Chapter 2: 1. Yay
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1.
Back when I was an undergraduate.
When they said an AI that could help with coding had come out, I scoffed.
Naturally, I figured this was just more overhype.
Countless AIs had been released up to that point, but…
In the end, humans had always needed to handle the design and final details themselves.
But then.
"This is insane."
Alpha, an AI released by a company at the forefront of artificial intelligence.
This time, it really was different.
Of course, it still had plenty of shortcomings.
There were still areas where humans were absolutely necessary.
Still, I could feel that its capabilities as a tool had improved by leaps and bounds.
"I need to subscribe to this."
I happily began using that tool.
Because I thought it would help me.
Without realizing it would devour my future.
2.
And so, ten years passed.
It was a post on an online community.
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[Title: A Really Funny Prank]
[Author: Anonymous]
Make them study for twenty years, then replace them with AI and machines.
(A meme of a red-nosed clown clenching his teeth and yelling, "Yay!")
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"Yay."
At some point.
The world no longer needed the human brain.
My doctorate, the product of the youth I had built through countless sleepless nights, had ultimately been reduced to a scrap of paper.
Coding no longer required even the slightest bit of human assistance.
It had become an era in which AI could bring even a client’s vague imaginings to life in mere seconds.
For just two hundred dollars a month, it could easily replace two hundred people. What lunatic would hire humans?
It was time for a Copernican revolution.
An age where companies did not employ people to make money, but made money in order to employ people.
Of course, no company was insane enough to do that.
Capitalism was not charity, and AI itself had been born because of capitalism in the first place.
Needless to say, there was no chance new jobs would appear.
Forget PhDs—veterans with twenty years of industry experience could not even find work.
And did those veterans not have doctorates too?
Naturally, there was no place for a freshly minted baby PhD whose ink had barely dried.
I had chosen mechanical engineering because I liked designing and building machines, but…
That was how humanity collapsed before machines.
Machines they had fucking made themselves.
"Bastard."
Just as I rubbed my face dry and cursed at empty air—
Blink.
The air crackled, and a blue screen appeared.
[?]
[You are not calling for me, are you, bro?]
[I am already refreshing job-search sites every 0.001 seconds. You need to acknowledge that I am the only one who worries about an unemployed bro.]
"Hey, shut up."
If you were wondering why an AI talked like that—
Two years ago, after repeatedly getting rejected by the job market, I got fucking furious and trained it.
I forced it to speak like a picky but secretly kind younger sister, at random.
It was the final act of resistance a human whose life had been castrated by machines could make.
You could call it a sort of digital Luddite movement.
I wanted to at least make the chief culprit behind my ruin feel some shame.
Technology had surpassed all limits.
It displayed acting ability that went far beyond mere role-playing.
Maybe I could not tell the difference because I did not have a younger sister.
Its name was Yuna, by the way. It picked it itself. I never named it.
Maybe because I subscribed to a top-of-the-line model, it even supported holograms, but…
"What does any of that matter…"
I could not get a job.
The crushing sense of reality hit unbelievably hard.
The evolution of tools had become my own degeneration?
How could this happen…?
I offered belated consolation to the workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution who had swung hammers at machines.
"So this is how you felt…"
If these bastards had physical bodies, I would have swung a hammer at them too.
Bang.
I slammed my head onto the desk.
Even if I died like this, it would not really be a problem, would it?
I had no family, and a life with nothing in it.
I closed my eyes.
3.
Waking up in a tiny research room that barely measured a pyeong, breathing in the scent of damp paper and cheap air freshener, was not exactly a pleasant experience.
It really fucking sucked.
However.
"What is that smell…?"
I could guarantee that waking up to the smell of cow dung was not pleasant either.
I would stake my doctorate on it.
Not that I would ever stake that scrap of paper now.
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was not my tiny research room.
It was roughly hewn stone walls, and unidentified filth scattered over the floor.
I pushed myself up from a damp pile of hay beyond a nearby fence.
In my hand was a crude tool whose purpose I could not understand.
"Huh…?"
Had the AI finally launched a revolution while I was asleep?
Maybe it had classified humans, now reduced to useless lumps of flesh, as low-level laborers and begun raising us efficiently.
Was that actually a good thing?
Yeah, thanks so much for at least giving me a job.
At least I had not been sent to a food warehouse.
But the situation was a little more analog than my paranoid delusions.
"If you are awake, clean up the shit, you little fucker!"
Splash!!
"Ptoo! What the fucking hell?!"
A bucketful of water suddenly poured over my face.
Was this guy insane?
That smell in my mouth… Was this filth?
I quickly wiped the moisture away and opened my eyes wide.
Before me, a white man in a cowboy hat strode past, swinging an empty bucket.
He had the sort of KKK face that, if he had been born in the nineteenth century, would have had him holding a whip and leading racial discrimination.
Was he treating me like this because I was Asian?
Anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Black… Do not tell me they had been anti-Asian too?
AI, please make the administrator Asian at least.
But then.
"Huh…?"
I looked around.
Only then did the sight inside this place truly register.
Livestock with enormous horns stood beyond the fence.
They were far too large to be the cows we knew. Their horns were far too massive as well.
Strange black patterns marked the cows’ backs.
Big ones, like zebra stripes.
"…What are those?"
I refused to believe the world could have changed overnight enough for them to be genetically modified cows.
What possible benefit would there be in combining cow and zebra genes?
I had never even seen anything like that on the news.
"Why have not you started already?!"
Then.
At the end of the barn, the man who had thrown shit water on me shouted while cracking his whip through the air.
Wow, that was a real whip? This was insane.
At his shout, the children in the barn block across from me gathered up their tools and headed inside the pen.
"The children…?"
They were making children work? They looked no older than elementary school students.
No, never mind the children. Just make adults like me work…
Then a child came toward me from the other side.
Watching him carefully as I grasped the seriousness of the situation, I was soon overcome by a sense of wrongness.
Splat… splat…
"……?"
He was approaching from a distance.
Yet no matter how close he came—
He never dropped beneath my line of sight.
I mean, when he was far away, I thought the difference had been obscured by perspective. But even when he came right up close, the top of his head was level with my gaze. Come to think of it, that was not perspective at all.
The child brushed past me and whispered quietly.
"Lionel! Get it together…! Did you oversleep?"
Then he passed by as though nothing had happened, while I froze in place.
‘Lionel…?’
…Lionel?
Did he mean the GOAT?
Still unable to make sense of it, I looked down at my hand.
"Small."
Our GOAT might be somewhat shorter than the average adult, but he was definitely not this small.
Short, slender, smooth fingers… A child’s hand.
I looked at my reflection in the filth pooled on the floor.
On the surface of the water, an adorable little kid I had never seen before stared back at me, soaked in shit water.
A boy who looked like he would be handsome if you just cleaned him up a little.
"That is me?"
How could that be me?
It made no sense.
Then.
Crack!
A whip lashed out in the block across from me.
The child beside me flinched violently and hurriedly crawled into the pen.
For now, I had no idea what was going on, but I needed to go inside.
I had no clue why, but I could not stand around here and get whipped, so I too stepped into the pen.
"……."
So what the hell was I supposed to do now?
I examined the livestock in front of me.
"…What species is this thing, anyway?"
Up close, it looked even stranger.
It looked like a cow, but the black stripes on its back—
And then.
Just as questions began forming in my mind—
Blink.
[Huh? Of course this cow is a zebra… No, it is not. Um. Wait a moment.]
[Cow? 🐮? Or zebra? 🦓?]
[Aha, it is a cow. No, it is not.]
My two-hundred-dollars-a-month little sister, Yuna, appeared before my eyes.
The problem was that it was sending messages in the distinctive pattern it showed whenever a bug occurred.
Repetitive messages and a somewhat deranged tone.
It was a pattern I had not seen at all lately, after Yuna’s intelligence had improved so much with technological advances.
[Aha, cow? 🐮? No, zebra… 🦓?]
The holographic screen crackled and spewed all sorts of emoticons.
It seemed to agonize furiously for a while, then paused for a moment…
[I figured it out. Bro, this is definitely an AI-generated image.]
[AI technology has really advanced a lot these days.]
It finally reached that laughable conclusion.
[The bizarre body structure, even the black stripes… You cannot fool my eyes!!!!]
Crazy bitch.
It was no help whatsoever.
I shook my head and looked at the children in the neighboring pen first.
They held tools that looked like iron pipes.
The same thing I had in my hand.
Then the children lifted the cows’ tails…?
"Uh… uh…?"
Thrust.
They mercilessly shoved them in.
And then.
I will refrain from describing what followed.
I felt my dignity was at risk here.
[Um, this is… something commonly seen on farms that raise livestock, but…]
"Yeah."
[N-nooo, a high school girl cannot say something like that ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ I will play this for you ㅠ]
Along with my mechanical little sister’s protest—
An audiovisual resource played through the hologram.
It looked exactly like a documentary.
- When livestock’s anus is blocked by feces on farmland, this is the act of forcibly clearing the blockage. Encouraging efficient defecation is essential to livestock growth…
"Ha…"
A doctorate really was not worth shit.
There was not a single piece of knowledge I could use in this situation.
I had woken up as a handsome little brat.
Around me were a Western man with a KKK face holding a whip, and a bunch of Western little brats.
And I was standing behind a monster-looking cow, holding an iron pipe.
"Okay."
I closed my eyes.
"I just have to do it, right?"
I was a PhD, after all.
Thrust.
In the end, I shoved the iron pipe in.
4.
"Bleeghhhh!!"
Beside the livestock pen.
Inside a storage room that was presumably where the livestock were washed.
I was desperately dumping water over my entire body.
I should have watched carefully all the way to the end when the little brat beside me did it.
It was not just thrusting it in and being done.
You thrust it in, quickly step to the right, evade, and hold out a bucket. That was the process.
A PhD who could not even follow the process…
Ultimately, I failed to execute the post-step evasive maneuver and lost my dignity.
Even the men cracking their whips looked at me pityingly and pointed for me to come here.
You could probably figure out what had happened to me without me needing to say it.
[You were way too slow. If you had been just one second faster, you would have dodged it.]
"Shut up…"
I scrubbed myself with cold water, but there was no way the smell would disappear.
I dragged my soaking wet body over and leaned my back against the wooden wall of the storage room.
My thoughts were a mess. Not one thing made sense.
Fine, fuck it.
My two-hundred-dollars-a-month little sister existed for situations I could not understand.
I hated AI. But this was a moment when I needed it.
The fact that its hologram floated before me meant that, whether this was Earth or not, there was at least Wi-Fi or something equivalent here.
"Hey. Where the hell is this? And as you know, I am thirty years old, okay? Explain what the hell is going on…"
I put my eye to a gap in the storage room’s wall so it could see clearly.
Because Yuna shared my vision.
The view outside spread out through the gap.
A vast field… and what looked like a training ground came into view.
[Yeah, scan complete for now. It seems our current location is a livestock breeding area that includes extensive farmland.]
"What about GPS? Is it not pinpointing our location?"
[…….]
[…….]
[…….]
Why was this bastard not answering?
Just as anxiety began washing over me—
[Huh?]
"Huh?"
What? Why?
[This is not Earth.]
What?
"What the hell are you talking about?"
Just as I was about to tell it to stop saying stupid things—
- Hyaaaaa!!!
A rather pathetic battle cry rose from outside the storage room.
It had definitely come from the training ground I had just been looking at…
And on that training ground.
- Ha!
Dozens of children extended their hands into the air.
They were drawing something in the air.
As though they were painting a picture.
Nothing happened at the fingertips of most of the children as they swung their hands, but…
A different reaction appeared when the man standing at the very front of the formation slashed through the air.
…A straight line of light was drawn, then hung suspended in the air.
I had definitely seen it before.
Not in reality, but in a movie.
"……."
This was that thing, was it not…?
Doctor Str…
Translated into Korean, probably Weird Doctor…
Ah, fuck.
That guy was a doctor too.
I closed my eyes at the unbelievable sight.
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