The Octopi.(Kevin Hughes) It was supposed to be a simple genetic manipulation. That’s all. I wanted my Doctorate to be stunning, the seminal work on longevity. I was cocky. I was smart. I was twenty five. And…I was foolish. My Thesis adviser had warned me about Hubris. Now, well, look up that word and my picture is there. What I thought would be a simple Lab experiment, got loose in the wild. And not by me. By them. Yes, them.

The Octopi.

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I was always the smartest kid in Class. I wanted a Nobel Prize and needed to live long enough to gloat over it. I already had five BS Degrees, a couple of Master’s too. When I started my Ph.D…I had the knowledge I thought I needed. What I didn’t have was experience. Or caution. I knew I could do it…so I did. I took a species most folks wouldn’t dream of making them long lived…the Octopi- and gave them a lifespan almost a hundred times longer than natural.

You see, Octopi only live a few years. Most just a year. Even the Giant Octopi living in cold water live only five years. So what if some Longevity researchers had doubled the lifespan of mice? Mice are cute as little buttons, but they have tiny brains. Octopi, have big brains. Nine of them. Nine. That alone should have given me some warning that I was toying with things I didn’t understand.

Evolution doesn’t give you that many brains…and a short life span…without a reason. Once my octopus (yes, just one) had her babies, it was all ready to late. Do you know how many eggs a single octopus produces? I do. Now, everyone does: as many as 100,000 eggs. Even if only one percent survive…well do the math. That’s a thousand of new octopi…and within a year, those will each breed another thousand that survive. Evolution at hyper speed.

Even the Giant Cold water varieties of Octopi - the biggest of them all, and the longest living too- really only have a year of life, because they sit on their eggs for an incredible four and half years on average. Stay at home Moms would shudder at the idea. In warm water, well, those octopi usually live only for a year, but they egg at the very end of their life, and only sit on their eggs for about fifty days or so. Then they die.

All octopi have that breeding strategy. It is called: semelparity. It simply means that the female bears her eggs and then dies. And she can lay anywhere from 20,000 to half a million eggs, depending on water temperature. They only lay eggs once.

We didn’t even know my experiment with increasing their longevity worked. Not until the Children taught them to read. To the octopi of the world now…I am virtually a God. They have monuments to me in every ocean on Earth. Above the water line…well, let’s just say…there are no monuments. Nor did I win the Nobel Prize. You see, I am the reason we don’t control the seas anymore. And, well, the reason we lost to the octopi once the children taught them to read.

Humanity is no longer the most intelligent species on Earth. Just the smarted of the creatures with one brain. And even that isn’t true anymore if what the Octopi are teaching us about Dolphins, whales and Squids. The future of Earth will be determined by creatures with nine brains and eight legs.

And…Yes…they do walk among us.

Briefly, and only for important visits, except when they play with children on the Beach.

Oh, yes, the children. So let’s fill in the blanks, shall we.

Melinda was my first octopus. I bred her mother with a male I had placed a longevity gene in. I won’t bore you with the technical aspects; which make CRSPR cas9 techniques look like Beta Tools. I hit for the fences. I didn’t try to double their longevity. No not me. I wanted fifty to a hundred times their normal lifespan. And I got it.

Melinda had babies that would live a hundred times longer than her. A hundred times. With mobile tentacles, fine motor skills unbelievable to a Human, and nine brains. What was I thinking? I wasn’t.

Melinda got pregnant - which meant she only had a few months to live. So she did what any mother would do…look for a nice place to have her babies. Apparently nothing in my Lab appealed to her. She went out through a drainage pipe. Got into the sewer and then..out into the Florida Keys warm water, sandy bottoms, and coral reefs. She had her babies. Fifty six thousand of them.

Usually, only about a percent or so of the brood would survive, but these were a new species. They didn’t have to hurry…so they learned. Scuba divers reported strange things. Things they had never seen before. Buildings, sculptures, towns…towns of only octopi. At first these things were all just rumor. Fodder for the gossip rags, conspiracy theorists, and pseudoscientists of the world.

Then the evidence mounted.

And then, children started making friends with the more bold and social offspring of Melinda. The kids would read to the tiny creatures. They loved the way the baby octopi would crawl up and perch on their shoulders to peer at the books the kids read them. They even taught the kids to take a dunk (with the tiny octopus secured to their shoulders by suckers) so they wouldn’t dry out. After just one season, the octopi asked for more books. They had learned to read out alphabet.

They couldn’t speak, of course, but boy could they write. And draw. And sculpt. So they did. The first Marine Biologists started teaching them advance courses a year later. The children stayed friends with their octopi…and got nice letters written on grease boards (at first, later, just five years in…texts from waterproof phones.)

I know what you are thinking…five years from learning to read to texting? Yeah. Remember the part about them having nine brains. Nine. And now time enough to learn with them all. Writing was a piece of cake, and they can write with every tentacle. Talk about multi tasking, and octopus can write a different paper, poem, or technical essay with each and every one of its eight tentacles, and still leave a brain to scan for the big picture items in its environment.

That’s when we found out about me…and them. One of Melinda’s first batch learned from her Mother all about me…just before she died. She knew where my lab was…and since she had all of her Mom’s memories, she just back tracked to my lab and left me a note. It was a short note. Here it is in its entirety”

“Hello dear Dr. Martin,

Your children are delightful. They have taught us much, and we have made many friends among them. Not so much with your adults. We need a favor. We need you to get us access to more of your Math and Physics books. There is only so much you can glean from “Curious George, the Little Train that could, and the man in the yellow hat.”

We also need to talk to your leaders about polluting our water. And noise pollution from your surface ships and submarines too. You wouldn’t believe the havoc those things cause to the whales and dolphins. You may have noticed how many fishing boats and warships are having with tangled nets around their propulsion systems. Luckily you have left us so much trash in our waters to use them effectively against you.

We mean you no harm. We don’t have a cookbook like that story you told on TV , but we do need to eat…and you are killing off our food. You may have noticed that more and more of your flotsam and jetsam is being returned to you along your coastal beaches. We stack them in neat little piles for you…and the children (God bless them all) love to give us a literal hand hauling the up the beaches.

Thank you for the gift of a long life…let us learn how to live together now.

Just write a note back and slip it in the drainage ditch to get in touch with us. One of the little ones will come get it.

That sink, that the first few notes went down, is now in the Museum of Life. Yep. We built it in the Florida Keys. The top half is above water, the Octopi engineered the underwater parts. Both the upper and lower levels can be accessed by both Humans and Octopi. Often both species will have a quick chat on the ramps. Most of the fear is gone from both species…as are the hardliners that wanted to go to war with the octopi.

A month with no shipping, access to any underwater pipelines, or cables, and the inability to fish at all, stopped those Authoritarian War Hawks in a New York Minute. We share the seas, we don’t rule them. The octopi do.

Melinda’s offsprings are now in their forties. I am retiring this year. My last act will be to give Melinda’s daughter Martine (yes, named after me, Dr. Martin) her Nobel Prize for the new propulsion system that will take us to other solar Systems in the First Faster than Light drive every engineered. Nine brains make a difference.

But, as the children who have grown up with octopi friends proved:

One heart is enough.

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