The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

We understand the encoding of genetic sequences, the folding of proteins to construct the cells of the body, and even a good deal about how epigenetic switches control these processes. And yet we still do not understand what happens when we read a sentence. Meaning is not neuronal calculus in the brain, or the careful smudges of ink on a page, or the areas of light and dark on a screen. Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world.

Ha remembered that younger self, so caught up in emotion, with loathing. 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.

I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when you look at a monkey. Unsettling. That was how she felt, looking back at herself as a child: Like looking at some half-minded thing. An inferior version of the self she was now. A failed attempt.

When we avoid behaviors that would instigate a shark attack, we are recognizing the shark has a mind capable of reading our signs and responding to them. Like it or not, we are in communication with them. If we accidentally send out signs to a shark that indicate we are prey (if we look too much like a seal in our wet suit, or we produce vibrations in the water like a fish in distress), we know we may instigate an attack, despite the fact that the shark does not typically prey on humans. We can cause the shark to misinterpret the world’s signs and make a mistake—a mistake which may be fatal to us. How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters. —Dr.

THE WORLD STILL CONTAINS MIRACLES, despite everything that has been done to it.

There was the her doing those things, and there was, as if somewhere behind glass (for some reason she thought of the warped portholes of the ground transport unit), another Ha, always untouched, observing and never being observed.

for the most part everything functioned with cost in mind. Including violence. Violence was something executed within the confines of that economy: kill too many crew members and it became too expensive; it couldn’t be cheap to pay the black-market operatives for new abducted crew members.

We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.

But it felt as if she were about to dive off the end of the earth, into another world. This was the way she always felt before diving, especially if she had been away from it. The surface of the water was a membrane. Above it, our world of air and sunlight. Through and beneath, another planet. The world in which her cephalopods dwelled, and all the other alien creatures of the sea, shaped and adapted to modes of life and destinies as different from those on shore or in the air as anything on another planet might be. But it wasn’t a feeling of alienation that took hold of her, underwater. It was homecoming. She always felt she was in the place she was meant to be.

If he could be dead without having been born at all—if it were as easy as never having existed—he would do it. But he feared death above all things. There isn’t anything a coward can’t live with. No amount of pain and suffering is too much.

In some people, this feeling of disgust at what humans are doing to the world becomes everything for them. They cannot stop thinking of such things—of the terrible cruelties we continue to inflict on the animals unlucky enough to share this planet with us. They feel the need to intervene: to do something to stop the suffering. They have to act: their rage will not allow them any other course of action.

“The problem,” Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan said, “is that this entire time, humankind has been afraid of something appearing in another creature that we don’t understand ourselves. What is it, exactly—consciousness? We don’t know. And how would we begin to re-create what we do not understand? Again, we don’t know. But we fear it appearing outside our species. Why? Such an irrational fear. But as I said—it isn’t fear. It is guilt—we need something to see what we have done, and destroy us.

“I was a nautical engineer, before all of this. This—” He gestured around them, to the darkened, sweat-stinking barracks lurching in the storm. “This world didn’t exist. It was a story in the news. A story I clicked past without reading. Autotrawlers crewed by slave crews. Another world, a degraded shadow of our own. How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.”

When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.

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.

“So you see, it is not human beings that are controlling technology—rather, it is the other way around. Technology has always been an unstoppable force, a creature evolving out of our need to invent—a creature feeding that need and creating the shapes and possibilities of our lives, shaping us to its purposes.”

HERE, UNDERWATER, WAS WHERE HA FELT MOST AT HOME. Strange, that the element she felt so at home in was one where she would not have been able to survive without assistance. I suppose we don’t get to choose our homes. They choose us.

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. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change.

She was killed for nothing: killed because some ship tried to break through the perimeter in exactly the wrong place. Killed by some fishing conglomerate’s profit incentives. And killed because the octopuses couldn’t have cared less whether she lived or died. She had been killed for the same reason a dolphin, tangled in a tuna net and drowned, was killed: the species that caught her didn’t care enough not to kill her. She meant nothing to them.