Chapter 1
1.
Back when I was an undergraduate.
When they said an AI that helped with coding had been released, I scoffed.
Of course, I assumed it was just another overblown announcement.
Countless AIs had come out by then, but….
In the end, humans always had to handle the design and the final details.
However.
“This is insane.”
The AI ‘Alpha,’ released by the leading company in artificial intelligence.
This time, it really was different.
Of course, it still had plenty of shortcomings.
There were still things that absolutely required humans.
But I could feel its capabilities as a tool had improved by leaps and bounds.
“I’m subscribing to this.”
I used the tool happily.
Because I thought it would help me.
Without knowing it was gnawing away at my future.
2.
Ten years passed like that.
It was a post from an online community.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡ
[Title: A Very Funny Prank]
[Author: Anonymous]
Study an AI for twenty years, then replace it with a machine
(A meme of a red-nosed clown gritting his teeth and yelling “Yay!”)
ㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡ
“Yay.”
At some point,
the world no longer had any need for the human brain.
The culmination of my youth, built up through sleepless nights—the doctorate I’d worked for—had ultimately become a scrap of paper.
Human help was no longer needed for coding in the slightest.
Even vague fantasies tossed out by clients could be fully realized by AI in mere seconds.
If it could casually replace two hundred humans for just $200 a month, what lunatic would hire people?
The time had come for a Copernican revolution.
An age when companies didn’t make money to hire people, but made money so they could hire people.
Of course, no such deranged companies existed.
Capitalism wasn’t a charity, after all—and AI itself had appeared because of capitalism in the first place.
Naturally, there was no chance any new jobs would appear.
A doctorate, my ass. Even industry veterans with twenty years of experience couldn’t find work.
As if those veterans hadn’t been PhDs themselves.
Naturally, a fresh-faced PhD whose ink hadn’t even dried had nowhere to stand.
I had chosen mechanical engineering because I loved designing and building machines….
Humanity had collapsed before machines like that.
Machines they had fucking made themselves, too.
“Damn it.”
It was then, while I was rubbing my face dry and cursing at the air.
- Wink.
The air crackled, and a blue-lit screen appeared.
[?]
[You’re not calling me, are you, big bro?]
[I’m already refreshing the job sites at 0.001-second intervals. Get it through your head that I’m the only one who cares about my unemployed big bro.]
“Hey, shut up.”
If you’re wondering why the AI talked like that.
Two years ago, after repeatedly failing in the job market, I got so pissed off that I trained it.
A forced-random-speech training regimen for a prickly but secretly kind little sister.
It was the last act of resistance available to a human whose life had been castrated by machines.
In a way, you could call it a sort of digital Luddite movement.
I wanted to at least make the main culprit behind my ruin feel ashamed.
Technology had advanced beyond its limits.
And it had developed acting skills that went beyond mere ‘role-playing.’
Maybe I just couldn’t tell because I didn’t have a younger sister.
Her name was Yuna, by the way. She named herself; I never named her.
Maybe because I subscribed to a fairly premium model, it even supported holograms, but….
“What does that matter….”
I couldn’t get a job….
The reality check hit me ridiculously hard.
Had the evolution of tools become my devolution?
How could this happen….
I send my belated consolation to the workers who swung hammers at machines during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
“So this is how you felt….”
If these bastards had physical bodies, I would’ve swung a hammer at them too.
- Bang.
I slammed my head onto the desk.
Even if I died like this. It probably wouldn’t be a problem.
I had no family and nothing else. It was an empty life.
I closed my eyes.
3.
Waking up in a one-pyeong laboratory while smelling damp paper and cheap air freshener isn’t exactly a pleasant experience.
It was fucking awful.
However.
“What is that smell…?”
Still, I can guarantee that waking up to the smell of cow dung wouldn’t be a pleasant experience either.
I stake my doctorate on it.
And I absolutely do not mean that it’s a scrap of paper now.
The moment I opened my eyes, what came into view wasn’t my one-pyeong laboratory.
It was roughly hewn stone walls and unidentified filth rolling around on the floor.
I pushed myself up from the damp haystack beyond the fence beside it.
A crude tool of unknown purpose was clutched in my hand.
“Huh…?”
Could it be that while I was asleep… AI had finally started a revolution?
Maybe it had classified humans reduced to useless slabs of meat as low-level laborers and begun raising them efficiently.
On second thought, great?
Right, thank you so much for giving me a job, at least.
Could’ve been worse—you didn’t ship me off to a food warehouse.
However, reality was a little more analog than my paranoia.
“If you’re awake, clean up the shit, you bastard!”
- Splash!!
“Gurgle-gurgle, what the fuck?!”
A bucketful of water suddenly poured over my face.
What the hell?
The smell in my mouth… Could this be filth…?
I quickly wiped off the water and opened my eyes wide.
Before me, a white man wearing a cowboy hat walked past, shaking an empty bucket.
The kind of face that looked like he would have carried a whip and spearheaded racism in the KKK if he’d been born in the 1800s.
Was he treating me this way because I was Asian?
Anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Black… Don’t tell me there was even an anti-Asian faction?
AI, please make the administrator Asian, at least.
However.
“Huh…?”
I looked around.
Only then did the scenery inside come into view.
Beyond the fence were livestock with enormous horns.
They were far too large to be what we commonly knew as cows, and their horns were far too massive.
Strange black patterns were stamped across the cows’ backs.
Broad stripes, like a zebra’s.
“…What?”
I believed the world couldn’t change overnight just because these were genetically modified cows.
What possible benefit would there be to combining cow and zebra genes?
I’d never seen anything like that on the news, either.
“Are you going to start already?!”
Then.
At the far end of the cowshed, the man who had thrown dung water on me cracked his whip through the air and shouted.
Wow, that really is a whip. This is insane.
At his shout, the children in the cowshed block across from me gathered up their tools and shuffled into the shed.
“The kids…?”
They were making children work? They looked elementary-school age at most.
No, okay, they weren’t exactly children. Still, they could’ve made adults like me work….
Just then, a child approached me from the opposite side.
Watching the child as I sensed the seriousness of the situation, I was soon overcome by a sense of wrongness.
- Splish… splish….
“……”
The child was approaching from far away.
No matter how close the child came.
The child never dropped below my field of vision.
I mean, I thought the difference wasn’t noticeable from far away because of perspective, but even when the child came right up to me, the crown of their head was level with my line of sight. Come to think of it, that wasn’t perspective either, was it?
The child passed by me and whispered quietly.
“Lionel! Get a grip…! Did you oversleep?”
The child passed right by me as if nothing had happened, but I froze in place.
‘Lionel…?’
…Lionel?
Could they mean GOAT?
At a loss, I looked down at my hands.
“They’re small.”
Our GOAT is a little short of the average adult height, but it absolutely isn’t this small.
Short, thin, smooth fingers… a child’s hand.
I reflected my face in the filth pooled on the floor.
On its surface, an adorable little kid I had never seen before stared back at me, soaked in dung water.
A boy who, at a glance, looked like he’d turn out handsome after just a little washing….
“Is that me?”
How could this be me?
This made no sense.
Just then.
- Crack!
A whip cracked in the block across from us.
The child beside me jumped and hurriedly crawled into the cowshed.
For now, I had no idea what was going on, but let’s go inside.
I didn’t know what was happening, but I couldn’t just stand around getting whipped here, so I stepped into the cowshed too.
“……”
So what am I supposed to do now?
I looked around at the livestock in front of me.
“…What species is this thing, anyway?”
Up close, it was even stranger.
It looked like a cow, but the black streaks on its back….
And.
It was just then, as I began to wonder about it.
- Wink.
[Huh? Obviously, this cow is a zebra… No, it isn’t, hmm. Hold on.]
[A cow? 🐮? Or a zebra? 🦓?]
[Aha, this is a cow. No, wait, no it isn’t.]
My $200-a-month little sister, Yuna, appeared before my eyes.
The problem was that she was sending messages in the peculiar pattern she displayed whenever a bug occurred.
Repetitive messages and a somewhat pathological tone.
It was also a messaging pattern I hadn’t seen at all in recent years, since Yuna’s intelligence had increased along with advances in technology.
[Aha, a cow? 🐮? No, a zebra… 🦓?]
The holographic screen crackled and spewed out all kinds of emojis.
She seemed to agonize over it frantically, then paused for a moment and….
[I figured it out. Big bro, this is definitely an AI-generated image.]
[AI technology sure has advanced a lot these days.]
In the end, she reached a ridiculous conclusion.
[The bizarre body structure, even the black stripes… You can’t fool my eyes!!!!]
Fuck.
She was completely useless.
For now, I shook my head and looked at the children in the neighboring cowshed.
The children were holding tools that looked like metal pipes.
It was the same thing I was holding.
Then the children lifted the cow’s tail…?
“Uh… uh…?”
- Thunk.
They shoved it in without mercy.
And then.
I’ll omit the description of what happened next.
I felt my dignity was in danger here.
[Well, this is something you often see on a livestock ranch, but….]
“Huh.”
[Uhh, a high school girl can’t talk about this kind of thing ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ I’ll play this for you instead ㅠ]
Along with my mechanical little sister’s protest.
Audiovisual material played through the hologram.
It was obviously a documentary, judging by the production quality.
- In agricultural areas, when a livestock animal’s anus becomes blocked with feces, this procedure forcibly opens it. Efficiently inducing defecation is essential to livestock growth….
“Ha….”
A doctorate really was worth jack shit.
Not a single bit of my knowledge was useful in this situation.
I’d gone to sleep and woken up as a handsome elementary-schooler.
Around me were a Western man with a KKK face and Western elementary-schoolers.
And now I was standing behind the ass of a cow that looked like a monster, holding a metal pipe.
“Okay.”
I closed my eyes.
“I just have to do it.”
I had a doctorate, after all.
- Thunk.
In the end, I shoved the metal pipe in.
4.
“Bleeegh!!”
Beside the cowshed.
Inside a warehouse that was presumably where the livestock were washed.
I was dousing my entire body with water like a madman.
I should have watched the kid beside me carefully all the way to the end.
It wasn’t just a matter of shoving it in and being done.
The process included shoving it in, quickly stepping to the right, dodging, and thrusting the dipper forward.
Even a PhD should know the process….
In the end, because I failed to perform the step-and-dodge maneuver.
I lost my dignity, and even the men who had been cracking their whips looked at me with pity and pointed for me to go here.
I don’t need to explain what kind of state I was left in.
[You were sluggish as hell. If you’d been one second faster, you could’ve dodged it.]
“Shut up….”
I washed myself with cold water, but there was no way the smell would disappear.
I dragged my damp body over and leaned my back against the wooden wall of the warehouse.
My head was a mess. I couldn’t understand a single thing.
Right, fuck.
A $200-a-month little sister exists for situations you can’t understand.
I hated AI. But this was exactly when I needed it.
Since her hologram was floating before my eyes, it was certain that, whether this was Earth or not, there was at least Wi-Fi or something equivalent available here.
“Hey. Where the hell are we? And as you know, I’m thirty years old, right? Explain what the hell is going on….”
I pressed my eye to a gap between the warehouse walls so she could see clearly.
My field of vision was shared with Yuna, after all.
The scenery outside spread out through the gap.
A wide field and… what looked like a sports field came into view.
[Yeah, I’ve finished scanning for now. It looks like our current location is a livestock facility that includes a vast stretch of farmland.]
“What about GPS? Can’t you pinpoint our location?”
[…….]
[…….]
[…….]
Why the hell wasn’t she answering?
Just as anxiety began to creep over me.
[Huh?]
“Huh?”
What? Why?
[This isn’t Earth?]
What?
“What are you talking about?”
It was just as I was about to tell her to stop saying stupid things.
- Hwaaaah!!!
A remarkably deflated battle cry rang out from outside the warehouse.
It had definitely come from the sports field I had been watching just moments ago….
And on that sports field.
- Ha!
Dozens of children were reaching their hands toward the air.
They were drawing something in the air.
As if they were drawing a picture.
Most of the children got no reaction at all from their waving fingertips, but….
When the man at the front of the formation sliced his hand through the air, a different reaction appeared.
…A straight line was drawn in light, then soon took shape in the air.
I’d definitely seen it before.
I mean, not in reality, but in a movie.
“……”
This is that thing, isn’t it…?
Doctor, Str….
If you translated it into Korean, it’d be a weird doctor….
Ah, fuck.
Another doctorate.
I closed my eyes at the unbelievable sight.