The Mountain in the Sea

In the near future, the transnational tech corporation DIANIMA seals off the Con Dao Archipelago after discovering a species of octopus that appears to have developed language, culture, and symbolic thought. Dr. Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist, is brought to the islands to study them alongside a hardened security operative and Evrim, the world's first and only conscious android. As Ha tries to make first contact with a mind built on a body nothing like a human's, other threads follow a fishing-fleet slave aboard an AI-run trawler and a hacker hunting the corporation's secrets. The novel braids these strands into a meditation on what consciousness is, who gets counted as a person, and how minds reach across the gulf between them.