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Tweak a few genes and the octopus no longer needs immersion. Tweak a few more and it lives long enough to learn to communicate with us. Takes us a bit longer to go the other way but with all those arms this mutant mollusk is far more than a sex toy or doer of clever tricks; four times as capable as a human engineer typing four times as fast as a graduate student, and the compact creatures crew the first starships with aplomb. Flashing the colors of their skin the crew write poetry about the sea their ancestors lived in memory. Poems glow in chatoyant energy under the streaming stars.