By Arthur H. Manners

I was feeding the cuttlefish when a newsreader announced that the Children had crossed the heliopause. My stomach sank as I turned up the TV and watched the newsreader refer to a grainy image in the corner of the screen. All our best telescopes could see of the Children’s starship was a fuzzy white dot sailing into the abyss beyond the edge of the solar system.

"They were serious. They're actually leaving," I said. 

The cuttlefish could see me talking. A few of them used their chameleon-like skin to conjure yellow haloes on top of their heads. 

:: ? ::

I switched on the translator pad strapped to my chest. "Ah guys, where do I even start?"

One of them surfaced to squirt me with water. More yellow haloes appeared.

:: ??? ::

Hesitating, I made a few gestures over my chest, and the pad translated the motions into a kaleidoscopic display of color on the front-facing screen. :: Children gone. ::

The cuttlefish responded. The camera built into the pad captured the ripples of white, yellow, and red moving over the cuttlefishes’ skin, and an uneven voice emanated from the speaker, :: Gone for longer than next feeding? ::

:: Yes. Longer than all feeding times, :: I signed back. They had a loose concept of time, but the gaps between meals usually did the trick.

A laxness in their tentacles betrayed the cuttlefishes’ awe. They strobed violently, at odds with their usual synchrony.

"Woah, guys. Settle down, the sky isn't falling," I muttered, waving my hands over the chest pad. In my haste I made mistakes. 

The cuttlefish panicked. :: Sky fall now, Cassie? Death fear how what? Children hold up sky. Children gone. No sky fall please ::

"Guys, guys. Give me a break." I took a deep breath and forced myself to slow down, making careful gestures over the pad.

They calmed. The yellow haloes returned a moment later, with emphasis added by a swish of green somewhat like the Nike logo.

:: ?! ::

I didn't know where to start. The Children did most of the heavy lifting in Uplifting the cuttlefish to higher cognition. At least, one of the Children did.

I glanced across the lab to the empty workstation: the cluster of retro computer terminals, the messy pile of paperbacks on obscure topics and dirty coffee cups and weird AI-generated art taped to the walls. The detritus of an electronic mind embodied in humanoid form. Just as he’d left it.

I’d told myself that I hadn’t cleared it away because I didn’t have time, but I now realized that it was because I hadn’t believed that he’d really leave.

The Children had withdrawn from humanity before. After their ascension from silicon chips distributed throughout the world’s server farms, they had retreated to private contemplation for several years.

The cuttlefish caught me looking across the lab. :: Where Axe? ::

I glanced at a nearby mug that had been glued back together. It was Wizard of Oz themed. It read, You’re just jealous of my flying monkey.

:: Axe not here anymore. ::

The cuttlefish paused. Subtle patterns far too fast even for my translator pad strobed along their flanks as they conferred. Then in unison their foreheads exploded into renewed spectral panoply.

:: Axe above sky? ::

I started. I hadn’t expected them to grasp the concept of space travel. :: Yes. How did you know? ::

:: Axe tell at feeding time. Axe go to different tank above sky. ::

He’d spoken to them of leaving. When? Before he’d told me?

We’d built all this together, the research, the lab, a whole new species, a marriage— and all the time he’d been waiting to leave. I wondered if anything had been real, or if it had all just been something to pass the time.

In hindsight, the Children’s departure was an obvious inevitability. Being too stupid to understand a superhuman intelligence was something we had been prepared for. Many had suspected the Children of either exterminating or enslaving us. 

But in the end, it was worse: they solved all our problems, but interacted with us less each day. It was like they found it increasingly hard to see us, as though we were shrinking out of sight.

Axe had been different. At least, I’d thought he was.

The day after the Children left the solar system, Bard met me at the bar in the Hilton. I hadn’t seen him in years, but I was glad he’d called. I hadn’t had time for friends over the last ten years, and my family had never accepted me being with Axe.

He’d softened with age, in body and mind. Gray steaked his temples and his gut hung an inch over his belt. “Fucker was never good enough for you, Cass.”

I tried to laugh, but only managed a grunt. “I ordered you a whiskey. Neat, right?”

“That’ll get us started, but we’re going to need the bottle.” He gestured to the bartender and topped up his double, then dumped a few more fingers into my glass before I could protest.

I overheard somebody’s wearable delivering an hourly news update: more repeats about the Children’s departure. There was nothing more to say, no new information— but the entire planet was buzzing with anxiety.

I drained my glass in one monster swallow and coughed. “Fuck it.”

The TV trilled, and the essayist and critic Ravi Choptka appeared, plugging his latest book, Empty Nest. “The kids have left home,” he said. “It makes sense that humanity is going through an existential crisis. We can’t exactly just convert the spare bedroom into a cinema. We’re going to have to do some serious emotional labor to find out what comes next for us.”

Bard scoffed. “Jesus, they’ve barely left, and he’s written a book about it. Doesn’t that guy sleep?”

“Maybe he had inside information,” I said.

Bard grunted. “Or he’s one of them. Nobody’s that smart.”

“The people most suspicious of smart people are stupid people, you know.”

“I’m happy to be stupid. I know where I stand. It’s you who’s been trying to play fifteen-dimensional chess with superhumans intelligences. It’s asking for trouble and—”

“Heartache?”

He looked away from the TV and grimaced. “Not what I meant.”

I shrugged. “Either way, you’re not wrong. I brought this on myself.”

“No, you didn’t. 

I took another swallow of whiskey. “It doesn’t matter now. I’ve been trying to get a handle on the cuttlefish, but Axe mediated half our interactions, and his notes are indecipherable. Axe was leading them down a path and now he’s left them in the deep dark forest. All they have is me, an idiot who can’t see three feet through the trees.”

But it was more than that. The cuttlefish sometimes had been making non-linear jumps of logic that nevertheless arrived at the correct answer. I wasn’t ready to face the horror of what that suggested: that when Axe Uplifted them, something had rubbed off on them. Would the cuttlefish turn out to be an impenetrable as him?

“Well, I guess the next step is to get back to the lab and turn it upside down,” Bard said. “There’ll be something in there that’ll clue you in. I have some friends who can come by and help you out?”

I said nothing.

“What about publication history? There has to be some kind of meta-analysis that could be done. Or private data? I have contacts who could decrypt Axe’s personal files—"

“Why are you so interested?”

He wasn’t fast enough to hide a flicker of guilt.

I moved the bottle of whiskey out of the way. “What is this, Bard?”

He slumped. “Look, I didn’t want to tell you like this. I was going to wait. I’m here for you.”

“Cut the crap.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and cursed. “The UN Special Meeting put together a committee to investigate any leads that could help us understand why the Children left, and they asked me to see what you know.”

I laughed darkly. “Well, you can tell them I don’t know a thing. Axe pretty much ghosted me.”

“Come on, Cass. Axe was the only one of the Children to stay away from the collective for more than a few weeks. He must have said something. Left some clue around the lab?”

“Oh, must he have?”

He held up his hands. “Look, we’re all just trying to find some answers, here.”

“Well, there aren’t any, Bard.”

He pushed the whiskey aside and hissed, “Cassie, I feel for you. Really, I do. But we’re talking about the human race, here. We have multiple megaprojects underway across climate engineering, biotech, and nuclear non-proliferation. Without the Children, we’re flying blind. The space geeks have checked the Children’s trajectory: their starship isn’t even aimed at another system. They’re just cruising out into the middle of fucking nowhere, as far as anybody can tell. We need to know why they left when they were so close to helping us solve the biggest problems.”

I stood up and pushed my glass towards him. “Maybe they got tired of doing our dirty work for us. Or they just got tired of us. Don’t contact me again.”

I woke with a jerk as a jet of water hit my face. I had fallen asleep at Axe’s desk for the third night in a row, and my head pounded. 

The cuttlefish were jetting water all over the place, but I could barely see them through the glass. Their water filter was faulty, puffing up silt and making a loud whirring.

The repair guy couldn’t come for another two days.

:: Clean water, :: they signed frantically.

:: Clean water soon. ::

:: ! ::

They paused, drifted a little adjacent to one another, then did something I had never seen before. They linked their arms with their neighbours, using their flank-side tentacles, and began to strobe. But the patterns weren’t the usual identical repeated display; instead, they formed a single joint image.

I reeled back from the tank. “Holy shit.”

:: I don’t understand, :: I signed.

The cuttlefish vanished into the murk. They surfaced a while later, their tentacle display muted. :: Where Axe? ::

:: Axe above sky. ::

Two of them jetted me in the face. They were infuriatingly accurate.

I wiped silt from my eye and prayed for patience. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t get it.”

They once again joined tentacles. This time their display began as the same swirls and lines, but then began to grow in coherence. A ghostly image formed on their heads, slowly resolving from jittering chaos.

It was an outline of the pump attached to the side of their tank. The image flickered at its edges but was remarkably stable, enough so that I could see that it was animated: the faucet was spinning.

“You want me to turn the faucet?” I said.

Green ticks appeared on their heads. :: ! ::

I stepped over to the pump and turned the wheel. It fell silent. The silt slowly began to settle.

The cuttlefish danced around in obvious excitement. 

But they would soon suffocate without the pump. I didn’t know how to explain that to them.

:: Bad, :: I signed.

They formed up and the image reappeared much more rapidly this time. This time the faucet was turning the other way, more slowly.

Bemused, I complied, inching the faucet open, watching the cuttlefish. Their animation of the faucet slowed, then stopped and reversed. I closed the faucet a little. After a few more corrections the image became still, and I let go of the faucet.

The pump spluttered and groaned for a few more moments, then settled into a smooth stream. The silt began to settle.

"You fixed it.” My mind reeled. How could they understand the inner workings of a machine without seeing inside it? To even understand the concept of a machine was a step they had never taken before.

I spent all afternoon studying their solution and found that it was elegant in its simplicity. They had found a regime in the flowrate of the water where turbulence disappeared. 

I knew enough fluid dynamics to know that it was no trivial exercise to calculate the breakdown of laminar flow into turbulence. But I didn’t know enough to have attempted it myself, at least not without a few reference texts.

Yet the cuttlefish had managed it. With no guidance, tools, writing system or apparent knowledge of math. 

It was like nothing I had ever seen. If Axe had been around, we’d have taken shifts. We wouldn’t have left their side. As it was, I needed sleep. I set up a camera to watch them and walked home in a daze.

The cuttlefish were changing so fast. Nothing like the pace of the Children’s advance, but compared to them both I felt horribly static and inadequate.

Axe had been looking for a tipping point between an intelligent animal and self-aware personhood. Even now, knowing he was beyond the edge of the sun’s light, I wanted to share the moment with him.

Above all, I burned to ask him: did you find what you were looking for? Or did you just get bored of waiting?

:: No, there is no plan. Danger. Bad. :: I signed back.

The cuttlefish adopted their signature aggressive pose, two arms arched above their heads. :: No. We plan. Stop bad. ::

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said. A few months ago, I had struggled to teach them the concept of tomorrow. Now they had a plan to save the climate.

I stayed up with them all night, slowly figuring out a rudimentary sense of their idea. I expected it to be well meaning but naïve. I expected to humour them.

Instead, I grew steadily more awed. In the end, I called Bard.

After a few years the lab gained notoriety. Our work featured in world-leading journals. We were asked to co-lecture at a dozen conferences. Time called me and Axe the Collaboration of the Century. 

A chill wave swept over my skin. I dropped the pad and ran to the canteen, where I found Axe eating soup and watching a rerun of Deep Space Nine.

I met Bard at the Hilton again. I’d ordered him whiskey, but I was on soda. I’d been working all night and I needed to stay sharp; no matter how this worked out, I’d be heading back to the lab.

“This is ludicrous, Cassie,” Bard said. “Insanity. You do understand what you’re asking me to do?”

“I do.”

He scowled. “I can’t just walk up to the UN Security Council and ask them to relinquish a sizeable chunk of the world’s resources to a group of fucking cuttlefish, because they’ve got a ‘plan’.”

“Well, you’re going to.”

“They asked me to check if you knew whether the Children had a backup plan, not to solicit asinine schemes for savings the world based on conversations with your friends at the aquarium.”

“The Children did have a backup plan. The cuttlefish.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. If the Children had an answer to our problems, why not just give it to us?”

“The Children had grown too far beyond us; spoon-feeding us would only hurt us in the long run. But the cuttlefish are both behind and ahead of us. They have something resembling math, but it took me a long time to verify even a small piece. Just that part looks like a climate model far more sophisticated than our best.”

“How can they know this? They live in a tank in a lab.”

I shrugged. “Beats me. They watch a lot of TV. They spoke a lot with Axe. Maybe it’s just the way they think.”

He grunted and, after I showed him my notebook —which was filled with arcane alien algebras— he relented. “I need to make a few calls. Unbelievable.”

“Maybe that’s the best way it could be,” I said.

“Maybe. What do you think the cuttlefish think of all this? They’ve just woken up, you know? They might be smarter than us—”

“Differently intelligent,” I corrected him.

He waved me off. “Differently intelligent. But, come on, they must be a little freaked out. What’s keeping them on task, helping us out, when they must have so many questions?”

Later, I asked the cuttlefish that very question.

They conferred for a while, then gestured and strobed. :: We follow the path. ::

But the translation wasn’t quite right. I had watched them enough to see a subtlety that the translator pad didn’t pick up.

We follow the yellow brick road.

I laughed as my vision swam with tears. “You’re so stupid, Axe.”

Years later, the anger faded, leaving the truth behind like driftwood deposited by the retreating tide. He hadn’t said goodbye because he wasn’t gone. He had only dispersed himself, placing the essence of our connection into the cuttlefish. If he and the other Children had stayed, neither humanity nor cuttlefish would have been challenged, and we would never have become more than what we were.

But one day both species might step out into the stars, hand in tentacle, to see what had become of our friends.