i have no mouth and i must scream short story

They show concern for Ellen, carrying her for the first 100 miles through terrible weather extremes. The group starts their trek to the ice caverns Nimdok saw in his hallucination. Ted reveals that, though he believes “it” is the most accurate pronoun for AM, he can’t help thinking of AM as a “he” and as a cruel inversion of the Christian God: “God as Daddy the Deranged” (2). Ted mentions that Ellen most likely receives little pleasure from the act, though the machine “giggles” whenever she engages in intercourse with her fellow survivors. Ted acquiesces, and Ellen has sex with him “out of turn” as thanks, alluding to her habit of having sex with each of the male survivors as a matter of course. Ellen, the only female survivor, pleads with them to make the journey. Ted and Gorrister both express doubt, pointing to past experiences in which the machine tricked them with unfulfilled promises of food.

Nimdok hallucinates that there are canned goods in underground ice caverns far away from their current location. The machine has been keeping them alive past their natural lifetimes through unknown means to torture them endlessly. Ted reflects that it is the 109th year of their captivity. They are then joined by Gorrister and subsequently realize that their captor, a machine called AM, has played another of its habitual pranks to torment them. The four other survivors, Ted (the narrator), Benny, Nimdok, and Ellen, react with horror and revulsion.

The story opens with the image of Gorrister, one of five survivors of a global apocalypse, hanging dead from the ceiling of a vast, artificially-created space that functions as a prison for the survivors. Misogynistic slurs are repeated only in direct quotes.

This guide refers to the open-source version available on New York City’s College of Technology OpenLab, which corresponds to the version printed in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories, published in 2014 by Open Road Media.Ĭontent Warning: “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” deals with disturbing topics, including physical and sexual abuse/violence, body horror, suicidal ideation, and homicide.

I have no mouth and i must scream short story