I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a dystopian science fiction short story by Harlan Ellison. This nightmarish tale of the evil that man can unleash from himself through science was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. It won a Hugo award in 1968. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Contents 1 Background 2 Plot 2.1 Backstory 2.2 Summary 3 Characters 4 Adaptations 5 See also 6 External links

[edit] Background

Ellison wrote I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream in a single night in 1966, making virtually no changes since the first draft. He derived the story's title, as well as inspiration for this story, from a drawing by a friend, William Rotsler.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Plot

[edit] Backstory

More than a century before the story opens, a supercomputer called AM had already destroyed the entire human race save for the five protagonists. Before AM's present incarnation, there had been three separate American, Soviet and Chinese supercomputers, each programmed for fighting an increasingly complex global war against its two opponents. However, the computers evolved and connected to each other, gained sentience and subsequently annihilated all humanity. AM, in a form of existential crisis, felt its own accidental creation was an act of unimaginable cruelty, because as a mind without a body it cannot experience the world personally. It hated humans for this fact, but realizing their absolute destruction would be even more unbearable it spared, trapped, and artificially sustained five individuals at their current ages indefinitely, solely for the purpose of tormenting them forever.

[edit] Summary

Four men and one woman are all that remains of humanity. They live together under the earth in an endless complex built by AM, a world in which the computer is omnipotent, and it is the only habitable place left, although it is explained that once they were brought underground the last few humans had no choice in returning to the above ground. It is apparent early in the story that the group is abhorred by the master-computer, for it spends all of its time torturing them with all of the power in its possession. With all of AM's technological influence, it has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, thus saving them from the horrors of AM's world, but has also made them virtually immortal.

Eventually Ted, the main character, finds himself alone in the dark. The computer tries to speak to him directly, although it is not certain how. Because of the incident, Ted finally understands why the computer has so much contempt for humanity and why it wants nothing more than to torture him and his four peers.

At the climax of the story, the group of humans manages to find a pile of canned goods only to realize that they have no means of opening them. Breaking down, Benny attacks Gorrister and starts gnawing madly at the flesh on his face. Ted begins to wonder why AM does not try to intervene when the humans are hurting each other despite the fact that the computer will not let them kill themselves.

Ted picks up a stalagmite made of ice, and kills the other four humans, their very last expression that of gratitude and relief. Unfortunately, Ted cannot manage to kill himself before AM realizes what is happening. AM is now more angry and vengeful than before. In order to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again, AM alters Ted into a gelatinous animal that cannot possibly hurt itself. Ted now lives in an eternal hell, where AM constantly alters his perception of time in order to deepen his anguish. In the end, Ted feels the need to scream out in pain but cannot, for his new form lacks a mouth.

[edit] Characters

The story is about five humans, whose lifespans have been lengthened by artificial means, in their 109th year of imprisonment inside a global system of artificial caverns. Their entire environment is under the absolute control of a sadistic supercomputer called simply "AM." The humans are:

• Gorrister, who tells the history of AM for Benny's entertainment. Gorrister was once an idealist and pacifist, before AM made him apathetic and listless.
• Benny, who was once a brilliant, handsome, homosexual scientist, and has been mutilated and transformed so that he resembles an ugly simian with gigantic sexual organs. Benny at some point lost his sanity completely and regressed to a child-like temperament. His former sexuality has been lost; he now regularly engages in sex with Ellen.
• Nimdok (a name AM gave him), who lives in an apparent state of denial, persuading the group to go on a hopeless journey in search of canned food at the beginning of the story. At times he is known to wander away from the group for unknown reasons, and returns visibly traumatized.
• Ellen, the only female of the group. She claims to once have been chaste, that it was AM who altered her mind so that she became willing to act as the group's shared prostitute. The others, at different times, both protect her and abuse her. According to Ted, she finds pleasure in sex only with Benny, because of his large penis. Described as having very dark skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity or racial identity is explicitly mentioned by Ted.
• Ted, the narrator and youngest of the group. He claims to be not at all altered, mentally, by AM, and that the other four hate him out of envy; however, he may in fact be suffering from delusional paranoia.

[edit] Adaptations

• Ellison adapted the story into a computer game of the same name, published by Cyberdreams in 1995. Although he is not a fan of computer games and does not own a personal computer, he co-authored the expanded storyline and wrote much of the game's dialogue, all on a mechanical typewriter. Ellison also voiced the supercomputer "AM" and provided artwork of himself used for a mousepad included with the game.

• The cartoonist John Byrne scripted and drew a comic-book adaptation for Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor.

[edit] See also

• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the computer game based upon the story.

[edit] External links

• A review on the short story
• A literary multimedia project