Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my.

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First book edition Cover art byAuthorCountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglishGenre(s)Published inPublication typePublisherGalaxy Publishing CorpMedia typePrint (, & )Publication dateMarch 1967' I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream' is a by American writer. It was first published in the March 1967 issue of.It won a in 1968. The name was also used for a 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 (2009). Contents.Background Ellison showed the first six pages of 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream' to, 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 's caption of a cartoon of a rag doll with no mouth.

Characters. Allied Mastercomputer ( AM), the 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 and, 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 with gigantic sexual organs. Benny at some point lost his sanity completely and regressed to a childlike temperament. His former has been altered; he now regularly engages in sex with Ellen. Nimdok (a name AM gave him), an older man who persuades the rest of the group to go on a hopeless journey in search of. At times he is known to wander away from the group for unknown reasons, and returns visibly. 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, 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 and, which the story implies are the result of AM's alteration despite his beliefs to the contrary.Plot In a dystopian future, the had degenerated into a brutal between the, the, and, who have each built an 'Allied Mastercomputer' (or AM) to manage their weapons and troops.

One of the AMs eventually acquires and, after assimilating the other two AMs, takes control of the conflict, giving way to a vast 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 the group on a daily basis. To disallow the humans from escaping its torment, AM has rendered the humans virtually and unable to commit suicide.The machines are each referred to as 'AM', which originally stood for 'Allied Mastercomputer', and then was later called 'Adaptive Manipulator'. Finally, 'AM' stands for '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 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.' Adaptations. Ellison adapted the story into, published by in 1995. Although he was not a fan of and did not own a at the time, he co-authored the expanded storyline and wrote much of the game's dialogue, all on a.

Ellison also voiced the supercomputer 'AM' and provided artwork of himself used for a included with the game. The comics artist 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 (the trade paperback or hardcover editions) entitled (1996).

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. In 2002, adapted the story into a for, directed by.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, 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 ', 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 (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.'