The “bird of winds” symbolizes the duality of AM as both a product and a destroyer of humanity. Even amidst all possible torments, AM actively chooses images and creative depictions that the humans will recognize from various past mythologies on Earth. To torment the group along its journey to the ice caverns, AM creates an immense bird whose flapping wings cause a hurricane in which the group members are caught and injured. Ted wonders where AM could have come up with such a concept. As a human-created supercomputer, the reader can deduce that AM has access to information about the entire pantheon of human gods, religions, and mythologies that have ever existed. Ted contemplates out of the seemingly infinite amount of knowledge AM possesses and the origins of its idea for this horrific monstrosity. Could it have come from “Norse mythology […] this eagle, this carrion bird, this roc, this Huergelmir. The wind creature. Hurakan incarnate”? The “bird of winds,” and the diverse breadth of mythology (Norse, Middle Eastern, Mayan) from which AM could have pulled to create the such a creature, comes to represent AM’s total domination of the human race, as it shows that the computer holds the power to both harness humanity’s knowledge base and to destroy the species entirely. The bird is both a culmination of human culture and a destructive force that can cause natural disasters powerful enough to leave human beings trembling in its wake. Thus, it is at once a symbol of AM’s immense intelligence and scope of knowledge as a manmade being, and the computer’s unhinged ability to devastate the very creatures who created it.
