Let's say you are an octopus.

by Rhizophora

Summary:

A North Pacific giant octopus, to be exact.

Notes:

• For Gammarad.

Let’s say you are an octopus.

 

A North Pacific giant octopus, to be exact. The first several months of your life are uninteresting; you drift in the surface waters, at the mercy of the current, just another speck of debris dining on smaller specks of debris. Your tiny translucent body is speckled with reddish-orange pigment and dominated by your wide, curious eyes. In the upper waters, you float bathed in light. Eventually you weigh too much for the ocean to carry along. You settle out of the currents, drifting down, until you reach the sandy sea floor. Here you will spend the rest of your life.

But now let’s say you’re a particularly curious (and unlucky) octopus. A particularly clever one. Octopi do not name themselves, at least in the way humans would understand it, but you have developed a sense of self since you descended from the light. You understand that you are distinct from your aquatic universe, a being on its own. This is a particularly profound revelation for a young octopus, though being an octopus and therefore solitary, you have no one to share it with. It dazzles you nonetheless. You dazzle you.

In addition to the flashy chromatophores embedded in your skin that allow you to change color as it suits you, your skin contains opsins, the same light-sensing proteins found in your eyes. Even when you doze, every part of your body is an open eye. Though most of your higher cognition takes place in the vertical lobe of the central brain between your red-gold eyes, your consciousness is woven throughout your body. Thoughts dance along a complex architecture of nerves that forms a ring beneath your central brain and links your tentacles together in an intricate web, each tentacle and its satellite brain paired with the third tentacle over to the right and to the left. Your own strange symmetry.

Your entire body is an eye, a brain, a squishy vehicle for light and thought that enjoys crab dinners. Of course it takes time for you to see yourself as separate from the infinite ocean.

Back to the curious (and unlucky) part. Sometimes—rarely—you share your world with other beings, ones that drop into the world from above and eventually rise back out of it. These visitors from another world look unnerving. Unnatural. Their bodies are long, usually a dull black but sometimes striped or splashed with brighter colors that are static, unmoving. Usually, but not always, they wear pieces of carapace or shell on their backs, like unusually large and ugly hermit crabs. Their legs are long and bend sharply at stiff angles, like spider crabs, but their bodies lack the symmetry of spider crabs. They are long, stretched out, with asymmetrical appendages that protrude from squishy bodies in odd places. They look something like sea lions. Giant, hideous, sea lion crabs.

They’re fascinating. They move through the water with the wallowing gracelessness of dead dolphins. Not predators. You approach one picking at a stony reef when you have the opportunity, and up close you can see that two of its long, clumsy crab legs sprout tiny forests of stiff tentacles at the end. Not as dexterous as yours, of course—you’re gifted, as malleable as water itself—but agile enough for it to manipulate objects.

It sets something down on the rock before you. A den, something den-like. A mobile void. You swim into it, investigating, and you find you cannot swim out.

 

#

 

Let’s say you survive the transition to the world abovesea. Many don’t. You, though, you’re curious (and unlucky). You want to stick around to see what happens next.

You’re not killed and eaten, which is the fate that awaits almost all octopi taken abovesea. You’re not sold to a hobby aquarist, or a large public aquarium, or some weirdo who wants to figure out how to farm you for meat. Instead you’re shuffled around for a while, passed through a sequence of dull, largely indistinguishable miniature worlds. You grow and you learn. You flatten yourself against the invisible barrier that stands between your prison and the world abovesea and soak up the light, learning what you can. And you grow, larger and larger still. And you learn.

You escape a few times. The world abovesea is gaseous and harsh, beset by strange forces that nearly flatten your flexible body the first time you escape your prison, slinging a tentacle up through a crack in the lid and hauling the rest of your body after it. The power of this force shocks you. You slide down the outside of the prison, graceless and unbearably heavy, your tentacles searching desperately for purchase. You exhale hard, instinctively, forcing water from your siphon in a jet that should propel you into the limitless sea. Instead, you simply find yourself flailing against an even slipperier surface.

You land on the floor, which is hard. It looked so smooth you’d taken it for sand. You huddle on the smooth rock for a moment, crushed and quite literally deflated, and realize that you cannot breathe.

For a moment, spitefully, you consider going on anyways. Despite the indignity of being squashed to the floor by some vast, unseen hand, your tentacles are impressively strong and nimble. You could crawl away. Escape this boring place. See some more of the world abovesea, or else escape back to the proper world. The real world.

But you cannot breathe. And as you sit, pondering your options, your time is running out. Octopi are adventurers, yes, and often spiteful, but they are survivors as well. You reach up, your clever tentacles making use of holds a human wouldn’t even notice, and pull yourself from the floor. You scale the slick wall of your prison and slip back into weightlessness.

Your body assumes the shifting, fluid symmetry so very natural to you. Your mantle flexes, drawing water in, drawing breath as the water runs over your gills. Your tentacles twist and flutter with relief, choreographing their joy in the water.

Your red-gold eyes remain fixed on the strange not-sand floor outside your prison as your body celebrates. There was quite a puddle there when you landed, like the sea in miniature. Water, you have found, behaves in peculiar ways in the world abovesea. But is it moving? You see that it is moving, it is shifting, drawn towards a dark circle on the floor. Drawn through the circle.

Where is the water going?

 

#

 

By the time you are sold to the laboratory that will be your second-to-last home, you are over two years old, and have reached the halfway point of your maximum possible lifespan. For many octopi of your species, three seems a good time to die. You’re in it for the long haul, though. Bring on the mid-life crisis. There’s still too much you haven’t seen. You haven’t figured out where the water goes, for example, and it’s a question you’re very interested in answering.

This particular laboratory isn’t very different from the others at first. It’s small, and dull, with few other octopi. You are tended to by three humans of various shapes and colors. The small, dark human tends to you the least, which is why you like her the most.

It feels strange, to like anyone at all. You do like her, though, perhaps because you’ve also learned to hate the other people in the lab, which is a very odd emotion for an octopus. Love and hate are artifacts of civilization, of people who care about one another deeply enough to murder each other indiscriminately. Octopi are not sociable creatures by nature, which is probably why you and your kind are the ones being eaten and stuffed into laboratory tanks instead of the other way around. Give it a couple of millennia of undersea organizing and maybe things will stand differently.

So this is what happens in the laboratory.

 

#

 

It turns out it’s difficult to describe.

 

#

 

You don’t like it. You don’t have the words for it. You don’t have the colors to paint a picture of it. Out of your elegantly linked nine brains, some major and some minor, none can wrestle the things you saw/unsaw into a coherent memory, one that your brain can hold. Your entire body is an eye, your entire body is a brain, and still you cannot see what you saw/unsaw.

Imagine this, though you won’t want to: imagine seeing in every part of you, imagine sensing in every pore: imagine water currents pressing against you, carrying the temperatures and flavors of the places they have been, imagine every moving molecule traced by a screaming comet tail of information, of velocity and destination and history, imagine everything a humming pile of energy and atoms, all particles, all movement, all constantly made/unmade as the universe births and destroys itself. Time unwinding backwards. Imagine perceiving this all in every cell of you, and imagine perceiving every cell of you on top of that: the layers of meat and nerve, chemicals squirting and electricity jolting, the consensus organism that is you meeting itself at last.

Now your brain is an open eye. One that cannot close.

It’s hard to like anyone, but you like the small human, the kind one, the one that brings you food that dissolves into energy in your beak. When she holds the terrible things to her face, the ones that opened the hole in your mind, you watch her.

You’d really rather she didn’t do that.

 

#

 

You’re taken away from the old people, which is good, but the place you’re taken to still has new people, which is bad. In your opinion, at least. You’d like to be where there are no people at all. You don’t remember much of the ocean anymore, but you know that there must be somewhere better than this. Most days you just lie there, flat on the sand, looking like a miserable brownish-orange heap. The world is still undone around you. You’ve stuffed up your den, crammed it full of rocks and clam shells to block the hole, but the holes are still there.

You sit, and wait. You don’t know it, but you are nearing the end of your life. Your keepers think you’re waiting to die. Perhaps you are, though you aren’t think of death.

You’re thinking, again, at long last, of where the water goes.

It was the taste of salmon sashimi that put the thought in your head. The human who visited earlier today wasn’t the one you liked, but she was similar. Close enough. The taste was fizzling atoms, liquid energy, and something else, something salty, like a current you drifted on long ago.

When the lights go dim, you crawl up over the side of your aquarium and slip out. You’re more flexible than they thought—more flexible than you remember—and you slither through the narrow gap in the tank lid with ease. When you splash to the floor you wait and watch, holding your breath, and then you follow the water to a dark hole.

There’s a circular grille over it. You loop an industrious tentacle through and yank it up. The hole beneath yawns, horrifying. You freeze, staring into it, choking slowly on the dry, dry air. Perhaps there’s something on the other side. Something vast, and blue, and entirely without holes.

You slip in, slithering into the pipe and away, your body flashing with brilliant, stuttering patterns that no one else sees.