Think of the phrase “morally upright” and what it shares with ideas in English such as “standing up for yourself” and “standing out from the crowd.” Once you see the way our physical structure and movement become metaphors we use to talk about ethics, conduct, and morality, you begin to understand the problems we would have communicating with a creature that does not share our physical form.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

38

PRESERVATION OF THE OCTOPUS SPECIES is incidental …

Ha had stayed up half the night, thinking of all the things she wanted to say to Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan—all of the recriminations, the accusations.

But in going through them one by one, again and again, she had vented much of her anger. And the small, slight figure at the table—even smaller than Ha herself—did not inspire anger.

Ha had seen her in so many feedstreams. Had seen her testifying before the UN Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and being interviewed in her laboratory, and running along a Northern European beach in the dawn light in some B-roll for a company advertisement. Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan was the kind of celebrity scientist that “real” scientists hated—mostly because she was so erudite. If only, like most popular scientists, she would say something wrong. If only, in her efforts to dumb her work down for the public, she would misspeak.

But she did not misspeak, and she rarely bothered to dumb anything down. It was clear, always, that she knew what she was talking about—that, in fact, she might be the only person who truly understood what she was talking about.

Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan’s technique was to mystify with descriptions the technocrats couldn’t begin to understand. When asked to break things down for her audience, she was contemptuous. Her eye-rolls were famous, borrowed for memes. She spoke to people as if every sentence were the beginning of a debate. The world, she made it perfectly clear, was in her way. It was something she was trying to push past to get back to her business. And that business was too complicated for you to understand.

But certainly that was not the woman before Ha here. That must be someone else.

You look bigger on the feedstreams, Ha wanted to say. But no—that wasn’t it. You look more powerful on the feedstreams.

Sitting here at the table, drinking a cup of coffee from the same brushed aluminum cups the rest of them used, Mínervudóttir-Chan simply looked tired—as tired as all of them were. Perhaps more tired.

Evrim sat a few places away from her. Altantsetseg was at the end of the table, cramming a slice of the hjónabandssæla Mínervudóttir-Chan had brought with her into her mouth, her lips smeared with rhubarb jam.