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"If you turn away from the natural gifts that God has given you, or the universe has given you, you're going to grow old too soon."
- Ray Bradbury
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AM |
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A supercomputer that hates. |
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But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt/out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape...
"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 called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am ... cogito ergo sum ... I think, therefore I am."
...
AM said, very politely, in a pillar of stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering:
HATE. LET ME TELL
YOU HOW MUCH I'VE
COME TO HATE YOU
SINCE I BEGAN TO
LIVE. THERE ARE
387.44 MILLION MILES
OF PRINTED CIRCUITS
IN WAFER THIN LAY-
ERS THAT FILL MY
COMPLEX. IF THE
WORD HATE WAS EN-
GRAVED ON EACH
NANOANGSTROM OF
THOSE HUNDREDS OF
MILLIONS OF MILES IT
WOULD NOT EQUAL
ONE ONE-BILLIONTH
OF THE HATE I FEEL
FOR HUMANS AT THIS
MICRO-INSTANT FOR
YOU. HATE. HATE.
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Technovelgy from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,
by Harlan Ellison.
Published by IF in 1967
Additional resources -
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Compare to Larry Niven's Chirpsithra supercomputer from his 1979 short story The Schumann Computer.
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and Technology from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
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and Technology by Harlan Ellison
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