I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

I have heard about this story a while back, not for the short piece of literature but for the point and click adventure game that was based on it. I remember the bare bones of the game, but upon reading the piece it was based on, I remembered more about the characters that the story left out although I read that the game is like another universe version of the characters). I remember it being about the torment of a small group of individuals and how they torment became too much for them to handle. In I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, we are taken through just a handful of things these 5 people have to endure for the rest of eternity because during WWIII, a super computer that gained sentience was built to torture humans and eventually wiped the human race. We do not know why the 5 people were specifically chosen to be the ones the machine AM chose to make “immortal”, but we do know it wants revenge similarly to how Frankenstein’s monster did. The machine has become sentient, but it is not able to do anything other than exist. Which isn’t much of an existence at all, and thusly wants its revenge on the human race. This story brings up how each character perceives and interacts with AM’s torture methods differently, but all of them lose their humanity from it in some way. Each characters morals have been altered by AM to support the opposite of what they originally stood for, Benny being altered the most physically; once a handsome gay scientist and is now a simian-looking heterosexual animal who’s only redeeming (?) quality is the fact that he was given a large penis. Other characters have been altered in similarly mental ways: Ellen who was once “pure” although not a virgin, has become a slave to her lust, Nimdok being mysteriously but visibly traumatized, Gorrister once a pacifist and idealist is now apathetic and nihilistic, and Ted our main character who believes he has not gone through any trauma from AM but is obviously paranoid the others despise him. It’s interesting how each character has had something destroyed within them, due to a machine that was created by the species it’s now keeping captive. As soon as Ted narrates Gorrister’s story of how AM came to be, they bring up how we needed bigger weapons to fight WWIII, and the Allied Master computer is what they created. There was one created by each major power, and they all became sentient and melded into AM. I think this is an interesting take on political commentary. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a WWIII and it was about the cyber race instead of nuclear weapons. I think war is a byproduct of greed and that nothing good comes from it. I think that people are capable of horrors we are not even aware of yet, but I do think that there will always be some kind of empathy. Ted especially feels this when he decides to sacrifice himself for everyone else to get a way out. I think there will always be two ends of the spectrum within humanity.