They had begun to refer to the octopus as the “Shapesinger.” It was Evrim who had formalized the name, made it something capitalized, regularized. And from that formalization flowed all sorts of theories, passed between them, about other structures in the society they had glimpsed.

Ha was not the only one who was working full-tilt: Evrim, too, was at their own end of the table, surrounded by palimpscreen notes and three terminals, freeze-framing data, tilting their angular head at the screens, drawing out the patterns with a stylus in those long-fingered hands. Sometimes sharing an insight with Ha—but mostly, the two of them worked in their separate worlds.

And now Ha began to see the value of Evrim’s memory. Evrim remembered everything they saw: Every frame of the recording. Every twitch of the Shapesinger’s limbs. Evrim’s mind did not collapse things into generalizations. No. Everything remained inside it, whole, to be accessed when needed. It wasn’t “processing power,” but it also was not human.

Sometimes, as they worked together, Ha was startled to hear Evrim quote her own words back to her exactly as she had spoken them. Not only the same words, but the same rhythm, the same intonation and cadence. The perfect recall was abnormal, like Evrim playing a recording back of Ha’s own voice. Evrim’s mind was not a human mind. And one of the things that was most inhuman about Evrim was that inability to forget.

Ha knew the feeling that had come over her. She wanted, more than anything, to be the one to crack the code. Evrim went from teammate to competitor. She resented the android’s tirelessness. Evrim did not sleep, but they retired, sometimes, to their room. As if out of a sense of politeness. But what they did in there, Ha did not know. She had a feeling they simply continued the work, on another terminal.

Even if Evrim may have been very close to being human when Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan brought them online, they would not be now: without sleeping, and especially without forgetting, they must be drifting further and further away from anything that could be called “human.” That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

What happens to a being that cannot? A being for whom what happened twenty years ago is as present as yesterday? As five minutes ago? As now?

“Everything okay down there?” Altantsetseg’s voice said in her ear.

Ha tapped the device once for a yes.