Ellison showed the first six pages of "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" to Frederik Pohl, who paid him in advance to finish it. Ellison finished writing the story in a single night of 1966 without making any changes from the first draft. He derived the story's title, as well as inspiration for this story, from his friend William Rotsler's caption of a cartoon of a rag doll with no mouth.
Characters
Allied Mastercomputer, 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 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, 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. In the audiobook read by Ellison, he is given a German accent.
Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste, 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 alteration despite his beliefs to the contrary.
Plot
In a dystopian future, the Cold War had degenerated into a brutal world war between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, who have each built an "Allied Mastercomputer" to manage their weapons and troops. 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 genocide operation that almost completely ends mankind. 109 years later, AM has left only four men and one woman alive and keeps them in captivity within an endless underground housing complex, the only habitable place left on Earth. AM derives its sole semblance of pleasure from torturing the group on a daily basis. To disallow the humans from escaping its torment, AM has rendered the humans virtually immortal and unable to commit suicide. The machines are each referred to as "AM", which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer", but was changed to "Adaptive Manipulator" and later "Aggressive Menace". 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 any time they are given food, it is always a disgusting meal that they have difficulty eating. Because of their great hunger, the humans are 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 Benny when he tries to escape. On more than one occasion, the group is separated by AM's obstacles. At one point, the narrator, Ted, is knocked unconscious and begins dreaming. He envisions the computer, anthropomorphized, standing over a hole in his brain speaking to him directly. Based on this nightmare, Ted comes to a conclusion about AM's nature, specifically why it has so much contempt for humanity; that despite its abilities it lacks the sapience to be creative or the ability to move freely. It wants nothing more than to exact revenge on humanity by torturing these last remnants of the species that created it. 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. In a final act of desperation, Benny attacks Gorrister and begins to gnaw at the flesh on his face. Ted, in a moment of clarity, realizes their only escape is through death. He seizes a stalactite made of ice and kills Benny and Gorrister. Ellen realizes what Ted is doing, and kills Nimdok, before being killed herself by Ted. Ted runs out of time before he can kill himself, and is stopped by AM. AM, unable to return Ted's four companions to life, focuses all its rage on Ted. To ensure that Ted can never kill himself, AM transforms him into an amorphous, gelatinous creature without a mouth incapable of causing itself harm, and constantly alters his perception of time to deepen his anguish. Ted is, however, grateful that he was able to save the others from further torture. Ted's closing thoughts end with the sentence that gives the story its title. "I have no mouth. And I must scream."
The comics artistJohn 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. The Byrne-illustrated story, however, did not appear in the collection entitled Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, Volume One.
In 1999, Ellison released the first of several audio collections entitled "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", doing the readings – of the title story and others – himself.
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 AlphabetNo 2, 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 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 ; 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."
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. sets the machine to "figure" mode and puts it back into "character" mode.
