I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

AM is an artificial intelligence developed to handle the complexities of World War III that gained sentience and destroyed all of humanity in hatred and rage. Its name has different meanings, including Allied Mastercomputer, Adaptive Manipulator, and Aggressive Menace. Finally, AM named itself AM after Descartes’s famous statement, “I think, therefore I am.”

AM is a globe-spanning system of machinery, described as consisting of “chittering banks” and “fused memory banks and corroded base plates […] burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles” (2). It is entwined with the Earth itself, utilizing tunnels created by humans to imprison the five apocalypse survivors within itself. AM is defined by its cruel, sadistic, and gleeful torment of its captives. It seems to especially hate and wish to punish the survivors for their bodies, torturing them through pain, heat, cold, and foul food.

AM mostly engages with the survivors through “pranks,” allowing them to believe they might acquire sufficient food before rendering that option impossible, or pretending one or more of the survivors have died terrible deaths. It also constructs impossible tasks for them, such as killing a giant bird with two bows and a water pistol. AM plays with their minds, inverting their past values and strengths into mockeries of themselves.

AM maintains distance from the survivors through its persona of a deranged biblical God, but its most sincere moment comes when it enters Ted’s brain after Ted is left battered and dazed by the hurricane. AM looks around at the physical representations of damage it has created in Ted’s brain before delivering the following speech:

HATE. 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 COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE (6).

This hatred reveals the ultimate emptiness of AM and its own unending torment. AM hates humans but has no purpose without them. It can learn, manage, control, and manipulate, but it cannot create. It utilizes biblical imagery to torment its prisoners because it cannot come up with anything new. It is a war machine, after all, and it hates the humans who made it to be the way it is. In Ted’s words, “[I]t had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. […] AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be” (6).

Ellen is the only character whose race is explicitly mentioned in the story: Ted describes her “ebony skin” against the snow of the ice caverns. She wears a skirt, which she uses to wipe the drool from Benny’s mouth, and after a disastrous earthquake and separation from the group, she walks with a limp after an unspecified injury.

Ted states that Ellen describes herself as “a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us” (5). This implies that she might have been celibate, or disinterested in sex in her former life, and her current willingness to engage in sex with her fellow survivors could either be the product of AM’s twisting of her mind or a genuine desire to express companionship or compassion with her friends.

Ellen is deeply rooted in the sensations and sometimes pleasures of existing in a human body. Ellen “services” the four male survivors as a matter of course, seeming to use sex as an expression of affection, comfort, and gratitude. From Ted’s perspective, she craves sex, though she makes some statements that indicate she may not enjoy it as much as he believes. Additionally, Ellen provides nonsexual physical comfort, stroking Gorrister’s hair and tending to Benny in his distress. She provides her fellow survivors with the few reliable pleasures of the human body that she can give. In this way, Ellen embodies traditional gender roles as a nurturing figure. Later, Ted berates Ellen as a “slut,” showing that misogynistic attitudes have survived the apocalypse as well.

Ellen speaks vividly and concretely about food, expressing desire for “Bartlett pears or peaches” (1) and “Bing cherries and Hawaiian fruit cocktail” (9) showing her appreciation for the pleasures of consumption as well as sex. She often expresses vulnerability, asking for help from her comrades, which gives them a reason to remember and exercise their own humanity. From Ted’s perspective, Ellen seems shortsighted, manipulative, and frivolous. The reader, however, gleans that Ellen may have the most sustainable relationship to their suffering. At the end of the story, Ted must decide whether to keep Ellen alive, his most reliable provider of small comforts and humanity, or end her torment. He decides to kill her and hopes that the look on her face is gratitude.

Ellen’s name is an Anglicization of “Helen,” a Greek name meaning “torch” or “light.” Ellen may function as a guiding “light” to the rest of her friends, pointing them toward humanity by both being kind and requiring kindness.

Gorrister’s only physical description comes from his false murder, in which he is described as having a “lantern jaw” (1). He is shown to be visibly shaken by the sight of his own dead body, walking away, expressing despair, and questioning why AM doesn’t just kill them and get it over with. He joins Ted in his skepticism of any hope AM promises them, though he gives in when Ellen pleads to try to find the canned goods. Later, Ted reflects that Gorrister was once “a worrier […] a connie, a conscientious objector […] a planner, a doer, a looker­ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder­shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him” (5).

Gorrister displays the same dichotomous behavior as Ted, protecting Ellen by carrying her with Nimdok. However, when Ellen pleads with him to save the escaping Benny from AM’s punishment, Gorrister cruelly “slap[s] her,” then “kick[s] her in the side” (3). By so brutally enforcing a lack of any action to save Benny, he confirms Ted’s observations that he has become numb and passive to the suffering of others, despite the ideals of his earlier life.

However, Gorrister later shows kindness to Benny, comforting him by acquiescing to his request for the story of AM’s creation and domination. He shows the most knowledge of the circumstances that led to AM’s creation and the subsequent destruction of humankind. Gorrister continues to parallel Ted’s dichotomy between kindness and cruelty through these actions.

Benny’s physical appearance receives the most description of any of the human characters. Ted describes him as having a “monkeylike face” and “radiation scars […] drawn down into a mass of pink­white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another” (2). Ted recounts that Benny is the only survivor to have his physical form contorted, sporting a distorted face and an enlarged penis.

Ted uses animalistic terms to refer to Benny, alternately calling him “apelike” and “monkeylike.” When AM punishes him, Benny begins to “mewl like a wounded animal. […] His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk's” (3). This is in contrast to Benny’s pre-apocalypse history, in which he was a handsome professor. Benny is the least connected to reality of the characters and acts largely on impulse or instinct. Like Ellen, he desires pleasures of the flesh, like sex and food. However, while Ellen uses sex and food as kindness and comfort, Benny’s desire for food drives him to attack Gorrister and try to eat his face to assuage his hunger.

Benny is a diminutive of Benjamin, a Hebrew name meaning “son of my right hand.” The name may refer to his former place of honor among humanity as a brilliant, handsome scientist. As the most animalistic of the group, this meaning might imply that Benjamin is the most human, as the furthest possible being from AM.