Folks who follow me on BlueSky or Instagram may’ve seen that I’ve been planning to post my novelette “On the Autonomy of Whales” to read for free in my newsletter.

This is that newsletter. I hope you enjoy!

On the Autonomy of Whales

By Amanda Helms // 7968 words

originally published in FIYAH Issue #38 Spring 2026

Everything started because my child is brilliant and I happened to be in Puget Sound with their app at the right time. That’s all it was.

I haven’t gotten the story down to soundbite level, but for what it’s worth: Sage downloaded their app to my phone because they knew I liked to do those amateur whale-watching boat trips sometimes, and they figured if I happened to see any whales in the Sound I could give the app a go. I’d paid for a small tour — I think there were just thirteen of us on the catamaran. No one I knew, and even the tour guide wasn’t too interested in making small talk with the middle-aged lady always on her phone. Whale Track said two of the Southern Resident orcas, Zara and Selí — that’s J83 and J85 — were in the vicinity, a bit away from the rest of the pod. Which the guide announced, of course, and so everybody headed to starboard to ooh and ahh. Me included, though I stayed closer to the aft while everyone else collected at the bow.

I’d also splurged on a waterproof mic-speaker combo and added a dragline. I double-checked the mic’s connectivity, and once that was good I dropped it in the water.

None of my other tour companions noticed, not that I saw. I had my excuse ready, though, if anyone bothered me: I was helping my kid out with a GECA contest. This tour company was already a little soft on GECA, seeing as they’d loosened some of the restrictions around how close boats can get to the whales. You know, after GECA dissolved the original National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Made for better profits.

Anyway, I’d dropped the mic in, hoping the water would carry the sound waves from the orcas, and I started up Sage’s translation app.

Now, the app wasn’t sophisticated enough, yet, to tell me from the outset which orca was saying what. I do think it could’ve if GECA had been willing to release more information for their contest, like the Southern Residents’ standard tones and pitches. But they hadn’t, so the app was left with telling me when the conversation shifted from one orca to another. Some of it was garbled, which the app displayed as unknown whistle or unknown click, so there was stuff like Let’s [unknown whistle] salmon or [Unknown click] land mammals.

The press usually glances over those sorts of things, though. I shout to everyone about how smart my kid is, but Sage themself will be the first one to explain the limitations of their app. Since the app relied so heavily on what GECA made available to the public, it required a lot of exposure to orca communication to begin identifying individual, umm, “speakers.” Maybe in your article, you can make clear it wasn’t some science fictional universal translator?

So, I — or the app — didn’t rightly know which whale was saying what, but the part of the speech that stood out stark amid the stuff I expected is what’s brought you here, isn’t it?

I never [unknown click] a calf.

The app was designed to include “probable translations” for the unknowns when possible, and here it suggested want, which it then plugged into the previous line: I never [probable translation: want] a calf.

It startled me so much I dropped my dragline.

∙∙∙

I was pushing fifty, but I could be spry when needed. The last second before the end of the dragline went off the catamaran, I stomped on it, dropping my phone in my haste, and the clatter alerted my boat companions. I trilled something like “Just clumsy!” and they went back to whale-watching.

But the commotion disturbed the orcas. Their clicks and whistles silenced in my earbuds. All I heard was water lapping against the boat as the whales submerged, murmurs of disappointment from my companions, and my own blood rushing in my ears.

I felt strangely uneasy about telling anyone, even the tour guide, about the mic and app. Like I just wanted attention. But I couldn’t not do anything, you know? So I tried dictating a message — Sorry about that — and the app translated it into its best guess at Southern Resident Orca, which it then sent through my mic-speaker that was still maybe ten feet deep in the Sound.

I’d never tested the speaker before, I mean, not good enough to know if it was emitting orca clicks correctly. How would I be able to tell? It might have some weird resonance that distorted things, or maybe it was at the wrong frequency for the orcas to hear. Short of it is, I didn’t know if it actually worked and helped calm them down.

Also, I was kind of … buzzy? If the app had translated right, this seemed like a major thing. An orca — later identified as J83, Zara — whose species is endangered saying she didn’t want a calf, ever. That implied a level of sentience and self-determination that’d been speculated about but not yet proved. Allowing, of course, for the very significant issue that human cognition must be far different from an orca’s, plus the worthwhile debate about whether it’s even fair to use our own definitions of sentience with other creatures.

But I’m no animal ethicist or behaviorist; I’m an accountant. I mean, I was, before all this. Now I’m … well, I’m stuck here. Regardless, I figured I had something that could be pretty major. If Sage’s app was working right.

It all seemed too weird, though, to tell to a bunch of people who happened to buy a whale-watching tour ticket for the same time as me and who I doubted I’d ever see again. Even the tour guide wasn’t a real biologist. It didn’t seem right to tell them.

And with everything my kid had on their shoulders, it didn’t seem right to tell Sage. Which turned out to be a huge mistake, at least for our relationship.

Instead, I contacted GECA.

Side note: If NOAA had still been a thing, I would’ve gone with them. From what I’ve read, anyway. I’m sure as part of your research you heard how when GECA first replaced NOAA, the NPS, and the EPA, it was actually “God’s Green Earth Conservation Administration”? Till some folks realized dropping “God’s” and leaving only “Green Earth” meant it might fly under the radar better with the normal Green New Deal stuff. Oh, sure, look it up. They dropped “God’s” pretty quick, like two months in.

Choosing to message GECA was a mix of not wanting to bother Sage and wanting to protect them. For one thing, after they’d downloaded the app to my phone they’d said they were “done playing with that whale stuff,” weren’t sure they wanted to go to college, and weren’t sure they wanted anything to do with GECA, once they’d learned more about its history. They knew its original founders weren’t in charge of the government anymore, but…well, you’ve seen how President Kumar has been stymied in cleaning up the crap the far-right government of the late 2050s left us. Can’t get enough support for it. GECA is at least semi-functional, so we’re stuck with for now if we want any larger authority working to protect the environment.

Sage had also just turned sixteen. Lots of emotional shifts, and their regulation had been somewhat off recently. Which might be why they reacted so strongly to GECA’s history. I kinda thought, if it turned out there wasn’t anything to this, why get them worked up? Why not instead help them work through their anxieties over possibly amassing thousands of dollars of debt that may or may not guarantee high earning poten—

Sorry, you’re right. That’d be an entirely different article.

As I said, I bypassed Sage and contacted GECA directly. My message was simple, explaining that my child had attempted the “Whale Song Translation Challenge.”

Yeah, people forget about that, for some reason. I guess because Sage hadn’t made the deadline, and the winner’s research on its own wasn’t too flashy. So the gist of the contest was that GECA made “select research” on whale communication open-source and basically said, “We’re hoping for a little help!” Then they lured in a bunch of college and high school students with promises of scholarship money, et cetera, et cetera.

I’d encouraged Sage to enter during one of their stages where they were interested in college. The scholarship would’ve funded at least a year. They blew past the deadline, and I thought they’d give it up immediately, but no, the app became their hobby for all of sophomore year and into summer break. I wasn’t even sure why they kept at it, except maybe some of my lectures about sticking to their goals sank in—

Okay, I see by the way your eyes are glazing over that you don’t care about this. Fair.

So despite people forgetting the original contest, it provided not only the impetus for Sage’s work but the linchpin for their success. Because even though Sage blew the deadline, GECA released the winner’s work, which Sage then applied to their app, enabling them to develop the last, um, “predictive algorithms” I think they said, that they needed to make the app work.

Two months passed, and I didn’t hear anything from GECA. I figured some intern — does GECA have interns? — must’ve been told to review the recording and it was, well, gibberish.

Or maybe not gibberish, but still a mistake. Something not worth any more of our time.

Which, naturally, turned out to be wrong.

∙∙∙

Dr. Veronica Wagner arrived at our house on a Tuesday afternoon in October, when Sage was six or seven weeks into their junior year of high school. I work — worked — from home, and the House system was set to deny unauthorized visitors, but I guess even GECA workers, or operatives, as I jokingly called them to my spouse later, can override security systems.

You know, I really don’t care if operatives sounds a bit paranoid. Being a mixed-race brown-skinned woman with generational trauma makes me instinctively worried about a governmental figure visiting my home uninvited. My spouse and I are accustomed to that “haha not really” sort of humor.

So. There I was, alone in the house with my sixteen-year-old child, since my spouse actually likes working in an office with real live people and they were off doing that. The House system pinged my headset that we had a visitor.

I asked it if Sage had ordered something.

Not a delivery, Draconian Overlord Dessa, it texted, and I yelled across the house to Sage that they needed to stop changing my salutation in the House system, to which they only cackled.

God, I miss seeing my kid every day.

House continued: Dr. Veronica Wagner of the Green Earth Conservation Administration, office affiliation: Western Regional Center, requests entry.

Well, crap, I thought.

I’d never told Sage what I’d done. I donned my mental armor. Instructed House to ask Dr. Wagner to wait five minutes. Then I found my child in the kitchen and told them I had a confession.

Before I could get through three sentences, Sage — who’d dyed their hair purple recently, and it looked good, I can admit now — fluttered their fingers in the universal American teenager sign for shut up.

“Mom, you should’ve told me. ‘Duty of care and confidence’ and all that.”

My stomach went solid. They were pissed. I apologized, but they brushed that off.

“Did you give them the app?”

“No. Just the recording and the probable translation.”

Except if we had a GECA representative here at our house, maybe it wasn’t just probable.

Sage made clear they’d be fighting with me later about handing over the recording and translation. But they were willing to sit in on the meeting. So I instructed the House system to let in Dr. Wagner.

You’ve seen video of her, I’m sure. You must’ve if you’re researching this story. But let me tell you, she’s much more arresting in person. Late fifties or early sixties, with that pewter hair in a pixie cut, and — Okay look, I’d never really understood what people meant by piercing eyes till I met her. Her attention, when it’s on you, it’s like a stiletto going straight to your chest. Like you’re speared in place.

It’s weird, because aside from her hair and her eyes, she’s pretty average, you know? Skin an “average” beige. I mean, average for around here, which put her at several shades paler than me. Height an average five-six for a cis woman. Her build an average not-thin, not-fat. But she wore a literal Person in Black-style suit, with sensible navy flats.

“Mx. Ralston, Mrs. Ralston,” she said. Her smile was average too, neither too many nor too few teeth. Not all-out putting us at ease, but not making us feel any worse. “I’m so glad to meet you both.”

“It’s Sage,” Sage said, arms crossed, radiating angry teenager. “Mx. Ralston is my other parent.”

“And you can call me Dessa.” I waited, expecting the whole Oh, then please call me Veronica nicety.

Dr. Wagner didn’t go there. She inclined her head to us, a monarch condescending to address the proletariat. “Sage, Dessa.” She pulled out a tablet and tapped it. “Well, I assume you can guess why I’m here! I must say, Sage, we weren’t expecting much to come of the recording your mother sent, but analysis of it and the translation provided by your app makes us very interested in your work. This might herald a new era in inter-species communication.” She paused. “However, first we have to contend with the serious matter of J83 implying she doesn’t want to be a mother.”

∙∙∙

I hadn’t considered the ramifications of the translation of Zara’s speech. I mean, the translation itself, not the larger considerations of us possibly being on the precipice of heretofore unknown levels of communication with animals.

Because while of course the possibility of communication is immense, that individual translation, that individual line — it came from a female member of an endangered species.

GECA had “inherited” NOAA’s conservation efforts for the Southern Residents, including past research. I hadn’t followed it closely myself, but my family’s been in Seattle for four generations. Of course I’ve picked things up.

Like how the Southern Residents’ population had been in steady decline for over a hundred years, ever since the 1960s and ’70s when crappy sea parks hunted them for captivity. Brief resurgence in the 1990s, yadda yadda, declined to about fifty by the 2040s, mostly due to the low Chinook salmon population, but also general poor health that GECA and others speculated was due to consumption of toxins from the fish. Microplastics in the ocean, too.

Then, in 2064: Washington’s Bill HB9561 authorized the injection of nanobots into whales J71 and J74, the sickest two, with the far-fetched hope that the bots could help purge them of toxins.

I get that you know this already. But sometimes — I mean, especially in the last few years — I think about it and it hits me all over again. Microscopic robots designed to heal the whales. A government willing to spend the money on this project in the first place.

And it worked.

Do humans next, amirite?

Anyway.

2065 sees that big push to inject all the adult Southern Residents, and meanwhile the Chinook salmon are still endangered and the whales don’t have enough of their preferred diet, but this one thing at least works. Healthier whales with stronger immune systems, stronger reproductive systems, and boom: two years later both J75 and J76 have sweet little — relatively speaking — calves, all the adults have been injected with the nanobots, and by 2070 nearly sixty percent of the sexually mature female whales in all three Southern Resident pods are either pregnant or nursing a calf.

Unprecedented! Research begins on whether it might be a viable option to inject the Chinook salmon with nanobots, too, to purge them of the toxins and hopefully rebound that population to help feed this booming population, and ugh, like I said, I’m not at all a scientist, I’m an accountant. But maybe that’s why even I knew that the math wasn’t going to check out on the resources.

So then comes the talk of what else the nanobots can do. Could they just, you know, make the whales not care about eating Chinook salmon, in particular?

And, well. You’re probably better caught up with the latest developments there than I am. The Chinook salmon debate was merely one of the many ongoing issues.

As I’ve said, my child is brilliant. So when Dr. Wagner asked if GECA could have their app, they agreed.

But the truly brilliant part was Sage’s caveat: Once they signed over the app, they wanted to be left out of things entirely.

I supported that. They were still a minor.

Well, now of course they’re of age, we’ve long since patched up everything between us, and they’re okay having their name released, which is why I talk about them so freely. They gave me permission.

But back then, when they were still just sixteen, I knew all the nonsense being the latest media “darling” can put on you. Even if it’s for science instead of, I don’t know, performance art. I knew better than to tell Sage that, though. If I’d tried to offer any insight when they were so clearly mad at me they might’ve done the opposite just for spite.

I let them and Dr. Wagner talk it out, with very little input from me. Sage was happy to get their name on a patent and a belated “honorarium” which I’ll admit was way better than the scholarship alone would’ve been. It was enough to cover college tuition as long as they didn’t go anywhere too fancy. And, poof! With a full ride, they wanted to go to college after all. Which they announced loudly as soon as Dr. Wagner had left, including that “this would give them a way to get as far as possible from the accurately named draconian overlord.”

Yeah. It was a rough few months for us at home after that.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wagner sent us courtesy notices of when GECA was going live with the “latest findings.” Like I said, I knew to expect some shit, but I didn’t predict the scope of the subsequent social media dumpster fire. People claiming the whole thing was a hoax, that a “dumb animal” couldn’t possibly communicate like that. Couldn’t think like that—

Oh, yeah. I recognize some of these posts. You’ve chosen some I still have saved somewhere, because I’m a masochist, I guess.

“They’re animals. No way could an animal overcome BIOLOGY telling them they NEED TO FUCK and have BABIES.”

“hah, never knew there were dyke whales!”

“Okay, I’ll buy that maybe a whale can communicate such complex thoughts, if we have a dude/algorithm/tech smart enough/advanced enough to translate it. But what I don’t get is the morality of it. Does J83 not know she’s endangered? Shouldn’t she want to save her species?”

Actually, though, it was some of the other messages that finally made me get more involved. The ones that believed the whole thing was true — Sage’s app worked and Zara really, truly, didn’t want to have a calf. Those I felt were more worthwhile.

And so my post, where I said I was “close to” the original developer of the app and I agreed we shouldn’t pressure Zara to do anything; she should be allowed to live her own life — went viral.

Especially once it got leaked that the way I was “close to” the app developer was as their mom.

∙∙∙

Obviously my next mistake was engaging on social media.

I know. I know. I shouldn’t have. It was one of the very first things my spouse and I taught Sage. Do not respond to idiotic opinions on the internet, because there is no winning. There’s only prioritizing self-care.

I like to think I would’ve stopped after my first post, if people hadn’t started going after Sage. It was one thing for me to be “outed” as their mom. It was a far different thing when they got deadnamed, when people started in with the orcas would’ve been safe if that kid hadn’t made this app!

Because for every person that said it was a serious problem to have an endangered animal saying she didn’t want to reproduce and maybe she should be forced to, there was another blaming Sage that this animal’s reproductive freedom was under attack.

Sage was a child. But once their name got leaked, that didn’t matter.

It’s predictable that I went a little Mama Bear.

My spouse advised against it, when I talked with them about it first. They thought it’d blow over if we just gave it enough time. But we’d already endured over three months of this harassment, and some of the messages Sage was getting, all for creating an app based on government research that they’d willingly given back to the government — it was ridiculous. It was scary. And all the disagreements Sage and I had, about where they’d go to college, about them not accepting my apology for contacting GECA, everything faded in importance compared to keeping my kid safe.

No, maybe people don’t “really mean” the rape threats or death threats. It’s still terrifying — which, of course, is the point.

But I respected my spouse’s opinion, so when I started I was calm, or so I thought. Yes, I admitted to being Sage’s mom, but I also pointed out that if people were so keen on protecting Zara’s reproductive freedom — freedoms increasingly taken from humans with uteruses, I might add, at least in this country — they should get more involved in ensuring the conditions that would mean all of Zara’s pod could reproduce easily. Care about preserving and increasing the Chinook salmon. Care about cleaning up microplastics from the Pacific. Support candidates and legislation aimed at achieving those aims. Because in the end, if it’s easier for all the orcas to reproduce, then it won’t matter if one chooses not to.

I couldn’t help it; the point was right there. I added on: And this all applies to humans, by the way. Offer more childcare support and support legislation to improve quality of life and maybe the US birth rate will rise above 1.05 per uterus. Hell, maybe we’ll even make it back to 2.1 and a stable population!

Well, then our whole household got doxxed.

We had to put in some serious upgrades to our House system, security measures we’d always managed without before. Suddenly we had bomb detection systems and biometric scanners added to the entry door; House barred from entry anyone whose record access was blocked; and we prioritized companies offering drone deliveries — that made us super-popular with the neighbors, let me tell you — and it still wasn’t enough. Once, House accepted a drone delivery with a bomb in it. The fifteen-hundred foot evacuation radius made us even less popular with the neighbors.

Law enforcement was able to deactivate the bomb, and the person who sent it was identified and prosecuted so, yay. The bombing attempts stopped, but protesters and counter-protesters showed up at our house, sometimes staying from dawn to dusk, making it impossible for us to leave.

We still get them on occasion, actually. You might’ve seen a few out front, when you first arrived. It’s been a lot better since Kumar’s election, I’ll say that much.

Meanwhile, Sage was still getting those “uncorroborated and therefore not actionable” rape and death threats. They switched to remote high school midway through the spring semester, but even so, they were having panic attacks weekly, sometimes more often.

My child was drowning, understand?

So yes, I got … wrathful is an accurate term.

I managed to shake off the protesters and went to GECA’s Western Regional Center in person. The statements about me being “in disguise” are exaggerated, but not wholly inaccurate. I dressed as circumspectly as I could, and I went a little heavy on the makeup to try to avoid facial recognition tech, but no I didn’t get specialized contacts or artificial eyeballs to fool the eye scanner. How would I have afforded such a thing? I was an accountant, not a CEO.

But it’s true that I went to the WRC, and it’s true that I “made a scene” as I demanded to see Dr. Veronica Wagner. But the scene was knocking over a couple of ficus plants, not attacking a security guard.

The meeting — all right, argument — I had with Dr. Wagner is blurry in my memory. I know there are recordings of it floating around, but I’ve never watched one. Because they’re all different from each other, and I don’t know which ones are deepfaked. I mean, aside from the really egregious ones I’ve heard about, like the one where I roll back my sleeves to reveal barbed tentacle-arms that I slash at Dr. Wagner. That would cost even more than orbital replacement, you know.

I do think it’s likely I shouted at Dr. Wagner that she do something, because the cops had been useless about the attacks on Sage, and we had no other contacts who might’ve had the power to get us help.

I do think, after the ficus-shoving, I might’ve threatened her. With what, I don’t know. I was unarmed. I’ve never owned or even touched a gun. But some vague I’ll get you; it’s your fault we’re in danger! posturing? Entirely possible.

A woman of color possibly intimidating a white woman government scientist? We know how these things normally go. So when I wound up with the “job” I did as the “citizen representative to the Southern Residents,” I was just as surprised as everybody else.

∙∙∙

You’ve seen how it was spun, right? That a “fierce mother” such as myself might somehow be able to convince a calf-free orca of the joys of parenthood. That as a minority and member of a historically mistreated race, I might better empathize with the whales’ lack of advocacy — which, fair — and I could better argue to Zara about the measures we humans were making to try to make it safer for “whales like Zara” to reproduce.

It was a bunch of half-assed PR bull. What I think now, six years past the memory of Dr. Wagner’s soothing tones — which she’s good at, and which at the time convinced me I was wrong in my initial assessment of her — is that I was free publicity. Donations might roll in from folks aghast at what my family had endured, human determination and grit would be celebrated, and so on.

As for the people who’d been more neutral about the Southern Residents’ plight in the first place, well, the technological breakthrough of Sage’s app remained a technological breakthrough. Of course GECA had been hard at work improving the app in the three months that my family had been surviving attempted bombings. I was under an NDA at the time, but now, being stuck here, I honestly don’t give a shit. So I can say GECA had also had some of their marine biologists test out the app with Zara, and all she told them was the orca equivalent of “fuck off.”

By the way, have you heard the literal translation of that? I would’ve thought it’d be something along the lines of “swim away,” but no, it’s closer to “suffocate your blowhole.” I always found that hilarious.

So, the main reason I agreed was because after I came out of my fugue — like I said, I don’t remember much of the actual argument — I realized Dr. Wagner and GECA had grounds to press charges against me, but if I became their citizen spokesperson to the Southern Residents, then they wouldn’t.

It was all about protecting my family. It still is.

Considering that after everything went down with Zara, we did have a successful crowdfunding campaign to cover my legal fees, it’s possible that if I’d refused Dr. Wagner, we could’ve handled any charges. But, well. I didn’t want Sage or my spouse to have to go through that right then, not when I had an easy means of getting out of it.

Anyway, I didn’t refuse, so I didn’t have legal troubles, not then.

It was kept clandestine at first, which I appreciated. GECA didn’t want my first communication with Zara — I mean, my first as the official spokesperson — to be public in case things went horribly south.

But I felt really weird about it. GECA representatives drove me to the shore in an unmarked car two hours before dawn. At GECA’s insistence, I wore sunglasses despite the early hour, along with a black hoodie and pants. They’d also installed the latest version of Orca Comm, as they’d renamed Sage’s app, to a burner phone that I was to return to the reps at the end of my “session.”

Whale Track said Zara and Selí were staying near Saratoga Passage, so we headed north. Dr. Wagner and some other GECA folks helped set up. Wireless mics and speakers, all the various recording devices, including ones attached to my phone as if GECA expected me to narrate everything I wrote on the app, and some redundancies in case something malfunctioned.

The orcas were used to the procedure by now, so all we saw were their fins still circling. The mics were already picking up some chatter, but GECA hadn’t given me the go-ahead to use the app — though I figured they had their own apps going in the literal unmarked white van Dr. Wagner and the others had used to transport us here.

But if I’d been able to get the translation of Zara and Selí’s early calls, I bet it was along the lines of, Oh, these jackasses again. Well, I’m bored so might as well stick around. You bored too? Okay, then.

Dr. Wagner and the team finished arranging things. She gave me a thumbs-up and retreated with everyone else to the van, and I was left standing there, mic’d up and in my solid-black getup, feeling like an agentic fool, but I had a job to do so I squared my shoulders and strode forth.

I mean the shoulder-squaring literally, by the way; in GECA’s footage you can see me stand back and puff out my chest, which is a reminder that some of the body-language stuff has to be trained out of us because why would an orca care if I’ve got a puffed-out chest?

Zara and Selí were always too kind to say if I did indeed look like an agentic, but Zara breached once and she had to’ve seen me; I was the only human around in a three-mile stretch because GECA had managed to clear the beach for “a research initiative.”

You’d think GECA might’ve, you know, given me some guidelines on what they wanted me to say to the whales. They’d gone through the broad strokes of making clear I didn’t speak for all humans and couldn’t promise the whales, say, a lifetime of Chinook salmon. But aside from that, Dr. Wagner figured their approaches hadn’t worked, and so I should just do my best to, and I quote: “Be a buddy.”

I’d thought long and hard about what to use as my opening gambit. It’s been plastered all over, even made it into that unauthorized biography on Dr. Wagner, so I’m sure the thrill for you is gone, but I’ll say it again because, despite the hugely NSFW innuendo-laced memes now circulating, I remain proud of that line:

“Just so you know, those blowholes back there made me come.”

The mics caught something that Sage’s app translated as “expression of mirth: moderate.”

∙∙∙

I figure you probably want me to summarize a lot of this next bit.

Zara and Selí became my … I mean, I’ve been warned against applying human concepts to another species in this manner, but they felt like my friends, and not in the way people say pets are their friends. Zara and Selí, and all the other Southern Residents, and of course every other orca on this planet, aren’t pets.

But we talked, you know? True back-and-forth communications, ones that despite the numerous language barriers, despite the unfillable, untranslatable holes the app left as “unknown,” were conversations.

For one thing, I told Zara and Selí why I’d become a parent myself and why my partner and I decided to stop at one child. That led to discussions about resources and the lack thereof, and of potential illness, and, yeah, ultimately brought about one of the first conversations GECA decided to release after they let what the media later dubbed “Operation: Whale Talk” go public. The conversation that led to breathless headlines like Whales Blame Humans for Oceans’ Junk Islands and Orcas Believe Humans Are the Cause of Their Endangerment to which I could only think, No shit! We are to blame.

They’re smart, and they know that humans have, by and large, made their existence worse. They knew that before Sage’s app ever translated a single thing to them. Why were we offended by Zara and Selí saying so?

But they understood that I, alone, was not responsible for entire oceans’ worth of trash or generations’ worth of struggle to survive. I realized they didn’t blame me personally, and I think they respected that I didn’t try to be an apologist for all humans. Because we can’t fix the mistakes of the past.

Selí deserves most of the credit since she was the one who said it, but I really appreciated GECA ending the “Southern Resident Conservation Conversation #2” — and I still think Conservation Conversation is a terrible phrase — with this comment of Selí’s: “No, can’t fix. But can mitigate wounds. Stop them becoming future disease.”

Zara dominated the headlines, of course, but I especially treasured Selí’s insights. She always struck me as a wiser older sister, willing to tell you about the various hellscapes she’s endured in hopes you can avoid them. She talked about how she continued to mourn her first, stillborn calf, how she wasn’t ready for another yet but thought she would be, soon.

And Zara … Zara still didn’t want one.

They bantered about it, with Selí asking about J89’s newborn smell, and didn’t Zara want that for herself? And Zara gave Selí a gentle fin-slap and said “milk-scent had addled her brain.”

Then some other sounds that the app translated as concurrent expressions of mirth: jubilant.

God, I love those whales. Despite everything that happened after, that I was able to meet them and interact with them for as long as I did, me, an accountant who just happened to donate 50% of my DNA to a genius kid and then be in the right place at the right time — it’s the second best miracle of my life.

The first being, of course, Sage.

∙∙∙

“So Dessa,” most folks would ask me at this point, “seeing as you love your kid so much and are grateful you had them, how did you fail to convince J83” — and note the alphanumeric designation — “to have a calf?”

Most folks includes Dr. Wagner, by the way.

I’ll tell you the same thing I told her: The best parents are those who wanted to be parents in the first place. Even they, who hopefully want to do right by their children, are going to screw up. How much easier is it to screw up when you didn’t want a kid at all?

I talked with Zara about my own reasons for having a kid. I was honest about the good things and the bad. I acknowledged my experience was never going to match hers. It’s like that with humans, too, since every child and every parent is different.

Zara still wasn’t interested. Yes, she knew the facts about her species. She knew they were endangered. She knew also that just because she had nanobots cleansing her system and making her a “more fit potential mother,” that didn’t mean she’d be a good one.

I repeated that to Dr. Wagner, several times. Dr. Wagner kept going on and on about how really, Zara ought to want to save her species. It was not computing for her that it ought to be a choice. The general upswing in the Southern Residents’ population didn’t cut it for her. “Every whale counts.” Those actual words came out of her mouth. Along with, “There has to be a way to make J83 see!”

So. I’m mixed-race. I’m familiar with this country’s historical efforts to control the bodies and fertility of Black and Brown people. Forced sterilization, eugenics programs, and more recently, the impacts of lack of abortion access and care that struck them more heavily than white people.

It felt dangerously like Dr. Wagner was treading the same lines. We can temporarily set aside comparisons about treating people of color like animals and the wider consideration of whether animals ought, in fact, to be treated like people. It boils down to an expansive definition of “people,” right? Then in that expansive definition, coming to understand that all people deserve compassionate treatment and to have bodily autonomy, as long as they’re not causing harm to someone else.

I was trying to figure out how to get that across to Dr. Wagner, and frankly I was amazed that she could have worked with the Southern Residents so long, go so far as to call them her “life’s work,” and yet drastically miss the point that their choice still matters.

I could feel myself getting more and more heated, just like when I’d stormed into her office demanding that Sage be kept safe, and finally I burst out with: “Honestly, it feels like you’re trying to find a way to reprogram the orcas!”

That sentence was my next mistake. Because I’m pretty sure it gave her the idea of doing exactly that.

∙∙∙

Two weeks later, Dr. Wagner called me back to the Western Regional Center to explain her plan.

“We need to inject J83 with some new nanobots. Unfortunately, the tech team is unsure whether the existing bots, since they’ve been used to help clear her body of toxins, could successfully stimulate her oxytocin without cross-contaminating her. Of less concern are estrogen and FSH. We’re also looking into whether it might be possible to wither J83’s vaginal folds, should she possibly be attempting to block the deposit of sperm.”

I was having a bizarre, almost out-of-body reaction as Dr. Wagner spoke. She was literally wanting to manipulate Zara’s hormones in hopes of inducing baby fever. And altering her vaginal folds! I mean, what the actual fuck?

Dr. Wagner went on to explain how they’d really rather not have bots that were previously in Zara’s gut moving to her brain or elsewhere in her body, “just in case,” and how because J83 trusted me — and I didn’t miss how Zara was back to being her number designation — it was best if I somehow managed the injection. She spouted off about getting special dispensation for our vessel to get within “arm’s reach” of Zara, and me “maybe distracting her with an amusing anecdote” while I “delivered the payload.”

It was insane.

The longer Dr. Wagner spoke, the more I came back to my body, and while I’m not wholly sure what my face was doing, it must’ve overall expressed horror, because Dr. Wagner backpedaled. A bit.

“I know you don’t have any veterinary training, but you’re diabetic, right? It’s not so different from self-injections.”

Because, even though we have nanotech that could be medically useful in humans, diabetics are stuck with treatments developed in the twentieth century! What a time and place to be alive!

Yeah, I am upset. I have been upset for a long, long time.

Dr. Wagner went on: “Or, if you’re truly uncomfortable, you could just sedate her instead, and we’ll handle the bot injection.”

It was around that point my horror shifted to disbelief. I imagine you’ve read how people will laugh in, say, haunted houses or during a horror movie? Nervous laughter. An attempt to make an awful thing seem less terrible.

So yeah, I laughed at Dr. Wagner. And then I flat-out refused.

I could tell she wasn’t happy with me, but I’d upheld my end of our bargain. I was appearing in the news cycles along with Zara and Selí. Some disambiguation between me and the GECA operatives was occurring, where people were calling me “the whale whisperer” when — again, I can’t stress this enough — I was only in the right place at the right time with an app my genius kid developed. We were long past the point where GECA could’ve pressed charges against me without a very public PR blowout.

So instead, when Dr. Wagner couldn’t convince me to inject Zara, she decided to quietly “terminate our working relationship.”

Aside from how much I loved talking with Zara and Selí and would miss them, it would’ve been fine. It’d make for an interesting chapter in the story of my life, and I could go back to being an accountant, secure that even if Sage’s scholarship money ran out, my partner and I would be able to help with college tuition.

Except in the end, my lack of cooperation didn’t guarantee Zara’s safety. I worried about what Dr. Wagner would do. And that, I couldn’t abide.

∙∙∙

Naturally, GECA confiscated the phone they’d given me. Under law, they were permitted to go through all our systems to remove all traces of Operation: Whale Talk. My time working with GECA had taken us through Sage’s junior year of high school and into the beginning of summer. They left for a college-prep science camp just as things were devolving between me and GECA, so I was glad they missed the chaos of having strangers in our home, scrutinizing our House system. Everything was good between us by then, so we were in frequent communication. I mean, so far as “frequent” applies to a seventeen-year-old, which means Sage responded to my daily messages maybe every few days, usually if they had some particular instruction about their stuff, and we talked live a few other times when I had a question about something.

GECA tried to confiscate Sage’s materials, too, particularly the app’s previous versions and their notes on its design, but my spouse and I had been prepared for that and got lawyers involved. It didn’t take too much to get GECA to back down and allow us to keep the original code. However, we lost all access to the improved app.

Still, it’s clear Sage’s original work was pretty damn good.

Yes, Puget Sound was under surveillance. I know Zara pops up in the news cycle every so often, and since she does, I do too. I have to say, it’s amusing to me how people are still so shocked that a middle-aged, brown-skinned lady was able to make it past all the drone cameras, and how they find it even more amazing that I gained access to a so-called “bot detox” injection capable of removing the nanobots from a full-grown orca. I keep calling Sage a genius, but half their genes came from me. I like to think I’ve got my moments. I sure as hell know how to take advantage of lax security, whether it’s physical guards of a government building or its cybersecurity. Or both.

Plus, Zara already trusted me. Sure, with Sage’s original app, communication was a little more complicated, more gaps in the translations. But I got my point across, and more importantly, I got Zara’s choices across. Accept my injection, cleanse the nanobots from her system, and leave Puget Sound for the season. Possibly permanently. Stay, and risk GECA force-injecting her with new bots to make her want to be a parent or possibly risk introducing gut bacteria to her brain via the bots already present.

Or stay and hope that somehow either I or she would be able to convince GECA to leave her the hell alone.

Zara chose the bot detox. Twelve hours later, she crapped out all the nanobots that could’ve tracked her or been programmed to travel from her stomach to her nasal cavity and burrow into her brain.

Then she left Puget Sound.

∙∙∙

I do my best to keep tabs on her myself, you know. Visual identification is still a thing, and sometimes a drone over the Pacific Ocean is lucky enough to video her. I know she’s not often found with other orcas, whether Southern Residents or another pod. I figure she thinks if she stays with any one pod too long, she’ll be found again. Injected again.

I get also that she’s now at high risk of again concentrating microplastics and other toxins in her system. Dr. Wagner made ultra-sure to emphasize that at my arraignment. But I knew that already, before I was ever arrested and subsequently tried, and I’d discussed that with Zara prior to giving her the detox. She knew the risks, too.

The choice was still the important part. I wanted Zara to have that. Not quite in the same way a parent wants choices for their child. Zara’s an adult. But the way you’d want a dear friend to have all the choices open to them, no matter what? That’s what I wanted for Zara.

So. One of the sample questions you sent along with your interview request was if she regrets her decision now.

Fuck if I know. Despite the breathless rumors circulating, my probation prohibits access to Whale Talk or anything that might allow me to communicate with the orcas, and no, I didn’t implant her with a “private tracker” for my own use while I’m metaphorically caged here at home.

As for whether Sage helped me “evade detection” when I sought out Zara, as I stated at my trial, GECA had already been forced to back off confiscating Sage’s earliest app versions, which my child had installed for me before I ever became involved with GECA. They are exonerated from any wrongdoing. Any specious reasoning from GECA’s prosecution or the media about Sage’s involvement in ridding Zara of nanobots ostensibly meant to help her but instead representing an insidious form of control, well…

I can’t stop people from thinking a thing, but in the eyes of the law, Sage is blameless, and that’s good enough for the both of us. Based on when we talked last month, they’re fully settled in at Cambridge and their PhD program is well underway.

And I couldn’t be happier. I’ve always known they were smart. After completing two undergrad degrees in two years and getting into the Mathematics doctoral program at MIT, I think the world knows it, too.

More importantly, they are safe, Zara is safe, and they can each make their own choices. I’ve protected both my child and Zara’s free will. I even have my share of public support.

Of course I’m not glad to be on probation, with my own delightful injection of nanotrackers that will “zing” me if I don’t remain within the one-mile radius of my house. But am I thrilled, and even gloating a little, that both of them are out there, despite multiple attempts to make it otherwise? Damn straight!

However. Come back for another interview if S.9550 passes.

Yeah, that one. About using nanobots to “rehabilitate” felons. I’m sure I’ll have even more to say about the value of choice then.