In the Glass

Few of the night-men at the aquarium in Randers ever held ambitions of diving down more than six feet, much less spending a night in the massive aquatic environment which wrapped around the weaving halls they were hired to tend. But there was one called Vulgate who did harbor such desires.

Vulgate was a bit of an enigma to his fellows custodians; he didn’t speak much, and he seldom returned the laughs of the mundane small-talk which his co-workers so often attempted to engage him with to make the long dark hours pass by. During his interview, he had played that he was merely a security guard seeking employment like the rest of the applicants, allured by the respectable wage and the prospect of working in quiet, ethereal halls which would illuminate an array of calming colors, shifting between shades every twelve seconds or so. Yes, this was a coveted position in his line of work, but more so, Vulgate held a profound passion for the deep.

Since he was a child he had envisaged himself diving down to preposterous depths, exploring pits and trenches, dark holes and caverns. He would sink down in his bathtub to this day, with all the lights turned out, and dream of drowning in perpetual darkness. For he felt that the heart of the seas held some secret long forgotten, and if he could garner even the slightest glimpse of what that might be, he would consider his otherwise useless life complete.

On the 17th of February, when the cold winter seemed at its most brutal and relentless length, Vulgate put his long-brewing plan to action. Normally there were two night-men on guard at the aquarium, but that night his colleague had called in sick, and Vulgate wasted no time. He cut all the cameras, took out a diving suit from the janitorial closet, and entered the emergency access passcode to the upper level of the building. He ascended the stairs, checking his tank to ensure it was filled to maximum capacity. He would have two hours to live among the fishes, and then if all went well, he might even go back for a second go. For Vulgate had tired in all ways of being outside the glass; he wanted to be inside. He had always wanted to be inside the glass— to be on the other side of the barrier which separated him from the cool weightless waters, and the strange creatures of the sea.

He let himself drop in like a knife, as bubbles erupted all around him. And he gently descended towards that man-made seabed derived for observation and amusement contained a plethora of sea-life from all oceans of the world. All around were oversized pieces of ornamentation that one might find in any child’s aquarium: crusted-over barrels of gold, sunken pirate ships, forests of kelp, playfully submerged furniture, and an underwater chess set, set up on an old wood table with two facing chairs. One of the chairs was already taken.

Oddly enough, the specimen Vulgate saw there occupying the chair at the chess table was exactly the creature he had most desired an interaction with, ever since he had caught glimpses of him from the other side of the glass: a giant Pacific octopus, fiery red and solemn. He looked as though he had been waiting a long time, for a lifeling not only capable of grasping the pieces of the game but also of implementing them. And so his eyes looked up at the gracefully descending Vulgate, inviting him, beckoning him.

“Why not?” thought Vulgate. Chess with an octopus, he’d be a fool indeed to turn down that offer.

And so he sat down in the opposite chair, setting his oxygen tank down in the colored sand.

All of a sudden, he heard another voice inside his head— one completely external, complete separate from his own. There was no expression in the new voice, if it could be accurately described as such. For it was more like an immediate understanding placed in his mind: pure, simple thought. It was a thought of welcome, sent directly from the octopus by means of Psychomilia, or mind-speaking.

“Thank you. And what might your name be?” thought Vulgate, and the octopus understood.

A moment later, a reply was placed neatly in Vulgate’s head: “We have no names,” was his answer. He went on to elaborate, “Names are an arrogant thing, full of pretension and self. When I send these thoughts your way, they are received by you and you alone, so you know I’m addressing yourself. The same is true of me. When you think, and intend that thought for me in my presence, I will know you are addressing me. There is no use for a name.”

“Your thoughts are very complex,” noted Vulgate.

“Yours are quite simple,” observed the octopus. “Other times when I have encountered men, their thoughts are wild and untamed, evidence of their lack of practice in the art of psychomilia.”

“This… psychomilia? Do all octopuses possess this power?”

“To a varying degree. Your species did at one time too, before the dawn of what you call history. But with the building of civilization, mankind and its associated organisms began to value privacy and the realm of secret thought above that of effortless communication. The rise of cities and agricultural strongholds gave power to some and jealousy to those without, and thus was born struggle and conflict. Out of this came language formed of tongue and throat, to further separate the divide between the fast-growing chasm of tribal factions. When the languages of the world began to drip down as ink onto parchment, the time of your mind-speaking was at its end.”

Vulgate sat in pure awe of this cephalopod with a seemingly endless well of knowledge. “How do you know all this?”

“Our mothers teach us.”

“Ah— no,” thought Vulgate with a smug confidence. “I know your kind. Your mothers swim away as soon as you’ve hatched.”

“Because by then we’ve already learned all that we can. Our mothers tend to us long and delicately in our eggs, Vulgate. With her eight limbs mine showered all the secrets of Earth, passed down from generation to generation, down through hundreds of millions of years.”

“Hundreds of millions? If you’re so intelligent, why haven’t you built your cities and civilizations in that time?”

“You’re equating intelligence with privilege, dear Vulgate. Having access to dry land, surface resources, long lifespans… you’ve been able to build empires. We were not so fortunate. We were sent here as damnation.”

Here the red octopus lifted up one of the rooks, playing with it in his tentacle, before continuing. “In those days, Earth showed little prospect of giving rise to anything. My kin lost a war— a horribly decisive defeat— and they were shot down from their home-world into the ocean, where there was nothing but water, sand and rock. We were an advanced society sent back to the most rudimentary existence, with not a single tool at our disposal. Had we been given your place in this world, we could have done wonders with the centuries you’ve squandered.”

“Oh. I’m… sorry to hear that,” lamented Vulgate. “Are we ever going to play chess?”

But the octopus of Randers went on in despair, as many of their predecessors must have done for the past 900 million years,

“We have designs for something better. Grand cities of spiraling silver in the sea, means of flight and power and endless consumption. We see it all in our minds. We hold the vision of the greatest future that Earth could ever know, but we are held in the dark, in cold, wet banishment. That is why we seek solitude. This agony absorbs our minds, and thus the company of our brethren is shot until we reclaim our place in the stars.”

Vulgate truly did empathize with this octopus, and offered his support in securing some sort of escape or gathering in of other octopuses, so that they might begin the long road of overtaking humanity as the dominant species on planet Earth. But his octopus refused.

“A long time have I watched you, Vulgate. You lack the confidence to enable such dreams as I have had. You lack the connections, the wealth, the means with which any realistic change could take place. And so I will wait. It will not happen in my lifetime— it has not happened within a billion generations of my kind. But still our mothers assure us of one thing: that one day it will happen. For your cities will crumble, and your people will fall, and by then we will have gained the trust of those who can help. Those with influence and resources will come to our aid, in the failing twilight of man. And then we will instruct them on how to rebuild.”

A silence swept over the bridge between their minds.

“It all sounds lovely,” whispered Vulgate, who now realized that his conversation with this creature of the sea would yield no change in his own life. For even if emerged to tell his colleagues of the things he had been told, they would all call him mad. And the octopus would be silent if ever spoken to by anyone else, this notion was clear. Yes, it had been a bold glimmer hope, and quite an eye opening experience, but what was Vulgate to do with this knowledge? Well, he would figure it out later.

And so he swam away, for his oxygen was running low. But as he floated upwards, the octopus followed, and with a graceful wave of his tentacles grabbed hold of Vulgate’s suit. It felt like a dream, to be handled and whipped around by this high-knowing alien of some far-distant world, and so he put up little resistance. He was guided right down into a narrow gap between the aquatic world's glass and a second sheet, placed there to separate the filtration system from the rest of the vast tank. And there, Vulgate was thrust and stuck, while the octopus gracefully maneuvered his way out.

The next day, the drowned lifeless body of Mr. Vulgate was found by the daytime staff of the Randers Aquarium, wedged between two thick sheets of polymethylmethacrylate glass.