I once spoke to a man who?d shared #consciousness with an #octopus.

I?d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I?d studied up to that point. #Identity has a #criticalmass, after all; #fuse with a million-brain #hive and you become little more than a #neuron in that #network, an insignificant lobe at most. Is the Olfactory Bulb self-aware? Does Broca?s Area demand the vote? Hives don?t just #assimilate the #self; they #annihilate it. They are not #banned in the #West without reason.

But #octopi? Mere invertebrates. Glorified snails. There?s no risk of losing yourself in a #mind that small. I might have even tried it myself, for the sheer voyeuristic thrill of perceiving the world through #alien eyes.

Before I met Guo, at least.

We met at #lunchtime in #StanleyPark, but we did not eat. He could not stomach the thought of food while reflecting on his own #experience. I suspect he reflected on it a lot; talking to Guo was like interviewing a #scarecrow.

It had been, he told me, a simple #interface for a simple system: a Pacific Octopus liberated from the captive #colony at #YaquinaBay, outfitted with a B2B wrapped around its #brain like a #spiderweb. Guo had one of his own, a force-grown #lattice permeating his #corpuscallosum in service of some Cloud-killing gig he?d held in #Guangdong. The #protocols weren?t completely #compatible, but could be #tweaked.

?So what?s it like to be an octopus?? I asked him.

He didn?t #speak for a while. I got the sense he wasn?t so much gathering his #thoughts as wrestling with them.

?There?s no such thing as an octopus,? he said at last, softly. ?They?re all? #colonies.?

?Colonies.?

?Those #arms.? His Adam?s apple bobbed in his throat. ?Those fucking crawly arms. You know, that thing they call the brain? it?s nothing, really. Ring of #neurons around the #esophagus, basically just a #router. Most of the #nervoussystem is in the arms, and those arms? every one of them is #awake??

I gave him time.

#PeterWatts #scifi #biology

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Sorry for the poor formatting. Friggin' reverse quotations. :P That'd be a nice synchronet feature to add, wouldn't it...

Anyway here's the link to the whole thing, if you're interested: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875

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