28. Lian

Old man Olof turned to his new guests from Earth.  “Before we grab a bite to eat, I need to show you one more … ah, "project" that they started here.”

Jasmine, still holding Jazmin in her arms, squeezed tight, as Jazmin’s head fell back into Jasmine’s chest and rolled into the side of Jasmine’s arm, and Jazmin closed her eyes in emotional pain and fought back the tears.

“More?” Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx questioned with a grimace.

Lilia’s eyes opened again, as her face-cover rotated open to allow her to speak.  “Lian is my Dolphin sister!”

“What?  What do you mean?” the old man questioned her.

Lilia just giggled.

“What do you mean, sweetie?” Olof asked again.

“Just like Jasmine.”  She giggled again.  The desktop computer on the nearby table started beeping again.

Olof looked at Jasmine, confused.  Violet remained quiet and kept a poker face.  Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx couldn’t help but quickly glance sideways at Josy Lynx, while both turned to look at Jasmine.

“Well, I always liked dolphins.  I … I gotta admit I always felt like I was a dolphin inside … somehow … since I was a little little girl.”

Lilia giggled again, and closed her eyes, and her glass-dome face-cover snapped shut.

Old man Olof shrugged, turned back toward the door, and started walking; the group followed him, with Jasmine holding Jazmin’s hand, as they took a bit of a wandering course through the research section of the underground Moon base. “This project was only recently conceived of, unlike Lilia, where they worked for years using wartime military victims on Earth to learn from before creating the greater cyborg project here” the old man said as they walked.  “This project you are about to see is the beginning of a new line of research that they are only experimenting with.”  They arrived at a closed door with no window.  Olof knocked on the door gently, then opened it slowly.

The group peered into the room through the open doorway.  What they saw shocked them even more than seeing Lilia.  The middle of the room held a large clear tank of warm salt water.  In the tank was a naked young girl with eyes that revealed her Chinese heritage, about 2 years younger than Lilia, her head above the water.  She mostly had a normal human body, except there were 8 tentacles growing out of her back from between her shoulder blades, just below her neck.  Her nose looked like a hard beak.  Her long black hair floated in the water.  She looked at the open doorway, and iridescent blue rings appeared on her tentacles, as she lifted them out of the water and waved them.

“Lian, these people are friends” old man Olof said to her.  Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx was in position to enter the room first, and started to move, but Olof quickly but gently blocked her with his arm.

Lian looked at them all for a moment, then said “Jasmine is my Dolphin sister” and smiled.  The iridescent blue rings on her tentacles disappeared.  She hopped out of the tank with ease and darted across the floor on her two human legs using her tentacles to aid, and was in front of Jasmine within two seconds.  Instantly her tentacles reached around from her back, and started exploring Jasmine’s body from head to toe.

Old man Olof was shocked.  “How do you know her name, too?” he asked.  Jasmine held her place and kept her calm, and allowed Lian to proceed.  After a moment, Lian turned around and scurried back into the glass hot-tub, without answering Olof’s question.

Old man Olof explained “Her tentacles don’t like being out of water too long.  They are actual octopus tentacles.  According to the records I found here, her mother was another extremely poor single female migrant refugee who showed up at the U.S. border while pregnant, asking for asylum.  They gave her "free medical treatment", knocked her out, gave her a premature C-section abortion, and stole the fetus.  They also extracted the stem-cells from the fertilized eggs of a blue-ringed octopus, modified their genetics slightly, and used them to grow tentacles in a test-tube, coercing the nerves fibers that normally lead to the octopus brain to grow extra long in the process.  Then they grafted these blue-ringed octopus tentacles onto the back of the human fetus, and connected the octopus nerves from the tentacles into the motor-coordination map of the body in her developing human fetus brain.  That alone was a feat.  The human brain maps its sensory input from head to toe in a physical pattern that can be seen in the nerve cell distribution in the brain; that is, the nerves that sense touch in your hand connect to a part of the brain, called the motor-sensory map, and the nerve cells in your wrist connect to a part of the brain right next to where the hand’s nerve cells connect in the motor-sensory map, and the forearm next to that, and so on throughout the body.  Not so with an octopus.  Their tentacles can act very independently, and seem to operate with only high-level control from the octopus’ central brain; it’s almost like their brain is distributed throughout their body.

“According to notes I found here, that was their motivation for trying to integrate octopus tentacles into a mammal.  The tentacles didn’t need a significant portion of the human brain’s computing power to operate, so the thinking was that they might be a simple addition.  The other real feat was getting their blood to work together.  You see, humans use iron-based hemoglobin to distribute oxygen throughout the body, but octopuses use copper-based haemocyanin instead.  That makes their blood blueish in color, instead of red.

“Lian needs a plethora of drugs daily to keep her immune system from killing the blue-blood cells, and from the tentacles killing her red-blood cells.  And that is just the beginning of the tricks needed to keep her alive.

“Her beak was unplanned.  They grafted the miniature test-tube tentacles to a fetus, and let it grow.  Octopuses’ R.N.A. is highly variable and editable by its brain and nervous system, like human R.N.A. is.  The original researchers suspect that’s how the D.N.A. that defines how her nose cartilage grows was manipulated into growing a beak — it’s not like a mollusk shell in an octopus beak; although they didn’t really understand HOW that was occurring.  Blue-ringed octopuses are venomous; one of the most deadly venomous creatures in the ocean.  Their venom can be found throughout their own body, but their body specifically adapted to it through evolution.  They inject this venom through a bite; biologically speaking, the functions are deeply tied together, and so, as the theory goes, the changes in her human R.N.A. was caused by the octopus-brain / human-brain interaction and was activated by the toxin.  Keeping her human body alive with all those toxins is another trick they perform … ah, well, now we perform with a daily dose of drugs.”

Lian spoke up: “You two are like my sister, … but different.”  She hopped back out of her tank again and nearly instantly scurried back over to the group and her tentacles explored the surfaces of Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx and Josy Lynx, as they looked at each other and back at Lian.  Then Lian focused her attention on Violet, and her tentacles touched Violet all over.  “You’re my sister too!  Now I see!”  Violet touched her cheek gently and she quickly scurried back to her tank.  “It’s cold out there!” Lian said.

“Her body is not accustomed to regulating its own temperature.  She’s been in a tank her whole life.”

“It amazes me: the lack of morality and ethics some people have” Josy Lynx said.

“The cold-hearted lack of humanity itself” Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx replied.

“That is the reality we live in these days.  As Yellow Tiger said, 400,000 years ago, it was not like this” Violet added.

Old man Olof looked at Violet and replied “Jeez.  I thought I was old,” trying to make a joke, trying to take it all as a joke, but somehow realizing Violet was being literally serious.

“You’re older than you think.  Older than you remember” Violet replied to Olof, with all seriousness.

“Ah, yes, … well …”

“I mean that as a compliment, not an insult” Violet continued, smiling.  “We’re depending on your wisdom and kindness, and … well … we can see it here right now.  Thank you.”

“Ah, … well … thank you for saying so.  I do care about these kids.”  He paused a moment.  Then he continued “But I need to add a note about Lian: do NOT startle her.  She is quick, and if you scare her, she may reflexively, instinctively bite you and poison you.  That happened to another child here, one of Lian’s best friends in fact.  I think it says a lot about the mentality of the original researchers to choose the venomous blue-ringed octopus.  They either wanted to create a military weapon or an assassin; or they were just psychopaths obsessed with killing and death; or self-masochists, because I couldn’t think of a more complicated, frustrating, failure-prone problem to solve than combining a mammal with a poisonous mollusk; or all of the above.  Anyway, Lian felt terrible.  The other child was quickly treated with the anti-venom they developed for Lian herself, and was O.K.  But now the supply is limited, and the folks that developed it are gone, and there are no notes we could find that survived the data-purge they tried to do as the older kids … ah, well, killed them during the revolt.

“But Lian’s brain differs greatly from the typical human brain.  They have a complete f.M.R.I. system here - the most sophisticated and powerful in the world … ah, compared to Earth — extremely high-resolution both spatially and temporally.  They also have a P.E.T. scan system here.  The neural traces from the tentacles that integrate into her brain did much more to the organizational "map" in her brain than they expected.  They didn’t just add themselves in to the sensory-input "map" region in her brain where they were originally grafted in.  They grew axons and dendrites to other regions of the human brain, including the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and the hippocampus.  Basic baseline f.M.R.I. images of her brain are very different from that of a typical human brain.  It’s as if, subconsciously at least, the brain of the octopus within the tentacles is influencing the brain of the human.  And remember, many octopuses are regenerative — cut off a tentacle and it grows back.  Now, recent f.M.R.I. images from this year indicate it seems like the central brain structure of the octopus is beginning to grow within the human brain structure while integrating with it.   They were just trying to add functional appendages to her body, not create a whole new brain system, according to notes I found.  They wanted her human brain to grow into using these appendages as if they were natural, not add them to her body later and have to train her to control and manage them.  Like the cyborg kids here have to be trained; except for Lilia — that was the intention behind her project also — start while they are very young and can learn with ease, like young children learn a spoken language with ease, but older ones need extensive training.  Just, Lilia trained the computer beyond what they expected.”

Tears started streaming down Jazmin’s face again.  Jasmine could feel it; she didn’t have to see it; she instinctively wrapped her arms around Jazmin again and held her tight, as Jazmin wrapped her own arms around Jasmine’s, around herself, and she grabbed on to Jasmine’s arms.

“I’m sorry this is so hard for you all.” Olof responded.

“No, you’re great.  Thanks for your kindness”  Violet returned.

“Anyway, what I’m trying to say here is Lian can be easily scared — it seems as if it is the instincts of the octopus in her.  They are shy creatures.  We need to treat her gently.  But there is more to her tragic story.”

“Why does it always get worse?” Josy Lynx asked rhetorically.

“Octopuses only live a few years.  They mate, then die.  Their body simply starts to degenerate; it’s like they rot away while they are still living.  This is a continuous problem with keeping Lian alive.  The supply of drugs they developed to counter this problem is going to run out within a couple years, and it seems to be less and less effective as time proceeds.  Even if we could make more, the notes here indicate that the researchers who developed the project were questioning before they started what human puberty would do to the octopus tentacles in that respect.  Beyond that, they questioned after-the-fact what puberty will do to her brain considering the substantial modifications in both function and form from the octopus’ unexpected neuronal connections.  Either way, they suspect these drugs are stimulating the "sub-brains" in the octopus limbs to regenerate the octopus central brain as they regenerate themselves to counter their natural degenerative nature.   Before they started, they asserted that they "would find" the solution to the problem of degeneration of octopus flesh without drugs within "a couple years", but that never materialized.”

“And they didn’t even try this with mice before hand?” Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx questioned, with a tone of "¡unbelievable!" in her voice.

“Well, they have genetically modified organisms and added genes from other organisms; they have learned to graft tissue from one species to another, even transplanted pig hearts into humans; learned how to grow whole organisms from stem cells as well as grow "parts" from stem cells.  All that was on Earth.  This is just a small step away, scientifically speaking anyway” old man Olof replied.