My Journey as an Octopus: A Speculative Science Fiction Essay
story and cover art by donsan
©2015
Tiny was my favorite tentacle. It was my host's dominant arm and generally had a cooperative attitude. Tiny seemed to experience positive emotions when Molly, my animal host, or I were happy with it's work. Twist by comparison, had a low attention span. Even as the second most dominant appendage, it would stray off task to taste or fondle nearby objects. But it could be relied on for quick, reactionary movements such as catching tools that were often sent flying across the cabin by T5. I hadn't bothered to give the fifth appendage a proper name because it not only was unresponsive to our requests, it rather enjoyed being unhelpful. I could sense that Molly had sympathy for the disappointing arm, so I refrained from the temptation to severe it or have it strapped down. Instead, Tall, Torn, and Jumper, who behaved more like legs, shared the task of babysitting T5 when it veered near critical undertakings.
One of my duties as life support engineer was to solder new circuit boards to replace damaged ones. The procedure required two or three tentacles to reach from inside our glass tank through ports into the air filled area of the cabin. Tiny would carefully operate the solder gun over the electronics while Twist held part B near part A. Twist would sometimes wiggle too close to the heated tip of the solder gun. The sudden pain would cause Twist to writhe away throwing the part aside. Molly would be embarrassed for inking herself. Then we would wait until the water filter had cleared the cloudy water enough for us to do a visible inspection of the damage. No matter how bad the shared pain of an injury felt to us all, Tiny never dropped a tool. It would hold the dangerous tip out of reach of the other squirming arms until things calmed down. It was the most stoic of tentacles.
Molly, for her part, was an endearing animal host. Her mind was open to me and she seemed to enjoy my company. My mind works in the language of my human birth. Though my host animals could not learn to understand my mental words, she understood my desires. She learned by feeling what I wanted her body to do at any given time. It was a slowly developed conversationalism based on actions rather than concepts. Having built a friendship with Molly was no guarantee that her tentacles would be helpful in my day to day tasks on board our star craft however. Cephlopod neurology is subdivided in such a way that tentacles have enough autonomy so as not to overwhelm the smallish central brain. Each arm is so complex with sensory input and motion that eight of them could not be exclusively controlled by the animal. So, it happens that in order to occupy the mind of, and share the body of an octopus, I had to establish relationships with nine beings of varying sophistication and cooperativeness.
Why choose to download my consciousness into an animal of multiple personalities, you might ask? My answer, dear descendants, is that for distant travel through open space, no other animal of comparable brain capacity is better suited. The nimble Octopus has no skeletal structure to degrade in zero to low gravity. Its favorite foods are simple to breed. It is comfortable in a wide range of cabin and water pressures. It comes in handy at times that the Octopus can leave the confines of the water tank for brief periods. The technical difficulty was in maintaining a system of salt water tanks and filters; that, and in keeping the salt water from eating the star ship from the inside out. Those were maintenance issues that were mostly handled by the ships AI.
For me the biggest downside was the very short lifespans of the hosts - usually five Earth years. Molly, like all females of her species, had the earnest desire to get the bundle of eggs inside her fertilized and pushed out. Her mind could not know that once reproduction was completed, she would lose all appetite and fade. I would lose my 203rd partner of few years and have to download to the next host. I hated the thought of losing Molly. She was by far the most sophisticated and had reached a level of understanding of human technologies beyond any of my expectations. Her tentacles even seemed more constructively curious than previous creatures. When her eggs had waited long enough to be fertilized, Molly had stroked the small prosthetic housing behind her eyes that must have seemed to her to contain my being. Despite my sadness, and per her motioned request, I had the water system open the tunnel to admit a desperate male octopus into our tank. The males driven by their one penile tentacle were singular of purpose and would soon die after having served the female. To be courteous, I disconnected myself from her mind during the mating. She produced one-hundred and twelve eggs that we carefully placed among the other frozen animal and human zygotes on board.
Molly expressed a fondness toward me. It was a strange love for a disembodied, voice less being. I was a companion that she could not see with her eyes nor feel with her sensitive appendages. A thousand years separated my digitized memory from the organic one that held another human in caring embrace. Yet, Molly tugged at my emotions with her own mental power. She effectively reversed the balance of power wired into the device attached to her brain. It was there, in that spiraling football of a spacecraft, that an immortal, digital human fell in love with a very mortal animal. To this day, I can not say if losing her broke my proverbial heart or if it had slowly eroded over the centuries culminating in an emptiness filled by the simple cooperative attitude of an octopus.
After Molly passed, I chose not to download into another host animal until we reached orbit around our new home planet. It was necessary then to fulfill my duty to awaken you all, and set in motion the birth of a new world.
So, dear descendant, while enjoying the dazzling purple sky of your newly established birth planet, give a toast to the noble octopus. For it repaired your ark when needed, watched over your frozen cells, and kept me company along the way.
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