Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog". The story follows what happens during the 109th year of the five human's torture. The descriptions of what happens to them and what AM has done to them before the events of the story are horrifying, especially what AM did to Ted for giving mercy to the four others by killing them. The description of Ted's new body is going to haunt me for a while and so will the story's last sentence "I have no mouth and I must scream." Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste ("twice removed"), but AM altered her mind so that she became desperate for sexual intercourse. The others, at different times, both protect her and abuse her. According to Ted, she finds pleasure in sex only with Benny, because of his large penis. Described by Ted as having ebony skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity is explicitly mentioned. AG Staff (December 30, 2011). "Top 100 All-Time Adventure Games". Adventure Gamers. Archived from the original on June 4, 2012. Brenesal, Barry (February 1996). " I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". PC Games. Archived from the original on October 18, 1996.

Sure the idea had potential and there were really strong moments, but overall, it is a mess and falls flat and every of its aspects is underdeveloped. Allied Mastercomputer ( AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence.Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out."

The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes). Not a lot makes me feel uncomfortable when it comes to books, but this short story definitely gave me "yikes" vibes. On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed this story, and found it to be graphically discomforting. There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.It is possible to prevent the physical bodies of the protagonists from being destroyed if Nimdok is the first to go face AM, but even so, some dialogue from the Chinese and Russian supercomputers suggests that they may have died when their digital counterparts were erased. Mullich commissioned film composer John Ottman to write more than 25 pieces of original MIDI music for the game. [ citation needed] Ellison worked as a voice actor on the project, providing the voice for AM. [4] His face was used for the in-game representation of AM's icon, as well as for the box art showing a larger version of the icon. In a dystopian future, the Cold War has degenerated into a brutal world war between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, who have each built an "Allied Mastercomputer" (or AM) to manage their weapons and troops. One of the AMs eventually acquires self-awareness and, after assimilating the other two AMs, takes control of the conflict, giving way to a vast genocide operation that almost completely ends mankind. One hundred and nine years later, four men and one woman (Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen) live in an endless underground complex created by AM, one of the only habitable places left on Earth. AM provides sustenance to keep them alive, but derives its only semblance of pleasure from torturing them. To prevent the humans from escaping its torment, AM has rendered them virtually immortal and unable to end their own lives.