UNFED

Hoon woke up for no particular reason. He just woke up. Since his awakening, his sleep had changed. He could get by on less sleep.

But today was different. It wasn't that he had fallen asleep; it felt as if he had been cut off from it by something. The moment he opened his eyes, the content of his dream had already vanished.

He sat up.

The room was dark. But it wasn't pitch black. Electricity had been restored yesterday. Beyond the window, the lights were on in the common area. For the first time, Gong was a place with light even at night.

Looking at that light, Hoon felt a strange sensation.

It was fear.

At first, he couldn't tell what he was afraid of. Since his awakening, the nature of his fear had changed. In place of the terror of starvation, something else had taken root. This wasn't a fear for survival.

It was something deeper—the kind of fear that doesn't announce what it's about, that simply arrives in the body first and waits for the mind to catch up.

Hoon went outside.

The dawn air was cold. Dawn in the Caraballo Mountains. He heard the sound of water. The sound of the generator, completed yesterday, came from below. The river was there first.

He sat down at the dining table. It was an empty table. An empty table. He sat there alone.

He slowly examined what fear was.

* * *

Gong was growing too large.

Fifty thousand. And beyond. People scattered across the globe via the radio network. At some point, that number began to weigh heavily on Hoon. It was a weight he hadn't felt when he first awakened Lee Jae-in.

Is this really what he had wanted?

That question came to him in the early morning air.

Hoon didn't push the question away. He let it sit. He looked into it.

There were multiple layers of fear.

First. The realization that what he had started could bring the world crashing down. The awakening movement was shaking the food system.

It wasn't just about breaking free from AI control; it could shake the entire current economic structure. There were far more people who had to eat to survive. Like Walter.

Hoon didn't know how this change would affect them. He thought of the letter that had reached him weeks ago, third-hand and slow, describing an old man standing alone at the edge of his field at dusk, watching the grain prices fall on a radio he could barely hear.

Hoon had never met Walter. He had never seen Alberta. And yet he had become, without ever choosing to, a fact in that man's life—an invisible weight pressing down on a market half a world away.

Second. The fact that people were following Hoon. Fifty thousand people were following what Hoon had started in one way or another. If they were following something wrong. If Hoon was wrong.

Then those fifty thousand people would be heading in the wrong direction.

He thought of the dining table he now sat at, built because Lee Jae-in had asked one question—what if it's not as simple as we think—and fifty thousand people now sat at tables like it, in clearings and back rooms across the world, because of a decision that had started with Hoon alone, in a different basin, on a different morning, before any of them existed to him.

Third. That this was heading in a direction with no end in sight. Hoon had started this to prepare for the ASI singularity. But now it had become something far bigger than that.

It was different from what he had originally imagined—a small, defensible thing had become a tide, and a tide did not ask permission of the person who first stirred the water.

Hoon laid those three thoughts on the table. He took out a notebook. He wrote.

"Am I destroying the world?"

That question hung in the early morning air.

He sat with it the way he'd once sat with hunger, in the first days, before he understood that the feeling would pass through him and not consume him if he simply let it be present.

This felt different. Hunger had a clock. It always ended, one way or another, within seventy-two hours. He didn't know how long this would take to pass, or whether it was meant to pass at all.

* * *

As dawn began to break, Lee Jae-in came out.

Lee Jae-in was an early riser. It was his habit to walk around the site before work began. He saw Hoon sitting at the table.

Lee Jae-in came over and sat across from him. Without a word.

Hoon spoke first.

"I couldn't sleep."

Lee Jae-in listened.

"I feel like I did something wrong."

Lee Jae-in looked at Hoon.

"What?"

Hoon slid the notebook toward Lee Jae-in. Lee Jae-in looked at it.

"Am I destroying the world?"

Lee Jae-in read that sentence. For a long time. Then he pushed the notebook back toward Hoon.

"Is that what's scaring you?"

Hoon nodded.

"The world is shaking. Because of what I started. There are so many more people who need to eat. I wonder how this will affect them."

Lee Jae-in listened.

"Someone told me about a Canadian farmer named Walter. He's been tilling the fields for forty-five years, but grain prices are falling. You can't say it's unrelated to what you started."

Lee Jae-in paused for a moment.

Then he said.

"Is that farmer starving right now?"

Hoon looked at him.

"No. Not yet."

"Then you haven't done anything wrong just yet."

Hoon looked at Lee Jae-in. That statement was too simple. But sometimes, simplicity hits the nail on the head.

"It could happen later."

Lee Jae-in said.

"If it happens later, we'll think about it then."

Hoon looked at Lee Jae-in.

"Is that the answer?"

Lee Jae-in said.

"No. That's not the answer—I'm telling you to distinguish between what you can do now and what you can't."

Hoon listened.

"Can you solve Mr. Walter's field problem right now?"

"No."

"Then do what you can do right now. We'll figure out what comes up later with the people who'll be here later."

Lee Jae-in stood up.

"By the way, do you know something?"

Hoon looked at him.

"The person who can build a world where Mr. Walter doesn't go hungry is sitting right here in this basin."

Hoon looked at Lee Jae-in.

"Who?"

"Elena. The one designing the non-consuming economy. When that economy is finished, the answer for people like Mr. Walter will be in it somewhere. Not yet. But somewhere."

Hoon looked at Lee Jae-in.

"Is that possible?"

Lee Jae-in said as he walked toward the construction site.

"If you're worried about people who need to eat to survive—the answer is to build a world where they don't have to eat either. That's what you started, isn't it?"

And then he disappeared.

Hoon was left alone.

Lee Jae-in's words lingered on the table. He thought about them for a long time.

His fear hadn't disappeared. It was still there. But the weight of that fear had changed. It was no longer a weight that crushed him—it had become a weight that propelled him forward.

He thought of Elena's notebook, somewhere in the basin right now, filling with the same patient handwriting Viktor used, working out an answer to a question Hoon hadn't even known how to phrase until this morning. He hadn't built that answer. He had only built the conditions under which someone else could.

Hoon opened his notebook. He wrote beneath the sentence he'd written earlier.

"It is not about tearing down, but about changing. That difference—the next generation will judge."

He read both lines together, the question and the answer beneath it, and noticed that the second sentence didn't erase the first. It only stood beside it.

He decided that was probably the most honest thing a person in his position could write.

The eastern sky was brightening. The ridgeline of the Caraballo Mountains appeared as a silhouette.

A bird sang somewhere. First one, then two.

The morning in Gong began.