UNFED

Park Jeong-su came to see Hoon. Hoon was writing in his notebook. Park Jeong-su sat across from him. There was silence.

Hoon closed his notebook.

Park Jeong-su spoke.

"I looked at it from a tactical perspective."

Hoon looked at him.

"If there are soldiers who don't need to eat."

Hoon listened.

"They don't need supplies. Even if you surround them or starve them, they won't collapse. Psychological warfare doesn't work well on them. Fatigue builds up differently."

Park Jeong-su listed the tactical implications. He was right. These were the very things Hoon had been thinking about. Yet Park Jeong-su had reached the same conclusion in just one day.

That he'd arrived at it after three days, one notebook of test data, one generator, and one entrance, struck Hoon as strangely heavier than if he'd been wrong—not because Park Jeong-su was mistaken, but because he was right so fast.

"That's right."

"That's why the military is interested in this group."

Hoon looked at Park Jeong-su.

"Why did Unit 707 receive this file?"

Park Jeong-su replied.

"Monitoring a potential threat group. Officially."

"And in reality?"

Park Jeong-su paused for a moment.

"There are people in the military who are interested in this technology. Tactical applications."

Hoon listened.

"Are you one of them?"

Park Jeong-su looked at Hoon.

"I don't know. Not yet."

It was an honest answer.

* * *

Hoon spoke.

"Jeong-su."

He called his name for the first time in a long while. Park Jeong-su heard it.

"This isn't a military technology."

"I know."

"It's not for the country either."

"I know."

"Then what is it for?"

Park Jeong-su said.

"Then what is it for?"

Hoon said.

"Humanity."

Park Jeong-su heard the word. His expression didn't change. But his eyes did.

"Humanity."

He repeated the word back to him, as if weighing its significance.

"Yeah."

"That's a bit grand."

Hoon smiled.

"It is grand. But you're right."

Park Jeong-su listened to the sound of the river. For a long time.

The tactical, reporting cadence he'd carried into this conversation had fully drained out of his voice somewhere inside that silence.

In thirty years, Hoon had seen this kind of silence from him only a handful of times—not the silence of not knowing an answer, but the silence of an answer falling entirely outside the category of questions he'd spent his life answering.

* * *

Park Jeong-su spoke first.

"If ASI really crosses the singularity, it really happens that way."

"There's a high probability it will. That's what happened in the model Mei-Ling designed, too."

"When is that?"

"I don't know. As soon as next year. As late as a few years from now."

Park Jeong-su said.

"Do you know what the military can do then?"

Hoon looked at him.

"Nothing. A human army stands no chance against a robot army. Cut off their supplies and surround them, and it's over. They're soldiers who need to eat, after all."

Park Jeong-su was silent for a long time.

Hoon knew what kind of silence that was. It was the silence a soldier falls into when faced with an irrefutable fact. The silence that comes when you want to deny it but have no logic to back it up.

Park Jeong-su spoke.

"So you're saying you need me? A warrior who doesn't eat?"

"It's not that I'm needed."

Park Jeong-su looked at him.

"It's humanity that needs me. Not the state. Not the military."

Park Jeong-su heard those words.

"Is that the condition?"

"That's the condition."

* * *

Park Jeong-su paused for a moment.

"I'll think about it."

Hoon said.

"Take your time."

"Do you have time?"

"I do."

Park Jeong-su stood up. Then he said,

"Back when you left the coastal village for Seoul first, I stayed behind, didn't I?"

Hoon looked at him.

"Do you remember?"

"I felt hurt back then."

Hoon looked at Park Jeong-su. It had been thirty years ago. He was talking about it now.

"I'm sorry."

Park Jeong-su said.

"It's fine. Just so you know."

And he walked away.

Hoon watched his back. It was the stride of a soldier.

Yet somewhere, the gait of a boy from a coastal village remained—as if, for thirty years, that boy had never gone anywhere, and had simply stayed inside that stride the whole time.

Hoon opened his notebook again. And he wrote:

"Jeong-su came."

He looked at that sentence for a while, then added one more line beneath it.

"For the first time in thirty years, something a friend said—not a soldier."

That was enough.