The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

“No. I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when you look at a monkey. Unsettling.” “I don’t find monkeys unsettling. I don’t think people generally do.” “No? I would have thought you would find them disturbing. So much like you, but in a degraded state. A failed attempt.” “I guess we don’t see them that way.”

And then Ha saw it. Yes. This was why the world would never build another humanoid AI. The smile was perfect. Sincere, unaffected. Fully human. And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death.

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

Communication is not what sets humans apart. All life communicates, and at a level sufficient to its survival. Animal and even plant communications are, in fact, highly sophisticated. But what makes humans different is symbols—letters and words that can be arranged in the self-referential sets we call language. Using symbols, we can detach communication from its direct relation to things present around us. We can speak with one another about things not here and now. We can tell stories. Tradition, myth, history, culture—these are storage systems for knowledge, and they are all products of the symbol. And the use of symbols is something we have not seen outside our own species.

Ha had seen Con Dao, but not seen it: it was as if the orphanage field trip had not taken place in the physical world. No. Her world had been built, that year, of pure emotion. The island was nothing but a backdrop to her feelings.

That person was alien to her. Worse than alien, because that sixteen-year-old self was her, but at the same time was not her. Like a preconscious being. A thing that she had been.

How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.

people had to matter. They had to. If they did not matter, it meant he did not matter.

humans. But there is no denying their sentience. I believe the first aliens we encounter will rise to greet us from the sea.

Without death, life would have no shape at all.

As long as he was working, it stayed away; but he was not able to work all the time, and whenever he took a break—for a meal, a shower, a walk to clear his head—it was there. There, like a wave crashing in from the walls around him or rising from the cobblestones of the street, soaking him to the bone. The Gray.

‘The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.’

To be seen by others is the core of being. Perhaps this is why humans are driven to create minds besides our own: We want to be seen. We want to be found. We want to be discovered by another. In the structured loneliness of this modern world, so many of us are passed over by our fellow humans, never given a second glance.

Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something from them into ourselves, and give them something of ours.

consciousness is a self-sustaining illusion.

Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust.