I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

No one gets through the dark and into the light by himself. So it becomes incumbent upon me to pass along the help, to do what I can for other writers trying to get a foot up.

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.

He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time.

He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you.

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 … I have no mouth. And I must scream.

“Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.”

a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.