How to create a community within the arena of biopower without killing off the individual? How to create a collective, and not some zombifying crowdedness, while living in a democracy that is currently being transformed into a discursive category debated at conferences? How to create a body, a Hamletian body that will stand against and redefine the imposed lie of capitalism, of injustice?

In the West, exploration of the deep sea has historically conjured images of ancient monstrous mythological creatures such as the Leviathan, the Kraken, and more recently the Cthulhu, among other figures of alterity and the unknown. Characterized by scientists and mainstream media alike for being “utterly alien,” newly discovered undersea life-forms are no longer gigantic, but microbial. Descriptions often mix in themes of outer space exploration in the evocation of the “alien” and the technical challenges of building robotics to withstand extreme underwater pressure conditions. Perhaps the recent reconception of evolutionary trees prompted by underwater hydrothermal vents, over a century after the initial Western exploration of the Galápagos, contributes to a particular form of modern mythology—a science-led search for a last common ancestor of sorts fueled by biogenetic labs.