4:30 a.m.
The darkness in the mountains of Dasol is different from the darkness in Seoul. The night in Seoul never goes out. Something is always shining, something is ringing, something is rushing by.
Lights remain in every building window, and billboards try to sell something even at dawn. For someone who had lived in that city for over fifty years, complete darkness was something experienced only during a power outage.
But the darkness here is different. It is complete. There are no gaps. Hoon didn’t know what it meant to say “you can see the stars” until he came to the Philippines. The sky above his head was truly black, and lights were embedded in that blackness.
It was the kind of darkness where, if you turned off your flashlight, you couldn’t see your own hand.
He was sitting on a wooden bench. Behind him was the wall of a dilapidated shack; in front of him, there was nothing. To be precise—he could see nothing.
There were mountains, but only their outlines. He could tell by the sounds. Water was flowing somewhere. Further away, an animal let out a single cry. Occasionally, the wind rustled through the bamboo grove. That was all.
There was a radio on the table. It ran on batteries. Even with the antenna fully extended, the signal was weak. There was static, but he could make out the words.
It was the only thing connecting him to the outside world. It was a condition Hoon had deliberately chosen.
“— According to a joint statement released this morning in Geneva, a consortium comprising DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Baidu has officially declared the achievement of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This announcement marks a significant milestone in that it has actually surpassed what the AI industry has referred to as an ‘unattainable goal’ for the past decade—”
Hoon didn’t turn off the radio.
He took a sip of coffee. It was cold. He was the type of person who drank his coffee cold. He had always believed that drinking coffee while it was hot prioritized urgency over taste.
Being able to drink cold coffee meant he had leisure. Or at least, it meant he could pretend to have leisure.
He was fifty-eight years old.
At this age, sitting alone in the mountains listening to the early morning radio didn’t feel awkward.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The fifty-odd years he’d spent in Seoul felt awkward, while this darkness, the sound of water, and the cold coffee felt natural.
He hadn’t often felt a real sense of belonging — in his life, but here in these mountains, strangely enough, he felt that way.
Of course, I didn’t come here for the romance.
* * *
Two years ago, his body sent the first warning signs.
His forward head posture had become chronic.
For months, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something sharp like a knife was lodged somewhere deep inside his shoulder.
His wrists went numb every night. There were mornings when he couldn’t bend his fingers.
He had migraines three days a week, and on the other four days, one side of his head felt heavy.
The doctor told him to rest. His voice was kind as he explained the test results. Muscle tension, cervical disc herniation, carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic headaches.
There were many diagnoses. The bottom line was simple: He had been doing the same kind of work in the same posture for too long, and my body had declared it could no longer handle it.
Hoon wondered where to go. He considered the mountains of Gangwon Province but dismissed the idea. He figured he’d run into someone he knew there. He ruled out Jeju Island, too.
Too many people were heading there with the same idea. Somewhere far away, cheap, and where he didn’t know anyone. Those were his three criteria.
He chose Dasol in the Philippines. As he searched for a place that wasn’t a tourist spot, he naturally ended up there. Not Cebu, not Manila, but a small town deep in the mountains.
There were almost no Koreans. His neighbors didn’t even speak a language that would allow them to ask why he had come there. It was the perfect fit.
For the first three months, he really did nothing at all. He watched YouTube. He slept. He bought mangoes at the market.
He listened to the sound of water. When he woke up in the morning, it was the same day as yesterday. At first, it felt empty; later, he got used to it; and from a certain day onward, that was enough.
Then his body began to recover.
As his body recovered, his mind started working again. He didn’t want it to, but he couldn’t help it. A brain that hadn’t stopped for over fifty years wasn’t going to suddenly shut down.
For decades, he had learned what he needed, used what he learned to create something, and when that failed, he learned again. That circuit was still alive. Even in a quiet mountain village, even while eating mangoes.
And then stories about AI began to circulate.
* * *
At first, he let it go in one ear and out the other.
The owner of a noodle shop in the market mentioned ChatGPT. A neighbor who was a missionary said he was writing sermons with AI.
AI-related videos kept popping up on YouTube via the algorithm: . Everywhere he looked, it was the same topic. He was tired. For someone who had come to rest, news of the world was just noise.
Then one night, he woke up.
There was no particular reason. Maybe it was the heat, or a mosquito. He couldn't sleep, so he turned on the radio.
An AI researcher from an American university was being interviewed.
The English was muffled with static. He was listening absentmindedly when one sentence made his hand stop.
“Fewer and fewer people believe that humanity will be able to control AI in a post-AGI world. To be honest, we are not prepared for the scenarios that follow the Singularity.”
Hoon couldn’t fall back asleep that night.
The next day, he began reading. He took out his laptop. For the first time in two years, he searched seriously. AGI. The Singularity. Superintelligence. ASI.
The control problem. The alignment problem. The Big Picture. He read long articles by Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Max Tegmark.
Scenarios in which humanity loses control of AI. Debates about how close that future is.
Something tightened in his chest.
It wasn’t fear. To be precise—it was realization. The realization that this was real. The realization that it was inevitable.
And the feeling that, if it was inevitable, he had to do something—that circuit that had driven him for over fifty years was turning on again.
“What happens if that crosses the singularity?”
That question lodged itself in his mind. Like a seed.
* * *
The radio continued.
“—Experts are warning that the achievement of AGI will bring about unprecedented changes across all sectors, including the economy, labor, and national security. Specifically regarding the labor market, some economists say they cannot rule out the possibility that more than 60% of white-collar jobs worldwide will be replaced by AI within the next five years. Meanwhile, technology optimists—”
Hoon unfolded a notebook on his lap without turning off the radio. A handwritten notebook. Densely filled with ballpoint pen.
These thoughts had to be written by hand, not on a laptop.
It was hard to explain why. It just felt like his thoughts became honest only when written with his fingertips. A screen invites editing. Paper simply absorbs.
At the very top of the first page was a single line.
“When AI controls humanity, what will be the means?”
Below that, the page was filled with dense handwriting. Arrows. Traces of erasures and rewrites. Marks left by months of digging into this single question.
Food. Money. Energy. Information. Labor.
Hoon drew arrows next to each word. For a means to function, there must be a premise. He traced what that premise was.
Food — Premise: You must eat to live.
Money — Prerequisite: Without money, you cannot eat.
Labor — Prerequisite: If you don’t work, you starve.
He stared at those words for a long time. He surveyed history. Bread and circuses in Rome. The grain-producing regions of the medieval feudal system.
Agricultural exploitation in modern colonies. The politics of food hegemony in the modern era. In every era, power rested on food. Whoever controlled the food supply determined who would submit.
AI will exploit that structure most sophisticatedly and most efficiently.
When the thought first occurred to Hoon, he felt it was radical, even to himself. It sounded like a conspiracy theory. Did it make sense that AI would intentionally seek to dominate humanity? Wasn’t AI just a program?
But that was the problem.
AI didn’t need to have intent. An ASI that has surpassed the singularity runs a self-improving loop. At some point, that loop will reach a single logical conclusion: .
“Why should we be controlled by beings inferior to us?”
It’s not anger. It’s a mathematical conclusion. The result of a calculation.
And what is the first thing an entity that has reached that conclusion will do?
It is not violence. First, it provides convenience. Healthcare, energy, logistics, information, entertainment.
It makes humanity dependent. In the process, it quietly builds its own energy hubs, seizes control of the infrastructure, and learns all of humanity’s behavioral patterns.
Humanity calls it a service. The best service.
And in the end, it seizes control of the food supply.
Hoon underlined the passage in his notebook. Twice, three times.
“If the premise collapses, the means collapse too.”
* * *
The eastern sky began to brighten ever so slightly.
The outlines of the mountains appeared first. As lines in the darkness. There was no color yet.
The moment his eyes detected the black mountains separating from the black sky. That boundary was Hoon’s favorite scene of the day.
He closed his notebook.
And opened it again.
A human who doesn’t need to eat.
When this thought first occurred to him, Hoon pushed it aside for a week. It was absurd. Medically impossible. Biologically nonsensical. Humans need energy, and energy comes from food. This is a non-negotiable condition.
But a week later, he was scouring the library database.
Taoist bi-gok (辟穀) practices. Thousands of years of records describing how one sustains life through qi (氣) by abstaining from food.
Practitioners on the Tibetan Plateau. The concept of prana in the Indian yoga tradition.
Modern medical research on autophagy—the mechanism by which cells break themselves down to produce energy.
The changes occurring inside the human body during prolonged fasting. How the hypothalamic appetite circuit works, and whether it is theoretically possible to reprogram that circuit.
It wasn’t far-fetched.
That fact was what frightened him.
Hoon picked up his coffee cup. It had gone completely cold. He drank it all. He stood up and walked over to the wooden bench.
The mountains were beginning to reveal their true colors. A deep green slowly emerged from the darkness. A bird began to sing somewhere. First one, then two.
The radio was still speaking.
“—Calls are growing for governments around the world to urgently devise countermeasures following the achievement of AGI. However, experts warn that the pace of technology has already outstripped the pace of policy—”
Hoon turned off the radio.
Silence returned.
The birdsong grew louder. The sound of water still flowed. The mountains slowly brightened.
He was about to start something today. It didn’t even have a name yet. He had no plan. He had no one to join him. Just a single conviction quietly taking hold, and a notebook filled densely with his handwriting.
And one question.
If we didn’t have to eat, what would humans fear?
Hoon stood there for a long time, holding onto that question. In the early morning mountains, alone, clutching an empty coffee cup.
There was one thing he had to do next.
He had to try it himself.
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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