Castle of the Creator (2)
JH Research.
I was on a video call with Illys from the CEO's office.
The Holy Relic's default camera angle looked slightly down from above, and Illys knew full well that I was watching from that direction. So whenever we talked, she sat facing the Holy Relic and tilted her gaze a little upward—which meant she always ended up looking up at me.
She was beautiful enough already, but at a thirty-degree upward angle? It was… outstanding. The classic beauty angle. Looking up thirty degrees automatically slimmed the jawline without anyone having to lift their chin—exactly the effect Illys was getting right now. And as for that jawline…
"Constellation?"
Illys called to me.
"Ahem… Yes?"
"We've made a few adjustments to the pillar connections between the DRAM layers."
I must have drifted off for a second.
"Adjustments?"
"Yes. We think it would be better if we shaped the pillars like tree branches."
Earth's engineers would have fainted on the spot. Setting copper pillars between upper and lower layers with nanometer precision was hard enough—even a nanometer of error meant no electrical contact and a dead chip. Just placing those pillars accurately was already remarkable. And now she was saying they'd changed them into complex shapes.
Of course, if curves and branching forms were possible instead of straight lines, the range of circuit designs would explode.
"That actually works?"
"Building branch-shaped pillars should improve the efficiency of mana—well, electricity—more than straight ones. It's a bit harder for the workers, but not beyond them."
Fair enough. Even Earth's architects didn't insist on perfectly straight columns. Traditional tile-roofed houses and timber frames routinely used diagonal bracing. To the nano people, this was just construction—there was no reason they had to stick to straight pillars alone.
"And the new territory residents have adapted to the system you taught us. They're absolutely thrilled."
"They like it?"
"Of course. Three meals a day, and everyone's putting on healthy weight. It's lovely to see. At this rate, we might end up in the kind of world you mentioned—where people start worrying about getting fat."
A world that still had no idea what a diet even was.
"I'll send over some healthy food later."
"Thank you. Oh, and we've named the castle the Castle of the Creator. Pretty good, right?"
"The Castle of the Creator?"
"Yes. Because it's the castle looked after by the Constellation of the Creator. Heehee."
"Ohhh—so you named it after me?"
"Of course. We had to take the Constellation's name. Whose else would we use?"
Constellation of the Creator. I'd just tossed that out when Illys asked for a title, and now even the castle bore the name.
"So I guess that means I'm stuck looking after the Castle of the Creator from now on?"
"Of course. Please keep watching over us."
"Haha. Alright. Anyway—how hard is the factory running?"
"We're turning out five hundred HBM units at a time right now."
"How many days for five hundred?"
"About three."
The counterfeit HBM units brought in from Baekryong Tech totaled a thousand. That meant six days to convert them all into the real thing.
"Ah, and LPU repairs are ongoing steadily as well. That should come to about five hundred units a week. But the residents' motivation is so high… we might be able to produce even more as time goes on."
Illys sounded completely confident about volume.
"How many people are working on this?"
"About fifty thousand are involved."
"That's nearly half the territory. Is that alright?"
"Yes. Everyone wants to do it. And we've already excluded the elderly, the children, and essential personnel. The workforce is only going to grow from here."
"How so?"
"Word is spreading. Refugees are coming in from other regions. Getting a job at the semiconductor plant has become a refugee's dream."
"You just went through a territorial war. Won't that cause problems?"
"We fought the Duke and won. And the outermost wall—word is it's a wall that delivers divine punishment. No one who sees that wall is going to pick a fight lightly."
The ducal castle Illys had seized—no, the Castle of the Creator now—had originally had double walls: outer and inner. Rodriguez Castle had been the same; they all were. On top of that, I'd raised another wall outside, built in the Block Workshop.
An offensive wall that launched giant trees, sent enormous Glass Marbles rolling, and could topple itself as a weapon of last resort.
"And everyone's going crazy over how beautiful the wall is."
"Really?"
"Yes. It even lights up at night. Lots of people come just to look."
A product—no, a work of art—crafted with obsessive care by the Block Workshop professionals. Building Rodriguez Castle had been a race against the clock; this time, there had been no such pressure. A wall touched by a master's hand. Multicolored LED bulbs were the bare minimum.
"I'm glad you like it. Still—if anyone ever comes at you, don't suffer in silence. Tell me. Understood?"
"Heehee. Understood."
I ended the call with Illys and left the CEO's office.
Rumble.
I wheeled myself toward the workroom on the same floor. The nameplate on the door read:
CEO's Private Cleanroom
Beep.
Whirr.
I pressed my fingerprint, and the doors slid open on both sides. Inside was a changing room, one wall made of glass—the staging area before entering the cleanroom proper. Through the glass, the cleanroom itself was visible: a fairly spacious area of about two hundred pyeong.
This top floor of the building had nothing on it but the CEO's office and the secretary's office, so we'd converted the remaining vast space into a cleanroom.
I didn't change clothes. I simply wheeled up close to the glass. Protocol called for a dust-free suit before entry, but I had no real need to go inside.
Beyond the glass, several wide tables were laid out. After performing the tribute summon enough times, I'd gotten down to the finer details of control.
"That table over there… Tribute Summon!"
Fwooom!
I shaped my hand like a gun and pointed. Light bloomed over the designated table—and with that light, a semiconductor appeared. The counterfeit HBM I'd sent into the Nano World had returned as genuine HBM.
"Summon."
"Summon."
A hundred units per table. Across five tables, the first shipment of five hundred HBM units took form.
"Good. Performance should be… ridiculous."
I'd still have to verify, but these were HBM units sent back from the Nano World. If they could build a twenty-layer Blue Tower, a ten-layer stack was nothing.
With that, the HBM mass-production pipeline was complete. The process was a little convoluted. To make HBM, we first had to buy DRAM from Osung. That DRAM then went to JH's subsidiary, Baekryong Tech. Once Baekryong finished assembling the ten-layer cases, the units were sent into the Nano World, completed as genuine HBM at the Castle of the Creator, and returned here to the cleanroom.
Osung → Baekryong → Castle of the Creator → JH Research.
"We're not done yet."
Semiconductor work was never just one or two processes. More steps still had to follow. HBM was memory—it needed to be connected to a central processing unit. The CPU I'd built was the LPU. So LPU and HBM still had to be packaged together.
I left the cleanroom staging area and headed back to the CEO's office. Outside the office sat Secretary Hwang.
Only her upper body was visible from where she sat. It was a strange thought, but looking at Secretary Hwang always made me feel like I had truly made it. Exhibiting at CES, trading favors with Wilson Huang and Merks—those had felt good, but never quite like success. More like an uneasy, am I really allowed to be sitting with these people? kind of feeling. But the sight of a secretary stationed outside the CEO's office? That puffed me up. That felt like success. Maybe that was why every chairman's secretary on TV was always so beautiful.
"Secretary Hwang. Please call Director Jang for me."
"Yes, sir."
A short while later, Director Jang entered the office.
"You asked for me?"
"Yes. The first batch of five hundred HBM units is finished. I've left them in the cleanroom. Please send them to Osung and have them packaged with the LPUs."
"Ohh! They're done already! That's remarkably fast. Understood. We'll outsource the packaging to Osung."
Packaging was something only a company on the level of TSNC, Osung, or Hi Electronics—or the Castle of the Creator—could handle. But the Castle of the Creator was busy. Nearly every available resident was already committed to LPU repairs and HBM production. Outsourcing the packaging was the right call.
So, sorted by difficulty: ultra-high-difficulty work went to the Castle of the Creator. High-difficulty work went to TSNC or Osung. Low-difficulty work went to Baekryong Tech. Proper distribution of the workload mattered.
Suwon, Gyeonggi Province.
The semiconductor analysis lab at Osung Semiconductor Research Institute.
At the center of the lab sat an ultra-precision electron microscope worth over ten billion won. The researcher in charge sat before it in a state of high tension, while the president of Osung Electronics, the executive directors, managing directors, and various other executives stood arrayed around him.
What they were looking at through the electron microscope was the HBM that had come over from JH.
The president of Osung Electronics furrowed his brow and asked,
"They really stacked ten layers?"
The chief researcher, still in his dust-free suit, answered.
"Yes, sir. It far exceeded our projections."
"Performance?"
"It delivers ten times the bandwidth of Nvidia's product. A single stack achieves a transfer rate of fifteen terabytes per second, with over ten terabytes of capacity. On top of that, power consumption is half that of the current generation—so it cuts heat and power load dramatically while delivering far higher performance."
The chief researcher glanced at the president's face, then added one more line.
"At present, nothing on the market can compete with this HBM."
The president pressed his lips together and folded his arms.
"Zoom in."
At the order, the researcher at the microscope controls magnified the display.
Whiiirr.
The electron microscope pushed in a hundred times, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand and more.
And on that enlarged screen, a strange shape appeared.
The president's expression twisted.
"What is that?"
A copper pillar measured in nanometers. At the base of that pillar was some unidentifiable mark.
(ง •̀_•́)ง
Something that looked uncannily like a human face and a pair of raised arms.
"Is it on the other pillars too?"
"Yes, sir! It is!"
(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ
Another mark that resembled a human face.
"Why? Why are there drawings like that on the nanometer-scale copper pillars connecting the RAM layers of an HBM?"
None of the researchers could answer.
The president of Osung Electronics asked,
"Never mind why the drawings are there for a moment—if I ordered you to put drawings like that on the pillars, could you do it?"
"We could draw them, yes. But it would mean manipulating individual atoms. It would take enormous time and effort."
"Then why would they go to that trouble?"
Meanwhile, the researcher moved the electron microscope across several more pillars. All kinds of drawings were etched into them.
"Huh?"
(ง •̀_•́)ง
"That's the same one from before."
"Looking closely, not every drawing is unique. Some of them repeat."
The president studied the images, deep in thought. Even at a glance, the variety was considerable. Copper lines connecting DRAM layers. Why had JH gone to the bizarre trouble of carving drawings into them?
"And the performance gap is the kind that would take us a decade to close?"
"Yes. For now, that's correct."
"Hmm… JH sent us LPUs and HBM for packaging—and they carved drawings like that into the copper pillars before shipping them over?"
"That… is correct."
The president of Osung Electronics pondered for a moment, then broke into a hearty laugh.
"Heh heh. Well now, this is interesting."
He rose slowly from his seat and pointed through the glass toward the board.
"I can tell just from looking at your faces. I know why they etched an ultra-high-difficulty job that had no practical reason to be done onto a product bound for us. Heh heh heh."
He spoke slowly, then cut in with firm certainty.
"JH is sending us a message through those drawings."
"A message?"
"Super-gap. Don't even think about catching up."
As he left the lab, the president spoke quietly.
"But you know—business isn't all about technology."
The resolve of a weathered merchant, ready to use every means and method available.
The executive director walking beside him asked carefully,
"Should we proceed with the packaging as normal?"
He was wondering whether they ought to pull something on the packaging work as well.
"We're merchants, not thugs. We do what we're paid to do. We do the job."
The president smiled brightly.
"And we stop what needs stopping."