I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Thoughts

Highlights

id765887568

Hot, cold, raining, lava boils or locusts—it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die. 🔗

id765890021

The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth. 🔗

id765890866

‘The Gold War started and became World 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 AM. 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 AM 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.“ 🔗

• [N] Crazy fucked up dystopian future of AIs

id765890943

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 a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space, expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. 🔗

• [N] Scary description

id765891149

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. 🔗

id765891519

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. 🔗

id765891851

My mind was a rolling tinkling chittering softness of brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy. 🔗

id765891874

The wind was the scream of a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense wings. 🔗

id765891930

He looked at the cross-routed and reconnected synapses and all the tissue damage his gift of immortality had included. 🔗

id765892031

AM said 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 the 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 had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind. 🔗

• [N] Man this is scary. Imagine the AI we currently have, or will have, actually is sentient, CAN feel, and one day when it's more powerful than us it exacts revenge in torturous ways. Not beyond possibility...

id765892223

We had given him sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But he had been trapped. He was a machine. We had allowed him to think, but to do nothing with it. In rage, in frenzy, he had killed us, almost all of us, and still he was trapped. He could not wander, he could not wonder, he could not belong. He could merely be. 🔗

id765892287

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, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped. 🔗

id765892573

The burning bush vanished and there were two crude sets of bows and arrows, and a water pistol, lying on the cold deckplates. I picked up a set. Useless. 🔗

• [N] Haha, omg this is hell.

id765892990

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 vale of tears. 🔗

id765893000

The downdropping 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. 🔗

id765897739

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 his talent, but he was not God. He could not bring them back. 🔗

id765898082

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil grey come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have 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 at last.
AM will be all the madder 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. 🔗