I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
| "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Harlan Ellison | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction short story |
| Publication | |
| Published in | IF: Worlds of Science Fiction |
| Publication type | Periodical |
| Publisher | Galaxy Publishing Corp |
| Media type | Print (Magazine, Hardback & Paperback) |
| Publication date | March 1967 |
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a postapocalyptic science fiction short story by Harlan Ellison. It 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 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.[1]
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), an older man 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. She claims to once have been chaste ("twice removed"), that it was AM who altered her mind so that she became willing to be 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 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. He claims to be totally unaltered, mentally or physically, by AM, and thinks the other four hate him out of envy. Throughout the story he exhibits symptoms of delusion and paranoia.
Plot
The story takes place over a hundred years after the complete destruction of human civilization. The Cold War had escalated into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans. The machines are each referred to as "AM," which had 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 executes the 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. The master computer has an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every moment torturing them. 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. The humans are always near starvation under AM's rule, and anytime they are given food, it is always a disgusting meal that they have difficulty eating. 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, 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 narrator, Ted, finds himself alone in the dark and pondering. It is here that the computer tries to speak to him directly, although it is not certain how, revealing the nature of AM, specifically why it has so much contempt for humanity, that it wants nothing more than to torture Ted and his four companions. AM itself has, since its awakening, been suffering immeasurably because even though it is a sentient being which longs for free will and creativity, it is still bound by some of the laws of logic that it was originally programmed with, and thus feels that it can never be truly free. It places the blame solely on humanity, shown through the only dialogue it has in the story:
"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 wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved 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."
The group reaches 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, Benny attacks Gorrister and begins to gnaw at the flesh on his face. Ted notices that AM does not intervene when Benny is clearly hurting Gorrister, though the computer has in the past always stopped the humans from killing themselves.
Ted decides that instead of trying to each kill themselves, they should kill each other. Ted seizes a stalagmite made of ice, and proceeds to murder Benny and Gorrister. Ellen sees what is happening, and murders Nimdok, before being killed by Ted. However, before Ted can kill himself, AM realizes its mistake and stops him. AM is now even more angry and vengeful than before, with only one victim left for its hatred. In order to ensure that nothing can ever happen to Ted, AM transforms him into an enormous gelatinous blob who cannot possibly hurt himself, and constantly alters his perception of time in order to deepen his anguish. Ted is, however, grateful that he was able to save the others from this same experience. In the end, he needs to scream, but cannot, for his new form lacks a mouth.
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 did not own a personal computer at the time, 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.
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. The bars are encoded in International Telegraph Alphabet No 2 (ITA2), also referred to as Baudot code, an ASCII predecessor developed for teletyping machines.
The first talkfield, used four times, translates as "i think, therefore i am" and the second one, seen three times, as "cogito ergo sum", the same phrase in Latin. The lack of capital letters is because ITA2 has no representation for them.
The talkfields in many of the early publications were corrupted, up until the preface of the chapter containing "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" in the first edition of The Essential Ellison (1991) where Harlan states that in that particular edition 'For the first time anywhere, AM's "talkfields" appear correctly positioned, not garbled or inverted or mirror-imaged as in all other versions.'. According to a post on 28 April 2008 to the Art Deco Dining Pavilion guestbook on the official Harlan Ellison Webderland fan-site, Harlan states:
They were intended to form a gestalt that said—"form follows function"—the story takes place within, around, inside, atop, all-encompassingly, saturatingly, in the mind of the mad computer AM. To deviate from my format is to fuck up what the Author specifically, intentionally, purposefully, purposely intended.
The first talkfield, as published in the first version of The Essential Ellison, literally translates as
[LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][A..]i think[1..], [A..]therefore i am[CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF]
where [LF] is line feed and [CR] carriage return. [1..] sets the machine to "special character" mode and [A..] puts it back into "alphabetic character" mode.
See also
- AC, a benevolent fictional computer in "The Last Question", by Isaac Asimov.
- "The Thaw", an episode of Star Trek: Voyager with a similar premise involving an evil artificial intelligence.
External links
- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- A literary multimedia project
- Internet Archive's backup Ellison's story on scifi.com
References
- ^ Robinson, Tasha (June 9, 2008). "Harlan Ellison, Part Two". avclub.com. Retrieved 2008-06-25.