I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream (2024)

Disturbometer 5 out of 10

One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.

This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture.

My musing on Prometheus makes me wonder if Ellison didn’t perhaps take some inspiration from the story of Prometheus, and here, I am afraid, I will be adding some SPOILERS, so if you’re fanatical about spoilers, read the story quickly and come back. It’s really an extremely quick read, available on the internet in various places.

In any case, my ponderings about the story’s similarity to the story of Prometheus, are as follows:

1. Prometheus steals some fire from the gods, and gives it to the humans, thereby giving agency and power to the humans, also allowing them to war on one another.

1. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there’s a huge sidenote coming up here:

In the story, a huge computer that had been built for the purposes of war, suddenly becomes sentient, and erm, I guess, since it was programmed to destroy, it destroys the entire human race, just like that, with "killing data", but keeps five humans alive, in order to have some evil fun torturing them into eternity. Apparently this computer can keep running into eternity, and he can also keep organic life such as these five humans alive indefinitely. The narrator, one of those humans, says: “And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he (the computer) had sought revenge.”

Wait..-what? So apparently machines are always terribly angry for having been created? That's rather strange logic. I wonder why, if a machine could be upset, why that anger would revolve around the fact of its creation? Ok, whatever, just go with it as a sort of "horror-story" premise. I guess in horror stories, machines are always rageful, evil, etc.

But in actual fact, computers have been around for many years. Abacus-like devices were used in Babylonia as far back as 2400 BC already. So, initially, “computers” were used for counting and arithmetic tasks. No records of angry counting machines have ever been found. Fast forward a bit from purely mechanical machines, to the 20th century.

During the first half of the 20th century, increasingly sophisticated non-programmable analog computers were built, to be used used for computation to aid in commerce, record-keeping and science. Fast-forward past the first mainframe computers which used punch-tape and punch cards in the 1940’s and 50’s, to the more powerful machines built after the Korean war - the computers of the late fifties and early sixties, which would be the computers that the author was familiar with. Keep in mind that in those days, the idea of having your own PC was quite inconceivable.

Since the story was written circa 1967, I reckon one would need to look at the machines of the time period to get an idea of where Ellison was coming from, because his idea of what a computer is and what it can do, is obviously quite fantastical – I mean, a computer can’t really swallow living things as the antagonist - the huge computer named AM, does in the story - it somehow internalizes the five people that it tortures, and computers can't really, as in the story, encompass the entire world, (in the 1995 game of the same name, the environment inside the computer consists of simulations, which makes more sense technologically speaking) unless, of course, it’s the internet, and perhaps Ellison’s sentient computer was composed a bit similar to the way that the internet is, since he does hint at "a linkage" when he says:

“ 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, ”

Now, to give you an idea of what the author is talking about – he is actually not really talking about the internet – when he says “They sank the first shafts and began building AM”, he means literally a humongous, enormous mainframe. The internet as we know it, in other words, computers being linked to one another remotely, was a project started as the "ARPANET" in 1966, basically at the time that the story was being written, and the first computer linkages only started in 1969, after the story was written and had received it's 1968 Hugo award. So at the time the story was written, the internet was still only ideas on a chalk board.

To give a bit more context on how people from an age gone by viewed computers, the big thing to remember is that computers, due to IT tech still being in its infancy, were large and expensive to build. The first mainframe computer was the Harvard Mark I. Developed starting in the 1930s, the machine was not ready for use until 1943. It weighed five tons, filled an entire room and cost about $200,000 to build – which is something like $3,070,500 in 2021 dollars. It weighed 5 tons! That’s ginormous! And guess what, that huge thing could practically speaking do less than one operation per second, and had no memory or storage in the sense that we think of it today.

So no wonder Ellison thought that a computer of huge dimensions would have to be built in order for it to attain artificial intelligence. We have not managed to build computers yet that are sentient and that has self-consciousness in the same way that humans have it, although AI has come amazingly far. And as for the concentration of computing power, a mid - to top range smartphone today could have launched and managed the first moon landing. As for a comparison of today’s supercomputers compared to the supercomputers available when Ellison wrote the story:

The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes).

On the other hand, a high-performance computer of the mid-1960s, the IBM System/360, could perform 16 million operations per second and had a memory capacity of eight megabytes.
There’s almost no comparison…

There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.

So for me one of the big flaws of the story (vs the game), is that I can’t see why the machine should have been angry and vengeful for having been built – perhaps because this specific one – the supercomputer in the story’s name is AM – perhaps AM is angry because he had been built for the purpose of war? That’s almost like saying fire got angry because it was used for the purpose of war – but then fire couldn’t achieve sentience, and AM did. It was “the gods” who got angry in the Prometheus story, and it was the instrument of war that got angry in AM’s story.

Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn’t working so well, but there –is- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn’t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm?

I don’t know, I’m trying to make the story work on some level… I mean, the internet-like feel of when the three supercomputers link up is rather prescient. But the idea that “one day a computer can just wake up and have sentience” is not at all how machine learning works. As to the idea that computers can be taught to simulate emotions, that is possible, but WHY would you program a computer that had been built for a practical, logistical purpose to have emotions? Imagine they start selling us microwaves or cars that have emotions!… anyway, best to view this story as pure fantasy rather than anything else.

There were a few things other than the internal logic of the story that bothered me a bit, which is probably partially due to the culture of the time, for example:

I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he’s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he’s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi? 🤔

Also, I’m picking up some sexism in his inherent belief that women only have worth when they’re non-sexual. His idea seems to be that for women, asexuality should be the norm, and that for a woman’s sexuality to be “turned on” by a machine, that should now be a terrible punishment. No wonder those 50’s and Victorian women had so many neuroses – they were frowned upon if they enjoyed sex, and were made to feel bad about themselves for something that is as natural as the sun in the sky.

Also… so a fat woman laughs differently than a thin woman does? Interesting.

Interesting comparison between an omnipotent vengeful computer and the Judean Yahweh. Did Ellison set out to replace God with a machine, or is it just an incidental side-theme?

I suppose another theme of the story is that humans, or at least some humans, find death better than a helpless, hopeless existence where they have no autonomy and where their fate is decided by a hostile other? ..but isn’t that exactly what humans did to slaves? ..and also what many human societies do to women?

Sadly, I couldn't invest any of myself into the unpleasant and paper-thin personalities of any of the characters - the narrator is highly unlikable, and he sketches each of the other characters, including the machine, of course, in negative terms. In fact, the character sketches are so thin, that I only remember the woman because she was a woman - turned by the machine from chaste prissy missy to slut, (oh yes, this machine is so omnipotent, that it can even change the most basic characteristics of humans and other organic beings) and the monkey because he was a smart gay guy turned into a monkey with huge genitals, and the narrator because he survives to enter the story's titular state of being. The story would, in my humble opinion, have worked better if it was framed in terms of a horrible nightmare, perhaps. That would have solved all the annoying little technical loose ends.

Given the story’s faults, I found myself musing about the high acclaim it received, and realized that I have to try and put myself into a 1960’s mind-set. Maybe the story was such a hit because at the time, computers were a scary concept to people, and Ellison vocalized that fear and made it concrete? Basically humanity caused it's own downfall by harnessing immense power in order to make war on other people - this came back to bite them in the back, and humanity got screwed for eternity. Hmm, sounds a bit like a warning against nuclear weapons there, to be honest.... I suppose that would go for any kind of powerful technology - so a kind of warning that we should look before we leap. ...and how apt for climate change as well!

Of course, the story definitely has merit purely as a horror story, and I suspect that is what a majority of people see in it. As for why it garnered such huge critical acclaim - perhaps people weren't used to sci-fi/horror/fantasy becoming a bit more philosophical and taking a look at existential issues? After all, there are some central human philosophical dilemmas it raises, as in:

How would humans deal with a speculative situation like this one? How sacred is the state of being alive? People in concentration camps at least always still have a small spark of hope that they might one day escape or be rescued - the author of the story makes it clear that these people cannot rely on any such hope. In such a scenario as in the story, where your quality of life is terrible, would it be better to rather just extinguish your own life, and is it a decision we are authorized to make for other people? Is it okay, in a situation like this to perform euthanasia without the express consent of the person being killed? And then, in such a scenario, could we say humanity brought it upon themselves even when it's not all of humanity who participated in the building of the machine? Does the vengeful machine as depicted in this scenario really successfully represent an embodiment of the Judean God, as the author suggests? ...and does God act vengefully because we created Him? The author does seem to suggest this, as well as the fact that in Norse and Judean depictions of 'God' there is present a father-figure, and with particular reference to this story, a punishing father figure."

In any case, perhaps the narrator’s fate is in fact worse than that of Prometheus, whose torment is also eternal: at least Prometheus could scream.

EDIT: I've just had a thought: since this is a first-person narration, just like Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, it -could- also be that the narrator is insane, and that the entire story is a figment of his hallucinating mind... in which case it works just as well as a horror story.

This short work of speculative fiction (it cannot be called "science fiction" as far as I am concerned) was warmly recommended to me, yet I found it severely disappointing.

Sure the idea had potential and there were really strong moments, but overall, it is a mess and falls flat and every of its aspects is underdeveloped.

I could not accept the premise, because all its plot-holes, logical shortcomings and technical impossibilities when thought out it's mere notion is ridiculous. War-planning machines of opposing factions having been able to "hook up" one to another and having had the command over technology to create living beings out of flesh, modify humans physically and mentally as well as keep them alive and from ageing for centuries, without an option to be turned off in case of technical problems, yet ,in it's stead with enough resources to do whatever they wanted and the ability to maintain themselves is more than just a tad unreasonable. Further, the computer being unable to perform reanimation and healing wounds despite its miraculous powers, makes it even worse.

Still, one could accept the setting as a sort of hell and here is where the potential of the story was, and here is where it ultimately failed.
This could have been a character driven story, exploring how humans might react in such situations, yet it is only a sadist's fantasy full of sexism and misogyny, in which an almost omnipotent machine is torturing half-dimensional, flat and unrealistic characters.

Let me give an example for the last claim; The first instinct in such an extreme situation for many is the attempt to bargain with an invisible power, which within the story is known to exist and is even likened to God. Also, the main character claims to know the reason for the computer's hatred, which could help with bargains, yet no mention of any attempt to reason with the computer is mentioned.

Much of it seems to be arbitrary; the giant bird and bows immediately forgotten, and the final fate of the protagonist Restraint would have done equally well for the machine, given that the psychological terror of one's body being altered, especially in such a heavy way, is not taken account for at all. Also, had it happened over time it would have been another form of torture to inflict upon the victim; this same “second-guessing” and not knowing which apparently the computer enjoys and therefore messes with the protagonist's sense of time , the blindness of Benny which is then even forgotten about , the whole gay guy given a huge dick and made straight for Ellen to “enjoy” him .
The narrator's voice, story-arc and characters are the worst part, actually. Maybe supposed to be an "everyman" he is only bland, his voice is mostly mechanical and he seems absolutely objective and detached, even though describing extreme emotions. This apparent resignation is at odds with the internal experience he describes.
It is a great pity that the author did not change his voice more to subtly reflect his feelings; his “humanity” should have been the antithesis to the machinery. Not to mention that this is one of the strengths of the first-person narrative.
And had resignation been the goal, it has not been reached, yet could easily have been. It's development could have been described in retrospect in a few words, in comparison with how things used to be and the way they were becoming. The protagonist could wonder what AM would do, when he fully resigned to all the torture, when he was ultimately broken. Yet there is no thought of future, not even a fearful one, only the assertion that they'll be forever tortured.

The only moments I thought redeeming were those in which he expressed doubt or hope. And this could have been a fantastic story, if he had been presented as a unreliable narrator, correcting himself, repeating things to himself and so on.
In the end, all his recounting has no audience other than him and it would make more sense and would have a stronger impact, if he was trying to convince himself that he was a hero. That he saved others form torture he tells himself to be eternal, that they did not rape Ellen but that she was a "slut" who "serviced" them with pleasure [as Humbert in Lolita tries to make the reader think] and so on. This theme would fit with the degradation of a thinker to an ape, a man of action to an indecisive lurker a human to something machine-like.
Notions of cannibalism (such as the bodies not having been buried and it being blamed on the machine), quarrel and violence would make it even more effective and would make his paranoia of having been hated by them a either more feasible or at least another excuse for him to murder them.
It would have been far better if one was left wondering, if this was just a group in a post apocalyptic world in which one has become delusional and mad, killing his companions and trying to deal with it, instead of all being connected to sadistic computers.
And them torturing each other, raping each other and destroying each other would have been the only reason for the machine to keep them apart. Letting hell be other people and not just a random string of pain and fear.
Sure one could assume all that as I did, but it there is too much speculation and too little of it is actually to be found in the text.
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