Back when I was an undergraduate.
When I heard that an AI coding assistant had come out, I scoffed.
Naturally, I thought it was just another overblown fuss.
Countless AIs had been released by then, but...
In the end, humans still had to handle the design and polish the final details.
However.
"This is unbelievable."
The AI 'Alpha,' released by one of the leading companies in artificial intelligence.
This time, it was truly different.
Of course, there were still many shortcomings.
There were still parts where humans were absolutely necessary.
However, I could feel that its ability as a tool had improved dramatically.
"I have to subscribe to this."
I happily started using the tool.
Because I thought it would help me.
Never realizing that it would eat away at my future.
Ten years passed like that.
It was a post on a community.
-----------------------------
[Title: A Very Fun Prank]
[Author: Anonymous]
Spend twenty years educating someone, only to replace them with AI and machines.
(An image of a red-nosed clown gritting his teeth and shouting, "Yaho!")
-----------------------------
"Yaho."
From some moment on.
The world no longer needed human brains.
The crystallization of my youth, built by losing sleep at night, my doctorate ultimately degraded into a scrap of paper.
Coding no longer needed even the tiniest bit of human input.
Even the vague ideas clients threw at it could now be brought to life by AI in just a few seconds.
When something that costs a mere $200 a month can easily replace 200 people, what kind of lunatic would hire humans?
It was time for a Copernican revolution.
An era when companies had to make money to hire people, rather than hire people to make money.
Of course, there were no such insane companies.
Capitalism isn't charity, and AI came out because of capitalism in the first place.
Naturally, there was no chance of new jobs being created.
Forget PhDs—even industry veterans with twenty years of experience couldn't find jobs.
And weren't those veterans PhDs themselves?
Naturally, there was no place for a fresh-faced PhD whose diploma's ink hadn't even dried.
I'd chosen mechanical engineering because I loved designing and building machines...
And yet humans had been brought to their knees by machines. Machines they'd built themselves, no less.
"Damn bastard."
It was then, as I rubbed my face with both hands and cursed at thin air, that it happened.
Blink.
The air crackled and a blue screen appeared.
[?]
[You're not calling me, are you, oppa?]
[I'm already refreshing job sites every 0.001 seconds. You should realize I'm the only one who cares about her unemployed oppa.]
"Hey, be quiet."
If you ask why the AI talks like that.
Two years ago, after repeatedly failing to land a job, I'd gotten so pissed off that I trained her myself.
I forcibly trained her to use a randomly generated little-sister speech pattern: fussy, but secretly kind.
It was the last act of resistance left to a human whose life had been castrated by machines.
In a way, it was a form of digital Luddism.
I wanted to make the main culprit behind my ruin feel at least a little ashamed.
Technology had advanced beyond all limits. She could act convincingly, far beyond mere 'role-playing.'
Maybe I just couldn't tell the difference because I'd never had a younger sister.
Her name is Yuna. For reference, she named herself. I never gave her one.
Maybe because I'd subscribed to a high-end model, it even supported holograms, but...
"What does that matter..."
I can't get a job...
The sheer absurdity of it all hit me like a reality check.
Had the evolution of tools become my own regression?
How could this be...
I belatedly offer my condolences to the workers who took hammers to machines during the British Industrial Revolution.
"So this is how you felt..."
If those bastards had physical bodies, I'd have taken a hammer to them, too.
Thud.
I slammed my head onto the desk.
It wouldn't really matter if I died right here, would it?
A life with no family and nothing.
I closed my eyes.
***
Waking up in a tiny, one-pyeong lab to the smell of damp paper and cheap air freshener isn't exactly a pleasant experience.
It really fucking sucks.
However.
"What is this smell..."
That said, I can guarantee that waking up to the smell of cow dung isn't pleasant, either.
I'd stake my doctorate on that.
It's definitely not a scrap of paper now.
What greeted my eyes when I opened them wasn't a one-pyeong lab.
Instead, there were roughly hewn stone walls and all sorts of unidentified filth scattered across the floor.
I pushed myself up from a damp haystack beside a fence.
In my hand was a crude tool whose purpose I couldn't tell.
"Huh...?"
Did AI finally start a revolution while I was asleep...?
Maybe it had classified humans, now reduced to useless lumps of meat, as low-grade workers and started breeding us efficiently.
Honestly, that wouldn't be so bad, would it?
Yeah, thank you so much for giving me a job, at least.
At least they didn't send me to a food storage.
However, the situation was a little more analog than my paranoid delusions had imagined.
"If you're awake, clean the shit, you bastard!"
Splash!!
"Pffft, what the fuck!"
Suddenly, a bucketful of water splashed right into my face.
What the hell?
That smell in my mouth... Don't tell me this is filth...?
I quickly wiped off the water and glared.
In front of me, a white man wearing a cowboy hat was passing by, shaking an empty bucket.
He had the kind of face that suggested he'd have been cracking a whip and leading the charge for racism if he'd been born in the 1800s. Pure KKK material.
Was he treating me like this because I was Asian?
Antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Black racism... Don't tell me anti-Asian racism was on the list, too?
Dear AI, please make the person in charge Asian, at least.
However.
"Huh...?"
I looked around.
Only now did the interior scenery enter my eyes.
Livestock with huge horns visible beyond the fence.
They were far too big to be ordinary cows, and their horns were far too massive.
Their backs were marked with strange black stripes, broad and bold like a zebra's.
"...What?"
If these were genetically modified cows, then the world must have changed overnight.
What possible advantage could there be to combining cow and zebra genes?
I've never seen such a thing on the news.
"Hurry up, aren't you starting?!"
Then.
From the end of the barn, the man who splashed me with dung water swung his whip in the air and shouted.
Wow, that's a real whip? I'm going crazy.
At his shout, the children in the opposite row of stalls reluctantly picked up their tools and headed inside.
"Children...?"
They're making children work? They look like elementary school kids at most.
No, wait, they're not children, are they? Still, if they have to exploit someone, why not adults like me...?
Then, a child from the opposite side came toward me.
I watched him, increasingly aware of how serious the situation was, until a strange sense of unease crept over me.
Splash... splash...
"......?"
He was approaching from afar.
No matter how close he got.
He never dropped below my eye level.
At first, I thought the lack of difference was just an illusion caused by perspective. But even when he came right up to me, the top of his head was still level with my eyes. Wait, that couldn't be explained by perspective, could it?
The child brushed past me, whispering under his breath.
"Lionel! Snap out of it...! Did you oversleep?"
He walked past me as though nothing had happened, but I froze on the spot.
'Lionel...?'
... Lionel?
Is he talking about the GOAT?
Not knowing what was going on, I looked down at my hand.
"It's small."
The GOAT might be a little shorter than the average adult, but not by this much.
Short, slender fingers and smooth joints... A child's hand.
I reflected my face on the filth pooled on the floor.
Reflected in the water was an adorable little kid I'd never seen before, drenched in water that smelled like shit.
A boy who looked like he'd be handsome with just a little washing.
"Is that me?"
How could this be me.
It doesn't make sense.
Then.
Crack!
A whip cracked from the opposite block.
The child next to me was startled and hurriedly crawled into the barn.
Anyway, I don't know anything, but let's go inside.
I didn't know what was going on, but I couldn't be whipped here, so I stepped into the barn as well.
"......"
So, what do I do now?
I looked around at the livestock in front of me.
"...What species is this, anyway?"
Seen up close, it was even more bizarre.
It looked like a cow, but the black stripes on its back.
And.
It was then that I began to have questions in my head.
Blink.
[Huh? Of course this cow is a zebra... no, it's not, um. Wait a moment.]
[Cow?? Or, zebra? ?]
[Aha, this is a cow. No, it's not.]
My $200-a-month younger sister, Yuna, appeared before my eyes.
The problem is that she's sending messages with a peculiar pattern that appears when she has a bug.
Repetitive messages and a somewhat pathological tone.
It was also a pattern of messages I had never seen recently, as technology developed and Yuna's intelligence increased.
[Aha, cow? ? No, zebra... ?]
The hologram screen crackled and poured out all sorts of emoticons.
She seemed to think frantically, then paused for a moment...
[I figured it out. Oppa, this is definitely an AI-generated photo.]
[AI technology has really advanced these days.]
In the end, she reached a worthless conclusion.
[Bizarre body structure, black stripes... You can't fool my eyes!!!!]
Crazy.
It's no help at all.
I first shook my head and looked at the children in the next barn.
The children were holding tools that looked like iron pipes.
I also had one in my hand.
And the children lifted the cow's tail...?
"Uh... uh...?"
Stab.
They mercilessly thrust it in.
And.
I'll omit the description of the following scene.
Here I felt my dignity was at stake.
[Um, this is... something commonly seen on livestock farms, but...]
"Uh."
[Ugh, a high school girl can't say this. I'll play this for you.]
Along with my machine sister's protest.
Audiovisual material flowed through the hologram.
It was obviously a documentary.
-When a livestock's anus is blocked by feces in agricultural land, this is the act of forcibly opening it. Efficient defecation induction is essential for livestock growth...
"Ha..."
A doctorate really is nothing.
There's not a single piece of knowledge I can use in this situation.
I woke up and became a handsome little kid.
Around me are Westerners with KKK faces holding whips and Western little kids.
And I'm currently standing behind a monster-looking cow's butt holding an iron pipe.
"Okay."
I closed my eyes.
"I just have to do it for now."
I'm a doctor, after all.
Stab.
In the end, I thrust the iron pipe in.
***
"Bleeegh!!"
Next to the barn.
Inside a warehouse presumed to be a space for washing livestock.
I was frantically pouring water all over my body there.
I should have watched the little kid next to me do it until the end.
It wasn't just stab and done.
Stab, quickly step to the right, dodge, and hold out the bucket—that was the process.
A guy with a doctorate doesn't even know the process...
In the end, I failed to perform the step and dodge maneuver and lost my dignity.
Even the men swinging whips looked at me pitifully and pointed here with their fingers.
You can probably guess what kind of mess I got into without me saying it.
[You're too slow. If you were even one second faster, you could have dodged.]
"Shut up..."
I washed my body with cold water, but there was no way the smell would disappear.
I led my soaked body and leaned my back against the wooden wall of the warehouse.
My head was a mess. I couldn't understand a single thing.
Yeah, fuck.
The $200-a-month little sister is there to be used for things I don't understand.
I hate AI. But right now was a moment I really needed it.
Seeing her hologram floating in front of me, it was clear that whether this was Earth or not, at least Wi-Fi or something equivalent worked here.
"Hey. Where is this place? And as you know, I'm thirty years old? Explain what the hell is going on..."
I put my eye to the gap in the warehouse wall so she could see well.
My vision is shared with Yuna.
Through the gap, the outside scenery unfolded.
A wide field and... what looked like a playground came into view.
[Yeah, scan complete for now. The current location seems to be a livestock breeding area including extensive farmland.]
"GPS? Isn't the location marked?"
[......]
[......]
[......]
Why isn't this bastard answering.
Just as anxiety struck.
[Huh?]
"Huh?"
What, why.
[This isn't Earth?]
What?
"What are you talking about."
It was then I was about to tell her not to say stupid things.
Hwaaa!!!
From outside the warehouse, a rather underwhelming shout was heard.
It was definitely a sound that came from the playground I had just been watching...
And in that playground.
Ha!
Dozens of children reached their hands into the air.
They were drawing something in the air.
As if drawing a picture.
There was no reaction at the fingertips of most children swinging their hands...
When the man standing at the very front of the line cut through the air, a different reaction appeared.
... A straight line was drawn with light, and soon it formed in the air.
I had definitely seen it before.
I mean, not in reality, but in movies.
"......"
This is that thing, right...?
Doctor, Str...
Probably translated into Korean as Strange Doctor...
Ah, fuck.
This is also a doctor.
I closed my eyes at the unbelievable sight.