Hello, hope your Halloween was great. It’s a new month and that means a new issue of Tight Beam. Progress on the audiobook has been slower than we would like, but steady, we’re over 3/4s of the way done. As that gets completed, chapter by chapter, another round of edits is done in the manuscript, chapter by chapter. We don’t have a specific date set beyond, as soon as possible. We would like to release before the end of November, but we’ll see what fate has in store for our efforts. Some new items for the holidays (spooky season) have been added to the Etsy shop, let us know if you need any of those 3D printed. We just keep enjoying the process.
Speaking of process, should we continue with our work on the audiobook, or let our author take a break from editing so he can work on writing his next book for this year’s National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo? (November) Please leave us a comment with what you think, should we let our author off the chain to write another banger, or make him keep editing?
Now, speaking of our author, here’s a short sci-fi story, revealing the origins of a reoccurring character from later in the series, Octopus 426, a new uplifted species made through genetic engineering, adding another piece to the four-dimensional chess game of space warfare, the infamous Russian Space Octopus.
Decanting 426
“Memory is a strange thing, isn’t it, little one? We remember so much, yet so much is forgotten. Yet our brains, much like the computers we derived from them, are binary. Neurons fire just like transistors, a one or a zero, an on or an off. Humanity can build memory, things can be injected straight into your brain, your knowledge is rewritable, programmable, just like a computer. But you know, magnets, mind control, conspiracies and all that. The public doesn’t like that we can remake people just as easily as flashing a processor’s memory. So it doesn’t happen often, or at least not often enough that the public finds out about it. Only when the Federation really needs it. It was nearly a century ago when we figured out how to do that, and while our use cases have been limited since then, we’ve gotten really good at it, we’ve had a lot of practice.”
The technician smiles through his surgical mask as he looks down into the one liter beaker full of water and octopus. This cold lights of the clean room cast his shadow along the curved floor as he turned, taking his beaker spinward along the research station’s outer ring.
“I know you don’t understand yet, little one, but you will soon. In early efforts to get around the laws around reprogramming, we discovered that some knowledge can be encoded genetically. People are born just knowing. Infants not yet capable of speech or walking, but they know how to solder broken wires, or reroute power between a ship’s sub systems. Neural pre-patterning and biochemical conditioning. That worked pretty good too, and it scared the public even more than cognitive patterning through a neural lace. Putting knowledge into babies from the moment an egg is fertilized, I mean sure that sounds scary. But I think it’s pretty cool. Imagine how easy life would be, already knowing stuff, just have to get over the frustration of being in a small body. Imagine even just the wealth generation. The interest generated from investments when you are five, and then cashing out seventy years later. So much growth potential. But you know, public sentiment and laws and all that. So we can’t do that to people either…”
The technician loved this lab, here on the outermost ring of the space station, it actually had windows. Through which the brilliant ball of Saturn was visible as they orbited, and he paused, holding the beaker and the seven centimeter octopus it contained up to the window.
“…But that’s the key to it, eh? We can’t do that to people. But you, you’re a North Pacific giant octopus. That’s a whole different bucket of fish, because you’re not a people.”
With a smirk, he carries the beaker to the next table, pouring it out into a recessed tank, the little octopus swirling with the current in the new larger container.
“You little one, already have the genetic pre-programming, and you’re about to get the other. We’ve been working with you, Octopi, for generations now. That genetic coding has been perfected, you’re already so much more than a wild Octo ever could be. You’ve got a lung, and lips, a syrinx and language and a neural port, thicker skin to help you retain moisture and a bunch of extra little muscles. Your distributed brain matter makes it harder for us to do the second step of this process than if you were a human with a more concentrated nervous system, but we managed. We can give you the rest of the knowledge directly into your brain through the neural lace. These pathways bred into you, engineered into you. Your flesh is truly scientific perfection, little…”
The technician pauses as he looks back at the beaker to read the serial number.
“…When we make ‘em in batches of a half million, and your life span is only five or six years, even after we eliminated the onset of senescence by removing the extra glands. We’ve had a lot of Octopi in our lab. That’s too many numbers for a little one like you, especially with how much information I am about to give you. Let’s just stick with four, two, six for now. You little four two six, are genetic and engineering perfection. So strange compared to us humans, but beautiful in your own serene, deep, ancient way.”
He unspools a hair thin fiber optic microfilament, and feeds it down into the tank, letting the tiny octopus wrap its many arms around his gloved fingers. As the growing hatchling squirms in the warm water, and tangles itself around his hand, he finds the exposed port, half hidden under 426’s mantle. Plugging in the fiber optic pinched between thumb and index finger with his other hand, and the tiny Cephalopod goes limp.
“But now we can give you all the knowledge. Every scrap of technical knowledge you’ll need for the job the federation has in store for you, and you can learn it in a couple of hours, instead of us spending years of short life in training, for us to impart incomplete or flawed knowledge to you. Now the skill is built into your DNA, and information uploaded to you in less than an hour, after that, we’ll even feed you. Nothing helps knowledge retention like a fully belly.”
That was almost six months ago, and 426 now fully grown still remembered the experience clearly. The way her body shut down, and she lost control of herself as the nodes of her brain exploded with the knowledge of humanity. Of their creations, of their spaceships, their weapons, their systems, their wars. Knowledge of physics and orbital mechanics, of metallurgy, of electricity and magnets, computers, processors, and her origins. The evolution of the giant North Pacific octopus, the genetic manipulation, the uplifting. She reflected on these earliest memories to fill her boredom on the destroyer she was aboard now. Deep in the dark, sensitive recesses of their ship, their weapons of war, their cursed, hard, cold, unnatural machines, and she longed for nothing but the cold dark of ocean she had never seen or experienced. Her instinct, her generational memory, still feeling the lapping waters of a wetness she had never known personally.
Her segmented brain wandered, a leisure humanity never got the pleasure of experiencing. Each if her arms had its own cluster of nerves that manipulated the tools and the parts in the dark, greasy part of the ship no human had seen since it was first built, and while the arms were busy with their own tasks, each independent aware of its task and what was doing through her programmed knowledge, all she had to do was delegate the tasks to herself, leaving the active conscious part of her existence to wander and muse and long for the deep of the Pacific ocean, for the tug of real gravity she’d never experienced. She mused over her fate, and how despite her supposed intelligence, her upliftedness, that she was not human, and they did all the things to her that their laws didn’t let them do to each other.
They were a strange thing, the humans. As she floated weightless in the bowels of the ship, her arms full of parts and tools, a screwdriver, pliers, tape, a coupling, doing a thing they could never do, in a task, a work space specifically designed for her and her body. This work space was made for her, and 426 wondered how humans ever made it this far. She had been given their knowledge, she knew them, their story, their history, their biology, their space race, the cold war, the interstellar colonization and the endless standoff in the black ocean of space.
Just because she knew about it, doesn’t mean they could make her care about it. Cold, detached indifference, just like the waters she longed for. Her mind grappled with the information like a large mollusk she tried to grip and pry open. How had the humans made it this far? How did they survive with their strange rigid biology, what with their bones and other hard things. They didn’t bend. Even their method of locomotion, walking felt like a strange concept to her. How could they tolerate it? Feeling the bones inside them as they moved, like a splinter in the flesh, how were they not in constant pain and irritation just from existing? How could they grip anything with those rigid hands, they were hardly better than the robots and machines they made. She almost pitied them, but that was too strong an emotion, she saw no reason to care that much beyond her objective curiosity on the topic.
She was better than they were, her body could not literally break, she had no bones to shatter and create compound fractures, she felt she was a physically superior being. And they resented her for it. She hated the way the humans disregarded her. They needed her, they needed her so badly they built their ships, the things that carted their fragile bodies between the stars, such that only she could work on them. Should something go wrong, they had to have her to fix it, for their inflexible bodies could never squish into the ducts to reach it.
The way they dismissed her so readily, when they could not survive without her, was just another mark against the strange brutality of humanity. She knew them, often better than they knew themselves, and yet it didn’t matter to her, why should it, when she, and the other Octos like her, never mattered to them. Humans treated her as a tool, to be deployed against their myriad of problems. They, to her were only another entry on her list of problems. Rigid things, calculating machinery to work around, to fix, or ignore and squish and slither past.
Thanks for stopping by to read this short story, a small part in the overall lore and world-building of The Descendant Saga. If you have any feedback, please leave us a comment, if you haven’t picked up a copy of the first book, Altar of Scales already, grab a copy in your format of choice from amazon before we release the next in the series, Cave in the Sky, coming soon.
The Descendant Saga 