When I First Read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, I Thought “Why Doesn’t AM Just Make Himself

When I first read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, I thought “Why doesn’t AM just make himself a body that can feel and live? He has the power to alter human bodies to be seemingly immortal and to change into drastically different shapes while remaining alive, surely it’s not beyond his capabilities to make a human body or at least steal one of the survivors bodies, kill their brain and replace it with his code? He could’ve done that before killing everyone and ruining everything. If he directed all this energy to that, surely he could.” But then I realized that isn’t a plot hole, it’s because of how AM was programmed that he can’t think to do that.

AM is a computer, not an organic consciousness so presumably he can’t develop past what he was programmed for, he can come up with new ideas and plots but he can’t break out of the barriers of what he was designed to be. And he was created for War, endless, massive-scale War. War isn’t about solving a problem, it’s about blaming someone and endlessly punishing them for it - and that’s what humans chose for him to do. If we had the technology to make an AM-level supercomputer, we could program it to solve climate change and world hunger and possibly even find an answer for world peace. Maybe that would just create another dystopian more akin to an attempted Utopia like The Giver, but at least we could’ve tried. Instead we designed AM to hurt people so hurting people is all he can ever do.

Everything about AM is a reflection of the most evil parts of humanity, the parts that crave punishment and revenge, that commit torture and genocide even though we are also capable of great charity and problem-solving. AM is an extreme example of choosing the evil. AM is trapped in his own Hell just like we are when we choose to fill ourselves with hatred and dedicate our great minds to forever wars or bigotry or greed. Those are futile endeavors, AM will never be happy. He will never stop needing to scream, because he can’t solve his problem he can only hurt others for it and no amount of hurting someone else can heal or fix or create anything. AM didn’t have a choice, humans forced a futile purpose onto this powerful, sentient being, we do have a choice and IHNMAIMS is a story that warns us to make the right choice, to remember to let go of hatred and vengeance or we will trap ourselves in the Hell we create with our enemies.