Chapter 5 #2
I round the endcap and nearly walk into Dr. Kymbert.
She has a neat stack tucked under one arm—field guides and essays by the look of the spines—but she’s currently considering a display of steamy STEM romances.
When she turns, the smile she gives me is wide and unguarded, nothing like the dry, surgical smirk she wears behind a lectern.
“Coralie. How lovely to run into you outside of my class.”
“Hi, Dr. Kymbert.” I have no idea what one does with their hands when meeting a professional hero in the wild. Discuss her latest methods paper? Curtsy? This is a special category of awkward.
Kai appears at my shoulder, eyes glued to a paperback. “So, let me get this straight—falling for your brother’s best friend is… appropriate?” He’s holding a title on my Tbr and looks genuinely concerned for society.
“Yes,” my professor and I answer in unison. My head snaps toward her—pinpricks of light from the speed of the movement, excellent—and her grin goes conspiratorial.
“I, um—this is my friend Kai,” I manage. “He’s excellent at many things, though currently acclimating to bookstores.”
“Welcome, Kai.” She gives him a courteous nod, then glances—pointedly, amused—at the stack in my arms. “Looks like you’re in capable hands. I’ll see you next week, Coralie. Stop by if you want to talk thesis. Or to weigh in on which of these I should read first.”
My eyes widen at the open admission—romance reader, noted—but then again, why wouldn’t she be? She lifts her science books in a small salute and heads for the register, leaving a faint wake of paper and possibility.
An hour later I’m a few dollars lighter, sugared with chocolate-covered strawberries from a street cart, and armed with a very good, very comfy read.
As we walked around campus, Kai finished what he considers crucial campus gossip: this girl named Kacey allegedly ran three air fryers at once and nearly smoked out her dorm, and some guy took a drunk photo with the Rainbow Warrior statue and went viral.
Most of it went over my head, but his animated retelling had me laughing until my stomach cramped.
Now he hugs me goodbye and heads beachward with friends while I, regrettably responsible, shrug off the sunnier, off-duty version of myself like a borrowed sweatshirt and head back to the lab for a few more hours.
I’m rewarded with an empty space; the earlier crowd has vanished and—miracle—left almost no mess. Labs are great at outing who washed dishes as a teenager and who grew up with a dishwasher.
As much as I love my friends, there’s relief in returning to the work. Outside, a conversation can reroute a day; in here, it tilts on method. Even when results don’t add up, the attempt still counts.
Here I get to steer: the protocol, the questions, the pace, the shape of what comes next. Every hour laid like a tile, every run a small vote for the future I’m building.
I want a life that would disappoint my laziest self and delight my bravest one. This room lets me build it—one clean label, one solved problem, one quiet hour at a time.
I grab what I need for a quick husbandry-and-enrichment session—logbook, tongs, thawed shrimp, the bin of sanitized LEGO, a new section of PVC—and head to Damon.
He’s dead center, pupils a neat slit, already watching.
I always feel a flicker of guilt seeing him like this; for all the care we pour into water quality and enrichment, a tank isn’t a reef.
I take what comfort I can from the fact that he was tank-hatched and has been looked after, properly, for all nine months of his life.
“If we both pretend I didn’t humiliate myself in here earlier, I’ll give you an extra block,” I tell him.
Two arms extend—his usual scouts—and he takes the toys with that efficient, unfussy grip.
A few days ago, I dotted the base of each arm with food-safe gel dyes so I could track who initiates what.
Octopuses aren’t nine-brained in the way people like to say, but they do run a distributed system: one central brain and big neural hubs in each arm, with most of the neurons out in the limbs.
The result is a kind of delegated intelligence.
They also show context-dependent “handedness.”
Case in point: Damon tends to start LEGO stacks with the arms I tagged blue and yellow, while the red-marked arm is his favorite for probing anything new—like the pipe I’m about to add.
I give him the usual few minutes to settle—ignore me, audit the toys, decide if the shrimp is a bribe or an insult—and that’s when I see it.
On the back wall, just above the tank’s rear panel, a fine Sharpie scrawl.
Normally I would die on the “do not personalize the underfunded lab” hill, but the sight pulls a snort out of me anyway.
In big, blocky cube lettering: Cephalopods > all other invertebrates. And listen, I try not to play favorites—the animal kingdom is vast and deserving—but this is not, strictly speaking, wrong.
I glance at the doorway like campus security might materialize, then fish a Sharpie from my pocket. On the outside glass (relax, it comes off with disinfectant) I add, small and neat: Truth of life. Fight me.
When I look back, Damon has paused mid-stack to watch me from the corner of his den.
“Hey, these are all compliments to you, my friend. Don’t judge me.”
He stays very still, chromatophores smoothing a shade—his version of a raised brow, maybe. Does he get it? Possibly. Or maybe it’s anthropomorphism doing its thing. I guess we’ll never know.
I look again—and stop. He isn’t stacking with blue and yellow. He’s using red and green now. For weeks, green has been strictly logistics: brace, ferry, anchor. Never play, never probe.
I yank the common logbook, skim the last few entries. No mention of green doing anything but transport.
Now he has my full attention. We, as people, get two arms and, for the lucky, ten fingers.
Our choices collapse to left or right. He has eight and a distributed controller, and octopuses usually partition labor—anterior arms for exploration, laterals for manipulation, posteriors for locomotion. Damon has been textbook. Until now.
I jot a timestamp, note his posture, pupil shape, chromatophore tone, and the order of grabs.
Then the hypotheses queue up. Did the new pipe shift his body orientation so green has the better reach?
Fatigue in the usual pair? Micro-irritation on a sucker I can’t see?
Did today’s texture tiles bias the affordance so a different controller is optimal?
If this is plasticity in action, I should see a pattern: switch, stabilize, consolidate.
I rotate the enrichment ninety degrees, counterbalance left/right, and log trial-by-trial which arm initiates, which assists, and how long the stack takes.
If green holds the job through the rotation and again tomorrow, we’re looking at a genuine policy change—arm-level retuning in response to a small environmental tweak.
Exactly the kind of live, breathing neuroplasticity I came here to catch.