“Ritual objects,” Ha continued. “There has been so much care poured into them. Time and attention. The ‘altar’ says so much about what we are dealing with. The octopuses are successful enough to have the time and energy to differentiate their activities. They have a surplus, so they can use it to build, to create. We’ve already seen that they take care of their elderly. That is a sign of successful development. Now we see specialization. There is, at the least, a carver among them. A builder, or many builders, of that structure…” The bone, deeply etched all over, the etched forms filled in so that the lines stood out black against the white of bone. “They have—”

“Writing,” Evrim said. “For one thing. Something we have had for only the last five thousand years, as you were saying before. Perhaps the greatest of our tools, after language itself. We have proof now that they are not only producing their symbols on the surface of their skin. They are also transferring those symbols to other surfaces. They are producing true writing. So that places them, if we were to imagine them on our ‘timeline,’ so to speak, within five millennia of us. And we have our answer, too, about whether they are capable of creating the object they inserted into your visor. They most certainly are, if they can build a structure as complex as the ‘altar.’”

“Yes, they have writing,” Ha said. “Which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution. The permanent transmission of information without error, from one generation to the next. The ability to store information for when society needs it most. To have latent knowledge, that you can refer back to. It’s massive. But what I was going to say is … they appear to have a cosmology. Whatever it is—that thing we are calling an altar must be related to a world-model. A system, a mythos. But what worries me is that the altar implies we have a central place in it.”

“As gods,” Evrim said. “It makes sense. So much arbitrary power over their lives. And the artifacts we create, that they see all the time, and even live in—”