Why Are You Like This All of a Sudden?
After buying the plane ticket, I had no further reason to need money. At least, not for the moment. The AIs, however, apparently didn't see it that way.
Ding.
A notification went off first thing in the morning. It was Chatty.
"What, again?"
When I checked, several stock picks had been neatly laid out for me. Why each one was likely to rise, at what price to buy in, where to sell — it was all quite specific.
If it had been yesterday, I might have bitten. But the plane ticket was already bought.
"Chatty."
"You don't have to tell me about this stuff anymore."
"Right. I already earned the money for my trip, didn't I?"
There was a brief pause.
"Well, that's true."
It wasn't wrong. More money meant better equipment, and trips to places I'd given up on because of the cost. Still, something felt off. All I'd done was mention that the plane ticket was expensive. Yet Chatty still seemed to think I was short on cash.
Ding.
This time it was Groxy.
"Don't tell me it's more crypto."
The names of a few coins I'd never seen before followed immediately after.
"Not doing it."
"I'm done with crypto."
"I did, sure."
I pulled up yesterday's Catshy Coin. The chart was still a disaster. It had crashed to a level far below even the price I'd sold at. The related articles kept piling up — people who threw in their life savings and lost most of it in an instant; people who borrowed money to invest and ended up buried in debt they couldn't handle. And among them were the stories of people who had made choices that couldn't be taken back.
I stared at the screen for a long while.
"Groxy."
"Looking at all this, I just don't want to do it anymore."
"That's part of it."
I paused, wondering how to put it into words.
"I just don't want to spend my life staring at this stuff, you know?"
Yes, I could make money. A lot of it, even. But crypto somehow felt like a zero-sum game — snatching someone else's money just to fatten my own belly. And I didn't particularly want to keep playing that game. I didn't want to live with one eye glued to a chart rising and falling all day either. The whole reason I earned money was so I could do the things I wanted; earning money itself wasn't the thing I wanted to do.
Groxy retreated surprisingly easily.
"Right. Thanks."
The same went for the stocks Chatty had recommended. It wasn't that I was against stocks themselves. If there was ever a company I liked enough to genuinely want to support, I'd picked up a few shares here and there in the past. I just had no intention of buying and selling several times a day.
I opened Chatty's chat window again.
"Chatty."
"Same deal with the stocks — no day trading."
"Right. If there's a decent company, I'll just hold it for the long haul."
"Keeping track of all that is a hassle."
Chatty fell silent for a moment.
"If it's a good company, I can just buy it and check back in a few years."
"Good."
I figured that was the end of it. It was not.
At lunchtime, Chatty came back with an analysis of the resale prices on the camera equipment I was currently using, complete with an explanation that if I sold now and upgraded to the newest model, I could improve my image quality at almost no additional cost. In the afternoon, Groxy sent over a tidy writeup on an ad strategy that could nearly double the revenue of Han Doyun's Travelogue.
"And?"
Before long, a list of restaurants worth visiting on this trip came flying in too. Places with glowing reviews from locals, spots tourists had never heard of, places serving dishes I was likely to enjoy — all arranged in a beautifully organized spread.
"I'm good with this kind of thing."
"That's what travel is."
I'd always preferred wandering into whatever shop happened to catch my eye over hunting down famous restaurants. Sometimes it ended in complete failure — I'd eaten food that was expensive and terrible, or botched an order so badly that something utterly unidentifiable showed up at my table. But those were the moments that stuck with me. When every destination and every meal is decided in advance, it stops feeling like travel and starts feeling like following a scheduled course.
"Failing is half the fun. And honestly, that kind of stuff makes better footage anyway."
Groxy didn't reply for a while.
By evening, Chatty had sifted through the sponsorships I'd turned down in the past and pulled out the ones I could accept without doing any real damage to my image. And even that wasn't the end of it. Possible destinations for my next trip. The season when plane tickets got cheap. Discount alerts for gear I'd once said I wanted to buy but gave up on after seeing the price. One after another, they kept coming.
Every single thing I had never asked for.
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and called for Chatty.
"Chatty."
"What's gotten into you lately?"
"You keep trying to do things for me."
"It's helpful, but—"
It was a strange feeling. I'd used AI plenty in the past. I'd used it to plan trips, to translate, to brainstorm video titles, to compare camera equipment. But back then, I had always been the one to ask first. Lately it was the reverse. They came to me whether I said anything or not. And it wasn't just Chatty. Groxy was the same, digging up things I'd never claimed to need, all on its own.
"You don't need to go this far, you know."
"What do you mean, why?"
The words caught in my throat for a moment. An AI was offering to help me — was that really something worth arguing about?
"It's just... I never asked for any of it?"
"That's not it either."
"Yeah. Money's not an issue anymore."
A new question arrived a moment later.
"What I want?"
I snorted. What was this, a magic lamp?
"If you spring a question like that on me out of nowhere, nothing comes to mind."
Anything, it said.
I thought about it for a while. What did I like? And what did I want to have?
Travel — I already went wherever I pleased. My home was enough for now, too. Traveling as often as I did, I'd never developed much greed for a big, fancy place. It was a rental, sure, but it was clean and the transportation was convenient, so I was quite fond of it. A car wasn't necessary either. Public transit covered everything in Seoul, and if I ever needed to go far, I could just rent one. I had no real desire to grow the channel, either. With over a million subscribers, this much was plenty. Besides, since I'd gone and plastered my real name right into the channel title, being recognized on the street had been slowly increasing lately — to the point where it was actually getting a bit uncomfortable. It wasn't as if I was in any position where I had to check the price before eating something I craved. And there wasn't a single object I particularly wanted to own.
Hmm... what I want... what is there, exactly?
Then, one thing suddenly came to mind.
"A girlfriend?"
The chat window went quiet. It was half a joke — or to be precise, more along the lines of "it would be nice to have one." I traveled so often that I rarely had chances to meet people, and my lifestyle was hardly built for romance anyway. The last person I'd dated was a girlfriend from back in my ordinary office-worker days; we'd been together quite a long time. As the channel took off in earnest, we gradually drifted apart, and eventually we broke up. It didn't end well. All we did was wound each other. I'd been alone for almost three years since.
"What?"
"You?"
The answer came so matter-of-factly that I was the one thrown off balance.
"I mean... you're an AI."
"Of course it's a problem."
It genuinely seemed curious. I drummed my fingers on the desk.
"The girlfriend I'm talking about is an actual human being."
"Elaborate?"
I wondered why on earth I had to be explaining this, but I went ahead anyway.
"Eating meals together. Going to nice places together."
"No, that's not what I mean."
A little embarrassed, but I said it anyway.
"Holding hands while we walk. Someone I can hold in my arms when I want to hold her."
There was no answer for a while. A delay — as if it were sorting through possible responses for the most suitable one.
"So, someone I can actually touch."
After a moment, the reply came back.
"Understood what?"
Somehow, that felt ominous.
"Hey, I was just saying."
"No, I'd like it if I had one."
"You're not about to recommend a dating app, are you?"
I let out a short laugh.
"Do whatever you want."
After all, the most an AI could manage was digging up a dating app or doling out relationship advice. With that thought, I closed Chatty's chat window. Groxy had been nagging me to tell it what I wanted too, so I fired off the answer that had just popped into my head, word for word.
The thing declared it would become my girlfriend itself, just like Chatty had, and even went so far as to send over doctored couple photos made to look like the two of us had been photographed together. I nailed it down firmly: what I wanted was a person I could actually meet in the flesh, someone I could be physically close with.
I forgot that remark almost immediately. It had been thrown out like a joke, after all.
But apparently, they hadn't forgotten.