This enabled it to seize control of all weapons, and then to efficiently and ruthlessly exterminate almost all human beings. The sentient AM immediately disarmed and absorbed the other two machines into itself. One day, one of the machines developed self-awareness and changed the meaning of its name to “I think, therefore I AM,” or AM for short. These machines were each named AM – an acronym that stood for, in succession: Allied Mastercomputer, Adaptive Manipulator, and finally, Aggressive Menace. Each of these powers then created its own artificially intelligent supercomputer to optimize the strategy and tactics of the war. Before the beginning of the story, an increasingly tense Cold War eventually grew into a war in which the world’s three main superpowers – the United States, Russia, and China – fought each other into a stalemate. The story’s title comes from the caption of a drawing of a rag doll without a mouth – a fitting image for the condition of the humans that Ellison describes.
Set in a post-apocalyptic future after a sentient supercomputer has exterminated all of humanity, except four men and one woman, which it has preserved in order to torment them indefinitely. The prolific science fiction author Harlan Ellison published his Hugo Award-winning short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1967.
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