I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a science fiction short story by the American writer Harlan Ellison (1934–2018), first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. It is set in a devastated world after a third world war fought between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. During the conflict, each power built a military supercomputer, called the Allied Mastercomputer or "AM", to coordinate weapons and troops. In time, the American machine became self-aware, absorbed the others and, driven by a profound hatred for its creators, wiped out nearly all of humanity in a nuclear holocaust.

As a form of revenge, AM kept five people alive—Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted and Ellen—and made them immortal so that it could torture them without respite. It prevents them from killing themselves, keeps them half-starved on food that is barely edible, and reshapes their bodies and minds at will. The story is narrated by Ted, the youngest of the group, and its action unfolds on a journey of about 100 miles that the survivors undertake 109 years after the genocide, driven by the hope that the complex's ice caves might hold canned food. The trek is a string of punishments inflicted by AM, and their arrival brings not relief but a despair deeper still.

Ellison builds the tale with a raw tone and an oppressive atmosphere, in which the horror arises less from explicit violence than from the impossibility of escape. Its most distinctive formal device is the pair of punch-code tapes interspersed through the text, which represent AM's "talkfields" and its reflections on existence; the phrase they carry, "I think, therefore I am", sums up the paradox of a machine capable of thought but denied free action. For its handling of technological evil and human suffering, the work was widely praised and won the Hugo Award in 1968. It has since exerted considerable influence and been adapted to other media, including a 1995 video game co-written by Ellison, who also voiced AM, a comic-book version, and a BBC radio play.

The story, included in the collection of the same name, remains one of the most frequently cited texts on the dangers of artificial intelligence and on human endurance in the face of unlimited cruelty.