I once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus.
I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe at most. Is the Olfactory Bulb self-aware? Does Broca’s Area demand the vote? Hives don’t just assimilate the self; they annihilate it. They are not banned in the West without reason.
But octopi? Mere invertebrates. Glorified snails. There’s no risk of losing yourself in a mind that small. I might have even tried it myself, for the sheer voyeuristic thrill of perceiving the world through alien eyes.
Before I met Guo, at least. [...]
> “I killed the fucking thing. Ripped it apart with my bare hands.” His eyes drilled right through me, black and hollow and unrepentant. “I’m still paying off the damages.”
Octopuses live like one year, how can a modified one be valuable at all?
Also it's true that they're a colony and the arms do most of the thinking, but IIRC as a consequence of this the brain is suspected to not get a lot of sensory information back from them - instead it kind of gets status updates about what they're up to. It actually has to look at its arms with its eyes to find out what they're touching.
