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To which I replied that my stories were by no means “statue” stories, immobile, fixed, permanent. They were assaults, and if they ruined her equilibrium only once, I’d settle for that. I wanted explosions, not cool meditative thinkpieces. There are other writers who do those in abundance; what I do is something else.
Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts—it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.
Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine … the paternal … the patriarchal … for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged.
Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen, oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
His eyes were two soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly. AM had blinded him.
“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.”
None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal …
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.
We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us.
All in an instant.
There was an eternity beat of soundless anticipation. I could hear AM draw in his breath. His toys had been taken from him.
he was not God. He could not bring them back.
We allow terrible things to happen, and turn our faces away in horror, but we never commit ourselves.
Either we feel we are not in a position to do any good—ludicrous when examined closely—or we cop-out intellectually, rationalizing the nature of the crime, and the nature of the struggle in the deepest, most esoteric, and most cheaply hypocritical terms.
