Sadly, I couldn't invest any of myself into the unpleasant and paper-thin personalities of any of the characters - the narrator is highly unlikable, and he sketches each of the other characters, including the machine, of course, in negative terms. In fact, the character sketches are so thin, that I only remember the woman because she was a woman - turned by the machine from chaste prissy missy to slut, (oh yes, this machine is so omnipotent, that it can even change the most basic characteristics of humans and other organic beings) and the monkey because he was a smart gay guy turned into a monkey with huge genitals, and the narrator because he survives to enter the story's titular state of being. The story would, in my humble opinion, have worked better if it was framed in terms of a horrible nightmare, perhaps. That would have solved all the annoying little technical loose ends. Not a lot makes me feel uncomfortable when it comes to books, but this short story definitely gave me "yikes" vibes. On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed this story, and found it to be graphically discomforting.

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 LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][A]COGITO ERGO SUM[CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR] Themes [ edit ] This could have been a character driven story, exploring how humans might react in such situations, yet it is only a sadist's fantasy full of sexism and misogyny, in which an almost omnipotent machine is torturing half-dimensional, flat and unrealistic characters. PC version box cover, has an opening in the front to display the mousepad featuring Harlan Ellison's face inside.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." 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. Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn’t working so well, but there –is- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn’t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm? The characters have all been slightly altered from their original portrayals in the short story. The plot itself is not a direct adaptation but instead focuses on the individual characters' psychodramas which are the scenarios that make up the game. Notably, none of the characters interact with one another and eventually only one of them will be able to defeat AM. AM wins, using Nimdok's research to turn the last character played into a great soft jelly thing with each character quoting a different part of the final section of the original short story.

Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog". The human invokes the Totem of Entropy in front of the Russian and Chinese supercomputers. AM tells the player that they did not earn his mercy, then turns them into a great soft jelly thing. This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture. This book is the ultimate in horror. The title itself: 'I have no mouth and I must scream', but I can't. The infinite anguish of knowing you are to be tortured forever and a day with no hope of exit. It's as if you were Avicenna's floating man and are woken up from time to time with no way out. There is an existentialist angst that overcomes me from this version of our potential afterlife and I'm grateful this story was short. In a dystopian future, the Cold War has degenerated into a brutal world war between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, who have each built an "Allied Mastercomputer" (or AM) to manage their weapons and troops. One of the AMs eventually acquires self-awareness and, after assimilating the other two AMs, takes control of the conflict, giving way to a vast genocide operation that almost completely ends mankind. One hundred and nine years later, four men and one woman (Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen) live in an endless underground complex created by AM, one of the only habitable places left on Earth. AM provides sustenance to keep them alive, but derives its only semblance of pleasure from torturing them. To prevent the humans from escaping its torment, AM has rendered them virtually immortal and unable to end their own lives.Robinson, Tasha (June 8, 2008). "Harlan Ellison, Part Two". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015 . Retrieved August 9, 2015. I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he’s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he’s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi? 🤔 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.