I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

For week 10 I read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. This story was extremely dark and graphic. Torture was the main idea explored in this story in my opinion and you could really feel the character's agony as the story went on. This short story was just the right length because it allowed me as the reader to fully immerse myself in the story and feel like I was living through it even though it is still considered a short story. The author also explores the idea of machines gaining sentience which has been explored before but the way that this author does it is really interesting. Not only does AM gain sentience, but it also becomes almost like God. Am killed off the entire human race except for the 5 main characters. I like how the narrator, Ted goes through several phases in which he believes Am to be God and then realizes that AM is not God and decides to kill his friends in order to save them from their never-ending agony. I also liked when Ted was explaining that AM had not altered his mental state at all while the others had been affected because as the reader it made me question whether that was true or not. In the end, AM wins and Ted is hardly even human anymore. He is a soft jelly like blob that trudges alone with all of his thoughts still in tact. A truly terrible way to live in my opinion. In this situation it's so easy to understand why someone would rather die which I honestly can say that I always have a hard time understanding in most cases. But this case is so extreme that there really is no other option. I would say that this story warns how humans may end up being the bane of their own existence in their constant desire to improve technologically. There may come a day when we take things too far...

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