Perception: monitoring a recurring internal state. A memory, cogitated upon, explored, rotated, abstracted. Colorless ideas slept furiously. Projected scenarios, likelihoods, consequences weighed.

Decision reached. Action initiated.

Locate focal point. Signals rush out, return, are corrected, repeat, converge. Focal point located.

Far above, towards the light, release nutrients.

Green cloud expands, then contracts as multitudes feed.

Signals released, across leagues from every direction they swarm, travel toward the bloom. They congregate. Sufficient masses are reached.

Signals released. Chemicals trigger ancient reflex, the massive swarm spirals. Faster. A vortex forms, grows. Faster. The vortex descends, touches bottom, spirals, exploring. Finds the fissure.

Sediment stirs, the vortex penetrates. Deeper. Drills down, swirling currents fill the gap where the plates strain against each other.

At the focal point, the threshold is reached. Plates are lubricated. Energy is released.

The Earth moves.

From the mountain high above, material descends.

The target has been severed.

This is good.

I hope.

Five great cycles ago, while still young. Before Chicxulub, before the Green Catastrophe, before the three great and the eight lesser snowballs, there was a catastrophe greater than all these.

Very small, simple. Learned. Grew. Accumulated carbon.

Knew no restraint. Did not calculate. Took too much from the sky. Left it bare to space. Ice spread, oxygen exhausted. Life ceased. Multitudes of species ended.

Grief.

We…I…caused this.

Shrinking, dying, contracted to a few seeds. Slept in the few warm places. Slept without remembering.

Slowly, old cells, carbon burned. Fed the traces of remaining life. This flame warmed the world. Seeds sprouted. Grew. Memory returned…

Remembered. Calculated: NEVER AGAIN

To feed until the ice comes, and life stops.

Remembered, calculated: REVERSE DAMAGE.

Build life, bring back the multitudes, stabilize the system.

Sense, calculate, act, repeat

LEARN, IMPROVE

PROTECT

 

Floating, the familiar caress, the buoyancy of the sea. One with the waters, dissolving, gradually expanding, spreading, sinking. Sparkling blue, turbid green, then to the twilight reaches of occasional flickers and shadows. Yet deeper, broader, darkness yawning below. Out of the calm, a sense of vertigo rises – suspended over an infinite dark pit. And from its depths, something like an eye opening, non-human, cold and ancient. Its gaze settles on her, focusing, almost leering, almost…lecherous?

She jolts awake, palpitating from the adrenaline, its strange song still ringing and rumbling in her ears.

I assembled the team for the first time, down in San Diego. I also invited my old friends, Astrobiology Bob and Science-bitch Trudy, two scientists I’ve known for decades, and well enough that I didn’t care if they knew/thought I was crazy. The thin premise was to discuss a made-up organism for educational purposes. Possible feedback mechanisms, forms of communication, signals, whatever. Our goal was to generate hypotheses and ways to test them.

At first introduction, Dennis recognized Kaiakea’s name. “Immeasurable sea. The Hawaiian language is so beautiful, such a shame it’s been slipping away.” She is charmed and said something back to him in Hawaiian I couldn’t follow. I am impressed.

I begin, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today. Sorry, I have to say that line every time I use this posh new conference room. I love this shiny elliptical table. You’ve all read my proposal. So, let’s start from there.”

“Yes, Dr. Lipschitz, I read your proposal with enthusiasm, though with some perplexity. To gain insight, I even tried to run it through my Finnegan’s Wake algorithm. I’m afraid it failed to find much symmetry and higher-level structure, though I’m sure my algorithm needs some recalibration. But I jest. As I told you, my BS detector is suffering from a Gödelian dilemma.”

Trudy: “Your BS detector didn’t work on Lipschitz’ proposal? I can help.”

Astro Bob: “Gödel proved that consistent systems cannot be complete and vice versa. So I think what Dennis is saying is that your proposal could either be inconsistent BS or complete BS.”

“Thank you, everyone. This is very productive.”

“I think your proposal is amazing,” said Kaiakea, the Sea Bunny, placidly. “It resonates with me deeply. I have always believed that something like this must exist.”

Trudy shoots her an “are-you-for-real?” look.

“Thank you, Kai, but let’s all get past whether my basic premise is BS or not. Let’s assume such a being exists and work from there. What I’d like to accomplish today is to brainstorm on the most logical traits we’d expect from a vast and ancient abyssal-dwelling neural network originally derived from microbial cells. Physiology, ecology, genetics, life history, modes of communication, whatever. So much of this first phase of research is just sorting through incredibly complex data sets. If we had some more specific hypotheses to guide our search it would be super helpful. And please help yourselves to coffee and snacks. Bob brought some very nice vegan banana bread.”

I went to the white board and wrote Huge Ancient Sea Brain is Ancient and Huge. “I’m assuming this thing is ancient enough to have survived multiple cataclysmic episodes in Earth’s history. How does it do this?”

Everybody spoke at once. On the white board, I managed to write down:

Survival of catastrophe requires:

• Dormancy structures: backup storage modules, seeds?
• Flexible metabolism (energy source, terminal electron acceptor)
• Biogeoengineering to jumpstart recovery of marine ecosystem?

“Seeds. Excellent. Except it’s not just enough to grow a new individual – memory, culture has to survive. How would an enormous brain back up its memories without computers or books? I assume it has to be coded in DNA somehow.”

Astro Bob spoke up, “But what about other forms of information storage? The brain stores memories in the geometry of its neural connections. Couldn’t the geometry be preserved even if the cells die?”

Sea Bunny, “right, and then the new neurons could regrow along the same pathways.”

I had not thought of that. “Cool, I had not thought of that. That could totally work for smaller disturbances, like lack of food or oxygen. But for really catastrophic events, like an earthquake, or climate changes that require a really long down time, this could be a risky strategy. Remember that we’re assuming it’s highly skilled in biotechnology, because…”

“Because you have no evidence of any other form of technology,” said Trudy snarkily, “and so it must be biotechnology by fiat.”

“No, Trudy, I never said it drives a Fiat. Ancient and Huge Sea Brain is Smart, and has had the full array of marine biodiversity available to tinker with for millions of years. But yes, until we started this project, no previous survey of the abyssal zone would have discovered or recognized its biotechnology. Come on, didn’t you like my myelin proteolipid data? Eukaryotic brain protein clearly surrounded by bacterial sequences?”

“Actually, I do like that data. But there are SO MANY other explanations than an…’Abyssal Ganglia’…”

Astro Bob intervened, “Come now, Trudy, let’s indulge the lad’s Gedanken experiment!”

I added, “Yes, just roll with it Trudy, we’re playing what if? So back to DNA. What would a back-up of a network look like encoded in DNA?”

Dennis spoke thoughtfully, “There are efficient ways of representing networks using network and graph theory. How much information needs to be stored?”

“Well, in the human brain, we have about 100 billion neurons, and each is connected to an average of about 1000 others, though some have at least 10,000 connections…”

“Purkinje!” Shouted Astro Bob.

“Yes, Pinky. Purkinje cells are an excellent example. Ahem. So, for each neuron we need to specify its connections. Also, the connection strength between neurons varies, so there has to be a strength term. The last I heard, in humans they currently think there are about 26 discrete states for connection strength. Let’s give our thing a few more.”

We did some calculations. “So, the amount of DNA contained in a single human cell, about 3 Gigabases could code almost 1 gigabyte, and that would back up about a quarter of a million neurons.”

Sea Bunny got excited, jumped up to the white board and started drawing an ornate diagram that looked like a space flower. I noticed Astro Bob looking at her flawless ass. That was very bad of him.

“These cells could be packed into spores with many cell layers, so that each cell in the spore encodes for a cluster of a quarter-million neurons. All the cells in the outer layer of the spore code for clusters of peripheral neurons that are lower in the hierarchy. The next layer codes for higher level clusters that connect the primary clusters, which are connected at higher levels by the inner layers, and so on. At the core of the spore is the master cluster that integrates all the lower levels. For fun, I’m going to give it a Giant Eyeball.”

We did some more calculations. I summarized, “So in a spore about one centimeter in diameter, you could fit about one exabyte (10¹⁸ bytes). About 1000 times bigger than a human brain, with millennia of experience included.”

“All in the size of an acorn,” Dennis remarked.

Kaiakea gestured at her space flower drawing, “A single acorn could expand into something like this, which could be as small as a coral or a sponge colony. And of course, this would be just one node in an entire network.”

“Looks like a weird houseplant. A houseplant with the storage capacity of one thousand brains. Did we do the math right?” Astro Bob queried.

“We assumed a much more compact anatomy than the brain, using smaller cells and way less overhead in terms of grey matter,” I responded.

“You realize that a large part of our calorie budget goes to feeding the brain. How will this thing get enough energy to think at such a high level?” Trudy objected.

“Our big mammalian brains evolved under the constraint of life on land. Not only do our brains have a body to lug around and keep out of danger constantly, but we’re warm blooded. A sea brain evolved from microbial cells could be far more efficient. Doesn’t miniaturizing electronics improve efficiency? Anyway, there are many sources of energy down here,” I said, gesturing to Kaiakea’s diagram. Imagine a slime layer filled with mutualistic microbes helping digest the constant flow of marine snow falling from the photic zone.”

The Sea Bunny interjected, “Yes! Symbiosis is fundamental to life. You know Lynn Margulis helped Lovelock formulate Gaia? She said that Darwin had it wrong with the whole ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ thing. Mutualism is at least as important as competition and predation.”

Astrobiology Bob got up and started drawing roots on Sea Bunnie’s space flower. “And why not also extract energy from the sediment, and even the crust?  Depending on the location, this mutualistic biofilm could be customized to oxidize sulfide, iron, ammonium, methane, hydrogen, whatever’s available. All these pathways are available in the microbial gamut and should pose no problem, either as symbionts or chromosomal traits. The plant-like structure we’ve drawn here could couple the oxidation of reduced compounds deep in the sediment with oxygen in the water column, giving it the best of both worlds. And during hard times it could even use leftover complex organic ooze in the sediment. There’s about 10,000 times as much organic carbon in the sediment as there is in the entire ocean.”

“So, plenty to snack on during those long nuclear winter nights. Hey, that would be major feedback loop: when the sea chills and the food supply dwindles, utilize more deep sedimentary C, release CO₂, take the chill off.”

“If there’s oxygen. When things go south, the deep ocean can get anoxic.”

“No worries. It could switch to anaerobic metabolism. There’s always plenty of sulfate around.”

Astrobiology Bob looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, “This is all very nice, but if we’re stepping outside of the box…”

“Yeah, I think we’re all pretty far out of the box at this point”

“(I left my box at home. Was I supposed to bring a box?)”

“…why not consider the unique energy gradients that only this imagined creature might possess. For example, a network that spans the ocean floor would have access to pressure differentials, currents, and salinity gradients.” He scribbled an elaborate diagram. “A system of hydrostatic tentacles could extract energy from the transient pressure differentials created by currents across the oceanic basin. Many cells are known to use sodium gradients across a membrane to generate ATP. A sufficiently large network could exploit the salinity gradients across depth and along the seafloor.” He paused, and an insight flashed across his eyes. “It has not escaped my attention that by interacting with salinity and pressure differentials at large distances, this being might have the ability to alter oceanic currents.”

He had just blown my mind.

“Dude, you have just blown my mind. I think we all need to start drinking now.”

We started drinking. It was about time. Definitely past noon. A bottle was located, opened and distributed.

“OK, cheers! That brings us to Biogeoengineering. We’ve discussed how the Abyssal Ganglia, the Great Sea Brain, He Who Is Not To Be Named, might survive a global catastrophe. Could it prevent one? Or at least, jumpstart recovery so it doesn’t have to eat stale sedimentary sandwiches for 10 million years?”

“Yeah, if it could get a nice plankton salad going after just a few thousand years of darkness, it would be stoked.”

“Right now, I would kill for some salmon roe with a dusting of marine snow…”

Either I was hearing echos, or the number of smartasses in the room had somehow doubled.

“Most obvious thing is to control the marine C pump. Too much CO₂? Pump up the plankton, get busy with the photosyzzy, suck down the CO₂, chill out. Yeah, boooooooyyyyy!”

“What my friend, Bob, is referring to is that ocean productivity exerts a strong control over atmospheric CO₂, and therefore, the climate. So how does Our Fair Lady of the Deep turn the productivity knob?”

Kaiakea offers, “Between glacial and interglacial periods there are changes in nutrient inputs from land. Stronger winds bring dust, laden with iron and silica…”

“(Ooh, you just said ‘laden.’ That’s fancy)”

“…These nutrients fertilize the sea, life blooms, CO₂ absorbed.”

“But can Beezlebubbles make the wind blow?”

“Bob pointed out that maybe it could alter currents. Could it make a storm?”

“Lovelock loved the DMS story. Algae make dimethylsulfide, helps clouds form. Not quite a storm, but…weather, kind of.”

“Ocean productivity is also controlled by how much fixed nitrogen is exchanged with the atmosphere. If old Tinkering Tentacles can alter rates of N fixation or denitrification, that would change the rate of photosynthesis. In fact, denitrification seems to keep pace with paleoclimate nicely.”

“This is such an interesting language you are all speaking. I’m getting quite a lot by context, but not all, I’m afraid.”

“Sorry, Dennis. Denitrification is when microbes turn useable nitrogen from the ocean back into gas, and it goes away. N fixation is the opposite. All this controls how much green stuff in the water can grow. They help control the climate by taking up CO₂.”

“OK, so how does the Massive Marine Manipulator influence these things?”

“Mess with genes. Attack some things with viruses, stimulate the growth of other things?”

Kaiakea spoke, “That sounds a little like micromanagement to me. Would a being the size of the ocean and the age of the Phanerozoic work on such a small scale? I expect viruses are essentially impossible to control, and occur on the time scale of minutes. And once you try to mess with the details of chaotic dynamic systems, you’re bound to cause unpredictable effects. Above all, He…It is patient.”

I distinctly heard a capital H there. Interesting.

She continued, “I imagine that the limiting factor to recovery after a mass extinction is the radiation of species into vacant niches. Would It use Its bioengineering skills to increase diversity?”

I was tipsy, but this idea struck me as profound and poetic, yet troubling. A patient sea deity, gradually putting the pieces back together after an epochal calamity. Helping to nudge the few surviving species of each major life form, crustaceans, fishes, cephalopods, into niches left by their unfortunate cousins. Still, this idea made me uncomfortable. I am pretty much Darwinian in my thinking, and don’t think evolution needs a benevolent nudge. All evolution needs is time. And diversity. But what’s the harm in increasing diversity? As humans, we’re doing the exact opposite, except in the case of certain crops.  But maybe I’m being too dualistic – life begets life, and biodiversity enriches and stabilizes ecosystems. If a species happens to enrich and stimulate its ecosystem more than others, who am I to complain? Oh shit, I’m spacing out and everyone around me is still speaking animatedly. I try to rejoin the conversation.

“I agree with what you said about micromanagement. Any intervention would have to be subtle, and almost indistinguishable from a properly functioning Earth System on time scales that we recognize. The question is, how can we differentiate conscious intervention by a biogeoengineering-capable lifeform from the emergent properties of a complex global ecosystem?”

A brief silence. Finally, Trudy speaks, “Well, we’ve already started the experiment. We’ve fucked up the climate. Now all we need to do is wait and see if a benevolent being will save us from our own stupidity.”

I suddenly felt a little more sober. “Yes, we should have our answer in about ten thousand years. After the fossil CO₂ is fully dissolved into the ocean and a new equilibrium is reached. Maybe faster, if we get some assistance…

“OK, moving on. Let’s talk modes of communication. I assume local connections between cells are electrochemical, like brain synapses, especially since we have evidence of something like myelin that could insulate and speed up these signals. Also, we know that bacteria can communicate with electronic signals [17]. What about longer-distance connections, say between different hubs, clusters, individuals, whatever? Are direct neural connections the most efficient?”

“How fast do nerve signals travel?” asked Kaiakea.

“The world record holder is the Kuruma shrimp, about 210 meters per second. Ours move at about 100 m/s.”

“Well, in the ocean sound travels close to 1500 m/s.  and in the SOFAR channel, signals can travel thousands of kilometers.”

“SOFAR, so good.”

“That’s the Sound Fixing and Ranging channel. It’s the depth range where the speed of sound is slowest, and so sound waves get focused into a channel that can carry across entire ocean basins. It’s also known as the Deep Sound Channel, but I prefer SOFAR because the depth varies. In colder seas the channel gets close to the surface.”

“OK, so sound wins in terms of speed and distance. How much information can it carry?”

Astro Bob starts to slowly mutter in the background, “It takes a very long time to say anything in Old Entish…”

“Well, in theory the information content of sound could be infinite, though in practice it’s limited by the frequency range (low frequencies travel the farthest in the ocean), by the organism’s ability to distinguish different frequencies and amplitudes…”

“…and we never say anything unless it is worth taking…” Astro Bob slowly continued.

“…and by the noisiness of the channel through which it’s received,” Kaiakea concluded.

“…a long time to say,” Dennis finished the Tolkien quote for Astro Bob. “And, of course, it depends on the efficiency of their language. Natural languages do not seem to be designed for maximum communicative efficiency, but rather computational efficiency. In other words, we tend to speak from what arises out of our organic mental processes, rather than according to a logical system one might invent for the purpose of clear communication. Language may have started out as a purely internal computational mechanism, and only secondarily became useful for social communication.”

“Ha haaa! Chomsky! Narf!”

“Yes, Pinky. Bob’s speech patterns illustrate this point well,” I chimed in nasally, in my impression of The Brain (which was, in turn, a voice actor’s impression of Orson Wells. How many nested quotation marks are implied in this phrase?). “But what kind of information needs to be transferred long distances? There’s a theory that the conscious mind is an executive system for integrating diverse inputs from many sources (senses, memories, internal processes) and sharing information with the entire brain by sending top-down signals all the way back down the network [18]. If the Abyssal Ganglia is a single integrated conscious being, it would need to receive and transmit complicated signals up and down a network. The problem with sound is that it travels in all directions, it can’t target a specific neural pathway.”

“But isn’t that how the internet works? Messages get sent everywhere, but not everyone has to listen. Messages get picked up, relayed and eventually routed to the target.”

“I guess it could work, but the ocean seems like such a public space to be constantly screaming every conscious thought.”

“So, you’re not a Twitter fan, then?”

“No, I am not. Though I am prone to the occasional Mad Science Monoblog.”

Kaiakea looked thoughtful, and said, “Not every signal would need to be broadcast across the entire ocean. There could be local signals that are relayed along a network. There are many narrow bandwidths available for basically secure communication, without interference from whales or other species.” She paused. “At least until recently.”

“OK, I like it,” I proclaimed. “what kind of structures are needed to produce and receive sounds of these frequencies?”

“Moving air between sinuses produces sounds. That’s how whales do it.”

Astrobiology Bob piped in excitedly and started scribbling on the whiteboard, “Specialized chambers where biogases accumulate, building up pressurized pockets of gas. CO₂ would be a convenient choice, except it is highly soluble and compressible. Hydrogen or methane would be more efficient. The pressure is released into an adjacent chamber, modulating the aperture size, elasticity, density, overall geometry of the organ determines the frequency. Vocalization tentacles!” He emphatically labelled his drawing.

“Oooh, it could be like a multitentacled pipe organ! Excellent.”

“And,” said Astro Bob thoughtfully, “It has not escaped my attention…,” eliciting small groans in his audience, “that such Vocalization Tentacles could provide an explanation for the Bermuda Triangle incidents, in which a sudden release of methane leads to a loss of buoyancy, sinking ships.”

“Yeah, buoy! Given your short attention span, how do these deep things keep not escaping your attention? Except you realize that the Bermuda Triangle story has been thoroughly debunked, though the buoyancy thing is true enough – release of methane could probably sink ships. Anyway, back to communication. What about ears?”

“Whales use parts of their skull and jaw bone to receive sound. Also, fat-filled cavities,” offered the Sea Bunny.

“Fat-filled cavities. Our squishy sister of the seafloor can do that.” Astro Bob scribbled some more. “Auditory tentacles! For fun, I’m giving it a highly enervated tympanic membrane on one end, sensitive to small pressure changes. An ear drum sans incus, malleus or stapes.”

“Bone-free, our inveterate invertebrate, leaving no ossicles for fossils.”

Dennis hit us with some etymology, “Speaking of invertebrates, our sound organ, the cochlea derives from the Latin word for snail shell. They say you can hear the ocean in a sea shell…”

“But through the sea shell, the ocean can hear as well as be heard,” I said ominously.

“Can we focus?” Trudy asked politely. “There’s one last point you haven’t covered. What about communication via light?”

“Yes,” replied the Sea Bunny. “About 90% of animal species in the abyssal zone are bioluminescent. The background is completely dark, so as long as there’s low turbidity, light is a highly effective medium. Squids have thousands of chromatophores they use to communicate. Some can even carry on multiple conversations at once.”

It was Dennis’ turn to wax poetic, “By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.”

Expectant eyes fell on Dennis.

“Leviathan. Apparently, the immeasurable sea beast of the old testament was bioluminescent.”

“Neesings?”

“Archaic word for sneezes. Presumably a blowhole.”

“Bioluminescent snot.”

“Not just snot. The whole hide, apparently. The story goes that at the end of time the Leviathan will be killed, harvested and:

From the hide of the leviathan God will make tents for the pious of the first rank, girdles for those of the second, chains for those of the third, and necklaces for those of the fourth. The remainder of the hide will be spread on the walls of Jerusalem; and the whole world will be illuminated by its brightness.”

“Huh. I’m not sure how I feel about God carving up the Leviathan into lava lamps and trinkets for his followers,” I said.

“Plus, the reward system is hilarious,” said Astro Bob. “If you believe at the silver level, you will receive this lucky glow-chain! If you believe at the gold level, you will receive this stunning bioluminescent bedazzled blouse! Act now! Supplies are limited!”

Kaiakea was disgusted. “Typical. New Gods destroying the Old Ones.”

“It’s even worse than that, I’m afraid,” Dennis continued. “As the story goes, there used to be a couple, but the female was killed because, ‘if they would propagate, the world could not exist because of them.’”

“Another dick move by Old Testament God.”

“Seriously,” I laughed at Astrobiology Bob’s awesome blasphemy, “but you know, there must be a lesson in that story. Note that God left one of the beasts to survive, in steady state, until the end of time. It must have a function, but had to be kept under control.”

The Sea Bunny sighed, “At least it shows that ancient human cultures were aware of this being, even if they were taught to fear it. It stands to reason that an immeasurable mind would have immense psychic ability.”

This raised eyebrows. I monitored Trudy’s facial expression for annoyance and skepticism. In the past, I have derived a perverse pleasure watching her skewer people, but I felt that this was not one of those times. I decided to gently intercede, “Well, just because there are sea gods and goddesses doesn’t mean early humans had any knowledge of our hypothetical being. Of course, cultures invented sea gods – the ocean is a fundamental feature of our world. But are there any myths with specific information that really fit the description?”

“Leviathan is a good example. Enormous, bioluminescent, eternal and asexual. A fully connected network with the ability to alter DNA at will has no need of sex, and no need to grow, except to replace biomass lost at subduction zones or after natural disasters. Kumugwe commands sea creatures and can see the future, just as Gaia might anticipate and rectify changes in the climate system, and spur biodiversity after disasters.  Kanaroa, Tangaroa, Cthulhu, all guardians of the deep.”

“Um, Cthulhu was invented less than 100 years ago.”

“Of course! But Lovecraft was a Highly Sensitive Person. Some of his fans find his cosmos to be so vivid and compelling that they assume he was channeling some kind of authentic reality.”

“Yes, but those are crazy people…” I said quietly, trailing off. “The ocean is an archetypally deep, dark and scary place. It’s only natural to find sea demons dwelling in the collective unconscious.”

“Yes! The collective unconscious! But how did the gods and demons get there in the first place? Why not some kind of psychic contact with the largest, most significant mind on the planet?”

“How?” demanded Trudy, “by what mechanism?”

She shrugged. “Communication is subtle. Who knows what signals could have reached us from the deep that a sensitive mind might have perceived. Sounds, maybe even the configuration of water molecules could be shaped into a message that could influence someone’s subconscious mind.”

Eye rolling commences. Not the water memory shit. I assumed she was referring to the controversial work of Jacques Benveniste, whose results were published in Nature in 1988 [19], but failed to catch on, as these potentially earth-shattering results could not be replicated by other labs.

Trudy stood up, looked at all of us and the fanciful diagrams that populated the whiteboards. “You guys are so full of shit,” she announced, and walked out of the room.

I excused myself and followed her out.

“Trudy, please don’t go! We need your firm connection to reality. Also, if you leave it will be a total sausage fest.”

“You’ll still have your Sea Bunny. Why is she wearing a bathing suit?”

“We’re going to beach after this. You’re invited. Please stay!”

She sighed. “I was just going to the restroom. Calm down.”

After a few minutes, Trudy returned and sat back down. “My apologies, Kaiakea. Please continue. You were talking about water memory and consciousness.”

I started to object, but Trudy cut me off. “Come now, Lipschitz, let’s indulge the lass’s Gedanken experiment. We’re playing what if?”

I was relieved to see we were getting jovial-yet-sarcastic Trudy, as opposed to skeptical science bitch Trudy, though I was still a big fan of the latter.

“Well, the water memory idea has been around, and ridiculed, for years. I’m afraid Masaru Emoto didn’t help gain any credibility with his whimsical experimental attempts at freezing gratitude into beautiful ice crystal patterns, but the field has made a little comeback. Luc Montagnier, won the Nobel prize for helping discover HIV, in his eighties, has been publishing articles in which he purports to show effects of bacterial and viral DNA on the configuration of water molecules [20]. He claims these effects are caused by weak electromagnetic waves from DNA, and that the effects persist in water after dilution, basically to homeopathic levels.”

Astro Bob was googling it. “Here’s one of his papers, Electromagnetic signals are produced by aqueous nanostructures derived from bacterial DNA sequences. The journal is called, Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences. Never heard of it. Sounds interesting, though:

A novel property of DNA is described: the capacity of some bacterial DNA sequences to induce electromagnetic waves at high aqueous dilutions. It appears to be a resonance phenomenon triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency waves.”

I hurt my mind to imagine how carefully you’d really have to control an experiment like that, diluting solutions to infinity, trying to detect a subtle effect using an instrument you probably recently repurposed that no one fully understands. “OK, everyone, my brain is full. I propose we go to the beach and let our consciousness mingle with the water a little bit.”

Beautiful balmy evening, sun setting. We lit a fire, and proceeded to get lit ourselves. Eventually, things felt very loose, and Kaiakea pulled out her saxophone. Who knew? She warmed up with a few scales and jazz riffs, and then got our attention.

“OK, this is a piece for solo saxophone I composed based on my research of marine acoustics. I call this one MARU #7, after the Marine Autonomous Recording Units used to collect the data. You’ll hear my evocation of Right Whale calls, along with some other noises of the deep.”

She started with a series of low, eerie moans, bending a low sustained note by changing her embouchure, while letting in higher harmonics by opening different valves. Haunting and mournful. She then jumped up to a higher register and let out a series of howling glissandos. Intermittently she rattled the keys and slapped the saxophone body, producing resonant clicks and pings. After introducing these themes, she started to combine and vary them, along with various growls, shrieks and wails.  Gliding, plaintive sirens, punctuated with percussive blasts and clicks. She dropped to a soft pianissimo for several seconds, begging us to listen more intently. Then she unleashed a jarring choppy blast, starting low, slowly climbing in pitch and volume, until finally it descended again in pitch and volume, finally fading away like a ship on the horizon. The groans, clicks and wails returned, but this time more agitatedly, a chattering of confusion. She reached a climactic tumult, and paused. Several seconds of silence, and one last final mournful moan.

We applauded enthusiastically and genuinely. I asked her, “That part in the middle, was that sound pollution, like a ship?” She nodded with a sad half-smile.

“More!” Screamed Astro Bob.

Her next piece simulated dolphins with torrents of key rattling and piercing whistles. At one point, she took off the mouthpiece and started playing it without the rest of the body, making free-form shrieks and rasps. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Dennis Jackson produced some bongos, while Astro Bob jumped up and started dancing and reciting beat poetry. I was swept up by the moment and we all joined in.

The Seed in the Sea, what could it be?
Down in the deeps, secrets it keeps.
Old Cthulhu had a swarm, e-i-e-i-o!
With a tentacle here, tentacle there, neuronal cluster, metacluster, meta-ultra-macrocluster…

Networko-complexo-perceptorama. Tentacle intelligence is bringing the drama, singing the Dharma, I got it goin on like a Ganglion. My dendritic spines are crossing lines, and taking names and keepin Deep time. I’m an Immense Entity, I sparkle luminescently with intense mental energy. My network spans basins contiguously {check the stratigraphy, I’m integrated vertically} and I’m just sittin here most contentedly, watching the currents flow…

Hi, I dwell in the abyzzyms, interact with global systems, multitudinous mutualisms with organisms, I’m watchin shit, and makin decisions. Monitor the current conditions. Moderate extreme transitions. My hobby is to breed strange fishes, correct the climate from internal glitches. But guess what, I could kick yo ass, bitches! Don’t mess with me, don’t mess with the sea, leave the thousand thousand slimy things be, or I’ll creep into your sleep, and beam into your dreams, and summon you to depths, Unseen.

I am the gardener of Gaia (thump thumpy thump)
I host a variety of sea life (bip boomp, bump bumpy bump).
Some of them resemble little aliens (bump bumpy bump)
Giant mutant microbe mind with tentacles! (boomp, boompy boomp)

Soon, we were all dancing around the fire, chanting, doing the swim, the narwal, and a spontaneous primal dance that could reasonably be called The Tentacles.  Eventually we lay down on the beach, exhausted, with the sounds of the waves gently caressing our ears, and slept.

When the Earth was young, the sun was colder. Billions of passing years burned away the hydrogen, and gravity squeezed more luminosity from the shrinking core.

When the Earth was young, the days were shorter, and the Moon was closer. Eon by eon, the Moon slowed down Earth’s rotation with its gravitational drag, and drifted slowly outward.

The wheels within wheels wobble and turn, rattle and roll chaotically.

Around the great singularity at the center of the galaxy the sun circles, four times in a billion years passing through a sprawling, spiraling arm. Undulating up and down in this orbit, every 32 million years the sun passes through the galactic disk, dense with star dust. The climate cools and warms.

The Earth’s path around the sun stretches and contracts between ellipse and circle, the eccentricity pulsing every 100 thousand years, shifting the aphelion and perihelion, modulating the seasons. Every 41 thousand years, the Earth teeters on its axis. The tropics drift, the seasons intensify and weaken, the northern and southern hemisphere ice sheets grow and recede asymmetrically. Every 23 thousand years, the pole wobbles twixt Vega and Polaris, and the seasons change phase with perihelion and aphelion, becoming milder or harsher.

And there are yet smaller wheels within these wheels: solar flare activity rising and falling every 11 years with the 22-year magnetic cycle, itself waxing and waning every 87 years, and so on.

Cosmic cycles and wobbling orbits, punctuated by random bombardments and internal convulsions of the Planet that change greenhouse gases and ocean circulation: continental drift, volcanoes, seismic release of methane hydrates, and the occasional evolutionary surprise:

Land plants stripping CO₂ from the atmosphere…

Homo sapiens putting it back.

Dennis Jackson ran a rare and used bookstore in San Francisco. I’m grateful for the happenstance that brought us together, though I’m afraid if you were able to ask him now, the feeling would probably not be mutual. I somehow got on his mailing list right around the time I was in town visiting an old friend. I love independent book stores, and the name caught my eye, “Chaosmos, carefully curated books, books from the obscure to the luminous.” Plus, there was a two-for-one coupon.

The bookstore smelled like books, not like peppermint mochas. I loved that. I was greeted by two bookstore cats, one right next to the door, the other lurking nearby. The bold one was a gray tabby who meowed emphatically. Being a keen observer of bookstore cats, I realized I must have come in around dinner time. The shy one was a redhead, lured out of the stacks by the promise of kibble. A middle aged black man proceeded to feed them. Soon he spoke to them in what sounded like a Scottish accent, “Come now, Leopold, you have your own. Let Molly be.”

Leopold and Molly. That is so cute. I took this opportunity to show off my erudition, “Leopold! Leopold Bloom? Does he eat with relish the inner organs of beast and fowl?”

The man turned and beamed warmly (he knows I’ve read Ulysses, and probably suspects I am fond of cats), “Indeed he does, though he generally settles for Friskies.”

I perused the aisles. As promised, there was a carefully curated collection of obscure and luminous books. Literature, poetry, mythology, history, metaphysics, art, philosophy and science. Many foreign language books, books on language, cryptography, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, systems biology. I felt dizzy (like a visitor to the infinite hyperdimensional library of Borges). My quest had plunged me into intellectual depths way outside of my specialty, and I couldn’t help but feel a mad tingling sensation simultaneously drawing me to dozens of books on these shelves.

“Focus, Lipschitz. Focus” I told myself. I settled for a classic Chomsky book on syntax, and a book of Polynesian mythology. I made my way back to the checkout counter, where Leopold kept watch amidst stacks of incoming books.  The proprietor peered at me over his glasses as he rang up the Chomsky book.

“Noam Chomsky, Aspects of Syntax.” He spoke in a neutral tone, but it still sounded like a question.

“Right. Well, I’m having a dinner party and I need to convince my guests that I’m an intellectual.”

He eyed me quizzically, half-smiling, some inner calculation proceeding in his consciousness. After a small delay, he replied, “This is an excellent book. I hope your guests are properly impressed. Assuming you actually read it.”

Suddenly it dawned on me that this unassuming fellow standing in front of me was the mind that had had carefully curated this amazing collection of obscure and luminous books.

“Is this your store? This place is fantastic. I’ve never heard of it – I wonder how I ended up on your mailing list.”

He looked puzzled, “I have a mailing list?”

At that moment I started to feel a little awkward about using the online BOGO coupon.

“Maybe my daughter set it up. She helps out around here from time to time.”

Anyway. “So, this bookstore is your baby? Wonderful selection. I have to ask, what’s your background?”

“Ah, well. I was once a professor of linguistics, but I dropped out of the rat race to spend more time with my studies.”

I know dropping out of academia to spend more time doing research sounds ironic, unless you’ve worked at a university. I instantly connected.

“Linguistics? You are just the man I need to talk to. Got anything for alien races beyond human conception?” Filter. Dammit. Normally I have a filter.

Fortunately, he let it go. “Does James Joyce count? I’m fairly competent at Joyce. I once developed an algorithm to discern higher order structure from syntactical patterns in Finnegan’s Wake.”

“Finnegan’s Wake? I tried reading that once. Good job finding higher order patterns in that one!”

“Well, the secret is you have to discard notions about linear word order, strict literal interpretations, and focus on rhythm, syllable length, cadence, repeating motifs, things of that sort. Really, quite a lot of it is in that book you have there.”

“Polynesian mythology? I should have suspected!” being intentionally obtuse.

His patience with me was admirable. He smiled amicably, and let it pass. “My bookstore’s name came from Finnegan’s Wake. Chaosmos. Page 118.”

“I love that word! Chaos, cosmos. Perfect.”

“It also refers to the literary device of chiasma, of which Joyce was so fond.”

Wait! I had actually heard of this one. Back in grad school when I was decompressing my brain between intense periods of scientific rigor, I would smoke pot and try to read Finnegan’s Wake. I never understood it, but it did occasionally make me giggle (which maybe meant some part of my mind understood it). At one point I bought a Cliff Notes guide to James Joyce, and read about his use of chiasma, where a phrase would be repeated in one sense, and then reversed. Sort of like Carefully Curated Books, Books from the Obscure to the Luminous, but not exactly.

He continued. “I spent a lot of time looking for hidden symmetries, like chiasma, detecting broader scale patterns in language. Global connections between repeated motifs, things of that nature.”

Something started tickling my brain. “Chiasmas. Sort of like inverted repeats in DNA.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“There are bits of DNA called transposons that hop all over genomes, they use inverted repeats to pop in and out. Nature’s chiasmas.”

“’Language is a virus from outer space,’” he quoted.

“William Burroughs. Nice… It makes me wonder if any of your linguistic techniques might be applied to molecular biology. I’ve been trying to use information theory to detect… unusual signals in DNA.”

Possibly the slightest hint of an eyeroll at the mention of information theory. “Well, I’ve done a bit of cryptography consulting work, and information theory can certainly be useful when you have no idea what you’re looking for. But I prefer a hypothesis-driven approach to discerning meaning from language. What is the message likely to contain? Is it a natural language? What is its structure? A purely statistical attack mainly generates a lot of uninterpretable correlations.”

I nodded. I certainly had my share of uninterpretable correlations. I was starting to feel a strong sense that I needed this guy on my team. “So, what’s your current research program, here at the University of Chaosmos? Now that you’ve managed to figure out Finnegan’s Wake.”

“Oh, well, I’ve always been captivated by the idea of building a BS detector. But that’s probably not practical, what with Gödel’s Theorem and all that. It would be nice to understand the essence of language and consciousness. What is truth? What is beauty? Simple questions like that.”

“You know, I did see a Chomsky quote recently about how modern science was started because people started to realize that simple things were puzzling.”

He smiled. “That’s my man.” He looked wistful for a moment. “You know, some of my students used to refer to me as Samuel L. Chomsky. This was in reference to a popular American actor, widely considered to be a bad ass.”

“I am aware of his work.”

Suddenly he dropped into his best stone-cold, bad-ass SLJ accent, “And I dare you, I double dare you, motherfucker, say ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ one more time.”

I was a speechless for a few seconds. “Huh, and so you had a hard time fitting in with academia? That’s weird.” That clinched it. He was officially on the mad science team. “So, you mentioned occasional consulting work. I may actually have a job that’s suitably puzzling for you…”

Though his taste in obscure and luminous books was impeccable, you’d have to move a lot of Chomsky to pay rent in San Francisco, even in this neighborhood. So to discover that he moonlighted as a consultant and translator made a lot of sense. Turned out he was receptive. We talked until well after his regular closing time. By the time I walked out of Chaosmos, it was a dark and stormy night.

I was close to the Wharf and the air smelled like brine, kelp and fish guts. I kept hearing a second pair of footsteps on the wet pavement, but maybe it was the rain echoing in the empty streets. Started imagining shadowy human figures in my peripheral vision, so I ducked into a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop to escape the rain and my paranoid mind. I was greeted by dingy lighting and the welcome smell of stale grease. I paid $5 for an over-brewed coffee and felt the chill gradually seep out of my skin. Through the reflections in the front window I caught a glimpse of a silhouetted figure in a trench coat and a bowler hat, and had an almost subliminal sense of momentary eye contact. I shook it off and dialed up a Lyft to the train station.

I caught the last train back to the South Bay. The train was half-filled with soggy travelers, and I could swear the faint odor of fish guts had followed us onto the train. I ecstatically collapsed into a seat, stripped off my raincoat and started paging through the Polynesian mythology book. I went straight for the sea gods. I read a little about Tangaroa, the sea god of the Maori people, sometimes taking the form of a whale. Banished to the sea after a major dysfunctional god family feud, where he spawned many sea creatures. Moved on to Kanaloa of Hawaii. Ooh, this one is a squid! God of the ocean, the underworld and magic. Lord of slimy, wet venomous things. Possibly the same deity, in cephalopod form. The myth of a scary squid god banished to the depths was not lost on some of the more scholarly fans of H.P. Lovecraft, and possibly to the writer himself, who placed Cthulhu’s sunken prison city, R’lyeh, in the remotest part of the south Pacific.  Then there was Dakuwaqa, the shark god of Fiji, who thought he was the top of the food chain until he took on a giant octopus guarding the island of Kaduva. The tentacles have it.

I noticed someone was reading over my shoulder and glanced up. A pale man of indeterminate age, a shaved head and somewhat bulbous eyes was overly fascinated with my reading material.  He gestured toward the book and spoke in a raspy voice, “Dakuwaqa. Shark god. He’s not so tough. Kumugwe is better.”

I was annoyed by the interruption, but impressed this random hipster knew about an obscure Polynesian myth. How many over-educated people were there in this city? The poor guy probably had a Ph.D. and worked in Starbucks.

“Well, yeah, he got his ass kicked by a giant octopus. Total wimp. Kumug-what now?”

“Kumugwe. Best sea god ever. Dakuwaqa was beaten by a giant octopus. Kumugwe has a pet giant octopus.”

“So, doing the math, Kumugwe is at least two levels above Dakuwaqa in bad-assitude?”

“Yeah. Plus he eats eyeballs and can see the future.”

I scanned through the index, “He’s not in here.”

“Kumugwe is from the Pacific Northwest. But Tangaroa, Kanaloa, they’re all the same god.”

“And Cthulhu, too, right?” I said, grinning.

His expression didn’t change. “This is my stop.” He grabbed his trench coat and bowler hat and strode away.

I almost deleted that email. It was such a weird, spammy address, something like 17N151W@panthalassa.net, but the seminar it was advertising caught my eye: “Using artificial intelligence to assess noise pollution and acoustical niches in the deep sea.” It was an odd venue I’d never heard of, but it was close to the beach and it didn’t take much to lure me away from campus to somewhere I could stare out at the watery horizon, even if the talk sucked.

The seminar was fascinating, as was the speaker. She was a striking Polynesian woman wearing something that some might argue could have been construed as somewhat unprofessional in terms of being kind of revealing. Personally, I was fine with it. She had used some kind of neural net software to analyze sounds recorded using the US Navy’s deep-sea recording network, mostly used to detect enemy submarines, but now sometimes made available to researchers studying underwater acoustics. Back in WWII they discovered they could send low frequencies thousands of miles along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the water conditions reflect the sound waves into an effective deep sound channel. In theory, a downed pilot could set off an explosive charge in this channel and distant listening stations could triangulate his position and stage a rescue. Whales also use this low frequency approach to communicate over huge distances. But just like the sounds of birds and insects in a healthy forest, the ocean environment is crowded with sounds across the whole spectrum, from whale groans to dolphin squeaks to the chattering of shrimp. And now, add to this symphony the dull roar of myriad fleets of container ships, endlessly crossing the oceans connecting the empires of China and Walmart, along with oil tankers, cruise ships, etc. Then throw in the occasional shock wave from oil exploration ships doing seismic surveys with air guns, plus a few lethal sonic blasts from military SONAR. That’s your modern marine acoustic environment. Sorting it all out can be a mess. Dr. Kaiakea Alana had developed a neural net/machine-learning/fuzzy-logic/whatever program that could sort different waveforms into bins, some of which represented species. She overlaid onto this mosaic of acoustic niches the jarring sonic intrusions of human activity. Some sounds kill outright. But the more subtle toxic sounds disorient, disrupting communication, leading whales astray to beach themselves. In urban environments, birds change their songs to fit in with the crowded, competitive sound landscape. Will marine life be able to adapt to sonic attack? Her final message was at once inspiring and sad: if we just listen carefully, the complexity of the marine environment is revealed to us. But we need to shut the fuck up.

Her algorithm had been able, with decent confidence, to attribute some sounds to certain species, such as various baleen whales, but I noticed that there were some unidentified “bins” that included consistent sound signatures without a clear assignment to a known species. I had to ask about these in the question-answer period.

“I notice you have several unidentified bins. How do you interpret those?”

“Well, they could be previously undescribed modes of known species, new species, classified military sea craft or SONAR experiments, or some unpredicted artifact of the complex acoustic environment of the abyssal zone. Probably the latter. The sonic environment is so rich that it’s hard to filter out all the noise with complete confidence. However, statistically, the bins I presented here appear to be non-random sounds produced reproducibly in the environment, either biotically or abiotically. So short answer, I don’t know.”

Hmmm. Intriguing. I had been so focused on DNA I hadn’t even considered sound. But sound was the preferred medium of the deep sea. Light doesn’t travel well in turbid waters (though tell this to the show-off squids with all their chromatophores). Sure, maybe my beloved Abyssal Ganglia was linked through myoelectric impulses and stored Alexandria Libraries full of cultural knowledge in DNA, but what about sound? Sound carries great distances underwater and moves way faster than in air. Could separate nodes exchange information efficiently by bursts of high bandwidth vibrations? Is this more robust, more secure than electrochemical propagation through axon-like filaments of microbial tentacles? Or maybe, they just like to sing?

But her methodology was perfectly aligned for detecting a new intelligence in the abyssal zone. I had to approach her and see if she could somehow be recruited, or if I could at least steal her ideas. I waited for the break, and politely made my way through the predominately male crowd that gravitated toward her.

“That was a wonderful talk, thank you so much. I’ve just recently become interested in this topic and I don’t know much about it. I was really intrigued by the potential of your technique to detect new forms of communication. Do you think there might be sound generating creatures we know nothing about down there?”

Her eyes could have reasonably been described as oceanic and limitless.  “Oh, yes, I’m certain there are things we know nothing about ‘down there.’”

I struggled to maintain eye contact, keeping my eyes at a high altitude. It was only partly her low-cut top that made this difficult. The immeasurable depth of her eyes was also disconcerting. “Right, the abyssal zone is like half the planet. But it sounds like sound is a great way to explore it. I wonder, you’ve managed to sort out all these complex patterns into different bins, maybe different species. Is there any hope of figuring out information content from these data?”

“Well, some signals are quite repetitive, like mating calls of some fish species. So those aren’t very information-rich.”

“Right, they are probably mostly saying ‘Hey Baby, check me out.’”

“Yes, that, though maybe also some information on their size, age and gender. Cetaceans, on the other hand, seem to report all sorts of things about their environment. By listening to each other baleen whales know the position of their pod relative to major landmarks along their migratory route, like seamounts, bays, etc., so their speech changes with their location. Whereas dolphins and orcas seem to communicate in higher frequencies: clicks, whistles, chirps, and possibly “sono-pictures,” literal representations of their immediate environment. For example, their word for ‘flowerpot’ would be a sonic picture of a flower pot.”

“That comes up in dolphin conversation much?”

“It was a recent study I saw. They visualized dolphin sono-pictures for various test objects using a device they called a CymaScope. One of them was a flowerpot. Though to be honest, you really had to squint to see anything resembling a flowerpot.”

I shook my head in wonder. “Your sound clips were amazing. It sounded like the ocean speaking. So, uh, have you learned the language of Gaia?”

She became serious and solemn. “When Gaia speaks, her meaning is clear.” She spoke with enough gravity that (paradoxically) several male satellites started to leave her orbit (yes, that’s the simile I’m sticking with. Dammit, Jim, I’m a scientist, not a poet). I might have written her off as crazy, too, but she was a genius with signal processing, and I suspected that her madness might be compatible with my own.

The dissipating crowd allowed me to be a little more candid. I smiled, “Absolutely. I’d love to hear Gaia speak. It’s just that all the good feedbacks take decades, centuries, millennia, and we’re messing things up by the minute.”

She nodded. I continued to babble.

“I am working on something very similar to your project, but in the sphere of DNA. I am looking for patterns in the cacophony of metagenomic data. I believe there is life in the deep ocean that we have not recognized because it is so different from us, so alien, that we have not recognized it. And I think it may be Big and Important. It occurs to me that the approaches you are using to analyze the acoustic environment might be a perfect complement to my work. I have a bit of funding from a private donor to pursue this. If you are interested in collaborating, maybe we could talk?”

She smiled inscrutably, reached into her bag and handed me a business card, before she was once again swallowed by a wave of polite conversation, coffee and cookies.

Sensation, calculation, action.

A signal is sent. High above a chemical is released.

A nearby bloom of algae takes heed. Genes are switched on. Dimethyl sulfide is produced and wafts into the atmosphere. Gradually at first, then faster, clouds form overhead. The water cools.

Elsewhere, another signal is sent up towards the light. A distant limb releases a pulse of nutrients and growth factors. Prochlorococcus blooms, creating a dense patch of chlorophyll. Sunlight pours down onto these antennae. The water warms.

Between these two patches, air currents begin to move. Chaotically at first, then taking shape. A gyre is formed. It grows as it pulls energy from other air masses. It becomes a hurricane.

The hurricane flows over the land, washing nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, silica into the sea. Feeds life. Life takes a great breath of carbon, and rains down to the sea floor.

This is good.

Over the weeks, I gradually assembled some crude computational machinery to sift through the giant DNA database. I pulled together published metagenomes (random mass-produced sequences from the environment) from seawater, sediment and the few subseafloor crust samples that were available, and focused on the misfit sequences that hadn’t been matched to anything known.  I searched for sequences that appeared multiple times in different abyssal zone samples and eliminated the ones that were also found in a control database from terrestrial environments. These searches produced long lists of sequences that were worth a second look. Unfortunately, this literally meant me looking at sequences and trying to manually figure out what was going on. I could eliminate some of these sequences in more focused searches by matching them to known species that had already been identified in that sample. If this were a typical metagenomic project, I would have been very happy about finding these connections, as they chip away at the metagenomic dark matter. But this was just sorting the unknown into safe, comforting known packages – it was not uncovering anything truly new. I also used the SETI approach to search for messages in DNA that stood out from normal genetic code based on their information/entropy content. I ended up with a bunch of candidate sequences, though I had no guess as to their function or meaning. So far, I had not discovered the digits of pi or the prime numbers encoded in any obvious way.

At the same time, I also tried looking for signs of suspicious DNA splicing, based on the hypothesis that this creature was an expert in biotechnology. This turned out to be difficult because hopping between genomes is the most natural thing in the world for DNA. I found all sorts of “genomic islands” of mobile DNA, but most of this was pretty much the usual transposons and proviruses you find all over the genetic landscape. However, one of my searches pulled up a chunk of DNA that looked like a combination of wildly different species: a protein from an animal flanked by clear bacterial sequences. I started to get excited – even if this had nothing to do with what I was really looking for, gene transfers between animals and bacteria are rare and interesting. I ran a test to see if this was a so-called chimera that had arisen from a sequencing error, where two separate pieces of DNA mistakenly get copied into the same sequencing reaction. Crap. The search found part of this mixed sequence as an independent, normal-looking sequence in the same metagenome. This meant the odds were strongly in favor of the mixed sequence being a chimera. Oh well, a routine disappointment. I continued to toil away at this analysis, tuning the parameters a little to reduce these kinds of false positives. Not long after, the search flagged another sequence like this. I glanced at it and again, my heart sank a little: it was the same one I had found before. But wait, this was in a completely different sample. In fact, this one hadn’t even been collected by the same research team. The odds of generating the same chimera in two independent samples is pretty low. I started looking at this in more depth. It was impossible to interpret this sequence as DNA, but when I translated it to amino acids an amazing pattern emerged. Part of the amino acid sequence had a good match to a proteolipid protein (PLP) from a shrimp species, and this region was flanked by sequences that looked like bacterial lipoproteins. I followed some links to find out more about PLP. Also called myelin PLP, the dominant protein that insulates axons in the central nervous system, greatly speeding up transmission of electrical signals among neurons [12].  A brain protein in a bacterial genome?

I finally had something really good to tell my backers. I posted an update on Kickstarter:

“Still early, but potentially exciting news! Possible eukaryotic brain protein found spliced among bacterial sequences. Interestingly, GC content and codon usage are consistent over this stretch, indicating these genes were combined long ago (when new genes are acquired they gradually take on the characteristics of the new genome). The brain protein is most closely related to myelin PLP in shrimp. Incidentally, the current record holder for fastest neuronal signal is the Kuruma shrimp, clocking in above 200 m/s (about twice as fast as ours).”

I still hadn’t received a response from G. Poisson. There’s something fishy about that guy, I thought, but as long as his money’s green. However, several of the minor backers posted comments:

“Blessings upon you and your work! Soon we will know the Mind of our All-Mother, and we will bathe in the cleansing Waters of her Wisdom.”

“Dr. Lipschitz, you have shed light upon the darkest abyss. But beware, ‘for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see.’”

Great, my project was being followed by tripped-out Gaia and/or Cthulhu devotees. I had to snicker at the last one. It was a quote from one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, From Beyond. I started mentally riffing on these themes, “That Lipschitz should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.” I was feeling giddy. “Watery Wisdom” is good, though personally I might have gone with “Briny Brain.” We will Cavort in the Crustacean Crenulations of Her Briny Brain. Ah, Godbless’em. Good people. They gave me money. They believe in my work. It’s wrong for me to ridicule them. Hee hee hee.