Note: I do not know where to find this physically, so if you want to read it, you can look for it yourself online. I only really wanted to read this because I have the game version, which you can get on GOG or Steam.
This is a horror science fiction short story by Harlan Ellison, which features five humans who were trapped in the belly of a sentient supercomputer (Not really sure HOW it did it, whether they were turned into data or the said computer had just figured out how to tweak the world somehow, but it did.) These humans have been made virtually immortal, and were forced to endure all sorts of torture for 109 years... until one of them, Ted, eventually comes up with a way to get them out of there.
It might be a short story, but it had gotten itself a fully voiced point-and-click video game for DOS. Ellison himself not only expanded on the short story version, but he also did the voice for AM. And man, was he into it!
Ted - One of the humans, also the narrator of the story. You could practically call him the main character. Is the youngest of the group, and, according to him, the one who was changed the least by AM (well, except for the last part, maybe). Seems to put Ellen on a pedestal in his head.
Gorrister – One of the humans in the group. According to Ted’s description of him, he was someone who always spoke out, possibly an activist of some sort, concerned with the state of the world around him. But since AM’s meddling with people’s minds and whatnot, he pretty much stopped caring.
Nimdok – One of the humans in the group. Not much is known about what was done to him, exactly, but it seems to be highly traumatic. Also, it seems that his current name isn’t his real one, when he was living as an ordinary human, but instead is one given to him by AM.
Benny – One of the humans, was a gay college professor who was changed into an ape-like appearance by AM. Apparently, that transformation also made him well-endowed down there (and pretty much lacking in sanity up there), and because of his large member, Ellen serviced him most often, at least according to Ted.
Ellen – The only girl among the group of humans. She had taken it upon herself to service the guys, and has taken to crying and being a damsel in distress as a coping mechanism (and to get the guys to do things for her, it seems). She does kind of step up in the end, though.
AM – Also known as Allied Mastercomputer, it is the antagonist of the story. It was created during World War 3, which grew too big for humans to handle. Turns out that it had killed all the other humans and “spared” the five for torture because it had become sentient but couldn’t do anything with that sentience. Now it could only rage against the race that created it.
The story starts out with the humans looking at the recently dead body of Gorrister. Except, well, he’s not actually dead. Turns out they’re inside AM (don’t ask me how, but they’re there) and they’ve been going through this kind of psychological torture for 109 years and counting.
Then we get introduced to Nimdok, who had been “hallucinating” that there were canned goods in the ice caverns somewhere in the hellish computer landscape. Of course, given that AM had fooled them with other things before, Ted and Gorrister found it suspicious. While Benny didn’t care, Ellen persuaded Ted to let them go there and take a chance on the lead. Who knows, there might actually be food this time, right?
Ted, being a bit of a simp, I guess, gave in to her pleading and they all went out to go to the said ice caverns. Needless to say, they went through all kinds of hardships on the way there, including piss-tasting “manna”, a failed escape attempt by Benny (who became blind in the process), high-pitched metallic sounds, random disgusting smells, and a hurricane made by a giant bird thing.
Eventually, they succeed on their journey to the ice caverns, finding that the canned goods were real. However, AM had left them no means to open those cans, so they went into chaos. Well, more like Benny starts going after Gorrister and everyone else starts to try and stop Benny.
In the middle of this whole mess, Ted soon realizes that the only way for them to get out of there is to die by getting killed, either by each other or themselves. Ted, along with Ellen, who had understood what the former wanted to do once he went in to kill both Benny and Gorrister, kill the others, and Ted kills Ellen, giving most of them the sweet release of death.
Ted doesn’t get to kill himself as AM gets so mad from not being able to bring back the others that he turned Ted into pretty much something like a slime. And well... he has no mouth and cannot scream.
I’m one of those people who have played the DOS game before reading the story, so I was kind of surprised at how different the two were. For one, the characters themselves were wildly unlike their counterparts (I know I was somewhat spoiled by the Wikipedia entry on it). And, not gonna lie, this version is quite a LOT more NSFW than the game.
If there’s something that I can learn from this, as a writer, it would be how to describe things in vivid detail and make that description interesting. Of course, there are also quite a few cusses here and there, but that’s not what makes it compelling. It’s how intense those descriptions are that take the cake.
It just makes me wonder at how much Ted has experienced for him to describe things in such a gruesome manner, but considering that they had all “lived” for 100+ years and they’ve been made to suffer all sorts of bad things, including food and non-food things that were fed to them, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.
A minor gripe with this, though, and this is likely only a personal thing, is that some of the scenes kind of have this disjointed feel to it, like there’s no transition between certain sets of events from each other. Although, I would say that it still kind of fits the setting, where things can just pop out of nowhere if AM deems it fitting. Likewise, even the narration would be affected.