Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
-Noam Chomsky
In the great scope of Earth’s history, even just the last six hundred million years, with complex multicellular life abounding, couldn’t there easily have arisen and fallen an intelligent civilization? Not mammalian, in fact, most likely marine, given how easy to hide in the depths, and how low the chance of relics surviving and being discovered. For example, the Squid People: convergent evolution has produced eyeballs, ganglia and complex social behavior unlike our own in structure, yet somehow equivalent. Even more intriguing, the great deep-sea microbe mind, the Abyssal Ganglia. A network of cells that spans the world’s oceans, tapping geothermal energy and acting as a unified global intelligence, even capable of Gaia-like actions: able to manipulate climate via DMS, the rate of C burial or even altering geothermal/tectonic activity. Perhaps the Abyssal Ganglia has the Knowing of the Three Times, and is master of natural history, using viruses to sculpt the destiny of species, ecosystems, the whole of the watery sphere. How will she respond to the threat that humanity now poses? Will she come to our aid and slow climate change, or rather decide the best course is to eliminate us so that the planet may live?
Such a being is not only plausible, in fact inevitable, given the span of Earth’s history and the forces of evolution. A purely biological technology would be virtually impossible to detect from our human perspective.
A frustrated professor, after learning the latest in an endless stream of grant proposals has been declined, is inspired to prove something so revolutionary it will dwarf the tiny minds and careers of the myopic review panels. He assembles a team of interdisciplinary researchers*, aided by a mysterious private donor (a probable tentacle-puppet of the Abyssal Ganglia**). Their voyage of discovery will lead to the terrible truth of Mankind’s Destiny.
* including a smoking hot marine biologist who inexplicably always wears a wetsuit or a bikini.
** something fishy about that guy, but as long as his money’s green
-First scribbled in June 2016 (Kilpisjärvi, Finland)