The radiation scars AM had given him during the “festival” were drawn down into a mass of pink-white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. His monkey-like face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. He was saying, “I’m gonna get out, I’m gonna get out …” over and over. I heard Ellen saying frantically, “No, Benny! Don’t, come on, Benny, don’t please!”Īnd then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM.
#I have no mouth and i must scream am hate skin#
Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. There was virtually nothing out there had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years. There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his 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. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks. It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing he had materialized, he sent down some manna. 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. Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other’s wrists, a seat. The passage of time was important not to us, sure as hell, but to him … it … AM. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. 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 a jealous people. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Maybe there’ll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts-it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.Įllen decided us. It couldn’t be any worse there, than here. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”īenny shrugged. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer. (At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of the Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was d. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”
He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. 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 in his hands. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it. When Gorrister 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. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette unsupported-hanging high above us in the computer chamber and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.
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