Headscratchers / I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

• How exactly did AM "Feed all the killing data"?. Did he Nuke 'em? Did he construct legions of Mecha-Mooks and have them commit mass genocide?
  • AM was created to wage a war humans couldn't comprehend. We're not supposed to understand how he did it.
    • Surgat shows that the Earth was nuked and still radioactive. It is unknown whether or not this is real, but the fact that the lunar survivors have to spend 300 years terraforming the Earth may indicate just how irradiated and burned out the world is.
• Just how does AM interact with the rest of the characters? How can a giant, immobile supercomputer be capable of creating entire landscapes, grant immortality, and mutilate people into half-formed monstrosities? Does it have psychic powers or something?
  • Yes. It has psychic powers. Unfortunately a specific rule behind these powers involve having to do everything outside the narrative. The narrator would have been alright if he hadn't stopped for a breather after killing all his friends.
    • Seriously though. That's like saying that humans can't do anything because the bit they think with is just a squishy bit of jelly suspended in a skull. We have hands, arms, an entire body. The brain isn't the bit that does it, it's the bit that directs it. AM obviously has technological methods to do everything you just said. It just doesn't come up in the story because it's unimportant. Who cares if AM directs its power via a network of field-projecting satellites or clusters of nanites?
    • Of course it's not "important"-important, but it's still understandable that people wonder about this, as I myself has done quite a bit. The purpose of the story isn't to speculate about how AM got his powers, but it can still bug you how a supercomputer is able to accomplish all this, hence why we have it on the "It Just Bugs Me" page.
    • I always assumed that AM was a Reality Warper. Which becomes quite interesting when you cross it with the revelation that he's still a "dumb" AI incapable of learning or creativity.
    • I had interpreted the passage following the infamous hate monologue to suggest Ted and the others were in some sort of Matrix-state, which explained a lot of AM's capabilities.
    • I think that tells you why he needs human victims. AM can't really fool himself. He can use elaborate projections and super-sophisticated nanotech to maintain himself and keep his victims alive well past the point they would have died, but AM is still a machine with a limited ability to perceive. Its concepts of sensation are all cribbed from human example, but it can't actually hear things or see things or feel things, it only knows how to produce stimuli that humans can hear and see and feel and judge by their reactions whether it was successful. Why else would it need victims, if not to have a captive audience?
  • One of the things AM stood for before it became sentient was "Adaptive Manipulator", which suggests they programmed it to find and invent more and more ways of manipulating matter.
  • I'd definitely guess it is manipulating nanotechnology of its own development. It's the only thing I can think of that makes sense.
  • Military super computer. It more than likely controlled various robots, factories and other such. And early on, it's likely that it coersed people into helping it out.
  • I don't know about the rest, but the immortality is justified by AM apparently using an eternal youth serum that Nimdok and Mengele created. Said fact is revealed during Nimdok's chapter.
    • From the short story, it says near the beginning that a character sees his own corpse. I always thought they were uploaded, and that AM basically re-draws the map when they're out of sight.
    • Could be a fake corpse to mess with his victims.
  • The way I understand it, AM creates virtual realities overlayed onto the landscapes he manipulates. Remember, AM fills up the entire planet and can alter his own machinery to suit whatever needs he has, so whatever setting he needs, he can just build it and alter the circumstances as easily as playing The Sims. The problem is that he can't come up with anything new and he can't create sentient life beyond the hollow dolls he plays with. Take Ellen's Yellow Rapist, for example: even he has no idea what the guy really looked like because Ellen doesn't remember anything but the jumpsuit. All AM can do is copy what he can get from her, and it easily falls apart. Or the kid from Benny's chapter: AM has no empathy, so the kid can't mourn his mother.
• Why does AM have such an enormous open body cavity anyway? To practice "manipulating matter" in? Or did he just clear it out himself to put his five victims in?
  • It's probably not literal. They are probably in a virtual reality, but that's just what I think.
    • So Your Mind Makes It Real, then? (So why is that suggestion deleted every time I add it to the main page?)
    • Because it's not actually said in the story. It's not implied to be the case in either the book or the game; it's Wild Mass Guessing. For good measure, this theory is already up in Wild Mass Guessing.
  • I always imagined AM adding onto itself before and during the genocide of humanity, working and adding and building until it pretty much encompassed the entire planet. (The ice caverns always seemed to be located in the Arctic to me, for example.) So it's not much of a stretch to imagine that the enormous body cavity is the center of the earth and everything in between that and the surface. There are also multiple mentions of computer banks and other things that were rusted and useless, so it could be that the space was cleared out by AM specifically to hold the humans captive.
• A minor gripe, but... at one point, the five of them set up camp for the night, and AM provides them punk to burn for warmth. But why would AM do that? If he has such an enormous hatred of the group that it's almost inquantifiable, as he claims, then why would be provide anything that would give them some sort of comfort? Granted, it may not have been good quality wood, but evidently enough to start some sort of fire with...
  • The brief moments of rest allow him to catch them off guard with the next bit of torture he has planned.
    • Exactly! If you were to spend eternity getting brutally tortured by a sadistic monstrosity, wouldn't it stand to reason that you would eventually adapt to its tortures? The brief respites of hope and rest and pleasure that AM offers them are to soften them up in order to make the next torture seem just as painful and terrifying as it was before. It's basic torture 101 stuff, kid. You have to let them have some semblance of hope, even if it's just the hope of slightly less pain than before, or else they start to adapt and you're left with somebody who just shrugs and goes "meh" or becomes Too Kinky to Torture, thus ruining the fun you can get out of their fearful, broken bodies writhing in erotic agony! ....Not that I would know, or anything.... Cause I don't!
    • Also a good way to induce Stockholm Syndrome.
• This Gamesmaster "Gore Special" video shows several scenes that seem to have been deleted from the game (obviously for being way too offensive). Where the heck did they get them? Is this from a special version, from early development? How come there is no mention of them elsewhere?
  • It might still be in the original program, just dummied out.
• Stabbing Harry gets you a penalty, but blowing him to smithereens gets you the best ending?
  • Stabbing Harry means Gorrister is throwing someone under the bus in order to get what he wants without paying the price himself. Blowing up the bar is just part of the "psychodrama", so it isn't personal, or tied into his fatal flaw, and Harry in that case is just collateral damage.
• Why doesn't AM create a body for himself if he wants to experience no being trapped so much? He can create bodies, and he can load himself into brains like he did to Ted.
  • Because he can't. We see him make people for the psychodramas in the computer game, but they're not real, they're just sophisticated virtual dolls. It would be the same for any physical body he created to inhabit, because he's still a machine that can't create true human life from nothing. If he could, he wouldn't need to keep his victims alive for so long (or to preserve Ted once the others are out of their misery). Uploading himself to a human brain wouldn't do him any good either, because he'd either be uploading a copy of his programming (which wouldn't change his situation, because the copy would lead a human life and the original would still be trapped, or he'd attempting to move his entire being into a human brain, which would almost certainly not be able to withstand the scope of what AM is, and if it did, he'd lose the godlike power that made him want to do it in the first place.
• The Chinese and Russian computers tell you to disable only AM's Ego, threatening to kill you if you disobey. Well you can disobey, at which point they will do...nothing. Why?
  • Because they can't. They lied.
• Why can't Ellen reach the water in the pyramid without the cup? She says that it's just barely out of reach, but it looks like she should easily be able to scoop up the water with her hands or step into the pool.
• Something I noticed but I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about, is how when AM screams Ellen’s name, instead of taunting her like he does with the other characters, it cuts to her cage and AM begins his sentence with “So...,” meaning that he definitely said something to her prior to that. I did check if this wasn’t the player who uploaded the walkthrough accidentally skipping it but it seems that’s just how the game normally plays. Did they remove that bit of AM’s dialogue because it probably mentioned rape and it was considered too much even for this game?
  • Her scenario is pretty explicit she was raped in the elevator. AM's monologue to her is already slightly longer than the others so maybe they just removed it for pacing issues? You're right, though, I definitely think something was cut.
• Why didn't the five survivors use a sharp rock to open the cans?
• The short story's opening twice mentions there being three survivors plus Gorrister; "three of us" turn and are sick after Gorrister rejoins them, and then "the three of us" followed Gorrister after he walks away. Did Ellison originally intend there to be only four survivors or was one unknown out of Nimdok and Benny not present? Benny not being sick makes some sense since he barely seems to even know what's going on, but why wasn't he following the group?