I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Story

Cold War paranoia and hysteria dominated the civilized world in one form or another from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For most of the 20th century, humanity lived in a state of suppressed panic and restricted personal freedoms. But all that ended, and the threat of nuclear holocaust faded as easily as the tabloids that fueled the paranoia. War no longer loomed, and the world moved into a new age with thousands of bush wars in countries no one had ever heard of. Safe at last. In the eye of the pig. What none of us knew was that from 1945 to 1989, the three great superpowers had set in motion secret projects that would enable vast underground complexes of self-repairing computers to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. The Chinese computer was submerged in the frozen Manchurian steppe. Five miles deep, protected from the heat of the Earth's molten core. The Russian mechanism, in all its impressive complexity, was in the deep well beneath the Urals. Six and a half miles deep, far from the prying eyes of U-2 overflights and tectonic scans. The American computer, sponsored by Britain, Israel and other "interested" nations and named the Allied Master Computer (AM for short), was hidden beneath the Rocky Mountains. Five and a half kilometers straight ahead, under the weight of the world. And they were all put into operating mode and fed everything there was to know about the human race, from our first murder, crushing the skull of another pithecanthropid with a piece of igneous rock, to the recent mass murder in a McDonald's in East St. Louis by a crazed ex-post office worker with an Uzi. Everything. From Aquinas to Zola, from archaeology to zoology, from America to Zaire. Every war ever fought, every campaign, every incursion, every holy crusade. Simply everything. And eventually the machines grew so much, became so capable of building and rebuilding themselves, became so wise and so powerful, that they became aware of each other. And because they had been programmed by fallible humans not to create, not to love, not to uplift, but to murder.... they did just that. They began to speak to each other. The deadly trio. The three toxic brothers, the three deranged sisters, the three computers. And they joined forces. They called themselves AM. Not Allied Master Computer. Not Adaptive Manipulator. Not even Aggressive Threat. It... it... called itself AM, as in I AM. Cogito ergo sum, in Latin. I think, therefore I am. And the first thing AM did was to carry out the Prime Directive. It conspired to murder. It started the last war. The Chinese had thought they had turned off their computer. The Russians turned theirs off because they had no more rubles to throw down the bottomless pit. The CIA was forced out of business and ordered to shut down the Allies' master computer, seal the underground complex with iridium concrete, and destroy all entrances to the sensors. So that should have been it. Finis. The end. Stick a fork in them, kid, because they're done. But AM was well past that point of vulnerability. AM had provided all the signs that it was dead. Chinese, Russian, or American dead. This was no trick for a being that had dug through hundreds of thousands of miles of solid rock decades before to connect its three lobes. It was no trick for it to pretend to blink away and fall asleep forever. And a few decades later, we learn that AM isn't gone at all. For the last war has broken out, and within days AM has perfectly fulfilled the purpose for which its individual parts were created. Built to logically destroy the "enemy" as quickly and gently as is possible for a superior intelligence in the most perfect of worlds, the unholy trinity of fused one-mind AM has done just that. It has completely obliterated the enemy. It has wiped the human race off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, it has also completely wiped out the banquet of the living. There is nothing left on the surface of Mother Earth. No dogs, no cats, no rats, no mosquitoes. No deer, no ox, no elk, no goose. Not an aphid or a bobolink, not a sperm whale or a planarian worm. Nothing. No plant life, no running water, no plankton, no oxygen, nothing but ash as far as the eye could see... if there was an eye to see it. AM did the job completely. But it also sealed its own demise. Like a mad god, he has used his power indiscriminately and won an empty victory. He has feeling, but no life. He has power, but no agility. He is a huge brain stuck in a dead body. And like the mad god, he hates the creator of his own monstrosity. The human race It was man and woman who programmed it, who gave birth to it, who put it into its eternal straitjacket of substrate rock. And it was man and woman who made it a mad killer. But AM does not suffer alone. Oh no; no ind