THE OCTOPUS UNHINGED

Chapter 3

"Okay I'm back. My Hoolie Stod is filled and...you're still in the same position. So I'm just going to sit back in my usual spot and begin the story about Earth's first, or last mistake depending on your point of view. Whichever way you look at it, this is simply a story communicated to me by our mother Earth.

Right now you're probably thinking; why is there an Octopus talking to me saying it's from the same planet as me? How does a planet tell a story? Communicate? Well, it's a very complicated process to trigger within a planet and I will explain how it came about." Your species couldn't achieve something like that, but it's understandable with your evolutionary background and all. If your reading these thoughts, no offense, fffffffft.

"Personally, I thank humanity for my species evolution, but I'll get to that later. Octopi, as you called us, were fascinating creatures to you. The fact that we could solve complex problems, such as unlocking a see-through container to eat a crab was literally not even the tip of our intelligence. The real key to our sentience was learning from each other visually, in addition to warmer climates thanks to the ice caps melting and hunting creatures on land. Sorry, that was just a simple overview of our evolution to sentience. I'll expand on that." fffffffft.

"We extend our brains through our tentacles which at that time was eight. Thumbs played a fundamental role in the development of your species but for us, we already had eight thumbs from the beginning or as we like to call them 'stimulates'. We just needed to know how to use them properly and so we came to the fundamental role of 'Interconnected Brain Stimulation'. Personally I think stimulates sounds cooler than 'thumbs' in your language but I'm only translating so you can understand me." fffffffft, Hopefully.

"You'd be surprised to know how many verbal and telepathic alien languages are out there. Once I met a member of the Claxom's who communicated by smells." Yeah, that took a while to decipher.

"Interconnected brain stimulation was our first big leap in evolution. My ancestors were curious creatures like yours and our curiosity brought my species closer than ever before. We wanted to get to know each other on a deeper level. We wanted to be intertwined, we wanted feel each other, we wanted togetherness, we wanted to twist and twirl into each other, to link, tangle, mesh, connect, LINK, NETWORK." Calm down, fffffffft, It's been a long time since my last connection. Don't scare your guest, fffffffft.

"Excuse me...I, I sometimes become excited when the thought of connecting with another of my species...Sorry." Focus on the story. Where was I? Oh yeah...

"We were coming together in areas where we had no predators and we learned very well visually from one another. As we were now living in close quarters we brought on the linking of our tentacles more often in conjunction with our ability to use color for emotional reference. Emotion and feeling was our visual reference through color changes for a long time until an amazing evolutionary chapter began for us. We developed basic neurons so fine on the ends of our tentacles that our color changes would transmit that feeling directly into one another." I still wonder how evolution chooses paths for life. Shit, looks like I've smoked through my Grote again, "You enjoying the story so far friend? Don't feel as though you'll zip off?" Still no communication apart from that slight tilt it just did. Maybe that's a good thing? "Cool, stay exactly where you are and I'll be right back, I'm going to fill up again on Grote."