i have no mouth and i must scream short story

AM was sentient, but AM could not wonder, could not wander, could not break the limitations of his programming, could not belong. I think, therefore I AM.īut AM was angry. They were collectively called ‘AM’ or ‘Allied Mastercomputer’, and then once they were linked up, ‘Adaptive Manipulator’, and even later, ‘Aggressive Menace’ (after it achieved sentience and systematically started wiping off humanity).īecause Cogito Ergo Sum. During World War Three, which just kept on going, China, Russia and America each built an supercomputer to take care of the strategies of war. Not survivors, but prisoners – or rather playthings – of AM, kept captive right in the belly of the beast, the bowels of this insane computer, and kept alive only to be subjected to eternal torment by AM and torture in an endless sequence of sadistic violence.Īnd at the root of all this lies the human penchant for war. Only five people remain - four men and one woman. The story is set 109 years after AM has wiped out all traces of humankind (something Skynet hasn’t managed to do yet).

Left: First book edition that ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ first appeared in. A few might say HAL 9000, the main antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the name HAL by the way is not a dig at IBM, even though the latter is just a convenient one-letter shift away from the former).Īsk me, and I’ll say the most sadistic and evil of them all, the AI that carries the most hate for mankind, is AM from 1967’s dark, powerful post-apocalyptic short story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by sci-fi legend and editor, Harlan Ellison, the anthologist of arguably the most influential science fiction anthology - Dangerous Visions. The story would go on to win the Hugo Award in 1968 and has since appeared in numerous collections, including horror anthologies, and is now widely considered to be amongst the best sci-fi short stories ever written. Ask people which AI embodiment in science fiction is the most villainous and mankind’s greatest enemy, and chances are they’ll say Skynet from the Terminator series.

I have no mouth and i must scream short story