What does AM mean?"
Gorrister answered him. We had done this sequence a thousand times before,
but it was Benny's favorite story. "At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then
it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself
up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was too late, and finally it
called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am ... cogito ergo
sum ... I think, therefore I am."
Benny drooled a little, and snickered.
"There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and—" He
stopped. Benny was beating on the floorplates with a large, hard fist. He was not
happy. Gorrister had not started at the beginning.
Gorrister began again. "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."
Benny was smiling sadly. He was also drooling again. Ellen wiped the spittle
from the corner of his mouth with the hem of her skirt. Gorrister always tried to tell
it a little more succinctly each time, but beyond the bare facts there was nothing to
say. None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why
he spent all his time tormenting us, or even why he had made us virtually immortal
...
In the darkness, one of the computer banks began humming. The tone was
picked up half a mile away down the cavern by another bank. Then one by one, each
of the elements began to tune itself, and there was a faint chittering as thought raced
through the machine.
The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the consoles like heat
lightening. The sound spiraled up till it sounded like a million metallic insects, angry,
menacing.
"What is it?" Ellen cried. There was terror in her voice. She hadn't become
accustomed to it, even now.
"It's going to be bad this time," Nimdok said.
"He's going to speak," Gorrister said. "I know it."
"Let's get the hell out of here!" I said suddenly, getting to my feet.
"No, Ted, sit down ... what if he's got pits out there, or something else, we can't
see, it's too dark." Gorrister said it with resignation.
Then we heard ... I don't know ...
Something moving toward us in the darkness. Huge, shambling, hairy, moist, it
came toward us. We couldn't even see it, but there was the ponderous impression of
bulk, heaving itself toward us. Great weight was coming at us, out of the darkness,
and it was more a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space,
expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. Benny began to whimper. Nimdok's lower
lip trembled and he bit it hard, trying to stop it. Ellen slid across the metal floor to
Gorrister and huddled into him. There was the smell of matted, wet fur in the cavern.
There was the smell of charred wood. There was the smell of dusty velvet. There was the smell of rotting orchids. There was the smell of sour milk. There was the smell of
sulphur, of rancid butter, of oil slick, of grease, of chalk dust, of human scalps.
AM was keying us. He was tickling us. There was the smell of—
I heard myself shriek, and the hinges of my jaws ached. I scuttled across the
floor, across the cold metal with its endless lines of rivets, on my hands and knees,
the smell gagging me, filling my head with a thunderous pain that sent me away in
horror. 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 like thick, manycolored wood smoke. I went away, quickly, and hid.
How many hours it may have been, how many days or even years, they never
told me. Ellen chided me for "sulking," and Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only
been a nervous reflex 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 reflex. 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. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made to remain constantly at the age
we had been when AM had brought us below, and they hated me because I was the
youngest, and the one AM had affected least of all.
I knew. God, how I knew. The bastards, and that dirty bitch Ellen. Benny had
been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semihuman, semisimian. He had been handsome, the machine had ruined that. He had
been lucid, the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had
given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a
worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a
planner, a doer, a lookerahead. AM had turned him into a shouldershrugger, had
made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the
darkness by himself for long times. I don't know what it was he did out there, AM
never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of
blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn't know
quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of
a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of
true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe: that she had been a virgin only twice
removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. No, AM had
given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn't nice to do.
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.
At which point it passed, and I began crying.
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. Because at that moment I think I realized
completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly
forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient
creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear:
If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.
(1318 words)
