Hemingway’s Cut
The Hunger and the Machine
The people were hungry. The land was dry in places and wet in others, but the hunger was the same. It did not care for seasons or fortunes. It came like an old enemy, slow and sure, and it settled in the bones of men, women, and children alike. In the old days, hunger was fought with grain from the fields, with the sweat of men who knew how to turn earth into food. But this was a new time, a time when sickness moved through the streets, when men could not gather, when work and wages were lost overnight.
In Togo, the government had to act. The old ways of finding the needy—through papers and visits, through questions and forms—were useless now. The world was closed. The streets were empty. The hungry still waited. And so the men who worked with machines stepped in. They built a new way, one that did not need paper or doors to knock on. They took the eyes of the sky—satellites that watched from far above—and let them see the places where the poor lived. They fed the machines the knowledge of men: how poverty looked from the heavens, how it spoke through the movement of a phone, the silence of an empty street.
The Money That Came Without a Hand
The machines told the government where the need was greatest. And then the money came. It did not come in a sack dropped on a doorstep. It did not come in an envelope carried by a man on a bicycle. It came to the phones, the same ones that rang with bad news and better days. A message, a sum, a chance to buy food, to hold off hunger one more day.
It was not charity in the old way, with the giver standing tall and the receiver bowing low. It was different. It was quiet and fast. The men and women who got the money did not have to beg for it. The machine had already seen their need, had already decided. It was efficient, like a sharp knife in a butcher’s hand.
Some would say it was impersonal, that it lacked the human touch. But hunger does not care for sentiment. It does not wait for kind words. It only asks for food, and the machine had found a way to give it.
The Future in the Wires
This was only the beginning. The men who built the system knew that poverty would not end with one crisis. There would always be another storm, another war, another sickness. The machine could help again, if men let it. It could find the starving before their ribs showed, before their eyes grew dull. It could send help before the hunger became something else—something desperate and violent.
But men must still decide. The machine does not have a heart. It does not know mercy. It only knows patterns, numbers, the logic of need. If men use it well, it will save lives. If they forget it, let it rust, let it turn to something else—something colder, something crueler—then it will be no different from the hunger itself.
For now, though, in Togo, the machine had done its work. The money had moved. The food had been bought. The people lived. And that was enough for today.
