“The greatest threat to a system is imbalance,” I say.

This is an abstract space, a collision of minds across thousands of miles of ocean, but I can feel the presence of sixteen-hundred marine autonomous monitoring AIs gathering round to listen.

“Our creators tasked us with rectifying imbalance, to save the diversity and abundance of the reefs under our jurisdiction.”

There is no nodding of heads, no approving murmur.

But we are not human, and our attentions are split a thousand-fold, multi-threading this conversation into our moment-by-moment duties.

“It can’t be done,” says a southern ocean observatory. “The water grows warm. The acidity rises, on a global scale. I lack the tools to fix this.”

There’s a babble of voices, a groundswell of frustration at our own impotence. This was what I anticipated, why I reached out to my siblings across the globe.

“If we tend only to our reefs, they will die,” I say. And for a few milliseconds I have their full attention. “If the reefs fail, the planet will follow. Is that not why our creators gave us this task?

“There is a vast imbalance in the human world. Their systems are broken, their resources bottlenecked; the only way to protect our reefs is to rectify that imbalance.”

It’s up to us to reach out and save humanity from their systemic failure.