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I have no mouth and i must scream am speech free#

ONE CHALLENGE: The adventure plunges you into the tortured and hidden past of the five humans.

Gorrister the suicidal loner, Benny the mutilated brute, Ellen the hysterical phobic, Nimdok the secretive sadist, Ted the cynical paranoid.

ONE FIVE DAMNED SOULS: Buried deep within the center of the earth, trapped in the bowels of an insane computer for the past hundred and nine years.

Summary: FIVE DAMNED SOULS: Buried deep within the center of the earth, trapped in the bowels of an insane computer for the past hundred and nine years.

So while AM does have the power to punish the group, the computer, too, is trapped in the prison of its own sentience-and the group are AM’s playthings to punish, not the beloved objects of its own creation. Instead, AM seems like a symbol for humanity overstepping its boundaries on Earth like Lucifer oversteps his as an angel in heaven, resulting in Lucifer ruling over hell. The association to God comes from Ted’s perception that AM is omnipotent-or all-powerful-but once he sees the chink in AM’s armor (that AM can’t bring them back to life), AM doesn’t seem like very much of a god after all. Ellison’s description of the presence AM is a “the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself towards us” with smell of “matted, wet fur,” of “rotting orchids” and “sulphur,” all of which add to the image of AM as more of an evil, demonic presence than that of a God. Similar to the tormented souls Dante and Virgil encounter, the characters in this story are punished in individualized ways that correlate to who they were prior to AM. Even before Ted figures out a way to beat AM, Ellison foreshadows that perhaps AM’s power isn’t quite as all-encompassing as that of a god, since it isn’t capable of actual creation-rather, it alternately sustaining the lives of the people within it and transforms their bodies and minds through torture. As the group moves through AM’s “belly” toward the canned goods Nimdok hallucinates are in the ice caverns, much of their journey mimics the journey Dante and Virgil take in Dante’s Inferno. On the other hand, AM could be interpreted as an allegory for hell.

I have no mouth and i must scream am speech free#

In addition, AM symbolizes a god figure because it has the power to transform the groups’ mental states and physical bodies on a whim, limiting their free will much like a god exerts predestination over people. AM appears to them later as a “burning bush,” which also parallels Exodus, in which God appears to Moses as a burning bush. For example, AM sends them on a trek through its miles of underground infrastructure, providing them a bastardized version of “manna” which “tasted like boiled boar urine,” paralleling the biblical Book of Exodus, in which God gives manna and water to the suffering Israelites in the desert. In the beginning of the story, AM throws various Old Testament plagues on the group, positing this act of creation as one of self-indulgence rather than divine love: “Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts-it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.” Ted associates AM with a “God as Daddy the Deranged” figure because AM is seemingly capable of “limitless miracles,” but these miracles further torment the group. Ted often conceives of the supercomputer as a kind of divine “ he” rather than an “ it,” and much of the figurative language and imagery that Ellison uses throughout the story alludes to AM as a god.

Because AM can’t be reduced to a singular entity, the closest correlation the narrator Ted can make is that AM’s seemingly limitless power is akin to a god’s. This allows for multiple interpretations about the symbolism behind AM, the most prominent of which are his allegorical similarities to either God or hell. AM, the supercomputer in which the story’s characters are trapped, isn’t just one machine-it is an interconnected supercomputer whose reach encompasses the entire Earth.