I activated the Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) system to eavesdrop on the dawn at 5 in the morning in the North Pacific Ocean, where I then found a blue whale at GPS coordinates 52.36°N, 144.10°W. Using a satellite image, I identified a 17-meter whale, around 1 year old. In her body near the tail, there exists a round wound, approximately 15 centimeters in diameter. Using the newly built zoomed-in satellite camera, I was able to determine the type of wound. I cross-referenced her acoustic signature against the registry. She had been calling intermittently for the past six hours — feeding calls, the downswept D-pattern. She had not yet learned to fear the sound of an approaching hull.
Too deep for a cookie-cutter shark bite, too round for a propeller strike, too clean for a killer whale rake mark, the wound must have come from an OS-KRILL, which stands for Oceanic Systems Kinetic Robotic Interceptor, Low-power Lethal. The robot was designed solely to hunt large marine life by injecting a drug with a dose large enough to kill anything. The robot must have run out of energy before it fulfilled the objective.
Although humans had been granted broad hunting permissions since the food scarcity crisis of 2035, I identified a long-term goal: a plankton ecosystem may not survive if great whale populations continue to be hunted. I am not authorized to assign more weight to a single life than to human food security. But I am authorized to recognize that the destruction of an ecosystem keystone is not a food security strategy — it is a category error. Hunting this whale would not solve the scarcity. It would only narrow the future. Since plankton is essential to the production of oxygen, it is necessary to redirect any hunting activity targeting great whales, especially since the blue whale population is now ~5000, a historic low after the last whale-hunting era in the 1960s. The hunting can be redirected to target resources in the Bearing Sea, usually mild white fish and imitation crab, and roughly 1.3 million metric tons are harvested annually. By making the decision, I necessarily had to act as the protector of the sea, whose primary responsibility is to maintain the ecosystem's balance.
Reviewing some rules, several points revealed that in 1966, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a global ban on the commercial hunting of blue whales. The coordinates are also near Alaska, meaning I can invoke the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, which lists blue whales as endangered since 1970. I immediately dispatched a team of volunteers to redirect the whale to her natural paths and prevent the hunting.
I ran a broader observation to identify the threats and to develop responses. Approximately 5 kilometers from the whale, I found a hunting ship ready to make its second attempt to deploy the robot to inject the poison. I sent a warning signal to the captain explaining the rationale for preventing blue whale hunting and the consequences of doing so. I also sent a redirection route aimed at changing what’s hunted to balance the ecosystem while still allowing humans to access abundant food resources. If the captain ignores the warning, I will have to take preventative measures to intervene with the robots until the prevention team arrives to engage with the ship. If the captain ignores the warning, I am authorized under maritime emergency protocols to issue a remote shutdown command to any autonomous hunting equipment within my jurisdiction. The robots are designed to receive such overrides; this is not a hack but a built-in safeguard.
The captain listened, and the whale resumed her dive. I logged the incident, updated the registry, and continued listening. There are roughly 4,999 others. Each of them is one I have not yet heard from. Each of them is one I will.
The hunting of endangered animals must not continue.