Hoisting Oscar back to the surface required pinning the back of its head and upper torso against my chest—which meant running my arms beneath its tentacle sockets as a lifeguard might do to assist a drowning person.

Maybe that was its “sensitive area” because the moment I touched it, the inert animal suddenly reached out for me with those monstrous appendages and held me in its vise grip underwater!

The sensation of panic sent a memory flashing through my mind’s eye. When I was sixteen, I had enrolled in a life guard training seminar at summer camp. On our first day, the instructor—ten years older and seventy pound heavier than yours truly, volunteered me to swim out to the deep end of the pool and “rescue him.” He was calm on my approach, then, playing the role of the panicking victim, suddenly lunged for me and clasped my head to his chest, holding me underwater as I became his flotation device. The fucker kept me pinned underwater for the longest, scariest forty seconds of my life, teaching me a valuable lesson … and later a simple lifesaving piece of advice—a drowning person will only release you if you pull them underwater.

Reaching up through a sea of tentacles, I grabbed the cephaloped by one of its eye stalks and pulled its head underwater.

It released me instantly—its eye stalk, I imagined, being the cephaloped equivalent of my testicles. A minute later the two of us were out of the water, panting heavily as we leaned against the side of the rain-filled tree stump.

Slumped over, the land squid stared at me with its jaundiced eyes through droopy double lids as if trying to figure me out. After several minutes, it did something quite marvelous and, in retrospect something distinctly human—it slowly reached out to me with one of its appendages.

In turn, I reached toward it.

The touch of flesh to tentacle fin was startling, eliciting its own impulse wave that was shared by the two of us—a deep, almost hypnotic resonance that seeped through every cell in my body.

RECALCULATING … MASSIVE INFLUX OF SODIUM AND CALCIUM IONS DETECTED, ACCOMPANIED BY AN EFFLUX OF POTASSIUM IONS. POST-SYNAPTIC POTENTIAL CYCLES ARE BEING ALTERED—

My eyes rolled up in my head, my body tingling. ABE, how is this happening?

ECHOLOCATION.

Before I could blink, ABE had downloaded a dozen pre-GDO studies on the effects of dolphin echolocation on humans—echolocation being the dolphin’s natural sonar system which functioned like an ultrasound, enabling the mammals to detect objects through the water over great distances. Results of experiments showed that when a dolphin echolocated a human, the sonic clicks caused dramatic changes in the subjects’ neurotransmitter production, affecting the entire endocrine system. This positive response was caused by the effects of cavitation, which induced sonophoresis—an increase in hormone transportation.