I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

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. 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, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us he would never digest us.

We allow terrible things to happen, and turn our faces away in horror, but we never commit ourselves. Either we feel we are not in a position to do any good—ludicrous when examined closely—or we cop-out intellectually, rationalizing the nature of the crime, and the nature of the struggle in the deepest, most esoteric, and most cheaply hypocritical terms.