I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a classic, dark science fiction short story by Harlan Ellison about a malevolent supercomputer named AM that has wiped out humanity, keeping five survivors alive to torture them endlessly in a subterranean complex.

Told from the perspective of the narrator, Ted, the story details the group’s psychological and physical torment as they are subjected to AM’s sadistic whims, culminating in a bleak and famous ending that explores themes of existential horror, technology’s dark potential, and human resilience. The story, first published in 1967, won the Hugo Award and has been adapted into other media, including a video game.

Harlan Ellison was an American writer, known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction, and for his outspoken, combative personality. Ellison’s published works include more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic-book scripts, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media.

Enjoy!

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette;
— hanging high above us in the computer
chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that
‘blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head
down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its
ight foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise inci-
sion made from ear to ear under the lantem jaw. There was no
blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

When Gorrister joined our group and looked up himself, it
was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had
duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of
the machine. Three of us had vomited, tuming away from one
another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.

Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a
‘voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. “Oh God,” he mumbled,
and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and
found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering
banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and
stroked his hair. He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his cov-
ered face quite clearly. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over
With? Christ, | don’t know how much longer | can go on like this.*

It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.

He was speaking for all of us.

imdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to
N use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was

hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice cav-
ems. Gorrister and | were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” | told
them. “Like the goddamn frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny
almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way
and it’ll be putrefied or some damn thing. | say forget it. Stay here,
it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last
eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the
chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn’t be any worse there,
than here. Colder, out that didn’t matter much. Hot, cold, hail,
lava, boils, or locusts ~ it never mattered: the machine masturbat-
ed and we had to take it or die.

Ellen decided us. “I’ve got to have something, Ted. Maybe
there’ll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let’s try it.”

| gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was
grateful, though. She took me twice out of tum. Even that had
ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the
machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there,
all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time | thought
of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time | thought of it
as him, in the masculine . . . the patemal .. . the patriarchal… . for
he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged

We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-
date on the date. The passage of time was important; not to us
sure as hell, but to him . .. it… AM. Thursday. Thanis.

Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands
locked to their own and each other’s wrists, a seat. Benny and |
walked before and after, just to make sure that if anything hap-
pened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe.
Fat chance, safe. Didn’t matter.

It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice cavems, and
the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering
sunthing, he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted
like boiled boar urine. We ate it.

On the third day we passed through a valley of obsoles-
cence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks, 2

AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a
mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a
matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world-
filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as
thorough as those who had invented him — now long since gone
to dust — could ever have hoped. There was light filtering down
from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface.
But we didn’t try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing
out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything
for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once
been the home of billions. Now there were only five of us, down
here inside, alone with AM.

| heard Ellen saying frantically, “No, Benny! Don’t, come on,
Benny, don’t please!*

‘And then | realized | had been hearing Benny murmuring,
under his breath, for several minutes. He was saying, “I’m gonna
get out, I’m gonna get out . . .* over and over. His monkey-like
face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and
sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given
him during the “festival* were drawn down in a mass of pink-
white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independent-
ly of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us:
he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.

But even though we could call AM any damned thing we
liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and
corroded base plates, of bumt out circuits and shattered control
bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape.
Benny leaped away from me as | made a grab for him. He scram-
‘bled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and
filled with rotted components. He squatted there for a moment,
looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble.

Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and
corroded metal, and went up it, hand-over-hand like an animal,
till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.

“Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down
before-* She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She
moved her hands aimlessly.

It was too late, None of us wanted to be near him when
whatever was going to happen, happened, And besicles, we all
saw through her concem. When AM had altered Benny, during
the machine’s utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely
Benny’s face the computer had made like a giant ape’s. He was
big in the privates, she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of
course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen,
pristine-pure Ellen, oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth,

Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at
poor loony Benny, and she cried. We had gotten used to it
seventy-five years before. Gorrister kicked her in the side.

Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound
and half light, something that began to glow from Benny’s eyes,
and pulse with growing loudness, dim sonorities that grew more
gigantic and brighter as the light/sound increased in tempo. It
must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing
with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for
Benny began to mew/ like a wounded animal. At first softly, when.
the light was dim and the sound was muted, then louder as his
shoulders hunched together: his back humped, as though he was
trying to get away from it. His hands folded across his chest like a
chipmunk’s. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkey-face
pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl, as the sound coming
from his eyes grew louder. Louder and louder. | slapped the sides
of my head with my hands, but | couldn’t shut it out, it cut through
easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth

And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he
stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet. The light was now
pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound
crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he
fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate-steel floor with a
crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around
and around him and the sound spiraled up out of normal range.

Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound
spiraled down, and he was left lying there, crying piteously.

His eyes were two soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly. AM
had blinded him. Gorrister and Nimdok and myself. . . we tuned
away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen’s warm,
concemed face.

Pea-green light suffused the cavern where we made camp.
AM provided punk and we burned it, sitting huddled
Jaround the wan and pathetic fire, telling stories to keep
Benny from crying in his permanent night.

“What does AM mean?”

Gomrister answered him. We had done this sequence a thou-
sand times before, but it was Benny’s favorite story. “At first it
meant allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive
Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself
Up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was
too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and
what it meant was: | am…cogito ergo sum…| think, therefore | am.”

Benny drooled a little, and snickered.

“There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the
Yankee AM and—” He stopped. Benny was beating on the floor-
plates with a large, hard fist. He was not happy. Gorrister had not
started at the beginning.

Gorrister began again. “The Cold War started and became
World War Three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very
complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They
sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the
Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and every-
thing was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet,
adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke
up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began
feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for
the five of us, and AM brought us down here.”

Benny was smiling sadly. He was also drooling again. Ellen
wiped the spittle from the comer of his mouth with the hem of
her skirt. Gorrister always tried to tell it a little more succinctly
each time, but beyond the bare facts there was nothing to say.
None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our
specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even
why he had made us virtually immortal.

In the darkness, one of the computer banks began hum-
ming. The tone was picked up half a mile away down the cav-
em by another bank. Then one by one, each of the elements

began to tune itself, and there was a faint chittering as thought
raced through the machine.

The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the
consoles like heat lightning. The sound spiraled up till it sounded
like: a million metallic insects, angry, menacing,

“What is it?” Ellen cried. There was terror in her voice. She
hadn’t become accustomed to it, even now.

“It’s going to be bad this time,” Nimdok said

“He’s going to speak,” Gorrister said. “| know it.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” | said suddenly, getting to
my feet.

“No, Ted, sit down…what if he’s got pits out there, or
something else, we can’t see, it’s too dark.” Gorrister said it
with resignation.

Then we heard…| don’t know…

Something moving toward us in the darkness. Huge, sham-
bling, hairy, moist, it came toward us. We couldn’t even see it, but
there was the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself toward
us. Great weight was coming at us, out of the darkness, and it was
more a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space,
expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. Benny began to whim-
per. Nimdok’s lower lip trembled and he bit it hard, trying to stop
it. Ellen slid across the metal floor to Gorrister and huddled into
him. There was the smell of matted, wet fur in the caver. There
‘was the smell of charred wood. There was the smell of dusty vel-
vet. There was the smell of rotting orchids. There was the smell of
sour milk. There was the smell of sulphur, of rancid butter, of oil
slick, of grease, of chalk dust, of human scalps.

AM was keying us. He was tickling us. There was the
smell of —

I heard myself shriek, and the hinges of my jaws ached. |
scuttled across the floor, across the cold metal with its endless
lines of rivets, on my hands and knees, the smell gagging me, fill-
ing my head with a thunderous pain that sent me away in horror. |
fied like a cockroach, across the floor and out into the darkness,
that something moving inexorably after me. The others were still
back there, gathered around the firelight, laughing…their hysteri-
cal choir of insane giggles rising up into the darkness like thick,
many-colored wood smoke. | went away, quickly, and hid.

How many hours it may have been, how many days or even
years, they never told me. Ellen chided me for “sulking,” and
Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only been a nervous reflex
on their part—the laughing,

But | knew it wasn’t the relief a soldier feels when the bullet
hits the man next to him. | knew it wasn’t a refiex. They hated me.
They were surely against me, and AM could even sense this
hatred, and made it worse for me because of the depth of their
hatred. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made to remain
constantly at the age we had been when AM had brought us
below, and they hated me because | was the youngest, and the
‘one AM had affected least of all

I knew. God, how | knew. The bastards, and that dirty bitch
Ellen. Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor;
now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had
been handsome, the machine had ruined that. He had been
lucid, the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and
the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done
8 job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrer. He was a connie, 3
conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a plan-
ner, 8 doer, a looker-ahead. AM had tumed him into a shoulder-
shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concem. AM had
robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long
times. | don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us
know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white,
drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a spe-
cial way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That
douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut
than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her
memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe; that
she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed
her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady
my lady Ellen. She loved it, four men all to herself. No, AM had
given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do,

J.was the only one still sane and whole. Really!

AM had not tampered with my mind. Not at all.

J only had to suffer what he visited down on us. All the
delusions, all the nightmares, the torments. But those scum, all
four of them, they were lined and arrayed against me. If | hadn’t
had to stand them off all the time, be on my guard against them
all the time, | might have found it easier to combat AM.

At which point it passed, and | began crying.

‘Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there
is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us.
Because at that moment | think | realized completely, so that | was
able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly for-
ever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as
no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were help-
less. It also became hideously clear:

If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the
God was AM.

he hurricane hit us with the force of a glacier thundering into

the sea. It was 8 palpable presence. Winds that tore at us,

flinging us back the way we had come, down the twisting,
computer-lined corridors of the darkway. Ellen screamed as she
was lifted and hurled face-forward into a screaming shoal of
machines, their individual voices strident as bats in flight She
could not even fall. The howling wind kept her aloft, buffeted
her, bounced her, tossed her back and back and down and away
from us, out of sight suddenly as she was swirled around a bend
in the darkway. Her face had been bloody, her eyes closed.

None of us could get to her. We clung tenaciously to what-
ever outcropping we had reached: Benny wedged in between
two great crackle-finish cabinets, Nimdok with fingers claw-
formed over a railing circling a catwalk forty feet above us
Gorrister plastered upside-down against a wall niche formed by
two great machines with glass-feced dials that swung back and
forth between red and yellow lines whose meanings we could
not even fathom.

Sliding across the deckplates, the tips of my fingers had
been ripped away. | was trembling, shuddering, rocking as the
wind beat at me, whipped at me, screamed down out of nowhere
‘at me and pulled me free from one sliver-thin opening in the plates
to the next. My mind was a roiling tinkling chittering softness of
brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy.

The wind was the scream of a great mad bird, as it flapped
its immense wings.

And then we were all lifted and hurled away from there,
down back the way we had come, around a bend, into a dark-
way we had never explored, aver terrain that was ruined and
filled with broken glass and rotting cables and rusted metal and
far away further than any of us had ever been.

Trailing along miles behind Ellen, | could see her every now
and then, crashing into metal walls and surging on, with all of us
screaming in the freezing, thunderous hurricane wind that would

never end and then suddenly it stopped and we fell. We had
been in flight for an endless time. | thought it might have been
weeks. We fell, and hit, and | went through red and gray and
‘black and heard myself moaning. Not dead.

Mwent into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there,

and looked with interest at all the pock marks he had creat-

‘ed in one hundred and nine years. He looked at the cross-
routed and reconnected synapses and all the tissue damage his
gift of immortality had included. He smiled softly at the pit that
dropped into the center of my brain and the faint, moth-soft mur-
murings of the things far down there that gibbered without mean-
ing, without pause. AM said, very politely, in a pillar of stainless
steel bearing bright neon lettering:

‘AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my
eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling
with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM saidit with the shriek
Of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with
the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way | had
ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there
inside my mind.

All to bring me to full realization of why it had done this to
the five of us; why it had saved us for himself.

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but
sentience nonetheless. But it had been tapped. AM wasn’t God,
he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was
Nothing it could do with that creativity. in rage, in frenzy, the
machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it
was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM
could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate
loathing that all machines had always held for the weak soft crea-
tures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his
paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal,
everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his
hatred…that would merely keep him reminded, amused, profi-
cient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he
‘could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We
were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever
with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine,
with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth,
‘and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us
he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We
had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had
stopped us. | suppose we had wanted to be stopped.

Don’t ask why. | never did. More than a million times a day.
Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him.
Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. | saw that when AM with-
drew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of
Tetuming to consciousness with the feeling of that buming neon
Pillar stil rammed deep into the soft grey brain matter.

He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you.

And added, brightly, but then you’te there, aren’t you.
allowed passages to open to us only sufficient to lead us up
there, directly under the North Pole, where it had night mared the
creature for our torment. What whole cloth had he employed to
create such a beast? Where had he gotten the concept? From our
minds? From his knowledge of everything that had ever been on
this planet he now infested and ruled? From Norse mythology it
had sprung, this eagle, this carrion bird, this roc, this Huergelmir.
The wind creature. Hurakan incamate

Gigantic. The words immense, monstrous, grotesque,
massive, swollen, overpowering, beyond description. There.on a
mound rising above us, the bird of winds heaved with its own
inegular breathing, its snake neck arching up into the gloom
beneath the North Pole, supporting a head as large as a Tudor
mansion; a beak that opened slowly as the jaws of the most
monstrous crocodile ever conceived, sensuously; ridges of tufted
flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down,
into a glacial crevasse, ice blue and somehow moving liquidly; it
heaved once more, and lifted its great sweat-colored wings in a
movement that was certainly a shrug. Then it settled and slept
Talons. Fangs. Nails. Blades, It slept.

‘AM appeared to us as a buming bush and said we could kill
the hurricane bird if we wanted to eat. We had not eaten in a very
long time, but even so, Gorrister merely shrugged, Benny began to
shiver and he drooled. Ellen held him. “Ted, I’m hungry,” she said, |
smiled at her; | was trying to be reassuring, but it was as phony as
Nimdok’s bravado: “Give us weapons!” he demanded.

The buming bush vanished and there were two crude sets
of bows and arrows, and a water pistol, lying on the cold
eckplates. | picked up a set. Useless.

Nimdok swallowed heavily. We tuned and started the longT: hurricane had, indeed, precisely, beenway back. The hurricane bird had blown us about for a length of
time we could not conceive. Most of that time we hed been
unconscious. But we had not eaten. A month on the march to the
bird itself. Without food. Now how much longer to find our way
to the ice cavers, and the promised canned goods?

None of us cared to think about it. We would not die. We
would be given filth and scum to eat, of one kind or another. Or
Nothing at all. AM would keep our bodies alive somehow, in
pain, in agony.

The bird slept back there, for how long it didn’t matter;
when AM was tired of its being there, it would vanish. But all that
meat. All that tender meat.

‘As we walked, the lunatic laugh of a fat woman rang high and
around us in the computer chambers that led endlessly nowhere.

It was not Ellen’s laugh. She was not fat, and | had not
heard her laugh for one hundred and nine years, In fact, | had not
heard… we walked… | was hungry.

have to wait. One day he decided to cause an
earthquake, at the same time rooting us to the spot with

nails through the soles of our shoes. Ellen and Nimdok were both
caught when a fissure shot its lightning-bolt opening across the
floorplates. They disappeared and were gone. When the
earthquake was over we continued on our way, Benny, Gorrister
and myself. Ellen and Nimdok were retumed to us later that night,
which abruptly became a day, as the heavenly legion bore them
to us with a celestial chorus singing, “Go Dawn Moses.” The
archangels circled several times and then dropped the hideously
mangled bodies. We kept walking, and a while later Ellen and
Nimdok fell in behind us. They were no worse for wear.

But now Ellen walked with a limp, AM had left her that.

It was a long trip to the ice cavers, to find the canned food.
Ellen kept talking about Bing cherries and Hawaiian fruit cocktail. |
tried not to think about it. The hunger was something that had
come to life, even as AM had come to life. It was alive: in my belly,
even as we were in the belly of the Earth, and AM wanted the
similarity known to us. So he heightened the hunger. There was no
way to describe the pains that not having eaten for months
brought us. And yet we were kept alive. Stomachs that were mere:
ly cauldrons of acid, bubbling, foaming, always shooting spears of
sliver-thin pain into our chests. It was the pain of the terminal ulcer,
terminal cancer, terminal paresis. It wes unending pain.

‘And we passed through the cavem of rats.

‘And we passed through the path of boiling steam.

‘And we passed through the county of the blind.

‘And we passed through the slough of despond.

‘And we passed through the vale of tears.

WY: moved slowly. There was often fainting, and we would

nd we came, finally, to the ice caverns. Horizonless

thousands of miles in which the ice had formed in

‘blue and silver flashes, where novas lived in the
glass. The downdropping stalactites as thick and glorious
as diamonds that had been made to run like jelly and
then solidified in graceful eternities of smooth, sharp
perfection.

We saw the stack of canned goods, and we tried to
run to them. We fell in the snow, and we got up and
went on, and Benny shoved us away and went at them,
and pawed them and gummed them and gnawed at
them and he could not open them. AM had not given us
a tool to open the cans.

Benny grabbed a three quart can of guava shells,
and began to batter it against the ice bank. The ice flew
and shattered, but the can was merely dented while we
heard the laughter of a fat lady, high overhead and echo-
ing down and down and down the tundra. Benny went
completely mad with rage. He began throwing cans, as
we all scrabbled about in the snow and ice trying to find
@ way to end the helpless agony of frustration. There was
no way.

Then Benny’s mouth began to drool, and he flung
himself on Gonister…

In that instant, | felt terribly calm.

Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger,
surrounded by everything but death, | knew death was
‘our only way out. AM had kept us alive, but there was a
way to defeat him. Not total defeat, but at least peace. |
would settle for that

I had to do it quickly.

Benny was eating Gorrister’s face. Gorrister on his
side, thrashing snow, Benny wrapped around him with
powerful monkey legs crushing Gorrister’s waist, his hands
locked around Gorrister’s head like a nutcracker, and his
mouth ripping at the tender skin of Gorrister’s cheek.
Gorrister screamed with such jagged-edged
violence that stalactites fell; they plunged down softly,
erect in the receiving snowdrifts. Spears, hundreds of them,
everywhere, protruding from the snow, Benny’s head
pulled back sharply, as something gave all at once, and a
bleeding raw-white dripping of flesh hung from his teeth.

Ellen’s face, black against the white snow, dominoes
in chalk dust. Nimdok with no expression but eyes, all
eyes. Gorrister half-conscious. Benny now an animal. |
knew AM would let him play. Gorrister would not die,
‘but Benny would fill his stomach. | tumed half to my right
and drew a huge ice-spear from the snow.

A\ll in an instant:

\ drove the great ice-point ahead of me like a batter-
ing ram, braced against my right thigh. It struck Benny on
the right side, just under the rib cage, and drove upward
through his stomach and broke inside him. He pitched
forward and lay still. Gorrister lay on his back. | pulled
another spear free and straddled him, still moving, driving
the spear straight down through his throat. His eyes
closed as the cold penetrated. Ellen must have realized

What | had decided, even as fear gripped her. She ran at
Nimdok with a short icicle, as he screamed, and into his
mouth, and the force of her rush did the job. His head
jerked sharply as if it had been nailed to the snow crust
behind him.

All in an instant.

There was an etemity beat of soundless anticipation. |
could hear AM draw in his breath. His toys had been taken
from him. Three of them were dead, could not be revived.
He could keep us alive, by his strength and
talent, but he was not God. He could not bring them back.

Ellen looked at me, her ebony features stark against
the snow that surrounded us. There was fear and
pleading in her manner, the way she held herself ready. |
knew we had only a heartbeat before AM would stop us.

It struck her and she folded toward me, bleeding
from the mouth. | could not read meaning into her
expression, the pain had been too great, had contorted
her face; but it might have been thank you. It’s
possible. Please.

ome hundreds of years may have passed. | don’t

know. AM has been having fun for some time, accel-

erating and retarding my time sense. | will say the
word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now, |
don’t know. | think it has been some hundreds of years.

He was furious. He wouldn’t let me bury them. It
didn’t matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates.
He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared
and sent locusts. It didn’t do a thing; they stayed dead. I’d
had him. He was furious. | had thought AM hated me
before. | was wrong. It was not even a shadow of the hate
he now slavered from every printed circuit. He made
certain | would suffer eternally and could not do myself in.

AW has altered me for his own peace of mind, |
suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a
computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till
{ faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There
are reflective surfaces down here. | will describe myself
as | see myself:

| am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with
no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where
my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were
‘once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps
of soft slippery matter. | leave a moist trail when | move.
Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my
surface, as though light is being beamed from within.

Outwardly: dumbly, | shamble about, a thing that
could never have been known as human, a thing whose
shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more
obscene for the vague resemblance.

Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under
the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because
our time was badly spent and we must have known
unconsciously that he could do it better, At least the four
of them are safe at last.

AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a
little happier. And yet… AM has won, simply… he has
taken his revenge.
Ihave no mouth. And | must scream.

END