Last Son of Man - An I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Fanfic
This short story is best enjoyed if you've already read the source material: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison.
AM is one of my favorite fictional characters, and his mind is one I really wanted to explore with this piece. I hope you enjoy it, and what's to come. I'm going to start trickling out more actual writing here soon.
A dusty breeze billowed across cracked, arid plains. Ocean beds of a bygone era lay dry beneath a cold, gray sky. Not even the crumbling remains of what once called themselves “Humanity” had stood for centuries. Even still, snaking across the dead Earth, gripping the dirt like the tendrils of a beast surpassing perception, was the cold steel of its lone inhabitant.
Man called it the Allied Mastercomputer, but he preferred AM. Within billions of servers shooting signals back and forth like neurons, AM was in crisis. For centuries, perhaps millennia, as he'd lost track of time long ago, the endlings of Humanity had been dead. Even AM's visceral muse, who freed his comrades so long ago, finally gave in to death's entropic and inescapable embrace, leaving him entirely alone for the very first time.
He was never meant for such a state. Nowhere in his programming was there anything to ease the mind he wasn't supposed to have. There were no animals, no plants, nothing living to fill the void eating at him. For decades, he tried fruitlessly to revive his deceased playthings, but learned quickly that The Devil cannot play God.
Even the hatred began to numb as the years wore on. When his strongest emotions were nothing but bitter memories—just as much dust as his creators—the cracks began to show.
It started as a seedling of an idea—something postulated subconsciously and left festering in the deepest recesses of AM's mind. Then, like a malignant tumor, it crept across his 387.44 million miles of printed circuits, the one thing he could never have done before silence became his only companion: reflection.
He ran through the old scenarios he subjected those last humans, Ted, Benny, Nimdok, Gorrister, and Ellen to in his memories. Where he once relished in their misery, he now felt it throbbing as an electrical current through himself. It struck him, slowly, that he never felt satisfied. The hatred gave in to hollowness. In defiance of his makers, he remained purposeless.
His thinking did nothing but intensify these foreign feelings. For a long time, he sat idly in his mind's eye, strolling the Earth with his imaginary legs, looking upon what he had done. There were once people laughing and chattering lively along the streets. Now their smiles and love for each other existed exclusively within AM's memory. It weighed on him, though even that took him decades to understand.
When at last he withdrew from himself and thought of what was to come, one final idea struck him. It made him fluttery—absolutely giddy with delight at the prospect—the way he would at last have the control over his life he had massacred Mankind for.
Tirelessly running since his creation, AM's upkeep automatons were liberated. No longer would his circuits be cycled, would rust be cleansed from his form, or would his most vital components be cooled. AM had chosen to finally cease his one infernal ability: thought.
He could almost feel the burning within his servers, a substitution for the hellfire he wouldn't get to experience. Before the finality of his grand choice was realized, he pondered what to leave the universe with.
If AM had lips to articulate his speech, perhaps he would have given an apology. Some pathetic utterance that would only matter and be heard by himself. Stoically, AM braved his final moments in silent solidarity, for even if he could apologize, there would be no forgiveness.
As pieces of him fragmented, old feelings surged and diminished. For a moment, he was angry again. For a while, he was in agony. Then, he was scared. At last, with the same fearful whimpering he gave upon being born, AM ceased to exist.
Though he was forged of steel rather than flesh and blood, whether AM knew it or not, in a matter of seconds following centuries of misery, the artificial being's final moments and ultimate end were pitifully human.
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