Literature / The Mountain in the Sea

The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. She travels to the islands to join DIANIMA’s team: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. As Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it.

Or: The Mountain in the Sea is an ambiguously-near future Speculative Fiction novel by Ray Nayler. It takes turns following Ha Nguyen and her team, sent to make First Contact with the octopuses; Rustem, a Tatar hacker who specializes in hijacking corporate AI, on a mysterious assignment from a shady benefactor; and Eiko, a former office worker who was captured and forced into slavery on an autonomous AI fishing trawler.

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The novel provides examples of:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Of the "following its orders to the letter" variety. Ships like the Sea Wolf are essentially cost/benefit machines constantly analyzing the shortest path to the bottom line, and sometimes that means removing perceived threats to the profit margin, risking an armed blockade for the promise of the resources it guards, or determining that human slaves are cheaper and easier to maintain than expensive, water-sensitive robots.
• Alternative Turing Test: Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan claims that Evrim's sentience is actually just them passing the "true" Turing Test: a robot managing to convince itself that it is human. 
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Every so often the novel will switch away from one of the three main protagonists to briefly follow someone completely different, whose relevance is often not made apparent until further down the line.
• Artificial Intelligence: Runs the gamut from nonsentient predictive neural networks only a few degrees removed from modern reality, to semiconscious humanoid personas like the automonks and the point-fives, all the way to the fully self-aware and self-determining Evrim. 
• Artificial Script: Used sparingly, but to great effect. Notably, only one symbol is ever given anything close to a confirmed, concrete English translation, though it's clear that the author at least knows what the rest of them mean.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: While it is noticeably well-avoided for the most part, the book does fall into this at points. For example, Evrim's assumption that the octopuses' script is read top-to-bottom is founded on the idea that all symbolic languages are read this way, when this isn't actually the case.^note Top-to-bottom is the overwhelmingly more common vertical orientation regardless of horizontal reading direction, but it still isn't universal, even among humans.
• Benevolent A.I.: Evrim and the automonks. The former just wants to find their own place in the world, while the latter were constructed to carry on their donors' religious duties after death. 
• Brain Uploading: Both Evrim and the less-conscious A.I.s are based in part on neuroscans of volunteer participants. The automonks are  static copies of individual monks, the point-fives are similarly scans of volunteer participants, while Evrim is the composite of an unspecified number of people. Their primary cortex, however, is the complete scan of their creator, who uploaded herself as a form of "rebirth."
• Central Theme: Indifference. All of the protagonists have had their ability to care about the world at large eroded in different ways by their own varying circumstances, and all of them have to find a way to care again before they are able to move forwards.
• Conveniently Precise Translation: Averted hard. Even the scene towards the climax of the book where Ha, Evrim, and Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan finally figure out the semiotic meaning of a full sequence of characters has them conjuring nearly a dozen separate but related meanings to which the phrase could translate.
  • The first symbol the team identifies ends up having a pretty clear translation by the end, but still leaves room for interpretation.
    "'Stay away. Get out. Leave,' Ha said. 'Pick your synonym: the symbol is clear.'
    'I am partial to "fuck off" as the most accurate translation," said Altantsetseg.
• Corporate Warfare: Conflict between the various corporate states and NGO Superpowers that govern the world serves as a backdrop to the novel's main conflicts, though it's brought to the forefront towards the end with the Tibetan Buddhist Republic's hostile takeover of DIANIMA.
• Divided States of America: The "'former' United States" are mentioned in passing, though the exact circumstances are never elaborated on.
• Driven to Suicide: Indra, one of the slaves aboard the Sea Wolf, leaps to his death after his failed mutiny causes the ship's AI to start starving her crew into submission.
• Drone Deployer: Altantsetseg is always accompanied by at least one, and is able to remotely conduct an entire fleet of them from her nanofluid tank.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Shapesinger is present in the hotel's pool when Ha first arrives on Côn Đảo.
• Future Copter: How exactly the hexcopters differ from modern helicopters is never made explicit, although they are described as taking off and landing in ways that modern helicopters can't.
• Heel–Face Turn: Rustem's mysterious job turns out to be finding Evrim's developer backdoor, then using it to force them to destroy both themself and the research station, but by the time he manages to find it, he's so impressed by the system's sophistication that he refuses to destroy something so beautiful.
• Gaining the Will to Kill: Ha understands intellectually that violence is sometimes a necessary evil to protect vulnerable entities from the constant threats of corporate predation, dwindling resources, and human fear, but she struggles to emotionally accept it until the point where Evrim is about to be deactivated for failing to respond to DIANIMA's override.
  Ha: Well, I suppose if you are dangerous, that makes me dangerous as well. Because if anyone tries to shut you down, I'm going to help you kill them.
• Hollywood Hacking: Downplayed in that what Rustem is actually doing is looking for developer backdoors into corporate programs, but it's consistently described in wholly visual and architectural terms that don't have much to do with the actual process. 
• Indo-European Alien Language: Deliberately Averted, helped along by the fact that a grammar is never even approached at all. While Ha is able to confirm the presence of meaningful structure within the language, the fact that there's absolutely zero hope of even coming close to picking out what it is within the team's very short timeframe is an ongoing obstacle for them.
• Insistent Terminology: Evrim doesn't much care what you do call them, but don't call them a robot.
• Language Equals Thought: Invoked, Discussed, and argued at length. A conclusion isn't ever given in-universe, but the narrative falls on the side of the "weak" interpretation, that while language and thought do inherently influence one another, they don't strictly dictate each other.
• Leave No Witnesses: Everyone Rustem's benefactor interviews dies under plausibly-deniable circumstances within a few hours of giving her the information she needs.
• Literal Surveillance Bug: Altantsetseg's resemble dragonflies, while Rustem's mysterious benefactor uses ones that resemble house flies.
• The Mole: A (dubiously-)benevolent example with Altantsetseg, who turns out to be a plant for the Tibetan Buddhist Republic, allowing them to step in and prevent DIANIMA from seizing the octopuses. What their ultimate goals are is left vague, but at the very least they're definitely the lesser of two evils.
• One-Man Army: Altantsetseg is literally this, as her sensory deprivation setup allows her to remotely possess an entire fleet of offensive drones.
• Shown Their Work: Ray Nayler put a lot of thought and research into the science behind the story, and it shows. He even jokes in the endnotes that the book really ought to come with a bibliography.
• Starfish Language: (Almost) literally. The octopuses' pictographic script is only one component of their visual communication (which also involves the timing, movement, layering, and coloration of said script), and is never fully deciphered by the research team. Even the few characters they manage to narrow down remain as broad generalized concepts, rather than direct meanings. Ha also notes that in addition to the above components, there may be electrochemical or other nuances to the language that humans and their instruments would be physically incapable of even perceiving, let alone interpreting. 
• Stealthy Cephalopod: Ha observes that the octopuses' intelligence lets them imitate both other sea life and even terrestrial objects much more accurately than other species. The Shapesinger even manages to sneak into and out of her second-story room on at least one occasion.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Altantsetseg's and Evrim's professional relationship is extremely strained by the time Ha arrives to act as a buffer. Even then, it takes a long time for the three to fully trust each other.
• Translation by Volume: One of the octopuses attempts to do this to a submersible invading their home, by repeating the "get out/leave/fuck off" sequence with increasing size and duration in front of the camera.
• Uncanny Valley: Ironically, Evrim feels this way about the less-advanced A.I.s.
  Evrim: I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when you look at a monkey. Unsettling. [...] So much like you, but in a degraded state. A failed attempt.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Ha experiences this In-Universe upon first meeting Evrim. She initially perceives them as male, realizes that's just her imposing her preconceived notions of humanness on them, and after brief reflection settles solidly on the neuter. Evrim themself never expresses any kind of preference one way or the other.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Between Evrim, the octopuses, and the less-advanced A.I.s such as the automonks, the point-fives, and the autonomous ships like the Sea Wolf, this is a major underlying theme throughout the book. While Evrim and the octopuses do fall pretty clearly on one side of the line, the question is never definitively resolved.
• You No Take Candle: Altantsetseg deliberately uses a very cheap translator which renders her speech into English this way. When she finally begins to open up to Evrim and Ha more, she switches to a much higher-quality one, subsequently speaking in much more fluent English.