Jun 5 19–

I arrived at the institute to be greeted by a hulking, silent man of inscrutable face. I offered him my briefcase to carry, but he simply turned and walked briskly through a narrow, windowless door.

I followed, along an interminable series of low corridors, very dimly lit. Always heading downwards, seemingly in a sort of vague spiral.

We stopped finally at a huge, heavy wrought-iron door, against which my escort knocked in a curious, delicate pattern, his knuckles barely brushing the rusted surface. Deadbolts screeched back, and the door roared slowly open. I recalled a description of nuclear bombs sounding like the slamming of a door in hell.

I entered alone. The stench was of every ocean creature long dead, and I instinctively clenched my nose. 

A man whose face I’d seen in old photographs lightly shook my hand, and joked weakly about getting accustomed to the smell. As my eyes grew used to the gloom I glimpsed seven or eight other faces which I recognised. All very dull men, and very clever, very brilliant. Men who’d split the atom and accentuated anthrax and would soon put an American on the moon.

Some of the other men smiled with real zeal. I imagined their eyes widening, with childlike delight, just before liquifying as a hydrogen bomb annihilates a big city.

The Octopus was easily the biggest animal I’d ever seen for real. Her eyes were wider than manhole covers, and burned bright with incredible intelligence. She was three-hundred-and-thirty years old, I was told. Her tank looked older, with glass greening from ancient algae. I knew she was in great pain, even before she communicated.

She begged me for help. Pleaded to be released, in a gargling, garbled voice, salty but sweet. She sung, rather than spoke. One of the institute’s men flipped a switch, sending a visible jolting shock through her broken body. This served as both punishment, and stimulus to shoot forth a clutch of tiny eggs, which several scientists began to slice open with great gusto.

I had heard nothing of the inside of the institute, as all who’ve worked here aren’t allowed to leave. Judging by their complexions, they’d not even been allowed outside. 

All I knew was rumors of their work; following ancient texts, they cultivated a terrible depression, triggered by procreation, into baby Octopi’s minds. Then these Typhoid Marys were released into the sea to breed. For, you see, the longer an octopus lives, the larger it’s size and intellect get. You’ll all have heard “tall” tales of these “leviathans” occasionally entangling astonished fisherman’s nets.

They can theoretically live forever, should they choose to. They shared our planet with dinosaurs; Imagine what we could learn from them! Instead, these men suppress their intellect, for one simple reason, which I learnt when my trembling lips asked why ancient humans were never attacked, overthrown, even enslaved, by these deep-sea beasts:

“Because they’re better than us”, one of the older men said, apologetically.