”Next stop: Luna 3. Please stay seated until the vehicle has completely stopped. We thank you for choosing SpaceVenture today. Please remember …”
The rest of the announcement was drowned out by people packing their things and leaving their seats, despite the warning. Nora watched them. Her bag was already packed, and she knew that if she would stand up now, it wouldn’t be any faster than if she waited for everyone to get out first. It was like this every morning. And most people never seemed to learn this.
When the transportation unit finally came to a halt, people left it in a hurry. Nora walked out slowly. Being early to work wouldn’t mean she could leave early too. It wouldn’t even get her any additional money. They’d just claim that the documentation machine had been broken and she had actually arrived later than she had been supposed to. And then they’d cut her pay.
It had happened before.
She walked down the street towards an office building, when something suddenly grabbed her ankle. She shrieked and jumped backward, almost falling down.
”Sorry, ma’am, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t … I’m sorry, it’s just …”
A cephi. A fucking cephi. What was it doing out here? Cephis weren’t allowed to leave their districts. Nora looked down at her ankle, expecting to see slime where the chepi had grabbed her with its tentacle. She wrinkled her nose and proceeded to walk past the thing.
It grabbed her ankle again.
”Please!” It called out. ”I can’t find my mom!” Nora turned back around and looked at the cephi. It was tiny, that was true. But could it really be a child? She never knew with those things. It was creepy enough, that they were able to speak.
Cephis were the descendants of animals called cephalopods. For millions of years, they had been mostly harmless animals, living in the ocean. Humans had known them as squid, octopuses or cuttlefish and either ignored or ate them. Only a few scientists had been interested in studying them.
It had been known that cephalopods had a certain degree of intelligence, uncommon for mollusks and even for most other animals, but nobody had worried too much about it. After all, they had still been animals.
And then several things happened.
Humanity had entered an age of technological progression, everything was going really fast in many areas. But at the same time, the planet was dying. Species were going extinct or were forced to adapt. And adapt the cephalopods did. Actively.
In basically all animals, evolution happened through the accumulation of mutations that proved to be beneficial. Bit by bit, the animals could change and adapt to their surroundings. But this process took time and the earth was dying faster than beneficial mutations could accumulate. Especially because not every mutation had a positive effect.
But the cephalopods were different. They directed their own evolution, by actively editing their RNA, which was the link between DNA and proteins. And by doing this, they evolved a lot faster and in a direction that helped them survive.
Their intelligence increased, and they made contact with humanity. But humanity didn’t like that.
Neither did Nora.
”I can’t help you. Go find some other cephi, they’ll help you find your mom. I need to go to work.”
The color of the tiny cephi turned from a hopeful yellow to a greyish blue as it withdrew its tentacles from Nora and skittered towards the side of the road. It seemed miserable. Then again, cephis always did.
Nora started to feel bad. It wasn’t this child’s fault that it was born as a weird joke of nature. In fact, humanity might have treated cephis differently if they had come from a different planet, not earth. But even after centuries of space travel, they hadn’t been able to find any aliens. They had colonized almost every solid planet and moon in their own solar system and were expanding further and further. But there was nothing.
And they were stuck with cephis.
”Ugh, alright”, Nora finally said, ”I will help you look. But don’t touch me again, you hear me? And hurry, I don’t want to be seen with you.”
The cephi turned bright orange and moved closer towards Nora.
”Thank you! Thank you!”
With the child by her side, she started walking towards the cephi district. Nora didn’t understand why cephis had been allowed to settle on Luna 3. The Moon, one of those that orbited Jupiter and had been the third to be colonized, was far from Earth and even drier than Mars. Cephis still needed a lot of water to survive, despite their adaptions, and water on Luna 3 was expensive.
Then again, the rate of hate crimes was comparably low. Nora knew of several colonies where cephis were hunted, fried and eaten on a regular basis. Protest groups had tried to stop that practice, but there weren’t enough of them. And nobody besides them cared about the weird, soft animals that suddenly gained more intelligence than they were supposed to have.
”We’re almost there”, the cephi said excitedly. ”I think I recognize these houses.”
”Great. I’m sure you’ll find your way home now by yourself.”
”Noooooo please don’t leave me!” The cephi shrieked. ”I’m scared!”
Nora sighed.
”FINE!” They kept walking down the street. Then they turned around a corner and were met by about fifty cephis. All of them were clearly adults. And they all seemed to stare at her and the child. Nora swallowed hard.
”It seems we found your people”, she said, almost losing her voice. ”I’m sure you can now …”
Something penetrated the soft skin on her neck. She reached up and had a thin dart in her hand.
”What the hell …” Everything went black.
The Cephalopods surrounded the unconscious human.
”You did well, little one”, one of them said to the child that had brought the human. ”That’s the 8th this week. If we keep this up, we will be able to infiltrate the whole base in no time.” The Cephalopod looked at another one. ”Are you ready to go through with the procedure?” It asked. The other one flashed its colors in agreement.
”I always wondered what it’d be like to steer a human”, it said. ”Cut her open so I can replace her brain.”
Sources:
Squid and octopus can edit and direct their own brain genes
Octopus genome holds clues to uncanny intelligence
Watch Jumbo Squid Speak by 'Flashing' Each Other
Picture taken from pixabay.com
