Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

On this job, they told her just to play with the octopus.

“Get comfortable with each other,” said the guy who hired her. “Make friends.”

Natalia had nodded and deliberately not asked any more. She tried to ignore her suspicions about why they were being so nice to this octopus. Maybe the company had a policy about giving all captive research subjects a certain amount of leisure time. ( Maybe they were doing something extra terrible.) She had done too many of these jobs to believe that the research lab cared very much about the comfort of an individual octopus in the face of SCIENCE, but she tried to convince herself that her role helped the animal more than hurting it. ( Maybe the experiments required the octopus to be relaxed, and Natalia was complicit. )

Her employers were probably going after those specific research interests when Natalia wasn’t there. The octopus she thought of as Vainilla was shut into a (decent-sized, but still) tank before and after her sessions. One day Natalia got to the center early and saw them peeling electrodes off of Vainilla’s flesh.

That day she was as gentle as she knew how to be, careful not to initiate any contact as she and Vainilla twisted in distant tandem through the water of the shallow, netted bay.

It wasn’t unexpected, or even necessarily sinister. Electrodes could be used for very non-invasive types of research. And in any case Natalia had long been used to the precarious or tormented lives of animal research subjects. She resisted any suggestion that she, for example, stop naming them, although since that seemed to particularly incense some people she mostly stopped telling her employers about it. She told herself that to do her job right she needed to face the current state of animal research. Sometimes it did not work out well for everyone.

After the electrode day the tone of that daily hour changed. There was still pleasure in their interactions, but it was definitely in a minor key. Natalia had slipped into thinking of her role as akin to that of a hospice caregiver: bringing Vainilla some marginal comfort in the interstices of a catastrophe beyond the cephalopod’s control.

So Natalia was surprised when David Gilcrest, one of the honchos at the center, sought her out after her post-swim shower one day and asked if she had availability to expand her commitment with them.

“You want me to add more swim time?” Natalia said, squinting up at him as she toweled her hair.

“Not exactly. Well, yes, more swim time, but we were wondering if you’d be willing to participate more directly in our experiment.”

“What experiment?” Natalia asked reluctantly, not really wanting to know what horrors were being inflicted on Vainilla.

“This phase of it,” Gilcrest begins, and Natalia was relieved that he obfuscated even so obviously, “would require you to don a sort of headset, much like a VR helmet—almost exactly like a VR helmet, to be honest—during the swim. Waterproof, of course,” he added hastily to her disbelieving expression. “We’ll connect it to the sensors we’ve been calibrating with the subject, and then you should see what it sees.”

“See…” Natalia’s brain caught up with what he was saying mid-sentence. “So it’s a neurology experiment?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Gilcrest said, looking somewhat taken aback. “Weren’t you briefed about it?”

Natalia brushed that off, no longer sure if she hadn’t been or if she had purposely tried not to pay attention for fear of what she might hear. “So you want me to be connected to… to the octopus? Neurologically?”

“Yes, that’s it exactly!” Gilcrest sounded relieved too. “We know it feels comfortable around you, and we thought that might be a way to ease it into the full rig, get better readings. We were thinking an extra half-hour per day, although the first few days we might not even keep it going that long. Of course you’d get paid for the full half-hour in any case. What do you say?”

“Sure,” Natalia answered. Non-invasive neurology was good, relatively speaking. “But if I get the sense that the octopus is in pain or discomfort due to the equipment, I’m out.”

“If that’s the case, we would of course try to mitigate it,” Gilcrest said, affronted, but Natalia had seen too many cases of unconscionable actions posed as the best option to feel any compunction about offending researchers.

“This looks amazing,” Natalia said, trying on the waterproof headset two days later. It was only a little larger than a standard scuba mask, although quite a bit heavier when she put it on. “Did you design this here?”

“Uh, no,” Gilcrest said, as the techie kid fiddled with the straps and connections. “We had a design firm in to work on it; they were excited about the commercial applications. Now remember, what you receive from the cephalopod, which you’ll see with your right eye, is not going to look like what you’re seeing with your left eye. You’ll be getting the images as interpreted by that strange octopus brain, so it will look really weird, but it’s just what’s there, okay? The images are what the octopus is seeing, understand? What you see is what’s there.”

“… Yes?” It wasn’t that hard a concept.

“This is just for calibration. So try to relax into the weirdness. Okay.” Gilcrest sighed, then psyched himself up again. “Let’s take it for a spin!”

“What exactly is your involvement in this project?” Natalia asked, out of curiosity. She had been freelancing for years and didn’t miss the corporate culture aspect of full-time work, which meant that she didn’t bother to keep titles straight.

“Oh.” He looked pleased that she cared, instead of annoyed that she hadn’t cared enough to remember his title when she was introduced to him. “I came up with it, actually. Well, with a couple of other people. Needless to say I don’t have the technical chops to be lead in all areas, but…”

Natalia stopped listening to him around that point, partly because he was taking a really long time to say anything important, but also because they had brought Vainilla to the bay and were attaching the electrodes. She narrowed her eyes, watching for any sign of discomfort from the cephalopod, as if the fact that she was actively and obviously watching would change the behavior of the techs.

The techs didn’t seem to notice her at all. But Vainilla made no show of distress. Probably already entirely used to the process.

“You should get in the water,” Gilcrest said; he at least had noticed the focus of her attention. “As soon as you’re ready give us a wave and we’ll switch it on.”

Empowered by that, Natalia took her time going through the greeting ritual with Vainilla and then paddled around a little as usual. She wondered if they were getting annoyed out there, on the other side of the water’s surface, if the anticipation was unbearable. She wondered if she herself was nervous. She raised her hand to the sun-baked air and shook it.

A few more seconds of stereovision and then her view bisected. Natalia shut her left eye, thinking it would be less confusing to see only what Vainilla was seeing, but that world was unintelligible furls of black-and-white gradations and she had to switch, closing her right instead and breathing slowly through the regulator while she watched a school of smelt flutter by. Vainilla caught one and ate it and Natalia kept her right eye resolutely closed until that was finished.

Cautiously, she swam up next to Vainilla, so they’d be seeing roughly the same vista, and opened her right eye.

This wasn’t going to work. Side-by-side, the two visions clashed, competing and confusing; but Vainilla’s alone was unintelligible. It was all blurry monochrome shapes—Natalia couldn’t even tell which side was up.