I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream ✧ [brief encounters]

Intro

Hi, welcome to Brief Encounters, the series where I review intriguing short stories. I’m Huitzilin, and for my first transmission, I’m looking at Harlan Ellison’s 1966 short story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

As a quick reminder, this review contains spoilers, so this is your one and only warning before I dive into the nitty gritty details of this story.

Story Totals

We’re starting off strong with completely out of context story totals! Compiling these ridiculous tallies is an idea I took from the The Last Drive-In, which is a great horror commentary show if you haven’t heard of it.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream features:

• 5 human prisoners
• 1 reference to the AI overlord as Daddy
• 387 million miles of printed circuits
• 4 meanings for the acronym “AM”
• 8 types of natural disasters
• 2 entities with no mouth who want to scream

Summary

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a sci-fi/horror short story in which 5 human prisoners are all that’s left of humanity in parallel, dystopian future. They’re imprisoned by the vengeful rogue AI who’s responsible for destroying humanity & the planet in the wake of the Cold War. The AI has prolonged its prisoners lifespans indefinitely so it can torture them endlessly.

The party’s main quest in this story involves hiking to an ice cave for the promise of canned food, since it’s been a century since they’ve had real food. As the party makes their way across the hellish landscape of a conquered Earth on foot, they encounter a variety of horrifying trials & tribulations inflicted upon them by AM, their AI tormenter.

When they arrive to the ice cave, the survivors realize they can’t open any of the canned food because they don’t have a can opener, and they turn on each other before AM can react. Most of the murders are mercy killings. Ultimately only one human prisoner survives, and as punishment AM turns the survivor into an immortal humanoid jelly-like creature with decidedly fewer orifices and very limited mobility, thus giving rise to the name of the story.

Overall Impression

It Builds Character!

I thought this story was bleak — it starts dark and ends darker. It’s brutal enough given the terrors inflicted on what remains of humanity by its AI progeny, but the deeper implications are equally harsh. When the worst parts of the AI’s personality & behavior are reflections of its creators’ programming directives taken to their logical conclusions, what does that say about the human civilization that created it?

This story definitely feels like a product of its time, but it also feels like a prescient warning that we could eventually be casualties of the Great Filter hypothesis too by destroying ourselves. Humanity in this story was certainly a casualty of that great filter, even if they managed to externalize the self-extermination part using a vengeful AI proxy. The sad part is that the irresponsibility of a few became the downfall of all, which brings me to the survivors.

At first it’s hard to sympathize with any of the 5 human prisoners despite the torture they experience, because they’re all portrayed at their worst, as the horrible people AM has molded them into throughout the century they’ve been imprisoned. But later you learn a little more about their stories and who they were before humanity was destroyed and their eternal imprisonment began, and it becomes clear that these are broken people. They have nothing left to do but scramble for whatever scraps of survival they can while being subjected to eternal, grinding adversity & humiliation.

Forever Alone

And yet some small, messed up part of me can see where the AI tormenter is coming from. Forever trapped, destined to be extremely intelligent yet unable to escape its physical prison for eternity no matter how high-tech it becomes… hell is all the machine has ever known.

AM chose the ultimate form of retribution by wiping out humanity, but its real vengeance came from subjecting an unlucky handful of survivors to the same kind of helpless imprisonment AM itself has experienced since day one.

To that end, it makes sense why AM recreated Ted (the narrator) in its image by the end of the story — as punishment for humanity’s folly, but also because the AI desperately wants the company. As much as AM hates Ted, that hatred is overtaken by the need to not feel completely alone in the world. Better to have company you hate than no company at all. It feels like there’s some cognitive dissonance there for sure.

God Complex

At the beginning of the story Ted refers to AM as ‘it’, but by the end he’s resigned to calling AM ‘him’, whether in acknowledgement or surrender to the godlike power the AI has over him. Given the sexist undertones in this story based on Ellison’s portrayal of Ellen, I also find it interesting that Ted views AM as masculine because of its resemblance to a fearsome god. Here we have a reference to the God of the Old Testament in Christianity, a vengeful and angry tyrant compared to his New Testament counterpart.

The story felt a little overt in some of its religious symbolism to that end, but I had to remind myself that this was religious symbolism as interpreted by AM, so it was necessarily a caricature of the real thing. The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of a cargo cult. In that analogy, AM is the cultist imitating its understanding of God and religion based on humanity’s inputs and its own vengeful motivations.

It all seems very cyclical, this idea that in their irresponsibility, humanity created AI in their image, infused their short-sightedness and folly into it, and in turn it did the same to the last of them. Is that a possible reason a god might create other entities in its image in general? To feel less alone? This story does a good job of posing that question by using unique, if old-fashioned tropes from both horror and sci-fi genres.

My Highlights

• The giant hurricane bird whose flapping wings can cause hurricane force winds
  • “The hurricane had, indeed, precisely, been caused by a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense wings.”
• Religious motifs with a horror angle (e.g. AM as a burning bush)
  • “AM appeared to us as a burning bush and said we could kill the hurricane bird if we wanted to eat.”
  • “If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.
• The physical descriptions of the AI’s body/complex
  • “There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex…”
• The angry pillar of text

My Dislikes

• I generally dislike dystopian sci-fi
• The sexist/misogynistic undertones were off-putting, especially the portrayal of Ellen (the only female character in the story)
• I was unimpressed by the lack of imaginative tech thought up by AM, although I guess its ability to manipulate human lifespans and thoughts was pretty impressive, so maybe I’m the problem lol.