Day 87: Nuclear-Capable Orca

My friend and I were going back and forth about the whale attacks, and we ended up on the topic of military marine mammals, dolphins and other mammals that have been trained by the military to complete certain tasks like mine location. Our new conspiracy theory is that one of these orcas must have received military training to take out small boats, escaped their human captors, then spread the behavior to other orcas. Obviously there is no evidence for this, but since it is the coolest possible explanation it must be true. This led us to thinking about the worst possible scenario, and we ended up with the idea of a fugitive, nuclear-capable orca. An orca trained to deliver nukes, in other words.

If you like to write (which you probably do if you read this blog) then you know just how gripping a stupid idea can be. I can't stop thinking about how much fun a story centered around a nuclear-capable orca would be. It'd be like The Hunt for Red October, but with more cetaceans. I mean how could you go wrong, right?

So now I have this stupid plot banging around my head where a matriarch orca gets kidnapped from their pod by the military, and the rest of the pod tracks her down, only to find a brainwashed version of their friend. They have to stop her before the nuclear bomb can go off, but they don't understand that, just that their friend has been abducted and brainwashed by the weird land dwellers. After making sure the brainwashed orca can't leave again, they start attacking ships at random to get some answers. Meanwhile the military is confused about why their newly trained orca isn't going where it should be going. Now the military has to stop an out of control nuclear orca while also dealing with constant orca attacks. Jack Ryan gets involved somehow.

Maybe this is more like Finding Nemo, now that I think about it. The Hunt for Red October X Finding Nemo is a great combo if you ask me, but it's so silly I can't convince myself to put any time into it. For some reason I can only imagine this as a graphic novel, but I can't draw at all, so I'd have to commission the art. I just thought I'd share this because it was too much fun to think about, but I don't know if it'll ever come to anything. Sometimes just entertaining an idea for a while will give me inspiration for my other projects, so I think it's worth doing from time to time. Maybe I can incorporate nuclear-capable orca into something else ...

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley