Episode 30: Food Stock Plunge — The World Reacts
The first signal came from the New York Stock Exchange.
No one in Gong saw it happen. No one in Gong was watching a ticker that morning. The first ripple of what would become, within a year, a worldwide reckoning with the existence of people who did not eat, began nine thousand kilometers away, in a city none of them had ever visited, on a trading floor where the word "Gong" meant nothing to anyone.
It was the third Monday of February. As soon as the market opened, the stock prices of global food companies began to fall. At first, the decline was gradual. It was at a level that analysts wouldn't have noticed. 0.8%, 1.2%, 2.3%. Those were the numbers.
But as the afternoon wore on, the decline steepened.
Three major food companies dropped by more than 5% simultaneously. There was no news that could have triggered it. It wasn't earnings season. It wasn't a change in interest rates. Analytical articles began to appear, searching for the reason.
Headlines speculated about a coming recession, a hidden supply shock, a coordinated short position by hedge funds—anything that fit the shape of a story they already knew how to tell.
By the closing bell, the food sector index had lost more value in a single session than it had in the previous six months combined. Trading desks that had spent the morning ignoring the dip spent the afternoon scrambling for an explanation they could put in a client memo by five o'clock. None of the explanations agreed with each other. All of them sounded confident.
The next day, the same pattern emerged in Tokyo, London, and Frankfurt.
* * *
It was the research center of a securities firm in Yeouido, Seoul.
Chief Analyst Park Seong-min was looking at three screens simultaneously. It was eight o'clock in the morning. No one else had arrived at work yet. The office was empty except for the hum of the building's ventilation and the blue light of his monitors reflecting off an otherwise dark room.
He had spent all night poring over the numbers. He was looking for something that could explain the drop in stock prices. It wasn't a supply chain issue. Raw material prices were stable. There were no signs of declining demand in the existing data.
He had run the usual checks twice—currency fluctuations, weather disruptions to crop yields, shipping delays at major ports. None of it explained a synchronized five-percent drop across three unrelated companies on the same afternoon.
But one thing caught his eye.
The food retail sales indices in the Philippines, India, and parts of West Africa were abnormal. It wasn't a decline. They were completely absent. It wasn't that the data was missing. It was that actual sales weren't happening.
The affected areas were small. But the pattern was the same. Across multiple countries, all at the same time. He pulled up a map and marked the regions in red. They didn't share a border, a climate, a government, or a currency. The only thing they shared was the absence.
He cross-referenced the regions against every database he had access to—refugee movements, disease outbreaks, religious pilgrimage routes, drought maps.
Nothing matched cleanly. The closest fit was a set of mountain and rural districts with poor digital infrastructure, places where data had always been thin.
That alone might have explained the silence in the numbers. It didn't explain why the silence had a shape, why it was deepening at a consistent rate across continents that had no contact with one another.
Park Seong-min called his boss.
"Team Leader, something's off."
"What is it?"
"People aren't eating. There's absolutely no food purchase data in certain areas. People are there, but they're not eating."
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line.
"What does that have to do with the stock price?"
"It's still limited to a small area. But if this spreads..."
There was a pause on the line, the sound of a chair creaking as his boss sat up straighter.
"How many people are we talking about?"
"An estimated fifty to five hundred thousand."
"What about evidence?"
"We don't have exact numbers yet. It's a group that operates offline, so we can't track them."
Silence fell again. Then the team leader said,
"We can't put that in the official report. We don't have any numbers."
Park Seong-min hung up the phone. He looked at the screen. He thought, for a moment, about writing it up anyway and filing it under his own name, the way analysts sometimes did when they believed in something the firm wasn't ready to put its name behind.
He decided against it. Not yet. He saved the file under a folder labeled simply "anomaly" and closed it.
By nine o'clock, the rest of the floor had filled in around him—the usual noise of phones and keyboards and someone's radio playing financial news at low volume.
No one asked what he'd been doing since dawn. No one ever did. He watched his colleagues pull up the same three food-sector charts he'd been staring at for hours and frown at them with the same puzzlement he'd felt at midnight, before he'd found the thread that connected it.
He didn't share it. It wasn't his to share yet, not without numbers the firm would accept.
Stock prices were falling again today.
* * *
Rania brought this news from Gong.
It came from a contact in the Geneva network. It was a copy of an analysis memo from the Finnish Economic Research Institute. It had been handwritten.
It had been delivered the old-fashioned way—carried by hand from Helsinki to a contact in Cairo, then transcribed again before it reached the basin, each copy a little more worn at the folds than the last.
It mentioned that the spread of non-consumers was being cited as one of the causes of the food stock crash. It wasn't mainstream analysis yet. It was a minority opinion. But it had been raised.
Rania had read it twice on the way up the mountain, trying to gauge how seriously to take a single paragraph buried in a six-page memo. By the time she reached the basin, she'd decided it didn't matter how seriously the Finnish institute had meant it.
What mattered was that someone outside Gong had looked at the world's numbers and arrived, independently, at the shape of something true.
Hoon read the memo.
Lee Jae-in was standing beside him.
"How fast do you think it will grow?"
Lee Jae-in asked.
Hoon put the memo down.
"It'll grow fast from here. The world has started to notice."
"Is that a good thing?"
Hoon thought for a moment.
"Good and bad come at the same time. Once people notice, interest follows, and once interest follows, more people come looking for us. But for the same reason, more people will try to stop us, too."
Lee Jae-in nodded.
"The ones trying to stop it will move first, won't they?"
"Of course. There's money at stake."
Lee Jae-in looked out toward the entrance, where David's new tree line stood, still young enough that the gaps between the saplings hadn't fully closed. A month ago, the basin's only defense against the outside world had been distance and silence.
Now there was a man whose entire former career had been built around finding exactly the kind of thing they were trying not to be found as.
"Do you think he knows we're already showing up on someone's spreadsheet in Seoul?"
"He will, once we tell him."
Hoon opened his notebook. Then he wrote a short note.
〈The world has seen us. Now, the timing is different.〉
He looked at it for a moment, then closed the notebook and went to find David.
Author's Note:
New episode drops daily at 7 AM (Philippine Time, UTC+8) until Part 1 concludes (Ep. 55) on July 25th.
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