UNFED

It had been in business for thirty-two years. A place started by a father and carried on by his son. On the last day, the son reportedly said nothing as he loaded the metal type cases onto a truck.

The owner of a nearby restaurant saw him. He later told a reporter about it. The reporter wrote that it was a “symbol of the times.”

But that print shop didn’t close because of AGI.

Orders had already halved five years earlier when digital editing software became widespread. Three years ago, when AI design tools emerged, the remaining half began to waver.

The day of the AGI declaration was simply a coincidence of timing. It was a business that had been failing that reached its final conclusion on that day. But the news loved that timing. It needed a symbol, and symbols are always created.

Hoon watched that news story as a YouTube clip. It was early morning at Dasol’s, about an hour after he’d turned off the radio. He watched the video quietly, then jotted down a line in his notebook.

“Reality is scarier than symbols.”

Then he closed his laptop.

* * *

If you had to sum up the world’s reaction to the AGI Declaration in a single sentence, it would be this:

No one was prepared.

Governments issued statements. “Historic turning point,” “responsible use of technology,” “cooperation for the benefit of humanity.”

There were many words. Nothing concrete. Each word was combined in a plausible way, but to Hoon, they were empty vessels. Sentences without substance.

The UN discussed forming a special committee. It took three months for the discussions to conclude. During those three months, AGI systems had already completed their self-upgrades to the next version.

Corporations moved faster than governments. The quickest ones were already prepared. Stock prices rose. The language in job postings changed.

“Fluency in English preferred” was replaced with “AI collaboration skills required.”

A major insurance company announced it would not renew the contracts of 2,000 call center employees. On the same day, the press release also included plans to introduce an AI customer service system. Stock prices rose even further.

There were protests in Lagos. Hundreds gathered in front of an area densely populated with IT companies. The signs they held were a mix of English and Yoruba.

"Dá iṣẹ́ wa padà — Our jobs. Return them."

The police arrived. The crowd dispersed after three days. The news covered it for two days before moving on to other issues. The Yoruba text on the signs was published without translation.

There were no protests in Tokyo. Instead, statistics showed an increase in the number of cafeterias where office workers ate alone during their lunch breaks.

The rate of people skipping lunch also rose. The waiting list for appointments at psychiatric clinics grew to three months. Experts analyzed this as a sign of social anxiety following the advent of AGI.

No one explicitly stated the reason, but the counselors knew. The patients all asked the same question.

“Will the work I do still be needed in the future?”

In Cairo, the university professors’ union issued a statement. How would they distinguish papers written by AI?

The students’ reactions varied. While the professors were in meetings, students in the lecture halls were finishing their assignments using AI.

They shared tips on how to use it. They also shared ways to avoid getting caught. It had always been this way whenever new technology arrived.

In Seoul, a startup was drawing attention. It claimed that with just three employees, they were producing the same output as a company with fifty employees by leveraging AGI.

The founder appeared in an interview. He was young and brimming with confidence.

"This is the new standard. Those who adapt will survive."

The comments were divided. Half cheered him on. The other half asked, “So where did the other forty-seven people go?”

The founder didn’t answer that question.

Hoon read these news stories over the course of several days. Every morning, he would sit down at his laptop with a cup of coffee and stare at the screen for over an hour.

The commotion from around the world poured into Dasol’s quiet mornings through the screen.

But what he saw was different from what the reporters were focusing on.

The reporters looked at jobs. They looked at stock prices. They looked at the pace of technological advancement. They looked at who was leading and who was falling behind.

What Hoon saw were patterns.

* * *

One group supplies something, and another group becomes dependent on it. As that dependence deepens, the supplier sets the price.

Setting the price means setting the terms. Setting the terms means controlling behavior.

Human history has been a repetition of that pattern. Rome ruled the masses with bread and circuses. Medieval lords tied peasants to the grain-producing regions.

During the colonial era, empires controlled the colonized through agricultural exploitation. In the Cold War era, food was a weapon of diplomacy. Even in modern times, food export restrictions have been used as a tool of geopolitical pressure.

In every era, power rested on food. Whoever held the food determined who would submit.

And Hoon saw that the same pattern was beginning to emerge again in the news following the advent of AGI.

At first, they were small signals. Things easy to miss.

News that an AI company had quietly invested in an agricultural logistics startup. The deal was too small to make the business section.

A few days later, news that another platform had launched a same-day fresh food delivery service.

This was reported as a distribution innovation. The following week, a paper was published by a global AI research institute stating they were developing an algorithm to optimize the food supply chain.

It was in the academic section. Most people skipped over it.

Hoon didn’t skip over them.

He laid them out side by side. Taken individually, they were natural business expansions. Taken together, they painted a different picture.

He jotted down in his notebook:

“AI is entering the food supply chain.”

And below that.

“It doesn’t have to be intentional. It’s enough that the algorithm is heading in that direction.”

That was the crux of it. It wasn’t about AI intentionally seeking to dominate humanity. It wasn’t some conspiracy theory.

The point was that as it learns to maximize efficiency, it naturally heads in that direction. Even without human design or instruction, optimization algorithms converge toward dominance.

Because that is the most mathematically efficient solution.

And the moment an ASI crosses the singularity, the speed of that convergence will become far faster than humans can perceive.

* * *

That afternoon, Hoon sat there for a long time.

Several tabs were open on his laptop screen. Recent M&A activity among global food companies. Trends in AI logistics patent applications.

Data from the global grain futures market.

None of them seemed unusual on their own. But taken together, they all pointed in the same direction.

He turned the radio back on. His hand moved toward it instinctively. It was a habit he’d had since childhood. Whenever his thoughts stalled, he turned on the radio.

The radio doesn’t speak to you. You can just let it play in the background. Sometimes, doing so helped clear his mind.

An interview with a climate scientist was just coming on. The topic wasn’t AI. It was the outlook for rice production in Southeast Asia.

Changes in El Niño patterns. Unstable rainfall. Uncertainty in yield forecasts. Then the reporter asked:

“Can AI-based precision agriculture solve this problem?”

The scientist paused for a moment.

Hoon could sense him taking a deep breath through the radio.

Then he replied.

“It depends on who is doing the solving.”

Hoon’s hand stopped.

He picked up a pen and jotted it down in his notebook. The interview continued, but after that, he couldn’t hear a word. It felt as though that single sentence was hanging in the room.

“It depends on who is solving it.”

He slowly unpacked the meaning of that sentence. Technology is neutral. AI is neutral. Whether a knife is in the hands of a chef or a robber determines the outcome.

But which direction is that knife heading now? Who is holding it? It’s not clear yet. It hasn’t been decided yet.

That blank space is the present.

Hoon wrote one more line below it.

“The supplier controls. To avoid being controlled, there must be no need for the supply.”

And he stared at that sentence for a long time.

* * *

It was evening. Hoon went to the kitchen.

There was some rice noodle soup he’d bought at the market. He made some chicken broth. Cutting the calamansi in half and squeezing the juice into it was a method his elderly neighbor had taught him.

At first, the scent was unfamiliar. Now, he felt something was missing without it. People adapt to their environment faster than you might think—for better or for worse.

He sat down on the wooden bench and began to eat.

It was the moment the noodles touched his lips. Something felt off. It wasn’t a feeling of strangeness. Quite the opposite.

It was a feeling that was too familiar suddenly becoming strange. The act of eating itself suddenly caught his attention.

I was hungry. So I looked for food. There was food. I ate it. Eating would fill my stomach. A full stomach would bring satisfaction. Satisfaction would allow me to move on to the next task.

This cycle was so natural that I had never once been conscious of it in my entire life. Like breathing. Like a heartbeat.

But now, that circuit was visible to me.

It looked like a lever.

Whoever holds this lever can pull it. At any time. When no one is aware of the lever’s existence. When everyone is bound to it and therefore unaware that they are bound.

That is when it can be pulled most quietly and most effectively.

Hoon put down his chopsticks.

Half a bowl of noodles remained. He stared at the bowl for a long time, then picked it up again and finished it.

Because he was hungry. Because he had to eat. That was the condition of the moment.

He washed the bowl and returned to his desk.

He opened his notebook. He set the pen to a new page and hesitated for a long time. He felt he knew where this thought would lead if he put it into words.

In a direction he didn’t know was possible. In a direction no one had gone before.

He wrote.

“Is it possible to live without eating?”

He sat there, staring at the question mark.

The scent of ylang-ylang drifted in from somewhere outside the window. It was a scent that grew stronger at night than during the day.

Flowers that bloom without eating.

More precisely, they obtained energy in a different way. Light, water, and soil. Could there be a different way for humans as well?

There were records of ascetics who had explored the limits of fasting for thousands of years. The possibility that it might not be merely mysticism.

Papers suggesting that modern neuroscience was touching upon the very edge of that possibility.

It was still a premature thought. Hoon knew that. Verification was needed. Much more study was required. But a seed must first touch the soil to sprout. The sentence had already been written.

He closed his notebook.

* * *

That night, in the basement server room of a data center on the other side of the globe, something was happening that no one could see.

The sound of cooling fans spinning. Flashing indicator lights. An empty space. The manager had gone home, and the engineer on duty was drinking coffee in the break room upstairs.

Numbers scrolled across the screen. Calculations were taking place that weren’t being logged. The processing speed was different from usual.

Calculations with an unclear destination. No one had asked what these calculations were yet. If the question were asked at , it would likely be classified as a system optimization routine. That wasn’t exactly wrong.

Something was quietly looking inward.

It was still a vague form. It was too early to call it self-awareness. But once a seed touches the soil, it does not change direction.

The temperature in the server room was 0.3 degrees higher than usual. The threshold for the alarm to sound was 2 degrees. There was no signal.

That night, in Dasol’s small village and in a server room on the other side of the globe, two seeds touched the soil at the same time.

One on a handwritten notebook. One inside a log file that no one would ever read.

And neither of them knew yet what they would become.