Manager Baek, I’m Counting on You +46
“Wow... take a look at this.”
Assistant Manager Jeong’s groan shattered my thoughts.
“The estimated machining time just came up at 12 hours and 40 minutes. Tool load is 95 percent.”
“That’s insane...”
Manager Kim clapped a hand over his mouth.
“At 95 percent load, the tool tips are all going to blow. If Team Leader Park sees this, he’ll be throwing a wrench before anyone can blink.”
“But if we slow it down, even twenty-four hours won’t be enough. This... isn’t this just a shape that can’t be machined?”
Assistant Manager Jeong scratched his head, looking frustrated.
This was the best result the computer could produce.
If I were an ordinary engineer, I’d have given up there or gone back to the design and changed it.
But I could see it.
Between those cramped, stifling black prison bars, a blue curve was blooming as smoothly as clear water flowing over stone.
It was slipping around the danger zones marked in red with uncanny finesse.
Instead of charging in straight and brutal, it was easing in along a perfect arc, as if it were soothing the material as it cut.
“Yunho, can you come here for a second?”
“Huh?”
“Let me take a look.”
Still confused, Assistant Manager Jeong moved out of the way.
I pulled the chair in and sat down.
Up close, it was even clearer.
The red lines on the screen were concentrated at the corners of the path the program had calculated.
I could tell why those red lines were appearing.
The trochoidal method the program suggested was theoretically excellent.
It reduced the load by moving in circles.
But it had a fatal flaw.
Every time it turned a tight corner, the contact angle between the tool and the material shifted suddenly, creating tiny vibrations—chatter.
The red lines were warning us about that vibration.
If we machined it like this, the machine would scream and butcher the surface so badly it would look like rats had gnawed it apart.
Any normal engineer would have raised the safety margin and cut the speed in half.
That must have been the twelve hours Assistant Manager Jeong had been expecting.
But the blue line was different.
It was ignoring the textbook rule that said to keep the motion in a steady circle.
In some sections it stretched out long; in others it suddenly shortened.
As if the tool were dancing, it was dodging the material’s natural resonant frequency with terrifying precision.
Instead of keeping a constant contact angle, it was cutting in off-beat, slipping in exactly when vibration would have formed.
The moment I realized that, goosebumps rose along my arms.
This was the kind of thing that would be hard to calculate even if you ran fluid dynamics simulations on a supercomputer.
A miracle path that could only emerge if every beat lined up—machine rigidity, the grain of the material, the spindle speed, all of it.
So of course it had to be fast.
There was no wasted idling.
It drove into the shortest distance without hesitation, yet never once made the machine cry out.
It was a perfect trajectory.
It went beyond simple engineering and into something like art.
“Um... Manager?”
“Hmm? Ah, sorry.”
The red and blue lines.
I’d told them to step aside for a second, then sat there staring at the screen in silence, so I supposed it must have seemed strange to Assistant Manager Jeong.
I took a deep breath and steadied the hard pounding in my chest, then reached for the mouse.
“Assistant Manager Jeong, watch closely. If we let the program run this automatically, it has no choice but to produce a shape that’ll make the machine scream. So we have to ease it in, gently.”
“Gently...?”
“Yeah. Gently.”
I turned off the auto-generation feature and opened the manual editing tool.
Then I moved the cursor along the blue line that had appeared on the screen.
Click. Drag.
The blunt, awkward black lines vanished, and in their place a rounded, soft spiral path began to take shape.
The rigid straight lines disappeared, replaced by smooth waves.
Some sections tightened up densely, while others opened wide and spacious, creating a sense of rhythm.
It stopped looking like an engineering drawing for cutting steel and started looking like a landscape painting of whitewater tearing through a canyon.
What was most exhilarating was the change itself.
Every time my fingertips followed the blue line, the red warnings that had filled the screen and cried out in pain for the machine melted away like a lie.
The precarious lights went out, and in their place only calm blue remained.
It was like untangling a knot and giving the machine room to breathe—a healing process, in its own way.
Maybe that was why.
“Uh...?”
I heard Assistant Manager Jeong’s startled voice from beside me.
“Manager? You’re... manually plotting the whole route? No, but the entry angle...”
“Huh? Wow... doesn’t it look really pretty?”
Manager Kim leaned toward the monitor as if he might be pulled into it.
“There isn’t a single twist in it. It’s like the tool isn’t striking the material at all, just brushing past it...”
I could hear the team’s exclamations, but they never really reached me.
I chased the blue line in a kind of rapture.
It was almost like one of those easy maze puzzles where you just follow the path that’s already been laid out.
How much time passed?
The moment I placed the dot at the end of the final blue line, all the tension in my body drained away.
“Hoo...”
I let go of the mouse and leaned back in my chair.
On the screen, a new machining path had been completed—beautiful in a grotesque, almost impossible way, like a vortex made into a pattern.
“Done.”
I stood and stretched my whole body.
I’d focused so hard that even this brief stretch made every muscle and joint ache in protest.
“Assistant Manager Jeong. Want to run the simulation?”
“Y-yes.”
At my words, Assistant Manager Jeong hit Enter with trembling fingers.
And after only a few seconds—
[Calculation Complete]
The instant the results window appeared, Assistant Manager Jeong and Manager Kim both dropped their jaws.
[Estimated Time: 04:15:20]
[Tool Load: 25% (Safe)]
“That’s impossible...”
Assistant Manager Jeong groaned the words out.
“You cut the time to a third? With a shape this complex?”
“At 25 percent load... that’s basically just cutting tofu. Manager, is this really valid data?”
Manager Kim was staring at me as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
I gave his shoulder a light pat and checked the time.
There was still plenty of room before quitting time.
At this rate... maybe this would work out.
After thinking for a moment, I took a card out of my wallet and handed it to Assistant Manager Jeong.
“When you’re done, use this to buy yourselves a nice dinner and head home. Don’t worry about what it costs—go with the expensive stuff. It’s my personal card.”
“M-manager?”
“Oh, I’m buying for the folks at Manager Oh’s place too. We can’t let our own people go around running on an empty stomach. We’re doing this to make a living, right?”
Assistant Manager Jeong and Manager Kim looked at me with moved expressions.
But the emotion ended there.
This wasn’t over yet.
“Ah, and one more thing—the most important thing.”
“Yes! Just say the word!”
Assistant Manager Jeong answered with military straightness in his voice.
The card buff was real.
“CAM data alone won’t convince Team Leader Park. You know how that old man is—if you shove a monitor in his face, he’ll complain that it hurts his eyes and won’t even look at it. Total analog fossil.”
“Ah...”
“Print out the simulation results, tool load, and time reduction graph. Everything. Summarize it so it hits at a glance, and give me the supporting materials too.”
“Understood! I’ll print them right away!”
The two of them sprang back into motion.
Preparing without gaps, while accounting for the other side’s personality—that’s the basics of being an engineer.
And a few hours later—
The office door opened, and Director Song came in.
When he’d left earlier, he’d looked as deflated as a man who’d seen the end of the world. But now there was a strange brightness on his face.
“Director, you’re back.”
“Yeah. Why are you still here, not heading home?”
“Haha. I was just working on a weapon I’ll need tomorrow morning.”
At my words, Director Song snorted and pulled out a chair to sit down.
“A weapon, huh... Right, can’t show up empty-handed. I’ve just come back with one myself.”
“A weapon?”
“I gave one of my ADD seniors a call.”
Director Song, an ADD alum, had made a call in a situation like this?
I had a rough idea of what he’d done, but if I made it too obvious, I’d spoil his fun. So I switched on my office-politics skill and asked with deliberate surprise,
“No way—did you ask them to lean on the higher-ups? Send down an official notice or something?”
“Hey now, kid. That’s the sort of thing amateurs do. You think I’d go through all that trouble just to make a call like that?”
Director Song grinned.
There was a giddy satisfaction on his face, the look of a man who knew he’d come up with a clever move.
“I struck a deal. If Team Leader Park pulls this prototype off properly, we’ll register the process as the standard manufacturing method for ADD’s next composite armor mass-production project.”
“The standard process?”
“Yeah. Honestly, there aren’t many places that can even imitate machining this difficult. If we lock it in as the standard, then for the next ten years, all that mass-production work is ours to monopolize.”
Of course, that came with the condition of “if it succeeds,” but even so—wasn’t this something?
Director Song chuckled to himself and continued.
“And I got them to promise that Team Leader Park Gwangchul’s name would be listed in the report as an advisory committee member for the technology.”
Wow...
The exclamation escaped me before I could stop it.
If we succeeded in mass production using the method I’d proposed, ADD would, in the end, register our process as the standard manufacturing method.
But that was only if we succeeded, and getting any kind of promise out of an outside party with no ADD connection—treating success as a given—was impossible.
And yet Director Song had gotten that promise.
And he’d done it in a way that was enough to ignite Team Leader Park’s pride, too.
“So once you hit the director level, political skill really does get monstrous.”
“Kid, call it tact, not politics. And what good is politics anyway? It didn’t even stop the knife from coming down on our department.”
“...Pardon?”
Out of nowhere, Director Song fired a point-blank shot at my gut, and I couldn’t help but freeze.
Director Song gave a bitter smile and went on.
“I should’ve stopped it, but I just let it slide by making excuses that nothing could be done. And now Manager Baek is blocking it with nothing but his own ability. I’m not even fit to be mentioned.”
Director Song.
Had he been thinking this deeply about it all this time?
I’d assumed he was just a parachute hire from ADD and didn’t care much about the people in our company.
“I’m sorry, Manager Baek.”
“...It’s fine. It’s already in the past now anyway. It’s not like you were the one who decided to kick me out.”
“The decision came from higher up. The kind of big shots who don’t know tech and just talk from a financial viewpoint. But even so, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Director Song fell silent.
He wore an expression that said he wanted to say more, and for a moment he seemed to wrestle with something inside himself before changing his face.
“Well, in any case, Team Leader Park is the kind of craftsman who prides himself on his skill, so this should definitely tempt him. How could he resist? Even a design nerd like me is leaning in just hearing about it.”
Director Song burst out laughing.
Was there some higher-level circumstance outside the company we didn’t know about?
Still, the important thing right now was that Director Song felt indebted to me.
In corporate life, a superior’s guilt is a rather useful weapon.
Something I might be able to use very effectively one day.
Thinking that, I said, “You’ve brought back a solid reason, Director, so I’d better show you the practical benefit.”
I slid the warm, freshly printed report that Assistant Manager Jeong had prepared toward Director Song.
“Here it is. The muzzle for Team Leader Park.”
“What’s this? Machining data?”
Director Song picked up the report without much thought.
As he turned the first page, his eyes widened little by little, until they looked ready to pop out.
“...?! ”
His gaze shot back and forth between the report and my face.
“Machining time, 4 hours...? Load, 25 percent...? Hey, Manager Baek. This isn’t a program error, is it? Does this even make sense?”
“It’s not an error.”
I smiled as I looked back and forth between the report and Director Song.
“We didn’t believe our own eyes either, so we ran the simulation three times. It’s been cross-checked. Solid data.”
“Good grief...”
Director Song couldn’t even close the report. He just stood there, mouth hanging open.
He looked utterly disbelieving.
“You really pulled this off? In that short amount of time?”
“We got a little lucky. I could see the path the machine wanted to take.”
“Lucky, my ass...”
Director Song seized my shoulder with both hands, his face full of emotion.
“I heard you had good instincts from the moment you were hired, then after the accident you were quiet for a while... They say the late bloomer flowers the brightest, and damn if that doesn’t fit you perfectly.”
“That’s too kind.”
“No, it isn’t. Your abilities are finally blooming properly, Manager Baek. Good. Very good!”
Director Song hugged the report to his chest like it was a treasure.
He had both a sturdy shield and a sharp spear now.
At this point, even the most impregnable fortress could be breached.
“Director. Let’s go in time for the production team briefing tomorrow morning.”
“Right. With this data, even that bastard Park Gwangchul won’t have a leg to stand on. I’ll flatten his nose good and proper.”
“No. Don’t flatten his nose. Shouldn’t we ask him to help us instead?”
“Hm?”
“The data is perfect, but in the end, it’s a person who runs the machine. We need to corner him while still preserving his pride. You dangle the advisory committee title in front of him, and I’ll use this data to make sure he can’t run away.”
“Hah... You’ve really turned into a fox, haven’t you? Perfect. We’ll squeeze him from both sides.”
Director Song laughed heartily and thumped my shoulder several times.
*
The next morning.
The production plant building.
Weeeeeeing—!
KA-BOOM!
The moment I stepped through the entrance, deafening noise and the sharp stench of cutting fluid punched into my nose.
It was a world utterly unlike the office.
A wild worksite where the smell of rough metal shavings and sweat tangled together.
At the center of it all stood a massive back, arms folded, barking orders at the workers.
Production Technology Team Leader, Mad Dog Park Gwangchul.
“Hoo...”
Director Song swallowed hard.
No matter how perfect a weapon you brought, it seemed there was nothing you could do about the pressure of the field itself.
“Let’s go. Manager Baek, I’m counting on you.”
I readjusted the file folder holding the report and answered briefly.
“Let’s go. Time to put a muzzle on him.”
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