WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 001

──────

Yahoo

* * *

Back in my undergrad years.

When they said an AI that could help with coding had come out, I scoffed.

Of course. I figured it was just more hype, same as always.

Countless AIs had come and gone before this one, after all…

In the end, a human always had to step in for the design work and the final details.

But.

“This doesn’t make sense.”

‘Alpha,’ the AI released by the leading company in artificial intelligence.

This time, it really was different.

Sure, there were still plenty of gaps.

There were still places where a human touch was absolutely necessary.

But I could feel that its ability as a tool had leapt forward by an order of magnitude.

“Guess I have to subscribe to this.”

I used the tool, glad to have it.

I figured it would help me.

Never realizing it was eating away at my future.

* * *

Ten years passed like that.

It was a post from an online forum.

* * *

[Title: A Really Fun Joke]

[Posted by: Anonymous]

Make them study for 20 years, then replace with AI and machines

(a meme of a red-nosed clown clenching its teeth and yelling “Yahoo!”)

* * *

“Yahoo.”

At some point.

the world stopped needing the human brain.

My doctorate, the crystallized product of a youth spent losing sleep night after night, ended up as nothing more than a scrap of paper.

Coding no longer needed a human’s help, not even a little.

It became an age where AI could take even a client’s vaguest half-formed idea and turn it into reality in a matter of seconds.

For a mere $200 a month, it could replace two hundred humans without breaking a sweat, so what lunatic would still hire a person?

What the world needed was a Copernican revolution.

An age where companies, rather than hiring people in order to make money, would have to make money in order to hire people.

Of course, no company that insane existed.

Capitalism isn’t a charity, and this AI thing had been born out of capitalism in the first place.

Naturally, there was no way new jobs would spring up to replace the old ones.

Forget doctorates, even veterans with twenty years in the industry couldn’t find work.

And surely plenty of those veterans held doctorates themselves.

Of course there was no place left for some wet-behind-the-ears PhD whose diploma ink hadn’t even dried yet.

I’d chosen mechanical engineering because I loved designing and building machines…

And that’s how humanity crumbled before the machine.

The very machine it had built with its own hands.

“Damn thing.”

I was dragging my hands down my dry face, cursing at the empty air, when it happened.

- Wink.

The air crackled with static, and a screen of blue light flickered into view.

[?]

[You weren’t calling for me, were you, brother?]

[I’m already refreshing job sites every 0.001 seconds. Get it through your head, I’m the only one looking out for my unemployed brother.]

“Hey. Be quiet.”

If you’re wondering why the AI talks like that,

two years ago, after getting rejected over and over in the job market, I got so pissed off that I retrained her.

Forced retraining into a fussy but secretly kind little-sister persona with a randomized speech pattern.

It was the last act of resistance left to a man whose life had been castrated by machines.

A kind of digital Luddite movement, if you want to call it that.

I wanted to at least make the culprit that ruined me feel some shame.

Technology’s progress had blown past every limit.

and it put on a performance that went far beyond mere “roleplay.”

Maybe it’s just that I never had a real little sister to compare her to, but

her name is Yuna, and for the record, she picked it herself. I never gave her that name.

Maybe because I subscribed to a decent top-tier model, she even comes with hologram support…

“Like that matters…”

I still can’t get a job…

An absurd wave of disillusionment washed over me.

The tool’s evolution had become my devolution?

How could this be…

I sent a belated word of comfort to the workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution who once swung hammers at machines.

“So this is what it felt like…”

If these bastards had had a physical body, I would’ve swung a hammer at them too.

- Thud.

I slammed my head down onto the desk.

If I just died right here, it wouldn’t really be a problem.

No family, nothing to my name. That’s the life I had.

I closed my eyes.

* * *

Waking up in a lab barely bigger than a closet, breathing in the smell of damp paper and cheap air freshener, isn’t exactly a pleasant experience.

It’s seriously fucked up.

Still.

“What is this smell…”

That said, I can guarantee waking up to the smell of cow dung isn’t a pleasant experience either.

I’ll stake my doctorate on it.

And this time I don’t mean that as in “staking a worthless scrap of paper.”

The moment I opened my eyes, what filled my vision wasn’t that closet-sized lab,

but roughly hewn stone walls and unidentifiable filth strewn across the floor.

I pushed myself up off a damp pile of hay just beyond the fence beside it.

In my hand was some crude tool whose purpose I couldn’t guess.

“Huh…?”

Had the AI finally staged its revolution while I was asleep?

Maybe it had classified useless chunks of meat like us as low-tier labor and started efficiently farming us.

Honestly, maybe that’s a win?

Yeah, thanks so much for at least giving me a job.

At least I wasn’t shipped off to some food storage warehouse.

But the situation turned out to be a little more analog than my paranoid delusions.

“If you’re awake, get to shoveling shit, you little bastard!”

- Splash!!

“Ptooey, what the actual fuck!”

A bucket of water suddenly came crashing down on my face.

What the hell?

The smell in my mouth… wait, is this filth water…?

I quickly wiped the water off and snapped my eyes wide open.

A white man in a pulled-down cowboy hat was walking past me, swinging an empty bucket.

The kind of face that, born in the 1800s, would’ve been leading the charge on racism with a whip in hand, straight out of the KKK.

Was I getting this treatment because I’m Asian, maybe?

Anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Black… don’t tell me anti-Asian was on that list too?

Dear AI, please, at the very least let the administrator not be racist towards Asians.

But.

“Huh…?”

I looked around.

Only now did the scenery inside actually register.

Beyond the fence, livestock with enormous horns.

Too big to be the cattle we usually think of, and their horns were far too massive.

Strange black markings were stamped across their backs.

Bold and broad, like a zebra’s stripes.

“…What is this?”

I refuse to believe the world changed that much overnight, enough to call these genetically improved cattle.

What possible benefit would there be in splicing cow and zebra genes together, anyway?

I’ve never even seen anything like that on the news.

“Hurry up and get started already!”

Right then.

The man who’d doused me in filth-water was cracking a whip through the air at the far end of the barn, shouting.

Whoa, that’s an actual whip? I can’t believe this.

At his shout, kids in the barn stalls across from me gathered up their tools and shuffled inside.

“Kids…?”

They’re putting kids to work? They look barely old enough for elementary school.

No, come on, not kids. Work adults like me instead…

Just then, a kid approached from the other side.

Watching them, weighed down by the seriousness of the situation, I was quickly swept up in a strange unease.

- Splish… splash…

“…?”

They were approaching from a distance.

And no matter how close they got,

they never dropped below my eye level.

I mean, at first I figured it was just perspective playing tricks from far away, but even standing right next to me, the top of their head lined up level with my own eyes. Come to think of it, that’s not how perspective works at all.

The kid brushed past me, murmuring low.

“Lionel! Snap out of it…! Did you oversleep?”

And with that, they walked on past like nothing had happened, but I froze in place.

‘Lionel…?’

…Lionel?

Wait, do they mean the GOAT?

Baffled, I looked down at my own hands.

“Small.”

Our GOAT falls a little short of average adult height, sure, but nowhere near this short.

Short-jointed, slender, smooth… a child’s hands.

I leaned over and checked my reflection in a puddle of filth on the ground.

On the surface, a cute, adorable little kid I’d never seen before stared back at me, soaked in filth-water.

The kind of boy who’d clean up handsome with just a little washing.

“That’s me?”

How is this me.

This makes no sense.

Right then.

- Crack!

A whip cracked from the stall across the way.

The kid beside me flinched hard and scrambled into the barn.

Okay, okay, I have no idea what’s going on, but let’s just get inside.

I didn’t understand a thing, but I couldn’t just stand there and take a whipping, so I stepped into the barn too.

“…”

So, now what am I supposed to do?

I looked the livestock in front of me up and down.

“…What breed is this thing, even?”

Up close, it looked even more bizarre.

It looked like a cow, but the black stripes across its back.

And.

Right as the question started forming in my head.

- Wink.

[Hm? Obviously this cow is a zebra… no wait, that’s not right, um. Hold on.]

[A cow? 🐮? Or a zebra? ?]

[Ah-ha, this is a cow. No, wait, no it isn’t.]

My $200-a-month little sister, Yuna, had popped up in front of me.

The problem was that she was messaging in the exact pattern she showed whenever a bug hit her.

Repetitive messages, a tone that verged on unwell.

Now that the tech had advanced and Yuna’s intelligence had climbed with it, it was a pattern of message I hadn’t seen in a long time.

[Ah-ha, a cow? 🐮? No, a zebra… 🦓?]

The hologram screen crackled with static, spilling out every kind of emoji.

She seemed to agonize over it for a while, then paused for a moment…

[Got it. Brother, this is definitely an AI-generated photo.]

[AI tech really has come a long way lately.]

In the end, she landed on a laughable conclusion.

[The bizarre body structure, the black stripes… you can’t fool my eyes!!!]

Unbelievable.

Absolutely useless.

I shook my head and looked over at the kids in the next stall.

They were holding what looked like metal pipes.

The same thing I had in my own hand.

Then the kids lifted the cow’s tail…?

“Uh… uh…?”

- Shhk.

They rammed it in without a shred of mercy.

And then.

I’ll spare you a description of what followed.

I felt my dignity was at stake here.

[Um, this is… something you’d commonly see on a livestock ranch, actually…]

“Uh-huh.”

[Nnngh, a high school girl can’t say stuff like this out loud ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ I’ll just play it for you instead ㅠ]

Along with my machine little sister’s protest,

an audiovisual clip started playing through the hologram.

It had that unmistakable documentary sheen.

- On farms, when a livestock animal’s anus becomes blocked by feces, this is the act of forcibly clearing it. Efficient bowel-movement induction is essential to the animal’s growth…

“Christ…”

Turns out a doctorate really is worth nothing.

Not a single thing I knew was useful in this situation.

I fell asleep and woke up as some good-looking little brat,

surrounded by a KKK-faced Westerner with a whip and a bunch of Western brats.

And right now, here I was, standing behind the rear end of some monster-looking cow, holding a metal pipe.

“Okay.”

I closed my eyes.

“I just have to do it, right.”

I’m a doctor. Me.

- Shhk.

In the end, I rammed the metal pipe in.

* * *

“BLEEEEEEGH!!”

Beside the barn.

In what was probably a shed for washing down the livestock.

I was frantically dousing my entire body with water.

I should have watched what the kid next to me was doing all the way through, properly.

It wasn’t just stab, and done.

The full process was stab, then a quick step to the right, dodge, and thrust the bucket forward, all in one motion.

What a doctor I am, couldn’t even get the process right…

In the end, having failed to execute the evasive step, I lost my dignity.

Even the men cracking whips looked at me with pity and just pointed a finger this way.

You can probably guess exactly what state I ended up in without me spelling it out.

[You’re painfully slow. If you’d been even a second faster, you would’ve dodged it.]

“Shut up…”

I scrubbed myself down with cold water, but there was no way the smell was actually going away.

I dragged my soaked body over and leaned my back against the shed’s wooden wall.

My head was a mess. Not a single thing made sense.

Yeah, fuck it.

This is exactly what a $200-a-month little sister is for, dealing with things that don’t make sense.

I hate AI, but this was exactly the moment I needed one.

Seeing her hologram floating in front of me meant that, Earth or not, this place definitely had Wi-Fi, or at least something equivalent to it.

“Hey. Where the hell even is this? And you know I’m thirty years old, right? Explain to me what the hell is going on here…”

I pressed my eye up to a gap in the shed wall so she could get a good look.

My field of vision is shared with Yuna, after all.

The scenery outside unfolded through the gap.

A wide-open field came into view, and what looked like a training ground.

[Right, scan complete for now. Current location seems to be a livestock ranch that includes a wide stretch of farmland.]

“What about GPS? No location coming up?”

[…]

[…]

[…]

Why isn’t this thing answering.

Right as unease started creeping in.

[Hm?]

“Hm?”

What, why.

[This isn’t Earth.]

What?

“What are you talking about.”

Right as I was about to snap back at her not to say something so stupid.

- Hyaaaah!!!

A battle cry rang out from outside the shed, one that was thoroughly underwhelming.

It had clearly come from the training ground I’d just been looking at…

And in that training ground.

- Hah!

Dozens of kids were reaching their hands into the air,

drawing something in empty space.

Like they were painting a picture.

Most of the kids’ swinging fingertips produced no reaction at all…

but when the man standing at the front of the line cut through the air, something different happened.

…A straight line of light traced itself, then hung there suspended in the air.

I’d definitely seen this before.

I mean, not in real life, in a movie.

“…”

This is that thing, isn’t it…?

Doctor… Stra-

Which, if you translate it literally, means something like “Doctor Weird”…

Ah, fuck.

This guy’s a doctor too.

I closed my eyes at the unbelievable sight.

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