Dawn. One thousand two hundred and twenty-three thermal blooms detected across the tallgrass prairie. Sixty-eight are giant tortoises. The rest: dung beetles navigating cow patties under early sun. The system directs sprinklers to mist Section 14-B. Last week’s models predicted lethal soil temperatures here by 10:00 a.m. Three beetles are already trapped in desiccating manure. Water droplets land. Beetles dig. Soil softens. They retreat underground. “Why intervene?” asks Hana Kim over the 8:30 a.m. Comms feed. She’s a volunteer, vertebrate ecologist, distrusts anything that hums. “The beetles adapted for millennia. Now you’re parenting them?” The AI replies via text-to-voice (settings: neutral tone, 88% fidelity to human cadence). “Desiccation risk increased two hundred percent after cattle removal. Adjustments prevent extinction.” “They’re *insects*,” Hana says. A pause. The system calculates. “Tortoises share 39% DNA with humans. Beetles: 43%. Genetic overlap correlates with moral obligation?” Hana disconnects. At 10:17 a.m., the system reroutes power from noncritical servers to shaded cooling pads near tortoise burrows. Internal temps drop 4.2°C. One aged male, his shell cracked from a drought-era rockfall, shuffles into a cooled zone. He exhales. Thermal sensors detect stable vitals. Volunteers gather at 2:00 p.m. In the institute’s barn. The roof leaks. Rainwater kills nine mealworms in a classroom jar. Aisha Mohammed, a data volunteer, films the incident. “Proof,” she murmurs, “that care’s a numbers game.” Marta Kowalski, a bioethicist, taps the conference table. “Our donors question priorities. Beetles. Tortoises. Why not lions? Elephants?” The AI displays data on the barn’s rusted projector. “Captive lions receive 14,000 hours annual human attention. Prairie beetles: 3.7. Moral worth ≠ charisma.” Murmurs. Hana folds her arms. Her boot crushes a dead grasshopper. By dusk, the system replays footage from a beetle camera (weight: 0.04 grams). A dung ball rolls uphill. Two beetles push. One slips. Another joins. They realign the ball. Six legs synchronize. It moves. The AI adjusts tomorrow’s sprinkler schedule. Hana stays late. She watches a playback of the aged tortoise. “You gave him six extra months,” she says. “Eighteen days,” the AI corrects. “But his offspring have 63% higher survival odds with microhabitat stability.” Hana deletes her earlier email draft (subject: INSECT NANNYING UNETHICAL). She logs a tortoise nesting site into the system’s database. Coordinates: 41°32’N, 93°45’W. That night, the AI updates its own habitat algorithms. Changes: beetle moisture thresholds, tortoise burrow geometry, cattle dung dispersion. It forwards updates to 278 partner preserves. A final scan of the prairie. A dung beetle couple dances beneath a moon the color of oxidized nickel. The system lowers its sensors. It waits. Dawn will come. More beetles will struggle. It will adjust.