These Bastards Cheated Me?!
“Representative Kim Siwon. You’ve had a rough one.”
After everyone else had left, the professor who had given the lecture today came over to our side. He seemed genuinely pleased.
“You must have had a hard time from the very start of the seminar, but thank you for seeing it through to the end.”
“I just brushed it off by thinking, ‘Ah, that bastard’s at it again.’ Haha.”
“You should eat and get ready for the next session as well.”
“Yes. I think I’ll be able to run it in a much better mood. Hahaha.”
After that, I vented a little about what I’d heard from Badugi.
Since the people who brought in T.A. Medical’s product and Professor Bang Yeon-gi were in different camps, there were people frantically looking for any excuse to get at one another.
“I just got dragged into faction fighting by accident. Yeah.”
“It’s fine.”
“Fine, my ass. I can’t exactly keep that bastard from showing up, either.”
“Why can’t you keep him from showing up?”
“Because I don’t have a proper reason, that’s why. Tsk. Let’s just eat.”
“Yes, sir.”
We left the seminar room and went to the separate space where the boxed lunches were being eaten.
From far away, we could see Professor Bang Yeon-gi getting on the elevator and leaving.
At last, everyone was able to eat with a little more ease.
＊＊＊
Professor Bang Yeon-gi was furious in his own way, too.
He had written a recommendation letter solely because he trusted JH Medical, and he had even opened the door for a demo in the internal medicine department right away, only to be humiliated like this.
“These bastards tricked me?!”
Professor Bang, just out of Korea University Hospital, called the CEO of JHX AI at once, breathing hard enough to sound like steam was coming out of his ears.
“Hey! What the hell were you thinking, lying to me like that, huh?!”
“W-what? Professor, Professor. What are you talking about?”
The CEO who took the call naturally had no idea what was going on and stumbled over his words in confusion.
“You lied to me, and I got made a complete fool of!!”
“Did something happen?”
JHX AI was a programming company with no medical foundation whatsoever. The developers were skilled, but every other part of the company was close to zero.
Then, the moment JH Medical acquired it, they changed the name to JHX AI.
After that, they ordered them to make a product as close as possible to T.A. Medical’s.
Of course, since everyone except the developers had been laid off, the remaining developers simply followed the order.
“You told me you’d made a more accurate product than T.A. Medical!”
“Ah...”
No matter how much training data JH Medical had provided, an AI that had merely been imitated over a short period of time could not beat T.A. Medical.
In that situation, an outsourced design firm had only been asked to “make a promotional piece that stands out,” and had produced something suited to that purpose.
A promotional piece claiming it was better than the competition, and even manipulating the competition’s data.
“You’ve spent years handling medical devices after stuffing yourselves with rice and side dishes, and this is the pile of lies you come up with?!”
“No, what are we supposed to do if you just get angry without explaining anything? What exactly am I supposed to do?”
The person on the other end of the call was a new hire who had been brought into JH Medical, only to nearly be kicked out during training.
But they couldn’t quite bring themselves to fire him, so in a fit of temper JH Medical had sent him to JHX AI instead.
A team being run by a useless team lead and one lone new hire, both shoved aside as punishment.
A team with no proper product, no promotional materials, and no response manual.
There was nothing they could do to an angry doctor there.
“I’m going to get every single one of your contracts canceled!! Just thinking about how I trusted you and got humiliated makes me furious!! Huh?! Just you wait, JH Medical!!”
“What? No, wait— Professor, Professor! Hold on!!”
The call was cut off.
Professor Bang Yeon-gi was furious to the tips of his hair.
He had only backed the competitor because the professors he found irritating were all showing off over T.A. Medical’s adoption, but it was hard to believe he’d been deceived like this.
Regret over his own past self, and the humiliation of it all, were now being directed at JHX AI.
What mattered here was that the person throwing this childish tantrum was, in his own right, a professor at Korea University Hospital.
“Hah. I let it slide because it was JH Medical, and this is how they stab me in the back?”
Professor Bang Yeon-gi was not the most powerful man at Korea University Hospital.
That didn’t mean he was some backroom nobody, though. It only meant he wasn’t the undisputed king inside the hospital. In academic circles, either, he was not someone who stood obviously below anyone.
“Hello? Yes. Cancel every equipment contract we were about to sign with any JH affiliate. Cut off the medicines too.”
One professor in the nation’s top university hospital internal medicine department carried out the best revenge he could manage.
“And contact the PR team. Tell them JHX AI put my face on their promotional material, and I never consented to that. Report them for illegal use.”
It was true that Professor Bang had written the recommendation letter.
But no one had explained in detail how it would be used.
All they had done was send an email asking, “If you were to write a recommendation for our product, what would you say?”
Under those circumstances, having his face slapped onto illegal advertising did nothing for his honor.
So he went ahead and filed a complaint through the hospital.
“Hey! Professor Bang Yeon-gi told us to cancel every contract related to us. What the hell is this?!”
“He says he’s furious about that weird JHX department and told them to cut everything off.”
“What, what? What the hell is that?”
“That jerry-rigged department they made to deal with T.A. Medical. The one they said would build some kind of machine.”
“Why the hell are we eating the crap they shat out?!”
Inside JH Medical, chaos naturally broke out.
It wasn’t yet an enormous blow to their immediate sales figures.
But the fact that even places connected to Professor Bang Yeon-gi were shouting for contract cancellations made it obvious that this would not end as a positive outcome.
“P-professor. I’ll come see you myself. No, ah—”
“Director, are you saying we shouldn’t contact Professor Bang Yeon-gi? Ah, you want us to leave him alone...?”
Sales reps, department heads, PMs, and even executives were frantically calling around.
But naturally, no one could get through.
“Ah. How many places has that man been stirring up? This month’s numbers are going to be hell.”
While everyone grumbled, the one thing JH Medical had been most desperate to avoid finally happened.
This news was lethal from JH Medical’s perspective.
For pharmaceutical companies, especially pharmaceutical companies in this era, it was difficult to operate with marketing that was completely clean and fully legal. So JH Medical had also been actively using everything from minor violations, like slipping questionable wording through in notes, to outright illegal kickbacks.
And now, all at once, they were saying they were cracking down on illegal activity on a broad scale.
“We’re screwed.”
It was screwed, plain and simple.
“For now, everyone needs to keep their heads down. Got it?”
“Then what about our numbers?”
“Shut up, you bastard! If you keep obsessing over numbers and get a product suspended, that’s a bigger problem! And do you have any idea how desperate our competitors are going to be to pick us apart?!”
JH Medical ended up taking a much bigger hit than it had expected.
“Hey. If you’re not going to do things the usual way, then why should I use this here?”
“Doctor, still, using the original medicine is...”
“Copy drugs are coming out so well these days. Why should I bother with yours? Huh? Why should I put myself at a loss just to use your medicine?”
The competitors all began launching aggressive marketing campaigns, while JH Medical alone had to be careful even about using loopholes, and was losing clients one by one.
The entire company’s staff felt like their heads were about to split open as they worried about when, and how, to win back the clients they’d lost.
Of course, that also meant employee resignations, in other words, talent leakage.
No one had imagined that a product hastily thrown together to keep T.A. Medical in check would end up staining JH Medical’s own reputation like this.
A filthy corporation, incompetent employees, and an angry customer. A collaboration from hell.
＊＊＊
> Is this also revenge, by your standards?
> It’s not as much as I wanted, but it’s a decent showing.
Badugi asked me with a faint laugh as the news about JH Medical flowed out over the radio.
I answered with a small smile of my own.
Then the person sitting beside me looked over and asked, “Are you spreading the word about your move? You keep smiling. Haha.”
“Haha. Yes.”
I was in the middle of moving.
Not to some huge place, just to a 1.5-room officetel right next to the office.
I would be a senior next year.
Since I’d already earned a lot of credits, I’d be taking fewer classes anyway, so I decided to move to shorten my commute to the company.
And, as an added bonus, I was about to have my first-ever “comfortable home.”
“But I was surprised at how little stuff you had. It looked like you could’ve done it in a regular sedan if you made a few trips.”
“Haha. Still, I couldn’t exactly move a mattress by myself.”
Inside the truck carrying my things, I sat comfortably in the seat next to the mover because I had so few belongings.
There really was so little luggage that a few trips in a sedan might have been enough to finish the move.
Still, I didn’t want to spend too much time and energy on anything outside of work, so I’d treated myself and booked a moving service.
Moving like this had been one of my little dreams, and now I was finally making it happen.
“We’re here already. Get out, get out.”
The move was over in no time.
It was a fully furnished officetel, and in truth there wasn’t even enough to require two people to carry anything except the mattress.
“Please transfer the payment to this account.”
“Yes. Sent.”
“It’s a little embarrassing how fast this ended. Haha. Take care now.”
The mover left after saying goodbye, and the moment he was gone I opened the officetel window.
It wasn’t a gorgeous Han River view, but it was a city view with various buildings scattered across the distance.
I could even see the shared office building where our company was located.
“This feels strange.”
As I ran the vacuum around, my new place felt undeniably spacious.
The built-in wardrobe was fairly large, too.
“I could probably buy one more padded jacket.”
I looked around the place a little more, indulging in small luxuries.
Seeing the desk and bed frame I’d just bought made my mood drift again for no particular reason.
“Next time I should change the monitor.”
I’d never realized that saving up my salary, maintaining a stable life, and still being able to spend it could feel this good.
So this was why everyone said a home was the best thing.
Compared to my excitement, Badugi reacted blandly.
It didn’t sound like it was being snappish because it was in a bad mood. It really just seemed to have nothing to say.
Maybe because it had never owned a home?
“I’ll give you a little perspective.”
It was nonsense to say I could make an AI empathize, but I grinned and pulled out the notebook I had in my bag.
Then I opened my laptop and typed the things written in that notebook straight into it.
Badugi, which had just been blankly watching me, widened its eyes slightly and wagged its tail.
The way it kept wagging its tail while pretending not to react was exactly like a dog.
[How is it? I moved you, too.]
What I had coded was a new house.
Not the crude doghouse I’d made before, but a small home with features like lights that could be switched on and off and a door that could be closed.
There was even a blanket spread over a soft cushion.
“Well?”
Before I’d even finished asking, Badugi walked right into the house I’d made for it.
Watching it turn the lights on and off by itself made me feel strangely proud.
I’d wondered whether it would really work, but as expected, if you implemented it somehow, it worked.
“If I touch any electronic device, you catch me immediately, so I prepared this one piece by piece by hand.”
That was true.
The moment my move was confirmed, I’d thought it would be nice if Badugi, who’d gone through everything with me, could live in a good house too, and so I’d made this event for it.
Writing the code line by line by hand, or searching image sources in paper magazines, had made me question my life more than once, but somehow I’d managed to pull off the surprise gift.
“I can’t keep doing surprises like this anymore. Let’s just be satisfied with this.”
Badugi’s tail was still whipping back and forth as it wrapped itself in the blanket and flashed me a bright smile.
I appreciate it.
“You know how to say thank you, too?”
lol
“Then keep helping me well from now on.”
Of course.
All right. A new beginning again.