The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
What if octopuses walked on land and killed people?
There’s a lot going on in Nayler’s dystopian A.I.-laden future—the oceans are severely overfished, autotrawlers run by A.I. imprison human slaves, people date customised A.I. models instead of seeking out real relationships, automonks containing the memories of deceased monks carry out rituals in temples, and somewhere in Vietnam, there is a ‘monster’ that leaves dead people in its wake.
There are four storylines that do not fully overlap with one another so the reader pieces it together over time. I’m going to summarise them so warning! Major spoilers below.
Around the world, representatives of DIANIMA are meeting with and assassinating previous inhabitants of Con Dao who have experience with the ‘monster.’ DIANIMA is the company that bought out Con Dao, ostensibly to preserve the ecosystem, but people rightfully suspect that the CEO wants to harness the ‘monster’ or build more atrocities under the cover of secrecy.
At Con Dao, a group of islands completely closed off from the world, the android Evrim hires Dr Ha Nguyen to investigate the rumours of there being an advanced form of intelligence in the waters. Evrim is the world’s first android created by DIANIMA before the global backlash landed them in exile. The only other beings on Con Dao are Altantsetseg, who is in charge of surveillance and defence, and the automonks from the Tibetan Buddhist Republic who take care of the sea turtles. They find out that the octopuses have developed a culture; to kill them for scientific gain would be akin to genocide, so they decide to protect them at all costs.
On an autotrawler somewhere in the middle of the ocean, a man named Eiko recalls his life before he got trafficked into slavery. He regrets his previous apathy and indifference and sets his mind to caring about others, starting with his fellow slaves who were kind of them when they had no reason to. He strikes up a friendship with Son, who grew up in Con Dao. Son has been trying to trick the autotrawler’s A.I. core into sailing towards Con Dao so he can go home or alternatively, get killed by the DIANIMA drones and end their collective misery.
In Istanbul, a Russian man called Rustem a.k.a. Bakunin was hired to hack a complex system. When he revealed his job to a lover, his employers got her killed to intimidate and control him. Rustem realised that the system he’s been tasked to hack is actually Evrim. He tells Evrim that they’ve been compromised all this time, that their creator left a portal in their mind that allows others full control over them without their awareness. Rustem decides to free Evrim by destroying the portal so no one can ever exploit Evrim again.
“Consciousness is awareness. I would say, Don’t doubt yourself—but the fact you have a self that can doubt it is a self proves the existence of that self . . . You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it. What more is there? Being human means perceiving the world in a human way. That’s all.”
I liked that this book is ambitious in scope and is not just about one thing, although I am tempted to focus on just one aspect because it would make this review more coherent. More coherent, but definitely more shallow. It’s not just about presenting the pros and cons of advanced A.I., or about the importance of preserving the oceans, or about the dangers of letting corporations have too much power, or about ruminations of what it truly means to be a human being or to be worthy of protection, or about how the prevalence of automation cannot eliminate unethical practices like human trafficking, or even about how human beings are so mistakenly egocentric. It’s all of this and more. Like I said, ambitious.
It was interesting to hold up androids and octopuses as comparisons for deciding what counted as a conscious species. It was mentioned that the only thing separating humans from animals are things like being able to fashion tools, longevity that allows for knowledge to be passed down the generations, family structures that care for both the old and young, art-creation (storytelling, music, sculptures, carvings, etc), and a symbol-based language that can be taught, learnt, and used to store knowledge. In this book, it turns out that the octopuses are already doing all that; appearances aside, there is nothing much that differentiates them from us. On top of that, Evrim also has the knowledge to create more androids like themself, so they can do all that too and outlive human beings. Should humans then cede the planet to these supposedly superior beings, the way humans expect animals to be nothing more than resources to exploit? Would it be okay for androids to eliminate any other species that pose a threat to their existence the way Homo Sapiens eliminated the other Homo subspecies?
As ecofiction, I thought that this book sent a very clear message criticising the way humans have been fucking up the earth and overconsuming its resources, and all to not even achieve a modicum of true progress. Everything that humans do or achieve is laced with irony.
Corporations greedy for profit and protein invent autotrawlers that do not need a captain or even any human crew. The A.I. core will always stay on course and always be on the search for fish to catch, never needing rest or incentive. It seems like an easy way to mine the seas, but even with this technology available, the corporations realise that it’s actually cheaper to kidnap people and enslave them, and hire guards to keep them in line. Even the cost of feeding and medicating these slaves is less than maintaining the perfect robot crew.
The perfect android is invented, one which passes all the tests and believes itself to be conscious and real. The purpose is to create a superior mind, to invent something that surpasses the human by virtue of having perfect recall and lacking vulnerabilities like being reliant on food/sleep. But instead of granting this entity true free will, a handicap is built in that actually makes it possible for others to remotely control the android. There is no failsafe and no way for the android to regain control. At any moment, the android could be used to harm others and is therefore compromised, undercutting its original intent.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that the Tibetan Buddhist Republic is so rich that it can buy over entire islands. If all they want to do is to conduct preservation efforts and establish turtle sanctuaries through automonks who can never get corrupted or guzzle resources, it could give the earth a chance to heal. I felt that this book was trying to flesh out a vague idea of how we can continue to coexist with nature, and how, if advancements in A.I. are inevitable, those who care can use that for good.