Chapter 18

Every octopus we encounter has survived adventures and trials unimaginable to us. The octopus who has lived to adulthood in the dangers of the sea will be an Odysseus, a “man of twists and turns,” a heroically clever artist of battle and escape. How many arms will it have lost and regrown? How many forms will it have taken on to hide and stalk its prey? How many deaths will it have escaped?

And what will it know of us, this hero of the sea? Has it hidden in a nineteenth-century diving helmet lost by our early explorers of the deep? Slipped from a fisherman’s net? Peered at us from the edge of its home as we walk upon our beaches? Handled the skulls drowned in our submarines?

What will we be to it? Gods? Monsters? Or nothing that can signify to it at all?

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

18

IT WAS NIGHT when Ha came up the beach to the hotel. She was tired, her arms covered in sand to the elbows. It had been good, though, to work with her hands. To get out of her own head, out of the thoughts constantly crowding in on her—the irresolvable questions.

She had felt unmoored ever since her arrival. The hexcopter coming down in the rain, the darkness of the abandoned island—when she thought back to that first night, she remembered the monkeys fighting over something along the seawall, a memory now tangled with Evrim’s comment on monkeys: So much like you, but in a degraded state. A failed attempt.

A failed attempt. Was that what Evrim was? The interviews Evrim had sat for when they were first introduced to the world had been like an elaborate series of Turing tests, in which people would pose question after question to Evrim and they would demonstrate, again and again, that they were human. Or—no, that wasn’t right. They were tests in which Evrim would demonstrate that they could pass for human.

And that was the thing, wasn’t it? The catch. Evrim could never demonstrate they were human, or were conscious. All they could demonstrate was that they had the appearance of being human. That they could create a facsimile of consciousness. The Turing test, like all tests of consciousness, wasn’t in fact able to prove anything except that the simulation was sufficiently complex to be indistinguishable from a human.