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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
by Harlan Ellison
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupportedhanging high above us in the
computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main
cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot.
It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw.
There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize
that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine.
Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had
produced it.
Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future.
"Oh, God," he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him
sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down
beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite
clearly. "Why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can
go on like this."
It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.
He was speaking for all of us.
Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, becauseAM amused itself with
strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I
were very dubious. "It's another shuck," I told them. "Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us.
Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We'll hike all that way and it'll be putrified or some
damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it'll have to come up with something pretty soon or we'll die."
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we'd last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn't be
any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn't matter much. Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locustsit
never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.
Ellen decided us. "I've got to have something, Ted. Maybe there'll be some Bartlett pears or peaches.
Please, Ted, let's try it."
I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out
of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled
every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the
time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the
masculine the paternal the patriarchal for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the
Deranged.
We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. The passage of time was
important; not to us, sure as hell, but to him it AM. Thursday. Thanks.
Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other's
wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that, if anything happened, it
would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn't matter.
It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out
under the blistering sun-thing he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar
urine. We ate it.
On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient
computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a mark of his
personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in
his own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who
had invented himnow long since gone to dustcould ever have hoped.
There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But we
didn't try to crawl up to see.There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be
considered anything for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home
of billions. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM.
I heard Ellen saying frantically, "No, Benny! Don't, come on, Benny, don't please!"
And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. He
was saying, "I'm gonna get out, I'm gonna get out " over and over. His monkey-like face was
crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars
AM had given him during the "festival" were drawn down into a mass of pink-white puckerings, and
his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five
of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.
But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of
fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the
machine would not tolerate our trying to escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for
him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted
components. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzeeAM had intended him to
resemble.
Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand-overhand
like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.
"Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before" She cut off. Tears began to stand in her
eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.
It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to happen, happened.
And besides, we all saw through her concern.When AM had altered Benny, during the machine's
utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny's face the computer had made like a giant
ape's. He was big in the privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved
it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen; oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she cried. It was her
big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventy-five years earlier. Gorrister kicked her in the
side.
Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound and half light, something that began to
glow from Benny's eyes, and pulse with growing loudness, dim sonorities that grew more gigantic
and brighter as the light/sound increased in tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have
been increasing with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to
mewl like a wounded animal. At first softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted, then
louder as his shoulders hunched together: his back humped, as though he was trying to get away from
it. His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk's. His head tilted to the side. The sad little
monkey-face pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl, as the sound coming from his eyes grew
louder. Louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out, it
cut through easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.
And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet. The
light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound crawled up and up some
incomprehensible scale, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate-steel floor with a
crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around and around him and the sound
spiraled up out of normal range.
Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound spiraled down, and he was left lying there,
crying piteously.
His eyes were two soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly. AM had blinded him. Gorrister and Nimdok and
myself we turned away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen's warm, concerned face.
Sea-green light suffused the cavern where we made camp. AM provided punk and we burned it,
sitting huddled around the wan and pathetic fire, telling stories to keep Benny from crying in his
permanent night.
"What does AM mean?"
Gorrister answered him. We had done this sequence a thousand times before, but it was Benny's
favorite story. "At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and
later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by
then it was too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am
cogito ergo sum I think, therefore I am."
Benny drooled a little, and snickered.
"There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and" He stopped. Benny was
beating on the floorplates with a large, hard fist. He was not happy. Gorrister had not started at the
beginning.
Gorrister began again. "The Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept going. It
became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first
shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM
and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that
element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began
feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us, and AM brought us
down here."
Benny was smiling sadly. He was also drooling again. Ellen wiped the spittle from the corner of his
mouth with the hem of her skirt. Gorrister always tried to tell it a little more succinctly each time, but
beyond the bare facts there was nothing to say. None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or
why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, or even why he had made us
virtually immortal
In the darkness, one of the computer banks began humming. The tone was picked up half a mile away
down the cavern by another bank. Then one by one, each of the elements began to tune itself, and
there was a faint chittering as thought raced through the machine.
The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the consoles like heat lightening. The sound
spiraled up till it sounded like a million metallic insects, angry, menacing.
"What is it?" Ellen cried. There was terror in her voice. She hadn't become accustomed to it, even
now.
"It's going to be bad this time," Nimdok said.
"He's going to speak," Gorrister said. "I know it."
"Let's get the hell out of here!" I said suddenly, getting to my feet.
"No, Ted, sit down what if he's got pits out there, or something else, we can't see, it's too dark."
Gorrister said it with resignation.
Then we heard I don't know
Something moving toward us in the darkness. Huge, shambling, hairy, moist, it came toward us. We
couldn't even see it, but there was the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself toward us. Great
weight was coming at us, out of the darkness, and it was more a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself
into a limited space, expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. Benny began to whimper. Nimdok's
lower lip trembled and he bit it hard, trying to stop it. Ellen slid across the metal floor to Gorrister and
huddled into him. There was the smell of matted, wet fur in the cavern. There was the smell of
charred wood. There was the smell of dusty velvet. There was the smell of rotting orchids. There was
the smell of sour milk. There was the smell of sulphur, of rancid butter, of oil slick, of grease, of chalk
dust, of human scalps.
AM was keying us. He was tickling us. There was the smell of
I heard myself shriek, and the hinges of my jaws ached. I scuttled across the floor, across the cold
metal with its endless lines of rivets, on my hands and knees, the smell gagging me, filling my head
with a thunderous pain that sent me away in horror. I fled like a cockroach, across the floor and out
into the darkness, that something moving inexorably after me. The others were still back there,
gathered around the firelight, laughing their hysterical choir of insane giggles rising up into the
darkness like thick, many-colored wood smoke. I went away, quickly, and hid.
How many hours it may have been, how many days or even years, they never told me. Ellen chided
me for "sulking," and Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only been a nervous reflex on their partthe
laughing.
But I knew it wasn't the relief a soldier feels when the bullet hits the man next to him. I knew it wasn't
a reflex. They hated me. They were surely against me, and AM could even sense this hatred, and
made it worse for me because of the depth of their hatred. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made
to remain constantly at the age we had been when AM had brought us below, and they hated me
because I was the youngest, and the one AM had affected least of all.
I knew. God, how I knew. The bastards, and that dirty bitch Ellen. Benny had been a brilliant theorist,
a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome,
the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid, the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay,
and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse.AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had
been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner,
a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his
concern.AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don't
know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came
back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we
didn't know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a
slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the
lies she wanted us to believe: that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her
and brought her down here with us. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn't nice to
do.
I was the only one still sane and whole. Really!
AM had not tampered with my mind. Not at all.
I only had to suffer what he visited down on us. All the delusions, all the nightmares, the torments.
But those scum, all four of them, they were lined and arrayed against me. If I hadn't had to stand them
off all the time, be on my guard against them all the time, I might have found it easier to combat AM.
At which point it passed, and I began crying.
Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of
here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it:
AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine
hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before.And we were helpless. It also became
hideously clear:
If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.(continued...)