I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.

And science fiction saved me from a life of crime. Honest.

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. 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 creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.