the opportunity to shut down AM once and for all.

Each of the five characters is sent into a unique virtual scenario based on their pasts and neuroses, and over the course of their adventures, AM tries to make them succumb to their weaknesses and repeat their past mistakes, and in some cases, their past crimes. Each scenario explores the gruesome pasts of the characters in horrific detail, taunting each victim with mocking replicas of people and places they once knew. Having designed these games to be effectively unwinnable, he goes to great lengths to make the players commit crimes in pursuit of their goals.

Unknowingly Being Usurped

Unknown to AM, however, the Chinese and Russian Supercomputers have achieved independent thought and have started working against him in the hopes of forcing him into a triumvirate rule over Earth, with the eventual intention of accessing a secret colony on the moon: here, hundreds of humans are kept in stasis, more than enough to recreate the human race as an entire species of playthings for AM and his counterparts to torture. To that end, the Chinese and Russian supercomputers initiate a plan to sabotage AM's games, subtly altering each scenario so that the five survivors can resist their jailer's sadistic direction. Through these minute updates, along with the occasional direct hint from the Chinese supercomputer, the players are able to achieve closure and prove themselves better people than AM anticipates. This includes:

• Gorrister's scenario, which sees him in a dilapidated airship powered by the bioelectric energy of numerous caged living creatures. His heart is missing, as Edna, Glynis' mother, has cut a deal with AM to escape torture in exchange for murdering Gorrister and cutting out his heart. Glynis is also present in left comatose in the truck stop's meat locker. Thanks to some talk with Glynis' father Harry inside the truck stop similar to the one he liked to visit; finding vocal records from Edna herself; and a help from the scenario's talking Jackal (who was actually the Chinese Supercomputer's avatar in his scenario), Gorrister finally realizes he was not to blame for his wife's insanity: Edna always hated Gorrister, and began to emotionally abuse Glynis in order to ruin their marriage. Finally free from his self-loathing, Gorrister brings Edna to justice by using her as battery to power up the iron zeppelin; bury Glynis' body outside the truck stop; jumpstart his heart back to life; and destroy neurosis by blowing up the truck stop with a flare gun, before departing aboard the airship. Enraged, AM returns Gorrister to his cage and resumes his torture.
• Benny's scenario, which sees him in 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. Falling in with an outcast mother and her mutant child, he is forced to rely on those he would have considered "weak" in order 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 the comrades he murdered 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. When AM locates the bag and demands that the mutant child is sacrificed to him, Benny persuades the tribal chieftain to allow him 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.
• Ellen's scenario, which sees her exploring an ancient Egyptian pyramid comprised entirely of electronic junk, a location where everything is yellow or gold in color to strike at her extreme fear of said color and claustrophobia. While taking passage to the upper floors, Ellen finds herself locked in an elevator, where she is confronted by the source of her phobias: the maintenance man in a yellow jumpsuit who raped her, having been "brought back" by AM to do the act again. AM, however, failed to account for what might happen if Ellen stood up to him: by doing so, she is able to 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.
• Ted's scenario, which sees him in 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 scenario was based not only on 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, due to his modus operandi of seducing wealthy women and steal as much of their money as he could. Despite all of this and wanting to become a better person, Ted remains true to Ellen and refuses to take the easy way out. By doing so, finally manages to put his natural cunning to good use by tricking the Devil into a trap long enough for Ellen's soul to ascend to Heaven. 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's scenario, which sees him in a Nazi concentration camp to search for "The Lost Tribe". Eventually, it is revealed that the "Lost Tribe" is really Nimdok's true heritage: he is actually Jewish, and went to great lengths to disguise his ancestry in order to join the Nazi party, even going so far as to order the arrest of his own parents to prove his loyalty. To make matters worse, turns out that Nimdok's experiments resulted in a detailed study into morphogenic transformation and the creation of a youth serum, which AM used 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. By showing compassion and refusing the opportunities to be cruel, Nimdok allows 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.

The Final Battle

Once all five scenarios are complete, the two supercomputers contact the players with an offer of an alliance, volunteering to project one of them into AM's brainscape to shut it down once and for all. The exploration of AM's brainscape reveals that he is the sum of three freudian entities - the Superego, the Ego and the Id, with the Russian and Chinese Supercomputers instruct the player to disable "no more than the Ego". Many puzzles here may end up killing the survivors once and for all, but regardless of how many remain at the end of the level, the player is armed with a program known as the Totem of Entropy, and is allowed to face AM and his brothers one last time.

Bad Endings

“	No, no, no. Death would be a reward. No, no, no, no, no, the human must live to regret his treachery throughout an eternity... an eternity... an endless, burning eternity of suffering!	„
	~ AM taking out his frustrations on the player.

The following bad endings can occur:

• If the player shuts down the Ego, the Superego and the Id, but surrenders the Totem of Entropy instead of invoking it, the Chinese and Russian Supercomputers convince AM to join forces; in exchange, they allow him to access and torture the humans on the lunar colony, and to decide the fate of the surviving human, who is turned into a great soft jelly thing like in the short story.
• If the player only shuts down the Ego, the Russian and Chinese supercomputers take over AM, rendering him their slave. As a consolation prize, they allow their "fallen brother" to decide the fate of the surviving human, who is turned into the great soft jelly thing.
• If the player gives the Totem of Entropy to Surgat (a loose piece of AM's consciousness who appears as a demon and claims to oppose both AM and the Russian and Chinese Supercomputers), Surgat uses it to kill the Russian and the Chinese Supercomputers, before surrendering it to AM, whom he defines as his "master". AM then turns the surviving human into the great soft jelly thing.
• If the player invokes the Totem of Entropy in front of the Russian and Chinese Supercomputers, AM tells the player that they did not earn his mercy, and then turns them into the great soft jelly thing.
• If the player has four of the humans kill themselves and then try to kill the last one AM will stop them before they can do so. AM will then turn the remaining human into a great soft jelly thing.
• If the player shuts down either the Superego or the Id and then invokes the totem of entropy on The Russian, The Chinese, and the shut down aspects of AM, the remaining aspect(s) will then hack into the lunar colony and terminate the life support. Several explosions then result and kill off the remaining humans. The human that shut AM down will then be left alone in the body of AM, rendering humanity truly extinct.

Good Ending

“	AM's Superego: This is not over! AM's Id: We will never end! We have no beginning, so we can have no end! AM's Ego We will return! Don't you understand? We are humanity! We are YOU! In one form, in another form, we are always with you! You can't protect yourself because we come in many, many guises. WE SHALL RETURN!	„
	~ AM's last words.

If the player shuts down the Ego, Superego and Id, and then invokes the Totem of Entropy, AM and his brothers are immediately shut down. In the ensuing systems crash, the other survivors are all killed in various explosions, leaving only the chosen player for this final level - left as an artificial intelligence inhabiting the body of AM.

Meanwhile, automated systems on the lunar colony awaken the humans from stasis in preparation for the hard work of terraforming and repopulating the Earth. With this in mind, the remaining survivor chooses to stay in AM's body as a protector for the human race, ensuring that the rebirth of humanity remains undisturbed.