I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
It was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring this story.
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.
Characters
AM, the supercomputer who brought about the genocide of almost all of humanity.
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 persuades the rest of the group to go on a hopeless journey in search of canned food.
At times he is known to wander away from the group for unknown reasons, and returns visibly traumatized.
Ellen, the only woman. Described by Ted as having ebony skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity or racial identity is explicitly mentioned.
Ted, the narrator and youngest of the group.
Throughout the story he exhibits symptoms of delusion and paranoia.
Plot
The story takes place over a hundred years after the near-complete destruction of humanity. The machines are each referred to as "AM," which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer," and then was later called "Adaptive Manipulator." One day, one of the three computers becomes self aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war.
It brings about the mass genocide of all but five people.
Four men and one woman are all that remains of humanity. They live together underground in an endless complex, the only habitable place left, although, it is explained that the last few survivors had no choice in returning above ground.
AM has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, but has made them virtually immortal.
The story's narrative begins when one of the humans, Nimdok, has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the great complex. Because of their great hunger, the humans are actually coerced into making the long journey to the place where the food is supposedly kept - the ice caves.
Along the way, the machine provides foul sustenance (on their ironic trek for palatable food), sends horrible monsters after them, emits earsplitting sounds, and blinds one of them.
On more than one occasion, the group is separated by AM's obstacles. At one point, the main character, Ted, finds himself alone in the dark and pondering.
It places the blame solely on humanity.
In the end, after overcoming so much, the group manages to make it to the ice caves, where indeed there is a pile of canned goods. The group is overjoyed to find them, but is immediately crestfallen to find that they have no means of opening them.
Finally, in an act of desperate insanity, the least stable member of the group, Benny, hurls himself upon Gorrister and begins to gnaw madly at the flesh on his face. In order to ensure that nothing can ever happen to Ted, AM alters him so that he is little more than an enormous gelatinous blob who cannot possibly hurt himself, and must continue to live on in the eternal hell AM rules, where AM constantly alters his perception of time in order to deepen his anguish.
The Soviet, Chinese, and American militaries delved beneath the earth's surface to create space in which to construct their increasingly gigantic and powerful computers, until the entire planet was honeycombed with artificial caverns beneath its surface. AM then turned all the strategies once used by the nations to fight each other on all of humanity as a whole, destroying the entire human population save for five, which it imprisoned within the underground labyrinth in which AM's hardware resides.
AM's extreme hatred of humanity is its overpowering motivation, caused by the fact that while it is virtually god-like in its power, it is trapped in that it cannot truly experience the world, a fact which it blames on its creators.
Should all five succeed, AM translates one (chosen by the player) into the cyberspace of its own mind in an attempt to discover what went so horribly wrong with its plan to torment them. The game also reveals that some humans escaped AM's takeover and remain in hiding on the Moon, giving the game's ending more of a positive twist.
The name AM may have been a reference to "I Am", a name for the Hebrew God.
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.
AM's talkfields - Punchcode Tape Messages
Ellison uses an alternating pair of punchcode tapes as time-breaks - representing AM's "talkfields" - throughout the short story. To deviate from my format is to fuck up what the Author specifically, intentionally, purposefully, purposely intended.
AM Talkfield #1 - "i think, therefore i am"
The first talkfield, as published in the first version of The Essential Ellison, literally translates as
i think, therefore i am
where is line feed and carriage return.