Ray Nayler’s novel, The Mountain In The Sea, is a superb example of asking a simple question and then exploring the ramifications at length. The question? What is intelligence and how would we recognize it in other species?

The novel concerns the discovery of an octopus species that exhibits the kind of behavior till now deemed impossible—unlikely at best—given the nature of octopus biology. Dr. Ha Nguyen accepts an invitation from the head of a global corporation to come to an isolated island in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, Con Dao, to study an anomaly. Con Dao is a protected area, cordoned off by advanced defensive systems to keep predators—human—from coming in and wiping out the ocean life in aggressive sea farming.

On Con Dao she meets two people with extraordinary capacities, one an android, the other barely human after a life of harsh conflict.

The android, Kamran, is the only one of its kind, a remarkable construct built by the woman who owns DIANIMA, Dr. Minervudottir-Chan, the corporation that has brought Dr. Nguyen to Con Dao. Humaniform, erudite, somehow not intimidating, they are set to research the octopuses together. Also on the island, Altansetseg, the security officer, a woman of long experience with the scars and the cynicism as proof, who operates an extensive remote drone net that proves startlingly powerful. Nguyen, Kamran, and Altansetseg develop an alliance centering on the creatures who have found a home in the bowels of an old shipwreck just off-shore.

Other characters in various locations come into play as berserkers, radical actors, fey factors in relation to DIANIMA, which impinge on the whole question of artificial intelligence and emergent sentience. Rustem, the outlaw hacker, who is hired by enigmatic people wanting to hack a code that has to do with (perhaps) autonomous AI; Eiko, a kidnapped worker enslaved to an illicit fishing trawler run by an AI system. But the main subjects in this are Kamran, Nguyen, Altansetseg, and, later, Minervudottir-Chan.

And the octopuses. Against all theory, they seem to have created a community, and developed the ability to communicate symbolically. The details of this are one of the chief pleasures of the novel.

One of.

These people all come together from isolated lives constrained by shells of self-defense and a frustrating inability to get past themselves in order to join community. Any community. They get by, they associate, the have colleagues. But Dr. Nguyen herself makes use of an advanced AI in order to indulge the forms of a relationship without there being an actual person involved. Kamran is alone by virtue of being the only one of its kind. Minnervudotir-Chan is perhaps the most isolated, having as excuse exactingly high standards for any kind of relationship, and finally resorting to build her own creature to meet them…which, of course, Kamran doesn’t. Altansetseg is buried inside a shell created by her entire life as a warrior. Vulnerability for her would be a form of self-destruction.

And yet they are all brought together to make contact with a creature that was supposed to be by nature all alone and has now, apparently, learned to make community.

The layers of revelation and interpenetration in this novel engage the desperate need to Be latent in all of us. And while Nayler does a remarkable job examining that, he is also giving us a material to consider the question of self-awareness at the heart of any discussion of AI. Before we can answer the core questions about AI, we have to answer it for ourselves. We have to recognize also that we need to extend that question to nonhuman life in all its forms. How, basically, can we expect to recognize self-aware intelligence in a machine if we can’t recognize it in biological forms other than our own?

Humans are rather chauvinistic about that. Perhaps understandably so. The question is meaningful only if we want connection, and we of course want it in terms we can understand. The only example we’ve studied in any depth till recently is…ourselves. So the template, the criteria, already presumes the markers of recognition.

“When we try to compare one animal’s brainpower with another’s, we also run into the fact that there is no single scale on which intelligence can be sensibly measured.” Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds

Given that, communication runs aground on the same problem. No one scale on which to measure. And that has to do with expression, never mind meaning.

The Mountain In The Sea is an alien contact novel, make no mistake, only the aliens turn out to our preconceptions and limitations, as defined by the encounter. Every single character in this novel is an alien and they are all trying to connect, whether they realize it or not.