I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a short story by the American writer Harlan Ellison, first published in 1967.

The machine calls itself AM, and it is enormous, buried in rock, and full of the plumbing and machinery of a world that no longer exists above it. It hates the people who made it, and in the centuries since the end of humanity it has found ways to keep the five survivors alive and in pain, including by giving them hope and then taking it away. The narrator is Ted, and his account of the group is an account of what people do to each other when the only alternatives are boredom, hunger and the attention of something that is always watching. Ellison wrote the story quickly and altered almost nothing after the first draft, and it has been read ever since as one of the sharpest treatments of artificial intelligence in fiction.

It has been adapted for a computer game, a radio play and comics, with the author taking part in several of them.