Uncanny Shift
‘We don’t know that the meeting is to lay you off.’
Although Buckley is only trying to help, I don’t want to have this conversation yet again. More than anything, I’d like to eat my clam in peace.
My beak parts crunch through the shell and I use what I can only think of as my tongue to push a remaining fleck out of my mouth.
‘I know you’re worried but Mr Hughes would be a fool to get rid of you. You’re our best phenomenaut,’ Buckley says. So much for the quiet meal.
‘But I got the fox Ressy killed,’ I say, swallowing the flesh. ‘The whole study wrecked.’
His hesitation speaks volumes. A wave rumbles above, tugging the bulb of my head into a wobble.
‘We secured plenty of usable data. Just because we can’t think of a benign reason for the meeting doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’
I don’t grace that with an answer.
There’s a chalky taste up one of my tentacles and I look to see that it’s clutching a rock. It drops it under my scrutiny, almost guiltily. Another glance tells me that the other tentacles are milling along the sand, probing as if with bored nonchalance.
‘Dammit.’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘No, not that,’ I say. ‘These tentacles are driving me nuts.’
Without looking, it’s impossible to tell where my limbs are at any moment, though the influx of information would fry my mind if I could. eight tentacles make the inbuilt Ressy neural matter necessary, but it also means that each limb comes worryingly close to autonomy.
‘How can they move by themselves and yet their taste and touch be mine?’
‘If you were born an octopus I suppose it would seem completely natural.’
‘I can’t imagine this ever being natural.’
Another tentacle unfurls towards the rock and I curl it under my body. It almost feels like being possessed.
But I’m wasting time. Sperlman’s crippled me for nearly an hour and as an invertebrate I’ll have to pull out at the end of the day. This isn’t a long study; we’ll need to have the population profiling well under way ready to make observations tomorrow.
So move.
All it takes is the intention and the tentacles get to work pulling me along the seabed. It’s amusing to watch their swaying tiptoe, like that of a drunk, lanky gentleman. Silt sifts around my tentacles, the touch ripe with the taste of grit and brine, but I have no real sense of how the movement is taking place. Although the minutiae of locomotion are always carried out by the Ressy ganglia, never before have I experienced this distance, as if this body were more it than me.
Even in the gentle current, my flesh feels flaccid; inside is only flexibility, as if I could simply stretch out of myself, on and on until cells break into molecules, indistinguishable from the water I breathe. That was the worst of Sperlman’s this morning, the sense that this Ressy has no concrete form at all.
Sand undulates about me in every direction; here and there outcrops of coral jut up like many-fingered hands reaching for the glass ceiling. The gentle push of water. Unbroken quiet.
Until it isn’t.
The roar is more force than sound. Water torn. I tumble, vertigo like pain, my innards smashed jelly.
Only for the roar to stop. As abruptly as it began.
I fall to the seabed, stark taste of sand across my head, guts a beaten drum. For a while all I can do is lie, watching the silt resettle into a silence so pure it’s hard to believe that it was ever broken.
‘That’ll be the oil rig. You OK?’ Buckley says.
‘Just about.’ Although if that happens a lot, I’m not going to be.
The patter of his fingertips, like drizzle on a window. ‘Readings aren’t pretty. You can see how the drilling is causing damage to the cephalopods.’
‘No joke.’
But the last trembles of the roar have stilled to silence, so there’s nothing to do but pull myself up and keep going.
At my passing, a tiny fish buried in the sand throws up a puff of silver. One tentacle snakes after the meaty taste, returns grudgingly at my command. This is getting stupid. I whip them behind me and start jetting. The squirt of water from my sphincter feels like a wet fart.
My body distorts under the speed, the bulb of my head stretching as if trying to separate from my eyes. My largest heart throbs at my nape, seeming to tow behind a beat late.
Furrows of silt sprint below; above, canopies of coral, the sky fractured into serpents of light. Pressure washes over my skin like headwind, as if I were not so much swimming as floating on heavy air. I’ve had dreams like this, where, with enough willpower, I can rise over the houses and glide.
When my sphincter starts to ache from the passage of water, I return to my crawl. All the while, I’m looking, eyes puckering and bulging from my head. But still no sign of octopus. The tentacles aren’t helping the search; they make a beeline for every crustacean and piece of flotsam we pass. It’s got to be bad control on my part . . . or a sign of failing plasticity, but it’s hard not to think of them as other creatures tethered to my own body.
I start an inner monologue with them, careful not to let it rise to the level of sub-vocalisation and freak Buckley out.
Leave the crab, leave the crab, leave the fucking crab. Run. Run, you useless pieces of spaghetti. I’m doing this for, you know. That is just a pebble, get over it already. Will you drop the goddam crab!
A foul taste prickles over my skin, all three hearts jolt as one. A silhouette sweeps across the sky, the beat of a tail taking bites from the heavens. Danger.
The jet bursts from me and I race for cover. Even at a sprint, the foul taste is growing, water turning putrid. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I flatten to the coral, suckers clinging to the foamy taste. A violent shudder passes through me, then stills. Without eyelids there’s no choice but to watch the seabed turn black.
I am stone. I am coral. Not a tasty octopus. Coral. Coral.
It stops overhead, plunging me into night. Pressure bulges inside my head, gills paralysed, though my hearts beat so fast they feel like birds lodged inside my head. Waves beat me from the monster’s lazy turn, fetid with the taste of death.
But the light has started to return, death receding into the salted freshness of water. And it’s gone.
‘That was amazing,’ Buckley says.
My suckers release the coral with a shiver.
‘Amazing is not the word I would use.’
‘I mean your camouflage.’
‘Camouflage?’ I say.
‘You went from brown to the same rusty red as the coral, just like that.’
That explains the prickling sensation i felt upon reaching my hiding place.
‘Oh,’ I say, not sure what to think of the fact that my skin can sense colours where I can’t. Though the ability did just save me from becoming dinner. Perhaps it’s not so bad my tentacles have ideas of their own.
‘OK to get on? We don’t have much time left today,’ Buckley says.
‘Yeah.’ You can’t let being hunted get to you too much as a phenomenaut.
But being out in the open no longer feels safe. I run between the outcrops, the raised puffs of sand thickening my passage with the taste of chalk. At every rock, my tentacles fling themselves out in a hug. Letting go is harder. Eventually, I build a routine: taste, listen, look . . . now run, run, run.
As the next outcrop nears, I slow. There, in the fissure – octopus. Its gills flicker, one eye bulging between sensual tentacles and cold tingles over my skin. However many times I come eye to eye with something so other, I am never prepared.
B-movies make it seem so simple – kill them before they kill us. If peaceful, a simple ‘take me to your leader’ will suffice; after all, most aliens are just blue space ladies beneath the tentacles. But octopuses have no language; no leader to be taken to if they had. And yet the octopus’s eyes are studying me as intently as I am it.
It makes me feel inferior as a phenomenaut. My whole job, trying to understand, when how could I? It’s like trying to hammer a square mind into a round hole. Translation turns to static in the wires.
The octopus’s body has blackened like an ink blotter; its tentacles stiffened into a disc. I’m alarmed to see that mine have echoed it; this must be a threat display. Loosen, I think, but nothing happens; if anything my unease is making them turn darker.
‘Stop tormenting it,’ Buckley says.
‘I don’t mean to! These tentacles have a mind of their own.’
‘Leave it to its territory then. I’ve marked its position.’
Buckley’s right, the first of its tentacles is edging out, even though I am clearly larger and healthier. If I stay any longer it will probably attack. This is its territory – what choice does it have?
As I speed away, my bowels loosen in a thick spurt. I’d bet anything it’s ink, this body is such a coward – or rather, I am.
My search continues, sluggish, fruitless. After another hour I begin to wonder whether there aren’t as many octopuses here as the scientists think. You certainly can’t blame them for not choosing to live here – every time the roar returns, my head seems to splinter.
In the distance, a mountain of rock glooms up from grey water. I jet towards it, its mass revealing coral cities of spherical palaces and skyscrapers, swaying with the waves.
Fish work over the coral, transformed into angels as they pass through the breaks of light. One draws near as I land, darting in clear aggression. I herd my tentacles away as they start to reach for it – that beak could hide a nasty bite. It stays in pursuit as I pull my way over the roots, so I stop and regard it with my best eye, trying to remember my earlier threat display. The tingling returns to my skin and the fish speeds away.
My gill hearts feel weak from the exercise, so I crawl into a crack in the rock.
‘How much longer until Come Home?’
‘We can give it another half hour. I’d bet anything this outcrop turns up another octopus.’
‘That was my thought.’
A saline taste alerts me that a tentacle has grabbed a scrap of seaweed. In my distraction, the other tentacles have started to snatch for the scrap too.
I hurl the seaweed from me, wincing as the tentacle bashes against the rock.
‘Fuck!’
It’s as if these limbs were toddlers, into everything unless I keep an eye on them at all times.
‘OK?’
‘I’m losing it. I really am.’
Of course I failed the plasticity test. I’m nineteen. It was only a matter of time.
‘That’s not true,’ Buckley says.
‘Then why can’t I handle this?’
‘Because it’s an octopus. Two-thirds of the neural matter is outside the brain. You’ve never handled a Ressy like it.’
All three hearts have lifted into a tidal wave.
‘I should be able to,’ I say.
‘It’s an invertebrate, anyone would find it hard.’
‘It’s not like I’m getting sensory deprivation.’
‘That’s not the point. It’s a biological system that diverged from the type of bodies you’re used to 700 million years ago. You’re not going to adjust in a matter of hours.’
He’s speaking sense, I know he is, yet that can’t stop the dread.
‘Kit. You’re our best phenomenaut, they’re not going to lay you off unless there’s an inescapable reason.’
‘Like a failed plasticity test?’
Now it’s his turn to not answer. I pull the tentacles beneath me and stare out into endless ocean.
‘What am I going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says.