Time
Dan pointed to a monitor, a modern softscreen pasted over a scuffed hull section. It showed a school of squid, jetting through the water in complex patterns. The image was evidently enhanced; the water had been turned sky blue. ‘We don’t rely on naked eye so much,’ Dan said.
‘Which one is Sheena 5?’
Dan touched the softscreen image, picking out one of the squid, and the virtual camera zoomed in.
The streamlined, torpedo-shaped body was a rich burnt-orange, mottled black. Wing-like fins rippled elegantly alongside the body.
‘Sepioteuthis sepioidea,’ Dan said. ‘The Caribbean reef squid. About as long as your arm. See her countershading? The light is downwelling, coming from above; she has shaded her mantle – brighter below – to eliminate the effect of shadow. Making herself disappear … Squid, all cephalopods in fact, belong to the phylum Mollusca.’
‘Molluscs? I thought molluscs had feet.’
‘They do.’ Dan pointed. ‘But in the squid the foot has evolved into the funnel, here, leading into the mantle, and the arms and tentacles here. The mantle cavity contains the viscera – the circulatory, excretory, digestive, reproductive systems. But the gills also lie in there; the squid “breathes” by extracting oxygen from the air that passes over the gills. And Sheena can use the water passing through the mantle cavity for jet propulsion; she has big ring muscles which –’
‘How do you know that’s her?’
Dan pointed again. ‘See the swelling between the eyes, around the oesophagus?’
‘That’s her enhanced brain?’
‘A squid’s neural layout isn’t like ours. Sheena has two nerve cords running like rail tracks the length of her body, studded with pairs of ganglia. The forward ganglia pair is expanded into a mass of lobes. We gen-enged Sheena and her grandmothers to –’
‘To make a smart squid.’
‘Ms Della, squid are smart anyway. They are molluscs, invertebrates, but they are functionally equivalent to fish. In fact they seem to have evolved – a long time ago, during the Jurassic – in competition with the fish. They have senses based on light, scent, taste, touch, sound – including infrasound – gravity, acceleration, perhaps even an electric sense. See the patterns on Sheena’s hide?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re made by chromatophores, sacs of pigment granules surrounded by muscles. The chromatophores are under conscious control; Sheena can open or close them as she chooses. The pigments are black, orange and yellow. The underlying colours, blues and violets, are created by passive cells we call reflecting … Ms Della, Sheena can control her skin patterns consciously. She can make bands, bars, circles, annuli, dots. She can even animate the display. The mantle skin is like a reverse retina, where neural signals are converted to patches of shade, rather than the other way around.’
‘And these patterns are signals?’
‘Not just the skin patterns. A given signal seems to be made up of a number of components: the patterns, skin texture – rough or smooth, posture – the attitude of the limbs, head, body, fins – and locomotor components – whether Sheena is resting, jetting, hovering, grabbing, ink-jetting. There may be electric or sonic components too; we can’t be sure.’
The diver growled, ‘Ms Della, we’ve barely scratched the surface with these animals. Not to mention their deep water cousins. Until the last few decades all we did was lower nets and see what we could catch. We used to say it was like trying to understand the animals of the land by working with a butterfly net from a balloon in the clouds.’
Maura said, ‘And what do they use this marvellous signalling for?’
Dan sighed. ‘Again we aren’t sure. They don’t hunt cooperatively. They forage alone by night, and shoal by day. The shoaling seems to be to provide protection while they rest. The squid don’t hide on the bottom like octopuses; they shoal over seagrass beds where there are few predators. They have elaborate courtship rituals. And the young seem to learn from the old. They post sentinels. Very effectively too; though they may have six or seven predator encounters per hour – with yellow jacks and mutton snappers, barracuda and houndfish, coming at them from anywhere – the squid kill rate is very low.
‘But a squid shoal is not a community like ours. They don’t play or groom. There are no leaders among them. The squid don’t show much loyalty to each other; they don’t care for their young, and individuals move between shoals every few days.
‘And they live only a couple of years, mating only once or twice. The squid live fast and die young; it’s not clear to us why such short-lived animals need such complex behaviour, communication systems and breeding rituals … Yet they have them. Ms Della, these are not like the animals you may be familiar with. Perhaps they are more like birds.’
‘And you claim that these communication systems are actually a language.’
Dan scratched his beard. ‘We’ve been able to isolate a number of primal linguistic components which combine in a primitive grammar. Even in unenhanced squid. But the language seems to be closed. It’s about nothing but food, sex and danger, as far as we can see. It’s like the dance of the bee.’
‘Unlike human languages.’
‘Yes. What we have done is open up the language of the squid. We built on the basic patterns and grammar the squid already employ. The number of signals Sheena can produce is not unlimited, of course, but even unenhanced squid have a very wide “vocabulary” taking into account the range of intensity, duration and so forth they can employ. We think they express, for example, moods and intentions with these factors. And some of this stuff is extremely ancient. Some of the simpler signals – the deimatic displays designed to drive off predators, for example – can be observed among the octopuses. And the squid diverged from them back in the early Mesozoic, some two hundred million years ago. Anyhow, building on this, we believe Sheena – or at any rate her descendants – should be able to express an infinite number of messages. Just as you or I can, Ms Della. Squid are clever molluscs. Giving them language was easy.’
‘How do you train them?’
‘With positive reinforcement. Mostly.’
‘Mostly?’
He sighed. ‘I know what you’re asking. Yes, cephalopods can feel pain. They have free nerve endings in the skin. We use low-voltage electric currents to deliver mild shocks during discrimination training. They react as if – well, as you would if I touched you with a stinging nettle. It’s no big deal. Ms Della, I hope you aren’t going to get hung up on this. I cherish Sheena – above and beyond her mission. I wouldn’t damage her. I have no interest in hurting her.’
Studying him, she realized she believed him. But she sensed a certain lack in him, a lack of a moral centre. Perhaps that was a prerequisite in any sentient creature who would inflict pain on another.
Dan was still talking. ‘… Designing the Sheena series of enhancements, we were able to prove that the areas of the brain responsible for learning are the vertical and superior frontal lobes that lie above the oesophagus.’
‘How did you prove that?’
Dan blinked. ‘By cutting away parts of squid brains.’
Maura sighed. Memo, she thought. Do not let Igor here repeat this Nazi doctor stuff in front of the cameras.
She felt uneasy on a deeper level, too. Here was Dan Ystebo hijacking the squid’s evidently remarkable communications senses for his own purposes: for capturing banal commands transmitted by humans. But Dan had admitted he didn’t know what all this rich speech was really for. What if we are damaging Sheena, Maura thought, by excluding her from the songs of her shoals?
Does a squid have a soul?
They studied Sheena. Her head was crowned by a beak surrounded by flipper-like arms, and two forward-looking eyes, blue-green rimmed with orange, peered briefly into the camera.
Alien eyes. Intelligent.
How did it feel, to be Sheena?
And could Sheena possibly understand that humans – Reid Malenfant and his associates, in fact – were planning to have her fly a rocket ship to an asteroid?
The squid school on the softscreen seemed to be hunting now. They were moving in formation around an unmanned camera buoy. The images were spectacular, Jacques Cousteau stuff.
‘They swim awful fast,’ she said.
‘They’re not swimming,’ Dan said patiently. ‘When they swim, they use their fins. Right now they are squirting water out of vents. Jet propulsion.’
‘You understand why I’m here. Malenfant is asking me to go into bat for you on the Hill Monday. I have to put my reputation on the line, to enable this project.’
‘I know that.’
‘Tell me this, Dr Ystebo. You’re sure, absolutely sure, this is going to work?’
‘Absolutely.’ He spoke with a calm conviction. ‘Ms Della, you have to see the power of Malenfant’s conception. I’m convinced Sheena will be able to function in space and at the NEO. She is smart, obviously adapted to gravity-free conditions – there’ll be no calcium depletion or body fluid redistribution or any of that crap for her – almost as if she has been evolved for the conditions of space travel, as we self-evidently haven’t. And she can manipulate her environment. We have a variety of waldo-driven instruments which will enable her to carry out her functions on the NEO.’
‘I’m told the squid are social creatures. And they’re very mobile, obviously. Whereas Sheena will be alone, and the can we’re going to cram her into –’
‘She’ll have a lot of facilities, Ms Della. Including comms, of course. We’ll do everything we can to keep her functioning.’
Functioning. ‘Why not an octopus? Squid are social creatures – in fact, isn’t it true that their consciousness arises from their social structures? Whereas octopuses, I’m told, are solitary, sedentary creatures anyhow who could stand the isolation and confinement.’
‘But not so smart,’ Dan said. ‘They work alone. They don’t need to communicate. And they rely on smell, not sight, to hunt. Thanks to those squid eyes – forward-placed for binocular vision – Sheena will be able to navigate through space for us. It had to be a squid, Ms Della. If she’s a little uncomfortable en route, that’s a price we’ll have to pay.’
‘And what about the return trip? The stresses of re-entry, rehabilitation …’
‘In hand,’ Dan said vaguely. He blinked like an owl.
In hand. Sure. You’re not the one going to the asteroid, you charmless nerd.
Maura found herself convinced. Malenfant knows what he’s doing, right down the line. I have to force the approvals through, on Monday. Sheena – smart, flexible and a lot cheaper than an equivalent robot, even when you took into account the launch costs for her life support environment – was the item that had closed Reid Malenfant’s interplanetary design.
There were some things working in her favour. Behind the scenes Malenfant had already begun to assemble promises of the technical support he was going to need. His old buddies at NASA had started to find ways to free up deep space communications, and provide support for detailed mission design and other support facilities. And it would help, she thought, that this wouldn’t be solely a NASA-related project; cooperation from Woods Hole in Massachusetts and the research institute at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California diluted the hostility NASA always attracted on the Hill.
… But, she thought, if I succeed I will be forever associated with this. And if the news about the brave little squid turns sour enough I may not survive myself.
Dan said, ‘I’ve been working with Sheena for months now. I know her. She knows me. And I know she’s committed to the mission.’
‘You think she understands the risks?’
Dan looked uncomfortable. ‘We’re counselling her. And we’re planning to have Sheena make some kind of statement of her own. Something we can broadcast, of course with a translation. If something does go wrong we hope the public will accept it as a justified sacrifice.’
Maura grunted, unconvinced. ‘Tell me this,’ she said. ‘If you were her – would you go?’
‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘But I’m not her. Ms Della, every moment of her life, from the moment she was hatched, Sheena has been oriented to the goal. It’s what she lives for. The mission.’
Sombrely Maura watched the squid, Sheena, as she flipped and jetted in formation with her fellows.
I need to pee, she realized.
She turned to Dan. ‘How do I, uh …’
The old diver type handed her a steel jar with a yellow label that had her name on it. ‘Your Personal Micturition Vessel. Welcome to the space program, Ms Della.’
Perhaps reacting to some out-of-shot predator threat, the squid shoal collapsed to a tight school and jetted away with startling speed, their motion three-dimensional and complex, rushing out of the virtual camera’s field of view.
Sheena 5:
The courting began.
The squid swam around each other, subtly adopting new positions in time and space: each female surrounded by two, three, four males. Sheena enjoyed the dance, the ancient, rich choreography – even though she knew courting was not for her: it never could be, after she had been selected by Bootstrap.
Dan had explained it all.
… But now, regardless of Dan’s strictures, regardless of the clamouring mind she carried, he came for her: the killer male, one tentacle torn on some loose fragment of metal, bearing his wound proudly.
She should swim away. But here he was next to her, swimming back and forth with her. She fled, a short distance, but he pursued her, swimming with her, his every movement matching hers.
She knew this was wrong. And yet it was irresistible.
She felt a skin pattern flush over her body, a pied mottling of black and clear, speckled with white spots. It was a simple, ancient message. Court me.
He swam closer.
But the other males, still orbiting her, began to encroach, their eyes hard and intent. The hunter, her male, swam up to meet the most bold, his arms flaring, head dark, bright bands on his mantle. Get away. She is mine! The male refused to back off, his body pattern flaring to match the hunter’s. But the hunter raised his body until his fins bumped the intruder’s, who backed away.
Now he came back to her. She could see his far side was a bright uniform silver, a message to the other males: Keep away, now. Keep away. She is mine! But the side closest to her was a soothing uniform grey-black, a smooth texture into which she longed to immerse herself, to shut off the clattering analysis of the brain the humans had given her. As he rolled the colours tracked around his body, and she could see the tiny muscles working the pigment sacs on his hide.
Now he faced her, open arms starfished around his mouth. His eyes were on her: green and unblinking, avid, mindless, without calculation. Utterly irresistible. And already he was holding out his hectocotylus towards her, the modified arm bearing the clutch of spermatophores at its tip.
For a last instant she remembered Dan, his rigid human face peering out of glass windows at her, the little panels he sent into the water flashing their signs. Mission Sheena mission. Bootstrap! Mission! Dan!
She knew she must not do this.
But then the animal within her rose, urgent.
She opened her mantle to the male. He pumped water into her, seeking to flush out the sperm of any other mate. And then his hectocotylus reached for her, striking swiftly, and lodged his needle-like spermatophore among the roots of her arms.
Already, it was over.
And yet it was not. She could choose whether or not to embrace the spermatophore and place it in her seminal receptacle.
The male was withdrawing. All around her, the squid’s flashing songs pulsed with life.
She knew, compared to a human’s, her life was short: flashing, bright, lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. And she was alone: she did not know her parents, would never know her young, might never see this mate of hers again.
And yet it did not matter. For there was consolation in the shoal, and the shoal of shoals: the ancient songs that reached back to a time before humans, before whales, before even the fish. The songs, poetry of light and dance, made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas, and on to the incomprehensible future; and that her own brief, vibrant life was as insignificant, yet as vital, as a single silver scale on the hide of a fish.
Sheena, with her human-built mind, was the first of all squid to be able to understand this. And yet every squid knew it, on some level that transcended the mind.
But Sheena was no longer part of that continuum. Dan understood nothing of the shoal – not really – but he had stressed that much to her. Sheena was different, with different goals: human goals.
Even as the male receded, she felt overwhelmed with sadness, loneliness, isolation.
Flaring anger at the humans who had done this to her, she closed her arms over the spermatophore, and drew it inside her.
e-CNN:
… Following the revelation that a genetically enhanced squid is to be the effective control centre of Reid Malenfant’s quixotic mission to an asteroid
But there was an unexpected reaction on Wall Street today where stocks in information technology companies took a beating. Prices
The reason for all this action is Bootstrap’s rejection of traditional IT solutions in favour of the apparently exotic choice of an enhanced animal. Now, analysts are questioning whether the industry’s reputation for overpriced, unreliable and bug-ridden products is finally taking its toll.
Most of the firms we contacted refused to comment. But an e-spokesperson for IBM said today
Ocean Child:
Thank you, your honour. I only want to say this.
I want everybody to know what we in the Eden League are attempting.
We are developing an internal technology which will selectively suppress the so-called ‘higher’ brain functions in humans. It is clear to us that our ‘intelligence’ has been of no real evolutionary advantage and therefore we intend to discard it. That is why I have no regrets about the mine we attempted to drop onto the laboratory at Key Largo. Frankly I wish it had worked, and I know that statement will affect my sentencing. I don’t care; in fact I welcome it.
And I can announce from this platform that we have already started researching a counter-technology that will similarly restore the squid to their innocence.
What those fascist scientists are doing is cruel.
I don’t mean the experiments where they scoop out the brains of a sentient, intelligent creature. I don’t mean the way they plan to put them to work, farming the oceans for us and even shooting them off into space, where once they were free.
I mean the fact that these animals have been given minds at all.
For centuries we have dragged these beautiful creatures from the Ocean for our food. Now, for our own convenience, we have committed a much greater crime. We have inflicted on these squid an awareness of mortality. And for that, may the Mother Ocean forgive us.
Thank you. That’s all.
Emma Stoney:
Cornelius Taine said, ‘We are invoking deep principles of scientific thinking. Copernicus pointed out that the Earth moves around the sun, not the other way around, and so we were displaced from the centre of the universe. The Copernican principle has guided us ever since. Now we see Earth as just one star, unexceptional, among billions in the Galaxy.
‘We don’t expect to find ourselves in a special place in space. Why should we expect to be in a special place in time? But that is what you have to accept, you see, if you believe mankind has a future with very distant limits. Because in that case we must be among the very first humans who ever lived …’
‘Get to the point,’ Malenfant said softly.
‘… All right. Based on arguments like this, we think a catastrophe is awaiting mankind. A universal extinction, a little way ahead.
‘We call this the Carter catastrophe.’
Emma shivered, despite the warmth of the day.
Malenfant had suggested they follow up Cornelius Taine’s sudden intrusion into their lives by accepting his invitation to come to the New York head offices of Eschatology, Inc. Emma resisted – in her view they had far more important things to talk about than the end of the world – but Malenfant insisted.
Cornelius, it seemed, had gotten under his skin.
So here they were: the three of them sitting at a polished table big enough for twelve, with small inlaid softscreens, and on the wall a grey-glowing monitor screen.
Malenfant sucked aggressively at a beer. ‘Eschatology,’ he snapped. ‘The study of the end of things. Right? So tell me about the end of the world, Cornelius. What? How?’
‘That we don’t know,’ said Cornelius evenly. ‘There are many possibilities. Impact by an asteroid or a comet, another dinosaur killer? A giant volcanic event? A global nuclear war is still possible. Or perhaps we will destroy the marginal, bio-maintained stability of the Earth’s climate … As we go on, we find more ways for the universe to destroy us – not to mention new ways in which we can destroy ourselves. This is what Eschatology, Inc. was set up to consider. But there’s really nothing new in this kind of thinking. We’ve suspected that humanity was doomed to ultimate extinction since the middle of the nineteenth century.’
‘The Heat Death,’ said Malenfant.
‘Yes. Even if we survive the various short-term hazards, entropy must increase to a maximum. In the end the stars must die, the universe will cool to a global uniformity a fraction above absolute zero, and there will be no usable energy, anywhere.’
‘I thought there were ways out of that,’ said Malenfant. ‘Something to do with manipulating the Big Crunch. Using the energy of a collapsing universe to live forever.’
Cornelius laughed. ‘There have been ingenious models of how we might escape the Death, survive a Big Crunch. But they are all based on pushing our best theories of physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, into areas where they break down – such as the singularity at the end of a collapsing universe. Anyway we already know, from cosmological data, that there is no Big Crunch ahead of us. The universe is doomed to expand forever, without limit. The Heat Death, in one form or another, seems inevitable.’
‘But that would give us billions of years,’ said Malenfant.
‘In fact more,’ said Cornelius. Orders of magnitude more.’
‘Well, perhaps we should settle for that,’ Malenfant said dryly.
‘Perhaps. Still, the final extinction must come at last. And the fact of that extinction is appalling, no matter how far downstream it is.’
‘But,’ said Emma sceptically, ‘if you’re right about what you said in the desert, we don’t have trillions of years. Just a couple of centuries.’
Cornelius was watching Malenfant, evidently hoping for a reaction. ‘Extinction is extinction; if the future must have a terminus, does it matter when it comes?’