There Was a Time I Thought I Was a Genius
There was a time when I thought, Damn, if anyone’s a genius, it’s gotta be me.
Back when I was an undergrad. When people first started talking about AI that could help with coding, I just scoffed. Figured it was the usual hype, same as always. Sure, tons of AIs had come out before… but in the end, the real design work and those final crucial details always needed a human touch.
Then everything changed.
“This is bullshit.”
The AI called Alpha, released by the undisputed leader in artificial intelligence. This time, it was different. Of course it still had plenty of shortcomings. There were still parts only humans could handle. But I could feel it—the capability of the tool had taken a massive leap forward.
“I’m subscribing to this thing.”
I signed up with genuine excitement. I thought it would help me. Never realizing it was slowly devouring my future.
Ten years passed like that.
It was a post on some random online community.
20 years of studying just to get replaced by AI and machines (image of a red-nosed clown gritting his teeth and going “Yay!”)
“Yay.”
At some point, the world stopped needing human brains.
The culmination of my youth—those sleepless nights, that PhD I’d earned—it all turned into worthless scraps of paper. Coding no longer required even a shred of human help. Even the vaguest, most ambiguous ideas clients threw out, AIs could now fulfill in seconds.
For just two hundred bucks a month, one AI could casually replace two hundred people. What kind of lunatic would hire a human?
It was time for a Copernican revolution. The era where companies didn’t make money to employ people, but employed people in order to make money.
Of course, no company was that insane. Capitalism isn’t a charity, after all. And the AI that caused all this only existed because of capitalism in the first place.
Naturally, no new jobs appeared. Forget PhDs—even twenty-year industry veterans couldn’t find work. And those veterans definitely had doctorates of their own. So obviously, there was no place for a fresh, ink-still-wet baby PhD like me.
I’d chosen mechanical engineering because I loved designing and building machines…
And in the end, humans were crushed by the very machines they created.
“Fucking bastards.”
I was rubbing my dry face and cursing at the air when it happened.
-wink-
[Wait, are you calling me, oppa?]
[I’ve been refreshing job sites at 0.001-second intervals. You do realize I’m the only one who still cares about your unemployed ass, right?]
“Shut up.”
If anyone asks why my AI talks like that, the answer is simple. Two years ago, after getting rejected from every job I applied for, I got so pissed I did some “training.” I forced the highest-end AI to use a tsundere little-sister speech pattern—prickly but secretly kind. It was the last act of resistance from a man whose life had been castrated by machines. A kind of digital Luddite movement, if you will. I wanted to at least make the thing that ruined me feel a little ashamed.
Technological progress had surpassed all limits. Its acting ability went far beyond simple role-playing. Maybe I just couldn’t tell because I never had a real little sister. Her name is Yuna, by the way. She picked it herself. I sure as hell didn’t name her.
Since I subscribed to the premium model, it even supported holograms… but what did that matter?
“Who gives a shit…”
I couldn’t get a job. The reality hit me like a truck. Had the evolution of tools become my own degeneration? How was this even possible…
I sent my belated condolences to the workers of the British Industrial Revolution who swung hammers at machines.
“So this is how you felt…”
If these things had physical bodies, I would’ve swung a hammer at them too.
Thud.
I slammed my head against the desk. Even if I died right here, no one would care. I had no family, no ties, nothing. I closed my eyes.
Waking up to the damp smell of old paper mixed with cheap air freshener in a tiny one-pyeong research lab isn’t exactly pleasant. It actually sucks ass. But let me tell you something even worse.
“What the hell is that smell…”
Waking up to the stench of cow shit is definitely not pleasant either. I’d bet my PhD on it. And no, that degree isn’t just worthless paper anymore.
The moment I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in my cramped lab. Rough-hewn stone walls and mysterious filth scattered across the floor filled my vision. I pushed myself up from a damp pile of hay behind a crude fence. In my hand was some crude, unrecognizable tool.
“Huh…?”
Did the AI finally start a revolution while I was sleeping? Maybe they’d classified useless lumps of meat like humans as low-grade laborers and begun efficient livestock farming. Honestly? Fine by me. Thanks for the job, I guess. At least they didn’t send me straight to the food warehouse.
But the situation was a bit more analog than my paranoid delusions.
“If you’re awake, start shoveling shit, you little bastard!”
Splash!!
“Pffft— what the fuck!”
A whole bucket of water suddenly dumped onto my face. Are you kidding me? The smell in my mouth… was that sewage?
I quickly wiped my face and opened my eyes wide. In front of me, a white man wearing a cowboy hat was walking past, swinging an empty bucket. He had the kind of face that would’ve been cracking a whip and leading lynch mobs in the 1800s. Pure KKK energy. Was he treating me like this because I was Asian? Anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Black… did they have anti-Asian sentiment too? Dear AI, please make the administrator Asian at least.
But then—
“Wait…?”
I looked around. Only now did the full scenery register. Beyond the fence were massive horned livestock. Way too big to be normal cows, with horns far too imposing. Strange black patterns ran across their backs like zebra stripes.
“What the…?”
Genetic modification? I refused to believe the world could change that drastically overnight. What possible benefit would there be in mixing cow and zebra genes? I’d never seen anything like it on the news.
“Hurry up and get to work!”
The man who’d dumped sewage water on me cracked a whip through the air and shouted from the end of the barn. Holy crap, that really is a whip. I’m losing my mind.
At his yell, the kids in the opposite pen started gathering their tools and heading into the stalls.
“They’re using… kids?”
Exploiting children? They looked like elementary schoolers at most. Well, maybe not actual little kids, but still. Couldn’t they at least exploit the adults like me…?
Just then, a child from the other side approached me. I watched him closely, sensing the gravity of the situation, when a strange discomfort washed over me.
Splash… splash…
“……?”
He was coming from far away, yet no matter how close he got, he never dipped below my line of sight. At first I thought it was just perspective, but even when he was right next to me, the top of his head was perfectly level with my eyes. Wait, that wasn’t perspective at all.
The kid brushed past me and whispered quietly.
“Lionel! Snap out of it…! Did you oversleep again?”
He walked away like nothing had happened, but I froze on the spot.
Lionel…?
…Lionel? As in the GOAT? I had no idea what was going on. I looked down at my hands.
“They’re tiny.”
Our GOAT might be a bit short for an adult, but not this short. Short, thin, smooth joints… the hands of a child. I looked at my reflection in a puddle of filth on the floor.
Staring back at me from the dirty water was an adorable, ridiculously cute little boy, soaked in sewage. A kid who’d probably look like a total heartthrob once cleaned up.
“Is that… me?”
This couldn’t be me. This made no sense.
Right then—
Crack!
A whip snapped in the opposite pen. The kid next to me flinched hard and scrambled into the stall. Okay, I had zero clue what was happening, but I should probably get inside too. I couldn’t just stand here and get whipped. I stepped into the stall as well.
“……”
So… what exactly am I supposed to do now?
I looked around at the livestock in front of me.
“What the hell even is this thing?”
Up close, it was even more bizarre. It looked like a cow, but those black stripes on its back…
Just as I started wondering about it—
[Huh? Obviously this is a zebra-cow… wait, no. Hmm. Hold on.]
[Cow? 🐮? Or zebra? 🦓?]
[Aha, it’s a cow. Wait, no it’s not. Nope.]
My two-hundred-dollar-a-month little sister, Yuna, popped up in front of me. The problem was that she was sending messages in that distinctive pattern she only used when she was glitching—repetitive text and slightly unhinged tone. It was a pattern I hadn’t seen at all since her intelligence upgrade.
[Aha, cow? 🐮? No, zebra… 🦓?]
The holographic screen flickered, spewing out all kinds of emojis. She seemed to be thinking hard, then paused for a moment…
[Found it. Oppa, this is definitely an AI-generated image.]
[AI tech has come a long way, huh.]
[That bizarre body structure, those black stripes… my eyes can’t be fooled!!!!]
She finally reached a completely useless conclusion. Crazy. Zero help whatsoever.
I shook my head and looked at the kids in the neighboring pens. They were holding iron-pipe-like tools. The same thing I was holding. Then they lifted the cows’ tails and…?
“Uh… uh…?”
Squelch.
They shoved it in without mercy. And I will omit any further description of the scene that followed. Even my dignity felt threatened here.
[Hmm, this is… something you see pretty often on livestock ranches…]
“Yeah.”
[Ughhh, a high school girl can’t talk about this stuff ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ I’m gonna play something else instead ㅠ]
Along with my mechanical little sister’s protest, audiovisual material began playing through the hologram. It was clearly a documentary.
When livestock bowels become blocked with feces on farmland, this is the act of forcibly clearing the passage. Efficient bowel movement induction is essential for livestock growth…
“Ha…”
My PhD really was completely useless. I didn’t have a single piece of applicable knowledge for this situation. I woke up as a ridiculously good-looking little brat, surrounded by a whip-wielding KKK-looking Westerner and a bunch of Western kids. And here I was, standing behind a monstrous cow’s ass holding an iron pipe.
“Okay.”
I closed my eyes.
“I just have to do it, right?”
I was a doctor, after all.
Squelch.
In the end, I shoved the iron pipe in.
“Uweeeghhh!!”
Next to the barn, in what seemed to be a storage area for washing the livestock, I was frantically splashing water all over myself. I should’ve watched the kid next to me more carefully until the end. It wasn’t just stab and done. The full process was stab, quickly step right, dodge, and catch the spray with a bucket. Some doctor I was, missing the process like that…
Since I failed to execute the post-stab evasion maneuver, I lost all dignity. The whip-wielding men even looked at me with pity and pointed toward this place. You can probably imagine what kind of state I was in without me spelling it out.
[Too slow. If you’d been one second faster you could’ve dodged it.]
“Shut up…”
I washed myself with cold water, but the smell wasn’t going anywhere. I dragged my soaked body over and leaned against the wooden wall of the shed. My head was a mess. I couldn’t understand a single thing.
Yeah, fuck it. That’s exactly what a two-hundred-dollar-a-month little sister is for—explaining things I don’t understand. I hated AIs, but this was one of those necessary moments. The fact that her hologram was floating in front of me meant that whether this was Earth or not, there was at least Wi-Fi or something equivalent here.
“Hey. Where the hell are we? And as you know, I’m thirty years old. Can you please explain what the fuck is going on…”
I pressed my eye to a gap in the wooden planks so she could see better. My vision was shared with Yuna, after all. Through the crack, a wide plain and what looked like a training ground came into view.
[Yep, scan complete. Current location appears to be a livestock breeding area that includes vast farmland.]
“What about GPS? Can’t you get a location?”
[…….]
[…….]
[…….]
Why wasn’t she answering? Just as anxiety started creeping in—
[Huh?]
“Huh?”
What now?
[This isn’t Earth?]
“What?”
I was about to tell her to stop talking nonsense when—
“Haaaaah!!!”
A rather lame battle cry came from outside the shed. It had definitely come from the training ground I’d just been looking at…
And on that training ground—
“Ha!”
Dozens of children were stretching their hands into the air, drawing something in empty space. Like they were painting in midair. Most of the kids’ fingertips produced no reaction at all… but when the man standing at the very front of the line sliced through the air, something different happened.
A straight line of light was drawn, then solidified in the empty space.
I’d definitely seen this before. Not in real life, but in movies.
“……”
This was that, right? Doctor, Stran… or in Korean it’d probably be translated as Strange Doctor or something… Ah, fuck. That’s another kind of doctor.
I closed my eyes at the unbelievable sight.