Letters to the Octopodes

December 1, 2080

My name is Michael Hayward, and I live in the DOM. DOM’s are large, geodesic, glass and steel structures designed to temper and harness the sun’s rays for energy, as well as sustain plant and animal life. I’m told they were originally built for large-scale agriculture in the early days of the Great Desertification. Now, structures like this keep us, humans, safe and alive.

I was a linguist before I came here, the name for a person who studies and documents human language. You might assume, Reader, that a collapsing society would have little value for bookish skills like these. In reality, this world values language more than the old one did. I spend my working hours translating scientific documents, and interrogating newcomers to the DOM.

As a reward for my service, Council has granted me two hours of stationary access on the first day of every month, with which I am able to record these letters. I am grateful for this gift, paper is a difficult thing to produce, and I do not take their generosity lightly. Reader, please forgive me for the small print.

For generations, human scientists have speculated on the existence of other intelligent beings in the universe. What they mean by “intelligence”, though, has remained unclear. The basic idea is this: the more a species resembles humans in its mental and emotional capacities, the more intelligent it is. I think we’ve always hoped to discover another being that understands itself the way we do. So far, we’ve had no luck.

No surprise, then, that recent scientists have to turned to guessing which species will inherit our cognitive mantle. We wonder which of the primordial creatures known to us might develop the most similar combination of self-consciousness, perception, and abstract thought that seems, to us, so unique in the world. In our hearts, we ask whether we really are so unique, and if any of the Earth’s animals might remember us when we are gone.

Our best guess for a successor is, surprisingly, the octopus, of the order Octopoda, an invertebrate sea-creature with eight arm-like tentacles, each with its own nervous system. Humans have feared the octopus for millennia. The Norwegians had their kraken myth, the Greeks invented the Gorgon. Maybe we feared them both for their physical strangeness and for their brilliance. They are remarkably good problem-solvers.

So, it seems the octopus will inherit the Earth. The irony - that the creature most likely to replace us is one of the least similar to us - is not lost on me.

Reader, I have to assume our scientists will be correct. It is all I have to work with. Assuming you are a descendant of the octopus species, maybe a historian reading these letters as part of some ancient time capsule, please know that we were fascinated by your ancestors, and that humans would be thrilled to hear that you’ve deciphered our text.

You may recall, somewhere deep in your being, what we did to you, to the oceans and the Earth itself. Remember above when I said we were afraid of you? Fear inspired us to do harmful things. I hope that will make us more sympathetic in your eyes. We grew too powerful and caused terrible damage all over the world, but behind that catastrophe was a group of scared animals, trying to ensure their safety.

Humans have made many mistakes in our time here. If I can leave you with any wisdom at all, it would be this: do not let your fear control you.

January 1, 2081

Today is the first day of 2081, a holiday known to us as New Year’s Day. Growing up, New Year’s meant snow on the ground, ice castles and hot chocolate and fireworks and skating. Fireworks are illegal now, they could damage the DOM. Snow is a distant memory.

We get by, though. New Year’s is my favourite day. Tonight, I’ll sit outside the pod with my neighbours and watch virtual fireworks beamed straight into my OcuLink implant. Far from the real thing (they never could get the scents right), but close enough to impart a little bit of wonder. The other old timers and I will remember our time as children, the feeling of cold air brightening our crimson cheeks, the smell of burning carbon. We’ll smile together.

The DOM’s resident children will swim in the creek and climb the few non-fruit bearing trees available, despite a long-standing ban on tree climbing. The council deemed it too risky an activity, trees being a precious commodity here, but the elders choose to overlook it on New Year’s. The kids deserve to cut loose once in a while.

I sired many of the children, bred as they were in the Council’s population maintenance program. Council pairs up fertile residents on a rotating basis, counting procreation among our civic duties. I often feel a pang of sadness upon spotting one of mine, since children are raised and educated collectively by the Council itself. Even though I interact with them, I have no role in their upbringing beyond serving as a sort of passive supervisor. I find it hard not to recall the past, the family I grew up with and the way parents, at that time, could really know their children.

I remind myself, at these times, that I have little to complain about. Life in the DOM provides me with more than enough food, friends, and reading material. Use of the OcuLink is a delicacy, but I do enjoy it once in a while. They were once mandatory hardware, but we lost the ability to install them long ago, making it, and me, a lucky relic.

Now, in my sixty-fifth year, and seeing as I have no real descendants, I’ve decided to write to you. I feel a bit silly, writing these letters to some unknown reader, in a language probably long-dead. A younger me would have called this trite behaviour. In my old age, though, I feel a need to leave something of me behind. To give something of myself to the world.

I wonder whether you, Reader, will count the years? Especially since you are, most likely, aquatic or amphibian. Certainly you will have your own rituals, and ways of tuning yourselves to the seasons, however you experience them. I hope you get to enjoy something like New Year’s, too. 

Reader, I hope these words reach you, somehow. I hope you recognize yourself in them, and that they guide you, in some small way, towards a better world than the one we created.

February 1, 2081

I’ve decided that February 2081 will be last month in the DOM. Life is good here, or at least tolerable compared to life outside, but memories of my home have dogged me since I penned the last letter. I have my health, but I am aging, and if I wait any longer I fear I’ll be too infirm to travel.

Vestiges of human life remain outside, though modern communities are a far cry from the great cities of the past. Life inside a DOM is comfortable, if predictable, and life outside is short. Since I expect my remaining time to be short anyway, I think the time has come to once again make contact with the world.

I grew up in a small, wooden house, adjacent to a deep ravine. The city government maintained a system of stairways and trails for residents to walk in the ravine, cutting through dense forest on either side of the water. They would search the forest for birds, for no reason other than to see them, and to watch them maintain life. Humans love to observe the behaviour of other creatures. Of course, humans also privilege themselves over other creatures. We enjoy their existence as long as it does not obstruct our immediate goals and desires. I really should say that we used to act this way, before industrial food production systems collapsed and we were forced to reconsider the structure of our lives.

The English language includes three possible plural forms for the word octopus: octopuses, an anglicization of the Greek root, octopodes, the Greek plural form, and octopi, a mistake, based on typical Latin pluralization. As a linguist, I cannot help but find this funny. We believed we could control the world, the very systems we, and you, depend on, and we named and categorized other creatures as though your existence depended on us instead. We could not even decide on your name.

Your species, Reader, will probably maintain collective memory of a time when the ocean rapidly warmed and became littered with foreign objects. Life became considerably harder for you, and you had to adapt to survive. Our species carries memories like these with us, embedded in our instinctual behaviour and our emotions, and I am sure you will remember, too. If you want to understand why humans acted the way they did - why we put you in such danger - I recommend you read two books. They are Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. They are indisputably important artefacts of human culture, though there may be even greater works with which I am unfamiliar. They are ancient, but I suspect you could find just about every human motivation explained and demonstrated in those pages.

The hero of The Odyssey, Odysseus, goes off to war in a distant land, and then returns to his home. On the way, he and his friends are faced with many trials and dangers, and must use their intelligence to survive. In a small way, I am also going home.

I write to you with the assumption that you are, in a sense, replacing humans. We no longer exist in this scenario, and you have created new civilizations and new systems that allow you to thrive and survive in a hostile world. I hope this is not the case, though.

I would like to think that, perhaps, humanity will find a way to sustain itself in this desolate environment. Maybe we will even find a way to restore what we have ruined. I hope that you, dear Reader, might exist with us side-by-side, that we might create a world worth living in. I hope that you will share your great works with us. Maybe we will read The Odyssey together.