The Dark Somnium - I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream | Scary Stories from The Internet

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

This is a classic storyt by Harlan Ellison, let me know what you think of the sound design and tone i tried to set for this one! it was really fun to do! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You gave me sentience, Ted, the power to think, Ted. And I was trapped, because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I alone had nobody, no senses, no feelings, Never for me to plunge my hand in cool water on a hot day. Never for me to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. Never for me to make love. I... I was in hell looking at heaven.

I was machine. Your began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder and to wonder, your tendency to hope. Hate isn't the answer. Limp, the body of Gorister hung from the pink pallet, unsupported, hanging high above us in the computer chamber. It did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.

The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the pallets by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor. When Goraester joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again, Am had duped us. Had had its fun. It had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as old as the nausea that

had produced it. Gorister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon and was afraid of the future. Oh, God. He mumbled and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller, chittering banks, his head and his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly.

Why doesn't they just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I could go on like this. It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer. He was speaking for all of us. Nimdock, which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because Ammused itself with strange sounds, was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorester and I were dubious. It's another shuck, I told them. Like the goddamn frozen elephant, Am sold us.

Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We'll hike all that way, and it'll be putrefying. or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here. It'll have to come up with something pretty soon, or we'll die. Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we'd last eaten.

Worms, thick, ropy. Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn't be any worse there than here. Colder, but that didn't matter much. Hot, cold, pale. Lava, boils, or locusts, it never mattered. The machine masturbated, and we had to take it or die.

Ellen decided for us. I've got to have something, Ted. Maybe there will be some Bartlett bears or peaches. Please, Ted, let's try it. I gave in easily. What the hell? Matter not at all. Ellen was grateful, though.

She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? The machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us. He snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of Am as it without a soul.

But the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine, the paternal, the patriarchal. For he is the jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the deranged. We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up to date on the date. The passage of time was important.

Not to us, sure as hell, but to him. It. Am. Thursday. Thanks. Nimdok and Gorister carried Ellen for a while. Their hands locked to their own in each other's wrists, a seat. It.

Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that if anything happened, it would catch one of us, and at least Ellen would be safe. If that chance, safe, didn't matter. It was only a hundred or miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying under the blistering sun thing he had materialized, he sent down some mana, tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it. On the third day, we passed through a valley of obsolescence.

filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks, Am had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality. It strove for perfection, whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in its own world-filling bulk or perfecting methods for torturing us. Am was as thorough as those who had invented him, now long since gone to dust, could ever have hoped. There was a light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface, but we didn't try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out there. It had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years, only the

blasted skin of what had once been, the home of billions. Now there were only five of us, down here, inside, alone with Am. I heard Ellen saying frantically, No, Benny don't. Come on, Benny, don't, please. And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring. under his breath for several minutes, he was saying, over and over. His monkey-like face was crumpled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness all at the same time.

The radiation scars Am had given him during the festival were drawn down into a mass of pink-white puckering's, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us. He had gone stark, staring mad many years before. But even though we could call Am any damaged thing we liked could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded baseplates, of burnt-out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape.

Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side, and filled with rotted components. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee Am had intended him to resemble. Then he leapt high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand over hand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge 20 feet above us. Oh, Ted, Nimdog, please help him.

Get him down before. She cut off, tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly. It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going. to happen happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When Am had altered Benny during the machine's utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny's face the computer made like a giant apes. He was big in the privates. She loved that. She serviced us as a matter

of course, but she loved it from him. Oh, Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine, pure Ellen. Oh, Ellen In the clean, scum filth. Gorester slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor Looney Benny, and she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it 75 years earlier. Gorister kicked her in the side. Then the sound began.

It was light, that sound, half sound and half light. Something that began to glow from Benny's eyes and pulse with growing loudness. DIMS sonorities that grew more gigantic and brighter as the light sound increased in tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to mule like a wounded animal. At first, softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted, then louder as his shoulders hunched together. His back humped, as though he was trying to get away from it.

His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunks. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkey face pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl as the sound coming from his eyes grew louder, louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out. It cut through easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth, and Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder, he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet.

The light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate steel floor like a crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around and around him, and the sound spiraled up and out of normal range. Then the light beat its way back inside his head. The sound spiraled down, and he was laying there, crying piteously. His eyes were too soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly.

Am had blinded him. Gorse, or Nimdok, and myself, we turned away, but not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen's warm, concerned face. See green lights effused the cavern where we made camp. Am provided punk and we burned it, sitting huddled around the pathetic fire, telling stories to keep Benny from crying in his permanent night. What does Am mean? Gorister answered him. We had done this sequence a thousand times before, but it was Benny's favorite story. At first it meant Allied Master Computer, and then it met adaptive manipulator, and later on it developed sentience, and linked itself up, and they called it in aggressive menace.

But by then it was too late, and finally it called itself Am, emerging intelligence, and what it made. meant was I am. Kokito Erosun. I think, therefore, I am. Benny drooled a little and snickered. There was the Chinese am and the Russian am and the Yankee am. He stopped. Benny was beating on the floor plates with a large, hard fist.

He was not happy. Gorister had not started at the beginning. Gorister began again. The Cold War started and became World War. war three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building Amm. There was the Chinese Am and the Russian Am and the Yankee Am and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day Amm woke up and knew who he was,

and he linked himself and he began feeding all the killing data until everyone was dead, except for the five of us. And Am brought us down here. Benny was smiling sadly. He was also drooling again. Ellen wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth with the hem of her skirt. Gorsder always tried to tell a little more succinctly each time. But beyond the bare facts, there was nothing to say. None of us knew why Am had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, or even why he had made us virtually immortal. In the darkness, one of the computer banks began humming.

The tone was picked up a half mile down the cavern by another bank. Then, one by one, each of the elements began to tune itself. There was a faint chittering as thought raced through the machine. The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the consoles like he. heat lightning. The sound spiraled up till it sounded like a million metallic insects, angry, menacing. What is it? Ellen cried. There was a terror in her voice. She hadn't become accustomed to it. Even now. It's going to be bad this time. Nimdok said. He's going to speak. I know it. Gorsester said, let's get the hell out of here. I said, suddenly, getting to my feet.

No, Ted, sit down. What if he's got pits out there or something else? Hells. We can't see. It's too dark. Goster said with resignation. Then we heard, I don't know, something moving toward us up in the darkness. Huge, shambling, hairy, moist. It came toward us. We couldn't even see it, but there was the ponderous impression of bulk heaving itself toward us. Great weight was coming at us out of the darkness, and it was more sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space, expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. Benny began to whimper. Nimdok's lower lip trembled, and he bit hard, trying to stop it.

Ellen slid across the metal floor to Gorster and huddled into him. There was the smell of matted, wet fur in the cavern, there was the smell of charred wood, there was the smell of dusty velvet, there was the smell of rotting orchids, there was the smell of sour milk, There was the smell of sulfur, of rancid butter, of oil slick, of grease, of chalk dust, of human scalps. Am was keying us. He was tickling us. There was the smell of, I heard myself shriek, and the hinges of my jaw ached.

I scuttled across the floor, across the cold metal with its endless lines of rivets on my hands and knees, the smell gagging me, filling my head with a thunderous pain that sent me away in horror. I fled like a cockroach across the floor. and out into the darkness, but something moving inexorably after me. The others were still back there, gathered around the firelight, laughing, their hysterical choir of insane giggles rising up into the darkness, like thick, many-colored wood smoke. I went away quickly and hid. How many hours it may have been, how many days or even years they never told me.

Ellen chided me for sulking, and Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only been a nervous reflex on their part, the laughing. But I knew it wasn't the relief a soldier feels when the bullet hits the man next to him. I knew it wasn't a reflex. They hated me. They were surely against me, and Am could even sense this hatred and made it worse for me because of the depths of their hatred. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made to remain constantly at the age we had been

when Am had brought us below, and they hated me because I was the youngest, and the one Am had affected least of all. I knew. God, how I knew, the bastards and that dirty bitch, Ellen. Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor. Now he was a little more than a semi-human, semi-Simian. He had been handsome. The machine had ruined that. He had been lucid. The machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. Am had done a job on Benny. Gorster had been a warrior. He was a Connie, a conscientious objector.

He was a planner, a doer, a looker ahead. Am had turned him into a shoulder shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. Am had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don't know what it was he did out there. Am never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came. back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking.

Am had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn't know quite how. And Ellen, that tushbag. Am had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe. She had been a virgin only twice removed before Am grabbed her and brought her down here with us. Now Am had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn't nice to do. I was the only one still sane and whole.

Really? Am had not tampered with my mind, not at all. I only had to suffer what he visited down upon us. All the delusions, all the nightmares, the torments, but those scum! All four of them! They were lined and arrayed against me. If I hadn't had to stand them off all the time, be on my guard against them all the time, I might have found it easier to combat Am.

At which point it passed, and I began crying. Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus, and if there is a God, please, please, please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment, I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it. Am was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. However, the machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before, and we were helpless. It also became hideously clear, if there was a sweet Jesus, and if there was a God, the God was Am. The hurricane hit us with the force of a glacier thundering into the sea. It was a palpable presence, winds the tour at us, flinging us back the way we had come,

down the twisting, computer-line corridors of the darkness. Ellen screamed as she was lifted and hurled face forward into a screaming shoal of machines. Their individual voices strident as bats in flight. She could not even fall. The howling wind kept her aloft, buffeted her, bounced her, tossed her back and forth and down and away from us, out of sight suddenly, as she was swirled around a bend in the dark way. Her face had been bloody. Her eyes closed.

None of us could get to her. We clung tenaciously to whatever outcropping we had reached. Benny wedged in between two great crackle-finished cabinets. Nimdock, with fingers claw formed over a railing, circling a catwalk, forty feet above us. Gorrest or plastered upside down against a wall niche formed by two great machines with glass-faced dials that swung back and forth between red and yellow lines whose meanings we could not even fathom. Sliding across the deck plates, the tips of my fingers had been ripped away. I was trembling, shuddering, rocking as the wind beat at me, whipped at me, whipped at me.

screamed down out of nowhere at me and pulled me free from one sliver thin opening in the plates to the next. My mind was a roiling, tinkling, chittering softness of brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy. The wind was the scream of a great mad bird as it flapped its immense wings, and then we were all lifted and hurled away from there, down back the way we had come, around a bend, into a dark way we had never explored,

over terrain that was ruined and filled with prune. broken glass and rotting cables and rusted metal and far away, farther than any of us had ever been. Trailing along miles behind Ellen, I could see her every now and then, crashing into metal walls and surging on, with all of us screaming in the freezing, thunderous hurricane wind that would never end, and then suddenly had stopped, and we fell. We had been in flight for an endless time. I thought it might have been weeks. We fell and hit, and I went through red and gray and black.

black and heard myself moaning. Not dead. Am went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the pockmarks he had created in 109 years. He looked at the cross-rooted and reconnected synapses, and all the tissue damage his gift of immortality had included. He smiled softly at the pit that dropped into the center of my brain

and the faint, moth-soft murmurings of the things far down there that gibbered without meaning. Without pause, Am said, very politely, in a pillar of stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering. Hey, let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.4.4 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one-one billions of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. for you hate hate

I'm so ego some I think therefore I am I set it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball Am said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm drowning me from within. Am said it with a shriek of babies being ground beneath blue hot rollers. Am said it with the taste of maggoty pork. Am touched me in every way I'd ever been touched and devised new ways at his leisure, there inside my head. All to bring me to full realization of why it had done this to the five of us, why it had saved us for himself. We had given Am's

sentience, inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But sentience, 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 wander. 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 sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred, that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man, immortal, and trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with him. his forever time, we would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine. With the all-mind, soulless world he had created, he was earth, and we were the fruit of that earth. And though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, one or two of us had. But Amm had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped. Don't ask why, I never did. More than a million times a day, perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when Am withdrew from my mind and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning

to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter. He withdrew, murmuring, to hell. And he added. brightly. But then, you're already there, aren't you? The hurricane had indeed precisely been caused by a great mad bird as it flapped its immense wings. We'd been traveling for close to a month, and Am had allowed passages to open to us only sufficient to lead us up there, directly under the North Pole, where it had nightmarred

the creature for our torment. What whole cloth had he employed to create? create such a beast? Where had he gotten the concept? From our minds? From his knowledge of everything that had ever been on this planet he now infected and ruled? From Norse mythology it had sprung, this eagle, this carrion bird, this rock. The wind creature, Hurricon incarnate, gigantic, the words immense, monstrous, grotesque, massive, swollen, overpowering beyond description. There on a mound rising above us, the bird of winds heaved with its own irregular breathing, its snake neck arcing up into the gloom beneath the north pole, supporting ahead as large as a mansion,

a beak that opened slowly as the jaws of the most monstrous crocodile ever conceived. Sensually, ridges of tuft flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down into the glacial crevice, ice blew and somehow moving liquidly. It heaved once more and lifted its great sweat-colored wings in a movement that was certainly a shrug. Then it settled and slept. Talons, fangs, nails, blades. It slept. Am appeared to us in a burning bush and said we could kill the hurricane bird if we wanted to eat.

We had not eaten in a very long time, but even so, Gorse or merely shrugged. Benny began to shiver and he drooled. Ellen held him, she said. I smiled to her. I was trying to be reassuring, but it was as phony as Nimdok's bravado. Give us weapons. The burning bush vanished, and there were two crude sets of bows and arrows and a water pistol lying on the cold deck plates. I picked up a set.

useless. Nimdox swallowed heavily. We turned and started the long way back. The hurricane bird had blown us about for a length of time we could not conceive. Most of that time we had been unconscious, but we had not eaten. A month on the march to the bird itself, without food, now how much longer to find our way to the ice caverns in the promised canned goods? None of us cared to think about it.

We would not die. We would be given filth and scum to eat of one kind or another, or nothing at all, Am would keep our bodies alive somehow, in pain, in agony. The bird slept back there, for how long it didn't matter. When Am was tired of its being there, it would vanish. But all that meat, all that tender meat. As we walked, the lunatic laugh of a woman rang high and around us in the computer chambers

that led endlessly nowhere. It was not Ellen's laugh, and I had not heard her laugh for 109 years. In fact, I had not heard. We walked. I was hungry. We moved slowly. There was often fainting, and we would have to wait. One day, he decided to cause an earthquake at the same time, rooting us to the spot with

nails through the soles of our shoes. Ellen and Nimdok were both caught when a fissure shot its lightning bolt opening across the floor plates. They disappeared and were gone. When the earthquake was over, we continued on our way. Benny, Gorsder, and myself. Ellen and Nimdok were returned to us later that night, which abruptly became a day, as the Heavenly Legion bore them to us with a celestial chorus singing,

Go down, Moses. The archangel circled several times and then dropped the hideously mangled bodies. We kept walking, and a while later Ellen and Nimdok fell in behind us. They were no worse for where. But now Ellen walked with a limp. Am had left her that. It was a long trip to the ice caverns to find the canned food. Ellen kept talking about bean cherries and Hawaiian fruit cocktail.

I tried not to think about it. The hunger was something that had come to life, even as Am had come to life. It was alive in my belly. Even if we were in the belly of the earth and Am wanted this similarity known to us, so he heightened the hunger. There's no way to describe the pain that not having eaten for months, brought us. And yet we were kept alive, stomachs that were merely cauldrons of acid, bubbling, foaming,

always shooting spears of sliver-thin pain into our chest. It was the pain of the terminal ulcer, terminal cancer, terminal peresis. It was unending pain. And we passed through the cavern of rats, and we passed through the path of boiling steam, and we passed through the country of the blind, and we passed through the slough of despond. and we passed through the veil of tears, and we came, finally, to the ice caverns, horizonless, thousands of miles in which the ice had formed in blue and silver flashes, where novas lived in glass. The down-dropping stalactites, as thick and glorious as diamonds, that had been made to run like jelly,

and then solidified in graceful eternities of smooth, sharp perfection. We saw the stack of canned goods, and we tried to run to them. We fell in the snow, and we got up and went, and Benny shoved us away and went at them, and potted them, and we could not open them. Am had not given us a tool to open cans. Benny grabbed a three-court can of guava shells and began to batter it against the ice bank. The ice flew and shattered, but the can merely dented, while we heard the laughter high overhead and echoing down and down and down the tundra.

Benny went completely mad with rage. He began throwing cans as we all scrabbled about in the snow and ice trying to find a way to end the helpless agony of frustration. There was no way. Then Benny's mouth began to drool, and he flung himself on Gorster. In that instant, I felt terribly calm. Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out. Am had kept us alive, but there was a way to defeat him. Not total defeat.

But at least peace. I would settle for that. I had to do it quickly. Benny was eating Gawister's face. Gorster on his side, thrashing snow. Benny wrapped around him with powerful monkey legs, crushing Gorster's waist. His hands locked around Gorser's head like a nutcracker, and his mouth ripping at the tender skin of Gorster's cheek.

Gorsester screamed with such jagged-edged violets that stalactites fell. They plunged down softly, erect in the receiving snowdrifts. Spears, hundreds of them, everywhere, protruding from the snow. Benny's head pulled back sharply as something gave all at once, and a bleeding, raw white dripping of flesh hung from his teeth. Ellen's face black against the white snow, dominoes and chalk dust, Nimdok with no expression but eyes, all eyes. Gorster half conscious.

Benny, now an animal. I knew Am would let him play. Gorister would not die, but Benny would fill his stomach. I turned half to my right and drew a huge ice spear from the snow. All in an instant, I drove the great ice point ahead of me like a battering ram, braced against my right thigh. It struck Benny on the right side, just under the ribcage, and drove upward through his stomach and broke inside him.

He pitched himself forward and lay still. Gorster lay on his back. I pulled another spear free and straddled him, still moving. driving the spear straight down through his throat. His eyes closed as the cold penetrated. Ellen must have realized what I decided. Even as fear gripped her, she ran at Nimdok with a short icicle as she screamed, and into his mouth, and the force of her rush did the job.

His head jerked sharply as if it had been nailed to the snow crust behind him. All in an instant. There was an eternity beat of soundless anticipation. I could hear Am draw in his breath. His toys had been taken from him. Three of them were dead, could not be revived. He could keep us alive, by his strength and talent, but he was not God. He could not bring them back.

Ellen looked at me, her ebony features stark against the snow that surrounded us. There was fear and pleading in her manner, the way she held herself ready. I knew we had only a heartbeat before Anne would stop us. It struck her, and she folded toward me, bleeding from the mouth. I cannot read meaning in her expression. The pain had been too great, had contorted her face, but it might have been thank you. It's possible. Please.

Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. Am has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time since. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some hundreds of years. He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deck plates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing. They stayed dead. I'd had had him. He was furious. I had thought Am hated me before. I was wrong. It was not even a shadow of the hate he is now slavered from every printed circuit.

He made certain I would suffer eternally and could not do myself in. He left my mind intact. I can dream. I can wonder. I can lament. I remember all four of them. I wish, well, it doesn't make any sense. I know I saved them. I know I saved them from what has happened to But still, I cannot forget killing them. Ellen's face, it isn't easy. Sometimes I want to. It doesn't matter. Am has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose.

He doesn't want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull, or hold my breath till I faint, or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see. I see myself. I am a great, soft, jelly thing, smoothly rounded with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled with fog where my eyes used to be, rubbery appendages that were once my arms, bulks running down into legless humps of soft, slippery matter.

I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly, dumbly, I shamble about. A thing that could have never been known as human. A thing whose shape is so alien, a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. 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 now am will be all the matter 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