It all revolves around a monstrous squid. A giant squid. When it touches a deep-sea cable, its arms and tentacles begin to tell a story. They tell of what it's like to live in perpetual darkness, what it's like to be a monster to humans. They tell of Sanja, an intern on a freezer trawler, caring for a captured squid. They tell of Dagmar, stationed in Antarctica for an intelligence agency, tasked with smuggling this squid back to Germany undetected. They tell of a childhood as a shepherd's daughter. They tell of a family whose ancestor fought a squid. They tell of the young Jules Verne, who hears of this fight and begins to write about it. In the end, they tell of how difficult it is for people to talk about animals, and why they do it anyway.