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“It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.”

At the story’s outset, the narrator wants to express the setting of the story as being somewhere beyond our world. By dropping the reader into the idea that these people have been anywhere for 109 years is to place it in some kind of post-apocalyptic afterlife. Based on the opening scene, this afterlife in which these people exist is at best a kind of purgatory and at worst a version of mechanical perdition.

“Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in its own world-filling bulk, or perfecting method of torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him . . . could ever have hoped.” 

AM has discarded unneeded elements of its own being, following a program of ruthless efficiency. There is a constant effort in our real world to make computers smaller, more efficient, and more useful for everyday life. In the world of this story, the same thing has happened via AM’s sentience. It absorbed all the lessons of productivity and deployed them toward the goal of making itself as good as it can be at torturing the humans it has spared.

“We had allowed [AM] to think, but to do nothing with it. In rage, in frenzy, he had killed us, almost all of us, and still he was trapped.”

As more of the backstory is revealed, AM’s motivation for revenge becomes clearer. In a clever bit of narration, the reader is forced to feel some sympathy for AM’s plight, if not its response. But to consider the feeling of utter imprisonment that would come from the capacity to think without the ability to act on those thoughts, to interact with the world in a meaningful way, forces the reader to confront the ethics of creating a thinking being, along with the unsettling ramifications.

“I could not read meaning into her expression, the pain had been too great, had contorted her face; but it might have been thank you. It’s possible. Please.”

While Ted can rationalize the deaths of the others by believing that he put them out of their misery, the fact remains that no one asked him to do it. He has to think that he has acted altruistically by mercifully ending the suffering of the others, but he doesn’t know it for a fact. There will always be some uncertainty in his thinking, so he must hold onto the hope that he has done the right thing for Ellen and the others, or he will be no better than the machine intent on forever tormenting him.

Next section The Relationship Between Humanity and Machinery

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