“That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is—eventually, she is going to put them on the table. You saw the equipment—the dissection tables, all of it. Eventually, they are going to go under the knife. Dozens of them. She’ll need to see the structure of their minds, their connectomes. And she won’t care how many of them she has to destroy to get the information she needs. That’s who she is. That’s why DIANIMA is here—to extract data. To build the next Evrim, a mind more advanced than mine. Preservation of the octopus species is incidental.”

“She told you this?”

“She doesn’t have to tell me. I know her. She isn’t like you, Ha. She doesn’t want communication. What she wants is mastery. She wants to create, and she wants to control. For you, communicating with the octopuses—understanding them—is an end in itself. For her, it’s about how she can exploit that knowledge, use it to push her own work forward.”

Ha thought of the dissection tables, the 3D bioprinters. Imagined the Shapesinger on the table.

“It’s not going to happen, Evrim. We won’t let it happen.”

“No,” Evrim said. “We won’t let it happen. When I first came here and began studying them, I felt remote from them. I thought only of the information we could gain—the knowledge. Not of them as beings. Not of what they might need. But no longer, Ha. You changed that. And perhaps they changed it as well. I could never allow a creature like the Shapesinger to be cut apart. I don’t know how anyone could do such a thing, but certainly I could not. Nobody goes on the dissection table, I promise you. There will be no killing.”

They walked on in silence for a while, until the hotel’s whitewashed top floors were visible through the trees. Then Ha saw it—a DIANIMA hexcopter descending toward the hotel’s terrace. Both quickened their pace. The hexcopter lifted off again, rising nearly vertically and swinging off in the direction of the mainland at a speed that would have made any passenger black out.

The hotel lobby was pink and gold with sunset. Dust motes floated in the beams like plankton. The figure seated across from Altantsetseg at the table rose to greet them as they entered.

“Hello, Evrim. Hello, Dr. Nguyen.”

“Hello, Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan,” Ha said.

IV Autopoiesis

Chapter 37