I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream: Stories

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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Video Game 1995)". IMDb. Archived from the original on 2019-03-16 . Retrieved 2018-11-13. 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. The story, narrated by Ted, begins with AM projecting a hologram of Gorrister to the other humans, hanging upside down, dripping blood and unresponsive. The real Gorrister joins the group to their surprise, and they realize it was another one of AM's illusions. Nimdok has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the complex. Because of their great hunger due to AM keeping them in a perpetual state of near-starvation, the humans are coerced into making the long journey to the place where the food is supposedly kept – in this case, the ice caves. Along the way, the machine provides foul sustenance, sends horrible monsters after them, emits earsplitting sounds, and blinds Benny when he tries to escape. 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. Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste ("twice removed"), but AM altered her mind so that she became desperate for sexual intercourse. The others, at different times, both protect her and abuse her. According to Ted, she finds pleasure in sex only with Benny, because of his large penis. Described by Ted as having ebony skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity is explicitly mentioned.

a b Dulin, Ron (1996-05-01). "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Review". GameSpot. Archived from the original on 18 August 2003 . Retrieved 22 January 2014. 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.

AG Staff (December 30, 2011). "Top 100 All-Time Adventure Games". Adventure Gamers. Archived from the original on June 4, 2012.

Withers, Jeremy (2017). "Medieval and Futuristic Hells: The Influence of Dante on Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' ". In Fugelso, Karl (ed.). Ecomedievalism. Studies in Medievalism. Vol.26. Boydell & Brewer. pp.117–130. ISBN 978-1-84384-465-5. JSTOR 10.7722/j.ctt1kgqvzg.12. Anyways, the title. The story is terrifying from start to finish and AM is one of the best villains I've ever seen. AM is powerful, terrifying, and almost a God.Francavilla, Joseph (1994). "The Concept of the Divided Self in Harlan Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' and 'Shatterday' ". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 6 (2/3 (22/23)): 107–125. JSTOR 43308212. it doesn't really help that said super computer gets up to the most misogynist, racist, and homophobic bullshit i've ever read. (and no, not in a thoughtful social commentary way, either. just the Real Old-Fashioned Bullshit.) The machines are each referred to as "AM", which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer", but was changed to "Adaptive Manipulator" and upon gaining sentience, "Aggressive Menace". It finally refers to itself as purely "AM", referring to the phrase " I think, therefore I am."

Nimdok– Nimdok, an elderly ex- Nazi physician, finds himself in a concentration camp, expected to conduct brutal medical experiments on helpless subjects. Nimdok is given the task of finding " the lost tribe" by AM but his failing memory, or denial, make it difficult for him to comprehend or engage with the situation, even though it represents actions he has already taken before. Eventually he learns the truth: he himself was a Nazi scientist who turned in his Jewish parents to the regime, and helped develop the very same technologies that AM uses to prolong their lives (the life serum) and alter their bodies (morphogenics). Nimdok redeems himself by helping the Jewish captives of the camp escape, and gives them control of a large golem, which they use to kill him for his past crimes. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there’s a huge sidenote coming up here: 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.Based on Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", one of the ten most reprinted stories in the English language Best Cyberpunk Books". The Best Sci Fi Books. 31 March 2015. Archived from the original on 21 January 2016 . Retrieved 11 January 2016.

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.

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Gorrister– Gorrister is suicidal due to the guilt of having had his wife committed to a mental institution. Gorrister finds himself on board a zeppelin over a desert with signs of a struggle, and a gaping hole in his own chest where his heart used to be. AM offers him the chance to finally kill himself, but sabotages all his means of doing so. In his scenario, Gorrister learns that his mother-in-law Edna also felt responsible for driving his wife insane despite previously hounding him for it and learns to bury the past. Ellison adapted the story into a computer game of the same name, published by Cyberdreams in 1995. Although he was not a fan of computer games and did not own a personal computer at the time, he co-authored the expanded storyline and wrote much of the game's dialogue, all on a mechanical typewriter. [4] Ellison also voiced the supercomputer "AM" and provided artwork of himself used for a mousepad included with the game. 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.