Magic Tower Semiconductor (2)
The phone buzzed.
He was resting at home when the lawyer called.
“Yes, Counselor.”
“Sir, the deposit should have gone through.”
He hadn’t gone into work today. He’d been waiting for exactly this call. His heart was hammering so hard he doubted he could have focused on a single customer at the electronics shop anyway.
“Let me check.”
Keeping the call open, he opened the banking app on his smartphone. The money was already sitting in the corporate account.
One zero. Two. Three. Four…
A little over a hundred billion won.
“Holy…”
He had never seen a number that large in a bank account before. The feeling was strange—his face flushed hot, and at the same time he felt faintly dazed.
What do I even do with this money?
I’m rich now. Should I go shopping first? I’ll take everything from here to there?
His mother in the hospital came to mind.
Mom… we’re rich now.
The lawyer’s voice came through the line.
“Sir, if you’re looking into a corporate building, or if there’s anything else you’d like to purchase, just say the word.”
He’d first met the lawyer during the auction and hired him then. Even at that first meeting he’d seemed sharp; now the man was volunteering work without being asked—almost as if he’d already become a real employee.
Jiho thought of the electronics shop for a moment. The place that had kept him fed all this time. The place they’d been renting since his father’s day. It sat a little off the main strip, so the rent had never been brutal, and they’d stayed there for years.
But with money like this coming in, buying a building of their own didn’t seem like a bad idea.
“Counselor, could you look into a building for me?”
“A research facility, you mean? What kind of price range are we talking?”
Right. How much should I spend?
He wasn’t any kind of professional investor, so putting money into real estate felt like a safe bet. The old saying about burying big money in the ground existed for a reason.
“Something around half of what just came in.”
“Understood.”
“And, Counselor.”
“Yes?”
“As you know, JH Research is just me right now.”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if you might come over to the lab yourself.”
“A scouting offer?”
“Exactly.”
“Thank you. I’ll serve you to the best of my ability.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you. As for the title… how about Chief of Staff for now?”
“Thank you. Then please call me Chief of Staff Jang Dae-shik from now on.”
“Yes, Chief Jang. Looking forward to working with you.”
“Likewise. Beyond the research building, is there anything else you need?”
His mother came to mind again.
“My mother’s in the hospital. I’d like to look into a better facility for her.”
Now that he had money, he wanted a building—and he wanted to move his mother somewhere better. Having Chief Jang handle the search made more sense than a man with no legs running around himself.
He was going to need more staff, too.
After hanging up with Chief Jang, he pulled out another smartphone.
The one that could call the Nano World.
The world’s fastest RAM. Wilson Hwang. A hundred-billion-won deposit. All of it had started with this phone.
It was, by now, the single greatest treasure he owned.
Tap.
He pressed the Observe button.
With Observe, he could tour their world without necessarily calling Illys.
He zoomed in.
He zoomed out for a wider view.
He panned left, then right, sweeping across the Rodriguez Territory.
“Oh. Looks peaceful.”
They were in a drought and short on food, but the landscape through this tiny screen looked like any ordinary countryside. Trees here and there, plenty of grass. Rocky hills showed the scars of construction work. They’d mentioned mining—maybe that was it.
“No big rivers, though.”
A territory with stone mountains and no rivers. He understood now what it meant that farming wasn’t their center of gravity. In Earth terms, it was more of a mining or light-industry region.
He touched the screen again.
“Whoa. They’ve really gotten somewhere.”
He hadn’t told Illys, but he’d been watching them build semiconductors in the Rodriguez Territory the whole time.
“How am I supposed to not watch this?”
The Rodriguez Territory. An impossibly small world—so small he’d taken to calling it the Nano World on a whim—and a massive construction project was underway there. Using five of the four-gigabyte RAM modules he’d given them, no less. Of course he was watching.
At this rate, the place was turning into a high-tech industrial city.
“Amazing.”
What he’d handed over had been memory modules: green PCB boards, each with four one-gig black chips mounted on them. People usually just called the whole green board “RAM.” He’d passed them five of those modules.
They had pried every chip free of its green board—and then started stacking towers with them.
Twenty chips stacked like a tower on a single green board.
“Is that even going to work?”
RAM stacked into a tower. Honestly, he had his doubts it would function. Still, the place was crawling with people working their hearts out, so he watched with quiet satisfaction.
Their methods were something else. Sometimes it looked like elegant magic. Other times it looked like thousands of bodies swarming a North Korean-style mass labor project. A mash-up of magic and muscle.
Whatever. A hundred billion won was sitting in the corporate account, so all he could feel was gratitude and contentment.
“What’s Illys up to?”
Curious, he checked the button next to Observe: Register Character. He’d already registered Illys.
Tap.
Observe → Register Character → Illys. Her image filled the screen at once.
Oh.
Illys was directing. The workers pulled back from the tower.
“Ralph?”
“Ready.”
“Good! Let’s begin.”
A low hum.
Illys climbed onto one edge of a green board and murmured something. Light bloomed across the substrate.
Whoosh—!
The light raced along the etched circuits and into the twenty chips stacked like a tower.
The hum deepened.
“Huh. They’re doing something.”
He didn’t know what, but it looked impressive. A moment later, Illys’s face lit with joy.
“I like watching her work this hard.”
It was a little like peeking in on an idol grinding through practice—except he was doing it on a smartphone.
The phone buzzed again.
“Hm?”
A call came through on the same phone he’d been using to watch. At some point Illys had changed clothes; she was in a white dress now, praying. When she prayed through the Holy Relic, the call reached him.
“Illys?”
He answered as if he hadn’t been watching the whole time. It would have been awkward if she knew.
Illys beamed.
“Constellation! We’ve made a semiconductor!”
“You made a semiconductor?”
“Yes. We combined everything you gave us last time.”
She looked confident. That flash of light a moment ago must have been the final check after assembly.
But her gaze on the screen wasn’t centered. She looked like someone filming without knowing where the camera was.
“Illys, could you shift your eyes a little to the left?”
“Like this?”
“More, more. Yes—right there. Perfect. And a bit higher.”
“Like this?”
“That’s it. That direction is where you’re looking at me.”
“Ah! So you’re watching from the Holy Relic’s perspective!”
He could see her; she couldn’t see him. From her side, it was as if he were observing from midair.
“I’ve got the hang of it now. Eye level, just a little above. Understood. I’ll speak facing this way from now on.”
“Great. So what did you do with the semiconductor?”
“We cut, pried, and reattached the pieces you gave us and assembled them in a new style.”
“A new style?”
“Yes. The mana artifacts you sent were spread out wide—five of them. We debated how to improve them and decided to merge them into one.”
“Is that even possible?”
Combining semiconductors was easy to say and nearly impossible to do. Not just for anyone—not for any company.
Illys looked sure of herself.
“As a 4-Circle Mage, I lived in a magic tower for a long time. And the finest craftsman in our territory—a dwarf—has built magic towers more than once.”
“And?”
He wasn’t sure what magic towers had to do with making semiconductors.
“We combined the semiconductors you sent and built them in the style of a magic tower.”
“Magic tower style?”
“Yes. More precisely, a Blue Tower–style semiconductor. Ralph says the most recent tower he helped construct was the Blue Tower.”
“I see. Go ahead and send it, then.”
“Yes. Sending it now.”
The phone buzzed with a push notification.
Tribute 1
Accept the tribute?
[Yes] / [No]
He tapped Yes.
Whoosh—!
A small light bloomed on his desk. Then something with a decidedly unusual shape arrived.
Calling it a semiconductor almost felt wrong—it was too beautiful. It looked like a miniature tower. Atop a green board sat a black cubic block about three centimeters tall, like a cut gem.
“Oh, that looks incredible.”
“Thank you. May I explain briefly?”
“Please.”
“Then I’ll change for a moment.”
“Sure.”
Illys smoothed her hair and spun once in place.
Whoa.
A second ago she’d been in something like a white dress; now she wore a sharp, polished outfit—office chic. A ponytail. Black-rimmed glasses. A black skirt and a white blouse.
She took up a pointer and gestured at the empty air.
Whoosh, whoosh.
Something the size of her outstretched arms appeared—the same shape as the magic-tower semiconductor he was looking at. She tapped the giant model with her pointer.
“We will call this structure the Magic Tower Semiconductor. It consists of twenty floors in total. At the center of each floor, we opened a channel for the flow of mana. Along that central channel, we applied a mithril coating over the existing metal lines to increase mana transfer speed. Furthermore…”
Illys’s explanation never faltered. After a while he lost the thread and simply said he understood. Listening more carefully, though, he realized Earth already had something like this magic-tower semiconductor.
HBM.
High Bandwidth Memory. Memory stacked in layers to increase the volume of data moved at once. From Illys’s description, the Magic Tower Semiconductor was exactly that—an HBM.
“Does the mana transfer speed match the last RAM?”
“It should be comparable.”
“And the amount of mana sent at once is higher?”
“We designed it to increase by a great deal.”
Yep. HBM.
He’d tossed them five ordinary four-gig RAM modules, and out came HBM. This wasn’t “put in corn, get popcorn.” This was “put in wood, get a check.”
HBM was the kind of product you couldn’t make enough of to sell. Even the mighty Osung Group had kept failing and been rejected by Mvidia again and again over it.
A decent HBM went for at least a million won; a high-end unit could run tens of millions. And this was Rodriguez-made HBM. Not Chinese, not domestic—Rodriguez-made.
One accelerated RAM module had put a hundred billion won in his account. So what was this one worth?
He steadied his racing heart and asked Illys,
“Thank you. I’d like to sponsor more—do you need anything besides bread?”
Illys hesitated, shifting awkwardly. He thought for a moment.
What does that territory need?
He’d looked it over—no river. If they didn’t have one? He’d just give them water.
“Do you need water, by any chance?”
“Water? That would be wonderful!”
He looked around the house, found a small plastic lid, wiped it clean, filled it with filtered water, and pressed the Sponsor button.
The tribute must have arrived; Illys’s eyes went wide.
“Wow! Thank you!”
She hurried outside, moving fast, and summoned the lid beyond the castle walls.
“Ohhh.”
A vast lake had formed there.
“That’s something else.”
If he topped it off every so often, they wouldn’t have to worry about water. Fine—he’d supply food and water; on their end, they’d keep turning memory RAM into HBM.
Mutual win-win. What a beautiful trade.
“Constellation! Thank you so much!”
Looking closer at her trembling shoulders, he saw that Illys was crying. Bread had been a surprise; water hit differently.
After that excellent deal with Illys, he sent Chief Jang a message.
He’d done it once; the man would handle it. Still, Jiho couldn’t help wondering. Last time it had been a hundred million dollars. What would this one go for?
Outskirts of Beijing.
A conference room inside a Chinese state research institute.
Beneath a wall hung with the red five-star flag, senior officials sat in silence. Every eye was on the man at the head of the table.
Pan Dengwei—Standing Committee member and head of the Central Science and Technology Strategy Directorate.
Behind him hung a red banner painted with bold characters: Semiconductor Rise.
Pan spoke quietly.
“JH Research?”
An official at the far end of the room answered.
“A company that suddenly surged out of Korea. Last time they put a single DRAM unit up for auction, and Wilson Hwang of Mvidia bought it for a hundred million dollars.”
Pan nodded.
“Impressive. And another product has appeared?”
“Yes. This time it’s HBM. It’s been verified by three university labs in Korea. And the unit… is said to exceed the performance of any existing HBM by more than twenty years.”
“Twenty years?”
“Correct.”
“How did you arrive at twenty years?”
“Assuming semiconductor performance doubles every two years, it would take twenty years to reach this level.”
“So if it doubles every two years… twenty years would be twenty times?”
“…”
Doubling every two years meant multiplying by two every two years. Over twenty years that was two to the tenth—1,024 times. No one in the room corrected a Standing Committee member.
“As you say. This JH has produced a top-tier HBM, had it verified by the institutions, and plans to put it up for auction in the United States the same way as before.”
“Prospects for persuasion?”
“Only one person from JH has been exposed so far. The actual lab location and the researchers’ identities remain unknown.”
“Hm. Countermeasures?”
“We can’t obtain it through official channels. Security is tight and the real facility is unlisted, so an unofficial operation will be required.”
“Is that so? Proceed.”
The official nodded at the Standing Committee member’s leave. A soldier who had been standing against the wall stepped forward and distributed briefings.
“Codename: Mukhwa—Ink Flame. Form an infiltration team targeting the private JH research facility. If necessary, consider securing personnel.”
When the soldier finished, the Standing Committee member nodded.
“In the event of failure, all information is to be destroyed. The operation’s very existence is to be denied.”
Unofficial—but with the highest-level tacit approval. The name of this operation was different; the core never was.
Under the banner of Semiconductor Rise, industrial spies of national scale turned toward JH.