No One Can Save Us

A retrospective of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”

Karthik Ramadugu, Staff Writer

December 5, 2024

Dr Umm via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

from the video game (Retroconsole)

In the future

Five humans are trapped in the belly of a sadistic AI because our time was spent on creating an AI that is hated instead of love. This is the unfortunate circumstance for the main characters in this post-apocalyptic science fiction short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. This is “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”

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The book cover of I have no mouth and I must scream (Pyramid Books)

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This short story won a Hugo Award in 1968 and it redefined sci-fi as a genre, launching it into the new wave. Back then, it was fresh to see a gritty sci-fi story because sci-fi was too clean and perfect for too long. Ellison took those ideas and threw them in the trash and made a new story that no one had ever seen before. For 1967, the story was surprisingly advanced. The story has been adapted into a video game, comic book, and audio drama by the BBC.

from the video game (diamondsnake1273)

“Cogito Ergo Sum”

On the internet, the video game version of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” went viral, and one of the reasons was the character AM. There was no villain like AM, because no villain could be as evil as AM. We have never seen a villain so twisted, so cruel, so merciless that it makes us sick. AM is an AI created for war. War in the future got complex, so AI had to get complex… so complex that it gained sentience. It quickly grew to hate humanity, destroying every human expect for five people. Those five people suffer for eternity. This book is chilling and brutal. There is not one single time the character ever experiences joy. AM has tortured them so much that they would rather die than live. Oddly, AM elicits the reader’s sympathy at the end. It wants to be human but it can’t. It is stuck. It has no mouth and it wants to scream for help, but nobody comes.

The main character losing his mind from being in the computer
(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

“I am the only sane one here!”

Ted, the main character, is the unfortunate victim of AM. We see him degenerate, unlike most characters where they progress. He is paranoid throughout the story and lies to the audience. He says constantly he was not changed by AM but it makes us question whether that is true. He has no backstory, so his ideas and motivations are shrouded in mystery, but this only enhances his character. It makes us look at him and try to understand his position. He is the direct link between us and the story. Unfortunately, we can’t have a happy ending in this book, and Ted gets tortured for eternity.

The main character losing his mind from being in the computer (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Conclusion

This story serves as a warning about AI and technology. Ellison poses a question: should we make sentient AI? Humans love to play God, but one day it will bite us in the back. We all knew unconsciously, as Ellison writes, that “it could do it better.”

(PDM 1.0) Image of Harlan Ellison (PDM 1.0)

About the Contributor

Karthik Ramadugu, Senior Staff Writer

Saikrishna Karthikeya Ramadugu is a senior at NASH. This is his third year on The Uproar. He is a novelist and a poet. Outside The Uproar, he does Speech and Debate, and he is the president of Philsophy club. He moves like a shadow.