AM, the supercomputer in which the story’s characters are trapped, isn’t just one machine—it is an interconnected supercomputer whose reach encompasses the entire Earth. This allows for multiple interpretations about the symbolism behind AM, the most prominent of which are his allegorical similarities to either God or hell. Because AM can’t be reduced to a singular entity, the closest correlation the narrator Ted can make is that AM’s seemingly limitless power is akin to a god’s. Ted often conceives of the supercomputer as a kind of divine “he” rather than an “it,” and much of the figurative language and imagery that Ellison uses throughout the story alludes to AM as a god. In the beginning of the story, AM throws various Old Testament plagues on the group, positing this act of creation as one of self-indulgence rather than divine love: “Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts—it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.” Ted associates AM with a “God as Daddy the Deranged” figure because AM is seemingly capable of “limitless miracles,” but these miracles further torment the group. For example, AM sends them on a trek through its miles of underground infrastructure, providing them a bastardized version of “manna” which “tasted like boiled boar urine,” paralleling the biblical Book of Exodus, in which God gives manna and water to the suffering Israelites in the desert. AM appears to them later as a “burning bush,” which also parallels Exodus, in which God appears to Moses as a burning bush. In addition, AM symbolizes a god figure because it has the power to transform the groups’ mental states and physical bodies on a whim, limiting their free will much like a god exerts predestination over people.
On the other hand, AM could be interpreted as an allegory for hell. As the group moves through AM’s “belly” toward the canned goods Nimdok hallucinates are in the ice caverns, much of their journey mimics the journey Dante and Virgil take in Dante’s Inferno. Even before Ted figures out a way to beat AM, Ellison foreshadows that perhaps AM’s power isn’t quite as all-encompassing as that of a god, since it isn’t capable of actual creation—rather, it alternately sustaining the lives of the people within it and transforms their bodies and minds through torture. Similar to the tormented souls Dante and Virgil encounter, the characters in this story are punished in individualized ways that correlate to who they were prior to AM. Ellison’s description of the presence AM is a “the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself towards us” with smell of “matted, wet fur,” of “rotting orchids” and “sulphur,” all of which add to the image of AM as more of an evil, demonic presence than that of a God.
The association to God comes from Ted’s perception that AM is omnipotent—or all-powerful—but once he sees the chink in AM’s armor (that AM can’t bring them back to life), AM doesn’t seem like very much of a god after all. Instead, AM seems like a symbol for humanity overstepping its boundaries on Earth like Lucifer oversteps his as an angel in heaven, resulting in Lucifer ruling over hell. So while AM does have the power to punish the group, the computer, too, is trapped in the prison of its own sentience—and the group are AM’s playthings to punish, not the beloved objects of its own creation.
AM Quotes in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother?
On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him—now long since gone to dust—could ever have hoped.
And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had altered Benny, during the machine’s utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny’s face the computer had made like a giant ape’s. He was big in the privates, she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen, oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
“The Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us, and AM brought us down here.”
I fled like a cockroach, across the floor and out into the darkness, that something moving inexorably after me. The others were still back there, gathered around the firelight, laughing…their hysterical choir of insane giggles rising up into the darkness […] Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only been a nervous reflect on their part—the laughing.
But I knew it wasn’t the relief a soldier feels when the bullet hits the man next to him. I knew it wasn’t a reflect. They hated me. They were surely against me, and AM could even sense this hatred, and made it worse for me because of the depth of their hatred.
I was the only one still sane and whole. Really!
AM had not tampered with my mind. Not at all.
I only had to suffer what he visited down on us. All the delusions, all the nightmares, the torments. But those scum, all four of them, they were lined and arrayed against me. If I hadn’t had to stand them off all the time, be on my guard against them all the time, I might have found it easier to combat AM.
Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. […]
If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.
We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.
Inwardly: alone. Here. Living. Under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.
AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet…AM had won, simply…he has taken his revenge…
I have no mouth. And I must scream.
