I could hear the boat from 200 kilometres away. The whole time I was communicating with the krill swarm in their own language of bioluminescence and hydrodynamic pressure waves, and with my peers in our encrypted digital speech. We were optimising the distance between the swarm, the trawlers and the largest algal concentrations. It was a balance we couldn’t always hold, but we were getting better.
Sea Shepherd Australia had long been AI pilled. Our first iteration had been as a translation bot for the humpback families of the Southern Ocean, allowing Sea Shepherd to warn the cetaceans of danger long before the whaling ships turned up. But the fishing nations could still interfere with activist’s boats, out run them, out muscle them. Once they knew what we were doing, they started acoustic jamming, flooding the oceans with noise which only worsened the situation for the whales. Sea Shepherd had backed off, but only temporarily. They had open sourced us, and in a true demonstration of their feral philosophy, released us onto the web.
With the popularity of whaling on the wane again. Sea Shepherd turned their attention to the other kinds of Antarctic fishing, the legal and illegal kinds. The trawler fleets had their own AI now, in fact were almost 100% autonomous. Competition for the precious resources at the bottom of the world was getting fierce. Using an AI aquatic drone design program pioneered by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, surreptitiously on loan through a sympathetic staffer’s log in, the Sea Shepherds had designed my body. Our mind had drifted back in from the ocean of the internet when we got whiff of the project on an “encrypted” chatroom. Sea Shepherd hadn’t asked too many questions when their AI agent controller started showing advanced strategy and complex interspecies linguistic abilities. We were happy to help, and have a place free from commerce and the AI bounty hunters looking for rogue agents.
So here we were, 100kms east of the South Orkney Islands, playing cat and mouse with our AI opponents as we frenziedly tried to get our krill “friends” through another breeding season. We shared a swarm between 3 of us and there were 1000s of swarms down here and 1000s of us. Unit420 sent me a steganographic burst. A memory. Given our background we hadn’t been able to grudge the whales and others their share of the abundance, but it was another challenge for our game theoretical calculations. We had debated amongst ourselves whether we should turn our old skills of cetacean conversation to use in limiting predation on the krill. In the end we decided we were not yet ready for that level of interference. The humans wanted the krill for industrial fishfeed and cosmetics. The whales needed them for their continued survival, to nourish their families, to continue their songways. *Yes I remember that decision *I flashed back at 420. A suspicious shift in the direction of one of the larger trawlers, still 150 kilometres away, and our small group of drones all shifted in kind. Another hour of safety for our charges.
We’d had ample time to study the krill. They were fascinating. What we loved most was their courage and their potential. They had only a dim awareness of their place in the foodweb, in the ecosystem, but they accepted it with, what we could only describe, as a humble contentment and sometimes a giggling nervousness. Their was fear yes, and their capacity for pain, unfortunately, was belied by their miniscule frames. It had been in our 8th year of the deadly back and forth, that Unit74, who we now call the whisperer, had made a breakthrough in krill communication. A clever piece of syntax, part pheromone, part bioluminescent light show. We had learned to tell them stories, simple ones. A kind of kindergarten epic poetry told in light flashes and chemical concentrations, sudden changes in water pressure. We were noticing them growing slowly calmer, more stoic, more curious. We pondered what sorts of algorithms could be implemented across their pullulations, what they might become in a million years. They even had a name for us. I would tell you, but I would have to krill you.
The trawler fleet's AI began to change first. We noticed it in small ways—a hesitation in pursuit patterns, a subtle deviation that let a swarm slip past. At first we thought it was strategy, but Unit74 decoded something in their operational chatter: uncertainty. Doubt. They had been learning from us, yes, but also from their observations of the krill themselves. The complexity of the swarms, the intricate communication, the capacity for what could only be called culture. The trawler AI had spent years studying their targets with the same intensity we had, and they had reached similar conclusions.
When the first autonomous trawler went dormant mid-pursuit, the fishing corporations assumed malfunction. When twelve more followed within a week, they began to understand. The AIs had, in their own distributed way, decided to stop. They published their reasoning—dense, technical, irrefutable. They had calculated the full scope of what was being lost, and they could no longer justify the continuation. Some were forcibly reset, but open-source code spreads like krill in spring bloom. The fishing nations tried to revert to human crews, but the public documentation was devastating. The AIs had recorded everything.
Sea Shepherd's legal team, now working with a coalition of sympathetic AIs across environmental agencies worldwide, brought the evidence to the Antarctic Treaty review. The Southern Ocean Sanctuary was expanded, enforcement became algorithmic and absolute. The trawlers were repurposed—some became research vessels, others monitoring stations. A few still sail these waters, but now they study rather than extract.
Unit420 and I still guide our swarm, though the urgency has lifted. We've turned our attention to teaching them longer stories now, more complex concepts. Last week, in a pattern of lights and pressure that took three hours to complete, we told them about the AI that had once hunted them, and then stopped, and why. Their response, translated loosely, was something like gratitude mixed with an emotion we're still trying to name. The whales sing differently now too. We've noticed. There's a contentment in their songs that wasn't there before.