“A small price to pay for productivity. But no, seriously: late at night is the only time we could get on the sequencer here, so everyone’s pulling an all-nighter.”

“I hope someone else made the coffee.”

“Your hopes, I am afraid, have come to nothing. I made the coffee. The students have been walking around wincing every time they drink it. It’s amusing to watch. A subtle torture.”

Ha checked her pulse on her terminal: 115. It had slowed a little since the beach, but was still too high. She felt close to what she called the panic. Before she went down there, to the lobby, and tried to explain it to them, she just needed to lay it out for Kamran. Get everything straight in her head. Right now her feeling of success was alloyed with dread and failure. How can one feel both happy—no, that didn’t even begin to describe it: vindicated, liberated from decades of doubt, elevated—and crushed to nothing in the same moment? There was no language for it. Like so much of human experience, there was no language for it at all. She could try to cram it into words, but none fit. Her hands were shaking.

Kamran read it, though. He looked at her, and knew. What else could a person possibly need?

“I keep thinking: How can we overcome it? This … mutual monstrosity? We’re monsters to the octopuses: hunters, destroyers, killing their relatives and laying waste to their world. And they are monsters to us: their motivations inexplicable, their minds totally alien.”

“Or a monster in the Latin sense,” Kamran said. “Monere. A warning. A portent. After all, if your theories are correct, this animal may be to a large degree a product of the Anthropocene and our exploitation of ocean resources. A species born, or at least accelerated, out of the stresses we have placed on its environment.”

“Thinking of them that way isn’t right, either. Their existence isn’t for us. We can’t treat them like a portent or a symbol. Whatever they mean to us, their existence is their own. And what I have seen indicates, anyway, that they are too advanced to have just emerged into culture. They must have been evolving alongside us, unknown to us, for a long time. But none of that is what matters: what matters is that to understand it I have to get inside their way of thinking. And how can I? How could anyone?”

“Don’t start there. Start simpler. You said you need to explain the symbols to the others. You need to be clear, so Evrim and Altantsetseg can understand. So lay it out for me,” Kamran said. “Start from the beginning and lay it out.”