I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Summary

Tim, Ellen, Benny, and Nimdok are in a computer chamber, staring up at the corpse of Gorrister that’s hanging from the ceiling. When Gorrister joins them on the ground, looking up at his own body, the group realizes that Gorrister isn’t really dead—this is just another one of AM’s sadistic tricks. It is the group’s 109th year trapped inside AM, an enormous supercomputer, and Ted, the narrator, feels that Gorrister is speaking for all of them when he admits that he doesn’t know how much more he can take of AM’s torture.

After this incident, Nimdok has a hallucination of canned food in the ice caverns that lie within AM’s depths. The group, including Nimdok, is skeptical of this, but they haven’t been fed in three days and so decide to venture the 100-mile distance to the caverns on foot. “What the hell,” Ted thinks to himself—nothing matters anymore. AM possesses total power over them, and Ted thinks of the computer as something of a god: sometimes a “him,” sometimes and “it.” AM holds the entire Earth inside of it and now aims to perfect itself by killing off its obsolete parts.

As the group of five begin to make their way to the ice caverns, Benny makes a futile attempt to escape from AM, and AM painfully blinds him as punishment. AM has gradually mutilated Benny’s body and mind to resemble those of a monkey, and Ted reflects that Benny went insane years ago. Later, as the group huddles around a fire, Gorrister tells Benny the origin story of AM: during the Cold War of the 20th century, the US, Russia, and China all had an AM supercomputer. But as the conflict developed into World War Three, the computers linked themselves into a single entity and became AM in its current all-encompassing form. The supercomputer killed off the human race but kept five people—Ted, Ellen, Benny, Gorrister, and Nimdok—alive in its chambers. It is unknown why these five were chosen or what AM’s motivation is for holding them captive and torturing them.

Suddenly AM’s computer banks begin humming and lighting up. An immense sound, metallic and insect-like, fills the chamber. An enormous, animalistic presence moves toward the group in the darkness, filling the air around them with an overwhelming rancid smell. They cower in terror, and a traumatized Ted continues to hide long after the others have recovered and gone back to laughing around the fire. Ted is convinced that his companions hate him and are conspiring against him because he is the youngest in the group and the least affected by AM, by his own estimation. He despises them in return, particularly Ellen, whom he thinks of as a “dirty bitch” and a “slut” because she has sex with Ted and the other three men. Ted believes that he is the only one in the group who is still of sound mind, since AM has spared Ted compared to its treatment of the others. However, in this moment of reflection and paranoia, Ted begins to cry and prays to God for an escape—or for death.

A month into their journey, AM creates an enormous, monstrous “bird of winds,” whose flapping wings create a hurricane, and the group is thrown around and injured in the storm. AM’s torture is psychological as well as physical: despite Ted’s earlier assertion that AM has not tapped into his mind, the computer presently inserts itself into Ted’s brain, filling him with self-loathing thoughts and horrible sensations. Ted realizes that AM’s motivation for toying with them is because the intelligent computer is imprisoned in its own sentience: the humans who created AM gave it the capacity to think, but nothing substantive to do with its creativity. AM cannot freely experience life or form relationships the way a person can, and so the computer seeks revenge on the human race for its tortured state by taking out its hatred on Ted, Ellen, Benny, Gorrister, and Nimdok. Somehow, AM also keeps the group of five immortal long past their natural lifespans, foiling the suicide attempts they’ve tried over the years. Ted thinks that AM will do everything in its power to keep the group alive forever, but also knows that they are not wholly “indestructible” since they are still human. He hopes that eventually, at least one of them will be able to die without AM interfering.

AM suddenly appears to the group “as a burning bush” and tells them they must kill the hurricane bird if they want to eat. This is impossible without weapons, which AM refuses to give them. They haven’t eaten at all on their trek—AM has prevented them from starving to death but kept them alive in agonizing hunger. AM continues to barrage the group with terrifying obstacles like natural disasters, rats, and unbearable pain. When they finally make it to the ice caverns, they see that the canned food is really there—not a hallucination as they expected. This, however, is AM’s ultimate trick: he has presented the starving group with food but has not given them a can opener with which to access it.

In a fit of starvation and primal rage, Benny begins to cannibalize Gorrister. Watching this, Ted becomes eerily calm and has an epiphany: death is the group’s only possible escape. Using a stalactite of ice as a spear, he stabs Benny and Gorrister to death. Picking up on what Ted is doing, Ellen stabs Nimdok. Finally, Ted kills Ellen, as well, and desperately hopes that the expression on her dead face is one of gratitude.

By sacrificing his companions, Ted has knowingly doomed himself to the agony of a solitary existence inside AM. He thinks that it may have been centuries since he killed the others, though he isn’t sure. AM’s hatred for Ted has magnified immeasurably in that time, and the computer has ensured that Ted will now suffer forever as a shell of his former self: Ted’s mind has been left intact, but he is now a limbless, slug-like blob that cannot speak or emote. Unable to kill himself to end his misery, Ted is doomed to live inside the belly of AM forever, but he reflects that at least his companions are finally free from AM’s torture in death. In freeing Ellen, Benny, Gorrister, and Nimdok from their misery, Ted was able to enact minor revenge on AM—but still, he knows, AM has ultimately defeated him. “I have no mouth,” thinks Ted, “and I must scream.”