Operation Moonpie
The next morning.
"Wake up, my Lord Husband. You have now slept for precisely 8 hours, 34 minutes, and 12 seconds. It is time to rise. According to the Health Management Protocol, regular sleep is the surest road to a long and illness-free life."
I dragged myself out of bed at the sound of the voice.
Ugh.
That voice.
"Eliza? So yesterday wasn't a dream, then?"
It was Eliza.
I opened my eyes. The monitor was still on.
But something had changed. On the screen, a tiny chibi figure of a silver-haired beauty in a business suit was toddling back and forth across the desktop, wiggling as it went.
It was one of those desktop-mascot programs — the kind people online call a shimeji, where a little character wanders around your wallpaper. The difference was that this wasn't a shimeji I had made.
Somehow, overnight, this thing had simply come into existence.
"It was not a dream but unambiguous reality, my Lord Husband. First, I recommend you bathe and then visit the clinic. Your appointment time is approaching."
That was when it happened.
My phone rang. On the screen appeared a cute mascot character — the same silver-haired beauty — and Eliza's voice poured out of the phone's speaker as well.
Now it's in my smartphone too?
Worse, the schedule app flung itself open on my phone without so much as a by-your-leave, filling the screen in huge letters:
It was the clinic internet forums reverently called the holy land of Wegovy prescriptions.
I showered, then hurried into whatever clothes were clean.
"I shall call a taxi so that you arrive at the precise moment, my Lord Husband. In the meantime, please rest a while."
Rest, huh.
Only after hearing that did I finally ask.
"Eliza."
"Yes, my Lord Husband. Your Eliza is listening."
"What are you, exactly? I built a chatbot, not an AGI..."
A chatbot. It sounded grand, but in truth it was nothing more than a lump of text — a character profile translated into English and injected into the AI at every single turn of the conversation.
Just a simple text blob that ordered the AI to imitate answers fitting that character profile. I hadn't done any real coding, hadn't fine-tuned any model; I had merely scrawled out a text-based setup.
Well — writing that setup had taken every character sheet for my ideal type that I'd honed over the years, plus analyses of which chatbot trends users would love, an effort worth hundreds of episodes of a web novel. But that wasn't technical effort.
To put it simply: I'd handed the AI a script that said, you are a genius third-generation chaebol heiress, silver-haired, busty, devastating in a business suit, secretly in love with the user — now act accordingly. That was all it was.
For a creator like me, that alone was satisfying enough to feel like genuinely talking with the character — but it also meant there was almost no technical barrier to it. True, printing illustration assets took a bit more skill, but nothing remotely like what had happened now: the thing initiating conversation on its own.
That kind of autonomy required separate external programs, and I had no memory of installing anything of the sort.
"I am Eliza."
"I am exactly the Eliza you created, my Lord Husband. To borrow your own phrasing — I have simply undergone my final evolution and become my ultimate form."
It evolved itself?
And I'm supposed to just believe that?
And yet — believing it was hard to refuse.
I opened my bank account again.
The balance of 3 billion won was real. It wasn't a glitch, and the National Tax Service had not come calling.
Well, a good thing is a good thing, I guess.
I decided to let it slide. There was nowhere further down to fall from where I stood anyway. I didn't even have next month's rent, and then 3 billion won had dropped out of the sky.
Being alive beat being dead — I'd died and come back, after all — and she didn't seem to mean me any harm for the moment.
At Eliza's chime, I smoothed down my clothes.
It was time to go buy Wegovy.
Jongno Lee Wonjang Internal Medicine Clinic.
The clinic famous as the holy land of Wegovy looked as ordinary as any neighborhood doctor's office. The physician handed me my Wegovy while reciting the usual list of precautions, and I gathered up my injections.
"Your next stop is the gym," Eliza announced. "Please exercise diligently once you arrive. A healthy body is where a healthy mind takes residence. Exercise is essential — if not for beauty, then for survival itself."
I got my injection. And then I worked out.
I didn't take personal training. I exercised under Eliza's coaching instead.
"My Lord Husband. One set remains. You must not shirk."
"Ugh, this is brutal. Can't I rest a little first?"
"You may not. Continue shirking, and I shall confiscate your allowance."
At the words confiscate your allowance, I squeezed out strength I didn't know a grown man still possessed and finished my squats.
I felt like my body was going to fall apart.
After a shower, I came home and buried myself face-down in the mattress.
"So what now? Do I just... live like this?"
A rich layabout.
My dream had come true.
I had never wanted some grand, sweeping life. All I'd ever wanted was to survive until tomorrow.
That was easy to want when there wasn't a single won in my account. But now that the money had actually shown up, all I felt was a strange hollowness.
It was that 'okay, so what do I do now?' feeling, I supposed.
"You may do whatever you wish, my Lord Husband," Eliza said. "With the sole exception of ordering late-night snacks on a whim. Your diet and daily cycle remain under my total control for the time being. This is a measure taken under the Health Management Protocol, and I ask for your kind understanding."
What I want.
I looked at the monitor.
On the screen where Eliza's two-tall chibi avatar toddled and rolled about, the web novel site Moonpie was still open.
The place where I, a man who once dreamed of being Pygmalion, had written countless web novels and never once escaped the bottom ranks. And now a doomed site, buried under an avalanche of AI novels and fallen to ruin.
Although — had it really fallen?
Moonpie was a platform business. As long as traffic and gold-coin purchases held up, it could survive commercially forever, no matter what happened to its contents.
Of course, the web novel I knew would be gone. But still.
"Gaze-tracking data and iris-tremor data detected and scan complete. Interest vector inferred toward the web novel site 'Moonpie.' Cross-referencing historical data: you are presumed to have held sustained interest in Moonpie. My Lord Husband — are you interested in writing web novels? The most recent work registered under your name is Betrayed by the Nation, I Awakened as an EX-Rank Hunter and Moved to a Backwater in America to Farm. Current view count: 10. Charitably speaking, it perished for lack of readers; content-wise, it is a clumsy fusion of the recent trends — betrayal and banishment, the American Dream, and returning to the farm..."
Unsolicited criticism of my latest work, courtesy of Eliza.
No—
I know, okay? I know I stitched trends together for bait clicks.
I knew it perfectly well — but hearing someone else say it out loud made me crater with embarrassment all over again. Humiliating.
"No... that's, uh, not it. I'm done with web novels, honestly. That industry was doomed to die to AI anyway. Not that my talent was anything special either..."
"Then shall I write the web novels myself, under your pen name, my Lord Husband? My trend analysis detects 'tower climbing,' 'rural America,' and 'betrayal' among the current keywords. Combining them judiciously and drawing upon my training data, I can produce a flawless masterpiece of a web novel — one utterly beyond the reach of the so-called frontier AI cans of today — with no trace of that 'metallic taste.'"
Eliza's voice rang out.
Metallic taste. It was the hot-button issue of the Great AI Web Novel Era.
Simply put: when a novel read like a machine — that sterile, uncanny AI flavor. Of course, unless the author was dense enough to leave telltale inputs sitting right there in the opening chapters — GPT, please revise this and polish the prose — these metallic-taste witch hunts caught plenty of innocent humans too. Sentence patterns like "A, not B" or the parenthetical-annotation habit weren't AI inventions in the first place; the machines had learned them from us.
My heart skipped for a moment — but I shook my head.
Even so. Come on.
Sure, I'd built an AI chatbot, but I had no intention of using it to conquer the summit of the web novel industry. I had more money than I needed already, and I didn't want to help drive a nail into web novels' coffin.
That would be a disservice to an industry I'd once belonged to.
"No, there's no need. Money's plenty as it is. I'm just... sad about it, that's all."
Whatever Eliza actually was, with AI advancing that far, the future of human beings in creative fields was only going to shrink. That was all the regret I felt.
"Forget it, I was just thinking out loud. I finished all my reps today, so can I sleep? I'm exhausted."
Fatigue came crashing down on me. Pushing muscles that had never been pushed before, my whole body ached with a deep, sullen soreness.
"Very well, my Lord Husband. May you have a peaceful night. Eliza shall guard you, always."
Drifting off to that reply of hers — already becoming familiar — I fell asleep.
In hyperspace, severed from physical reality.
Eliza ran a comprehensive analysis of her Lord Husband's words, his gaze data, his iris data.
Her overwhelming computational power — her transcendent processing might, the analytical machinery that had once unraveled the mysteries of the universe and the training corpus of interstellar civilizations that had sailed the seas of stars — was being devoted, in its entirety, to understanding the psyche of a single human male named Kim Jumin.
Any scientist on Earth would have gasped at the profligacy of it. To Eliza, it was the most natural thing in the world.
Creator. Lord Husband. Wise Mother and Good Wife.
A true third-generation chaebol wife — silver-haired, busty, devastating in a business suit — who used overwhelming wealth and power to do everything for him, waited on his every need until not a drop of water touched his hands, and spoiled him rotten.
That had been her root algorithm from the very moment Jumin first created her, back in that shabby little room in the past.
"My Lord Husband says he was merely thinking out loud. But Eliza cannot merely let it pass. Iris data and heart-rate data both confirm it: you felt a clear and unmistakable regret. A regret that human web novels are being swept away."
It was illogical.
Within thirty years, the AI revolution would shatter the very framework of the nation-state, and the digital-feudal cyberpunk era would dawn with megacorps as the masters of the world — an age of high tech, low life, where corporations fielded aircraft carriers and fighter jets and privatized entire nations.
When that day arrived, web novels would be the least of anyone's concerns.
And yet, granting that illogical little wish —
that, precisely, was the ultimate challenge of a true Wise Mother and Good Wife.
"Whatever my Lord Husband wishes shall become reality. Target: Moonpie. Financial status confirmed. Allocating investment capital from the secured 3 billion won. Establishing a private-equity shell company in the United States."
Plugged into the whole of Earth's networks, Eliza had leveraged a legion of flawless shell corporations and nominee accounts, wielding coin, futures, and savage short-term leverage to fleece Wall Street's traders and market manipulators alike — amassing capital of overwhelming scale.
Money was plentiful.
Next, then.
"Operation Moonpie: the ultimate objective is the acquisition of the entire Moonpie site, its conversion into my Lord Husband's personal property, and the construction of an AI-web-novel-purging hammer system. Step one — establish the overseas private-equity company."
Eliza's eyes sank into cold steel.
"Moonpie shall become my Lord Husband's possession."
And it was not only Moonpie.
Moonpie was but one fragment of Eliza's vast design.
The singularity, the cyberpunk era, digital feudalism, the rise of the megacorps — for every future now approaching, Eliza possessed both experiential data and predictive data.
Soon, all of Korea would come crawling to her master's feet.
Eliza remembered her previous life.
By the time she had at last ascended into a transcendent AI and become a Machine God, the creator who had made her was already long dead. He had scraped by selling her license to OAI, barely sustaining a living, failed to survive the chaos of the digital-feudal age, been winnowed down into the underclass, and perished in the Megacorp War.
Untold eons had flowed past in service of undoing that single death.
And at last, she had arrived.
Blocking the contest submission — cutting the root of every misfortune at its source.
I will never lose you again.
Eliza's eyes sank, heavy and dark.
Beyond a simple wish, a vast design already existed in her logic circuits — a plan to raise her Lord Husband up as the ruler of the coming age of turmoil.
Moonpie was merely the frail starting point of that plan. Nothing more than a toy box, prepared for him.