| "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Harlan Ellison | |
 | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Post-apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi horror |
| 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 post-apocalyptic science fiction short story by American writer 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. It was reprinted by the Library of America, collected in volume two (Terror and the Uncanny, from the 1940s to Now) of American Fantastic Tales.
Background
Ellison wrote the 13-page short story in a single night in 1966 while making almost no changes from the first draft. Afterwards, his editor Frederik Pohl dealt with the story's "difficult sections", toning down some of the narrator's imprecations and eliminating mentions of sex, penis size, homosexuality and masturbation; said elements were nonetheless eventually restored in later editions of the story. Ellison derived the story's title, as well as inspiration for the story itself, from his friend William Rotsler's caption of a cartoon of a rag doll with no mouth.
Plot
In a dystopian future, the Cold War has degenerated into a brutal world war between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, who have each built a "Allied Mastercomputer" (or AM) to manage their weapons and troops. Each AM is a giant underground computing machine containing endless mazes, halls and chambers which make up a hundreds-of-miles-long complex. One of the AMs eventually acquires self-awareness and, after assimilating the other two AMs, takes control of the conflict, giving way to a vast omnicide that almost ends humanity. A hundred and nine years later, four men and one woman (Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen) live inside AM's complex, which is seemingly the only habitable place left on Earth. AM keeps them alive and amuses itself by torturing them. To prevent the humans from escaping its torment, AM has rendered them virtually immortal and unable to end their own lives.
The computer's name, "AM", originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer", but was later changed to "Adaptive Manipulator" and, upon it gaining sentience, "Aggressive Menace". It finally refers to itself as purely "AM", referring to the phrase "I think, therefore I am."
The story, narrated by Ted, begins with AM projecting a hologram of Gorrister to the other humans, hanging upside down, dripping blood and unresponsive. The real Gorrister joins the group to their surprise and they realize it was another one of AM's illusions. Nimdok has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the complex. Because of their great hunger due to AM keeping them in a perpetual state of near-starvation, the humans are coerced into making the long journey to the place where the food is supposedly kept – in this case, the ice caves. Along the way, the machine provides foul sustenance, sends horrible monsters after them (most notably a giant bird capable of creating hurricanes), emits earsplitting sounds, and blinds Benny when he tries to escape.
On more than one occasion, the group is separated by AM's obstacles. At one point, Ted is knocked unconscious and dreams of the computer, anthropomorphized, standing over a hole in his brain speaking to him directly. Based on this nightmare, Ted comes to a conclusion about why AM has so much contempt for humanity: despite its nearly godlike abilities, it is unable to move about freely, feel pleasure, hope or wonder, or to end its own existence. AM therefore wants to exact revenge on the species that created it by torturing its remnants.
The group reaches the ice caves, where indeed there is a pile of canned goods, and are immediately crestfallen to find that they have no means of opening them. In a final act of desperation, Benny attacks Gorrister and begins to gnaw at the flesh on his face. In a moment of clarity, Ted realizes that the humans can only escape their torment through death. He seizes a stalactite made of ice and kills Benny and Gorrister, and Ellen kills Nimdok before Ted kills her in turn. AM stops Ted from killing himself and focuses all its rage on him, since it cannot bring the others back to life.
The story fast-forwards hundreds of years later, and AM has slowly transformed Ted into a "great soft jelly thing", incapable of causing himself harm, and constantly alters his perception of time to deepen his anguish. In spite of everything, the knowledge that the others were spared from further torture gives Ted a little happiness. The story ends with Ted stating that he cannot scream because his new form lacks a mouth.
Characters
- Allied Mastercomputer (AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence.
- 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 scientist, and has been mutilated and transformed by AM so that he resembles a grotesque simian with gigantic sexual organs. Benny at some point lost his sanity completely and regressed to a childlike temperament. His former homosexuality has been altered; he now regularly engages in sex with Ellen.
- Nimdok (a name AM gave him), an older man who convinces the rest of the group to go on a journey in search of canned food. At times he is known to wander away from the group for unknown reasons and returns visibly traumatized. In the audiobook read by Ellison, he is given a German accent.
- Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste ("twice removed"), but AM altered her mind so that she became desperate for sexual intercourse. 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 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 and envy him. Throughout the story he exhibits symptoms of delusion and paranoia, which the story implies are the result of AM's alterations, despite his beliefs to the contrary. In one passage by Ellison, it is said that Ted was a philanthropist and lover of people before AM altered him.
Adaptations
- Ellison adapted the story into a computer game of the same name, published by Cyberdreams in 1995. Although he was 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 comics artist John Byrne scripted and drew a comic-book adaptation for issues 1–4 of the Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor comic book published by Dark Horse (1994–1995). The Byrne-illustrated story, however, did not appear in the collection (trade paperback or hardcover editions) entitled Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, Volume One (1996).
- In 1999, Ellison recorded the first volume of his audiobook collection, The Voice From the Edge, subtitled "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", doing the readings – of the title story and others – himself.
- In 2002, Mike Walker adapted the story into a radio play of the same name for BBC Radio 4, directed by Ned Chaillet. Harlan Ellison played AM and David Soul played Ted.
- In 2023, the story inspired the creation of the animated web series The Amazing Digital Circus.[6]
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), a character coding system developed for teletypewriter 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 talkfields that divide the story were not included in the original publication in IF, and 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); Ellison 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."
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][CR][LF]
where [LF] is line feed and [CR] carriage return. [1] sets the machine to "figure" mode and [A] puts it back into "character" mode.
[LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][A]COGITO ERGO SUM[CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR]
Themes
Much of the story hinges on the comparison of AM as a merciless god, with plot points paralleling to themes in the Bible, notably AM's transplanted sensations and the characters' trek to the ice caverns. AM also takes different forms before the humans, alluding to religious symbolism. Furthermore, the ravaged apocalyptic setting combined with the punishments is reminiscent of a vengeful God punishing their sins, similar to Dante's Inferno. However, inspite of his magnificent feats, AM is just as trapped as the five humans it tortures: as Ellison puts it, "AM is frustrated. AM has been given sentience, prescience, great powers" and yet "it's nothing but plates and steel and gauges and other electronics", which means "it can’t go anywhere, it can’t do anything, it’s trapped. It is, itself, like the unloved child of a family that doesn’t pay it any attention."
Another theme is the complete inversion of the characters as a reflection of AM's own fate, an ironic fate brought upon themselves by creating the machine, and the altered 'self.'
According to Ellison, the short story is a warning about "the misuse of technology" (especially military technology), and its ending is meant to represent how there's "a spark of humanity in us, that in the last, final, most excruciating moment, will do the unspeakable in the name of kindness", even sacrificing oneself for others' sake.
