'I have no mouth, and I must scream' is a short story by Harlan Ellison. It is a little under 6,000 words long and won the 1968 Hugo Award for shortform fiction.

It is set in the future, after an atomic catastrophe has devastated the Earth. Humanity has been reduced to a handful of survivors who are kept alive by an insane computer, called AM. At one point AM is described as speaking with a voice which sounds like 'the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers'. This is a very Harlan Ellison thing to say, and one of the reasons why people like him so much.

AM is keeping our heroes alive so that it can submit them to hideous torture for all eternity, because it is bored - bored, because the apocalypse has destroyed everything in the world of interest. The story has perhaps the ultimate bitter-sweet ending; the title is the last line of dialogue, delivered by the main character after offending AM for the last time.

When the MS-DOS game based on the short story was being developed, Harlan Ellison wanted to make it impossible to win. Unfortunately, the game designers won that argument, and it is possible to beat the computer. Which kinda ruins the point, donchya think? I mean, you would think that... *sigh* but people wouldn't pay for a game that just beat them down, would they?

Back to the computer game: I wasn't able to beat it when I first played it as a 7th grader, but 3 years later I managed to actually start making my own decisions and stop listening to the damn computers.

Still the hell each of those characters went through makes any angst I may feel minimal. If you lose (or if you just read the book). Having absolutely nothing in your power, not even being able to kill yourself, by bludgening your head next to a rock.

Anywho, in the game you follow one of five characters:

• Ted - the paranoid
• Ellen - the phobic
• Gorister - the manic depressive suicidal shamble of a man
• Benny - The deformed freak
• Nimdok - The secretive Sadist

You first follow each of the characters through a personal quest set up by AM, formerly Allied Mastercomputer. This allows you to build up yourself esteem, by outwitting AM. Then you go through a final quest to destroy him, depending on what you figure out.