Price of Justice
A few days later—
Daehan Ilbo’s greatest strength lay in presenting distorted articles as though they were perfectly ordinary reporting. To achieve this, they primarily relied on slapping irrelevant frames onto the story.
Nextcom’s Korean server had indeed been shut down following police action. However, the backup server located in the United States had come online, allowing normal operations to continue. With the spread of ADSL, video and high-resolution images were gradually becoming more common on internet services, but until recently the mainstream had been small images paired with text documents. Thanks to that, running everything from the U.S. backup server posed no technical difficulties. Legally, there was nothing to be caught on either.
Daehan Ilbo knew this perfectly well, which was why none of its articles blamed the United States. Instead, they wrote as though Yoo Jae-won had simply dug a mouse hole in America and continued doing business from there.
“I wonder who these articles are written for.”
Yoo Jae-won muttered while staring at the monitor. Nextcom’s Korean server remained offline, yet every function operated normally. The real-time article service that updated daily was no exception. Even the paid service for viewing scanned copies worked without issue. The Daehan Ilbo article currently displayed was one such paid scan, and the latest edition could be read without any problem.
For reference, Daehan Ilbo had refused to supply its free articles to general news pages. Although Nextcom paid proper fees for the content—making it a paid supply in reality—the newspaper simply could not tolerate netizens reading it for free. They did, however, agree to a paid scanned-copy service priced at 300 won per copy, exactly the same as the paper edition. In their own eyes it was an act of pride, but to Yoo Jae-won it looked like nothing more than pathetic ignorance of the changing times.
The articles splashed across today’s front page were, upon closer inspection, hopelessly outdated. Following the precedent that had once brought them great success with the National Security Law, they had believed they would land another blow on Nextcom. Instead, they watched helplessly as the borderless nature of the internet rendered their efforts meaningless. The desk editors and reporters appeared thoroughly incensed.
To older readers, it might have seemed that Yoo Jae-won was slyly evading the law while continuing to host the Modern Philosophy Club, a den of subversive posts. At the same time, they would have shown not the slightest concern for freedom of expression—a constitutional value far more important than the National Security Law.
“Well, it doesn’t matter.”
Even now, Korea’s media environment remained extremely conservative. Meaningful discussion of such values would have to wait until at least the twenty-first century. When Yoo Jae-won said it didn’t matter, he meant that Daehan Ilbo’s whining articles simply weren’t being taken seriously in Korea. Far bigger and more sensational news was already dominating the headlines.
The family history of Prosecutor Kang Im-seok, who had ordered Nextcom’s closure, was being laid bare one revelation after another. He had drawn his sword with great confidence, yet Nextcom remained unscathed while he himself was being destroyed.
Among the chief prosecutors, Kang Im-seok had accumulated considerable seniority. In a few more years he would have been considered for promotion to chief prosecutor. He had even been told that handling this case well would make the chief prosecutor’s seat a foregone conclusion. Now he was learning exactly what it felt like to be hit by indiscriminate bombing.
The story had not only appeared in newspapers but also on television—KBS’s 9 o’clock news included—so Kang Im-seok was in a state of complete panic. ID Group’s media influence had reached its absolute peak. Of course, that power ultimately stemmed from money, which only made its cohesion all the stronger.
Yoo Jae-won had handed the article he discovered to Choi Kang-wook, who then selected the media outlets that could strike the hardest. The information team had even located physical evidence and attached it: a commemorative photograph of the Korean members of the Joseon History Compilation Committee who had sold their history. Yoo Jae-won had recalled the clue—that the photo lay dormant in the warehouse of a small museum at a provincial university—from his Memory Palace. The information team had moved directly and retrieved it. With physical evidence in hand, the attack was driven home with maximum force.
Even without the photo, the hidden history of pro-Japanese collaboration among the nation’s elite was already a major issue in this incident. The revelation that the grandfather of the prosecutor who had attacked Nextcom ranked among the highest tier of collaborators reignited an issue that had begun to cool.
Prosecutor Kang Im-seok made a final, desperate argument: even if the server was in the United States, ordering the shutdown of the Nextcom service itself was illegal. In particular, he claimed that allowing continued access to the Modern Philosophy Club constituted a direct challenge to the judiciary and a rejection of the rule of law. No one listened.
Instead, the Blue House—which had been watching—apparently moved. A message came down ordering restraint. Once the Blue House acted, the Prosecutor General was summoned, and naturally the Seoul District Prosecutors’ Office chief was called up as well and returned after a thorough scolding. Kang Im-seok, too, was summoned by his superior and berated for bungling the investigation so badly.
After that day, Prosecutor Kang Im-seok stopped coming to the office. Even inside the building he felt the stares, and every time he appeared, reporters who had been camped outside would swarm him—not only about Nextcom but also demanding comments on his grandfather. The resulting chaos made work impossible, so he eventually took sick leave. The reporters followed him home. Now he had disappeared entirely.
“You reap what you sow.”
His once-promising career as a public-security prosecutor had suffered a fatal wound. Branded a pro-Japanese collaborator in the public eye, his political ambitions were as good as finished.
Yoo Jae-won felt not the slightest pity for Kang Im-seok’s sudden downfall. If someone had lived in comfort and received an elite education with money earned by selling not only his country but its very history, he should at least have learned how to reflect. Instead, after becoming a prosecutor tasked with upholding law and justice, he had chosen the path of public-security work, ruined countless innocent lives, and personally embodied the principle of “guilty if poor, innocent if rich” through judicial corruption. He deserved exactly this treatment.
The only regret was that Yoo Jae-won had been unable to extract from Kang Im-seok the identity of the person who had pressured him into ordering Nextcom’s closure. None of Yoo Jae-won’s people were close enough to Kang Im-seok to approach him naturally.
In his previous life, the Modern Philosophy Club incident had occurred at a PC-communication company called Cheonrian. Because Nextcom had already become Korea’s leading portal and ISDN and ADSL had spread so rapidly, PC communication had become a declining industry before it could truly popularize—Cheonrian had never even appeared. Club culture, however, was being led by Nextcom, which absorbed everything from singer fan clubs to hobby groups for older people such as fishing and hiking clubs. It was only natural that the Modern Philosophy Club, centered on activist university students, would form on Nextcom.
In the original incident, only the club itself had been blocked. Even that had quickly become a social controversy, leading to the deletion of a few problematic posts and the restoration of access. What should have ended so simply had escalated into the temporary shutdown of all of Nextcom Korea only because someone had pulled strings behind the scenes. It was no great leap to assume that the same force was responsible for the external pressure that had turned the Japanese colonial-era victim lawsuit into a loss.
Still, forcing the issue with Kang Im-seok risked sending the case in an unintended direction. Since the sociable lawyers Kim Chang-hwan and Jung Byung-woo were already making discreet contact with court insiders to trace the upper chain of command, Yoo Jae-won decided to wait a little longer.
Waiting, however, did not mean idling. As chairman of ID Group and its most capable developer, Yoo Jae-won had urgent tasks piled up—from the next version of the Android operating system to mobile phones. If he did not handle them in advance, he would later be buried alive by work. He closed the web browser displaying Nextcom and opened his coding environment.
At that very moment, another wave of backlash was surging through Korea, yet Yoo Jae-won slipped into the world of code as though entering meditation.
The next day.
Mid-December. On a morning when heavy snow had fallen overnight and blanketed the world in white, breaking news from the American media began to turn Korea upside down.
It was simply news about ID Group, completely unrelated to the Japanese colonial-era victim lawsuit.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and other global investment banks were reportedly working hard to secure the role of lead underwriter for Android Inc.’s IPO. Becoming the lead underwriter meant not only substantial fees but also the power to influence how shares would be allocated in the market—an enormously lucrative position. Even the world’s largest investment banks, managing hundreds of billions of dollars, were competing without regard for appearances.
To Koreans, this was simply jaw-dropping news. Until the 1980s, any Korean company doing business in America had been the exclusive domain of a handful of chaebols. Securing even a few million dollars in U.S. construction contracts had once been front-page news. Now Yoo Jae-won had built a business in America so successful that it was preparing for a Nasdaq listing. Even economic experts with far more background knowledge than ordinary citizens were astonished.
For Koreans, nothing conveyed the scale of a business more clearly than money. Twenty trillion won left everyone speechless. The fact that this was the market capitalization of a single subsidiary rather than the entire ID Group made the news even more staggering. For those who understood the power of capital—including Choi Hyun-hee of Ilseong Group, who had already been thoroughly humbled by Yoo Jae-won—the report sent chills down their spines.
Yet they had not completely lost their fighting spirit. Issuing promotional articles to inflate corporate value before an IPO was standard practice in their world. The difference was that while Korean outlets had mobilized obscure magazines and analysts no one had ever heard of, Android Inc. was being covered by the Wall Street Journal and Forbes—media with genuine global prestige. That fact alone created a profound sense of crisis.
While the news filled Yoo Jae-won’s enemies with alarm, it brought genuine joy to others: the friends and acquaintances in Deokjin-ri who supported him with pure hearts. Most of them could not fully grasp how enormous twenty trillion won truly was, yet they were simply happy. Jung Byung-woo, who now moved through the courts as though they were his own home, also rode the wave of Yoo Jae-won’s rising stature. So did former Prime Minister Jeon Myeong-heon and the majority of Tongil National Party lawmakers. They puffed out their chests as though Yoo Jae-won’s success were their own family affair.
That pride soon translated into action. The Tongil National Party, after coordinating with Jeon Myeong-heon, formally called for a National Assembly investigation into allegations of undue pressure on the Japanese colonial-era victim compensation trial.
In the National Assembly, every lawmaker’s personal calculator began clicking furiously.
“Chairman, the National Assembly has begun full-scale discussions on a national investigation into the suspicion of undue pressure in the Japanese colonial-era victim compensation lawsuit.”
It was a report from Chief of Staff Choi Kang-wook, calling while Yoo Jae-won was deep in coding. The Korean National Assembly was in heated debate over whether to proceed with the investigation. Conservative forces were naturally horrified. On the surface, they protested that the budget bill had not even been passed yet—what business did they have conducting a national investigation? The 1994 budget, which should have been finalized in early December, was still under review. The government’s proposed budget totaled 45.6 trillion won, more than 30 percent higher than the previous year. While tax revenue had grown along with the expansion of large corporations like ID Group and rising average incomes, it had not grown by 30 percent. The shortfall would have to be covered by borrowing, yet no one welcomed increased national debt. At the same time, lawmakers still needed to secure budgets for their own districts, so the budget review was going nowhere.
Minjeong Party members insisted that if the budget bill failed to pass, they would block discussion of all other livelihood bills and the national investigation as well. Since failure to pass the budget could paralyze the government, it was a threat the ruling party could credibly make. Behind the rhetoric, however, lay the uncomfortable truth that undue pressure on the judiciary was a tool they themselves had frequently employed. For ruling-party lawmakers, the vested interests and power structures within the judiciary were beneficial to them; therefore they were determined to minimize the fallout from this incident by any means necessary.
If the Tongil National Party joined forces with the Democratic Party and independents, they would command a majority and could force the investigation through. Doing so, however, would also collapse the coalition with the Minja Party and place Jeon Myeong-heon’s position as prime minister in jeopardy. Of course, the ruling party faced the same risk—if they broke the coalition, their own majority would vanish. It was no easy choice for anyone.
“Everything is going well, but there’s still something two percent short.”
In the picture Yoo Jae-won was drawing, the national investigation was the key point. The ultimate goal was to impeach every judge who had interfered with the trial and engineered a sloppy conclusion. Impeachment, however, was no child’s game. It could not be done simply because he wished it. At minimum, a national investigation or formal inquiry had to identify those who had tampered with the trial, hear their explanations, and only then proceed to impeachment. Yet if the prosecution conducted the investigation, no one could predict where it might lead. That was why Yoo Jae-won had chosen to resolve the matter politically through the National Assembly.
The problem was that the true upper echelons remained veiled. The presiding judge and associate judges who had actually rendered the ruling could not hide their names, so the investigation could begin with them. But if those three kept their mouths shut, there would be no answers. This was precisely why so many national investigations in the National Assembly had produced almost no meaningful results, despite their frequency.
Yoo Jae-won wanted to know at least who the upper echelons were before beginning. Only then could he concentrate his firepower and deliver a decisive blow.
“Chairman, I understand exactly what you’re concerned about.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“The detailed story will be reported by Lawyer Jung Byung-woo. I’ll put him on.”
A brief rustling sound came through the receiver. Choi Kang-wook and Jung Byung-woo were apparently together in Korea.
“Chairman! This is Jung Byung-woo!”
“Ah, yes! Hello?”
“Yes, Chairman. Thanks to you, I’m living with tremendous energy these days. And congratulations on Android’s upcoming listing! You’ve truly recorded a new era that will remain in the history of the universe even before reaching the age of majority. I’m so proud!”
As soon as the call connected, Jung Byung-woo launched into an extravagant speech of congratulations. The listing had not even happened yet, but he spoke as though it already had, even dragging the universe into the conversation. In his previous life, when Yoo Jae-won had only seen Jung Byung-woo on the news, the man had seemed completely taciturn. Once again, he was reminded that outward appearances revealed nothing of a person’s true nature.
“Thanks to your unassailable achievements, Chairman, a junior who had been hesitating has finally made up his mind.”
“Huh? Made up his mind about what?”
“That’s right. He confessed exactly who applied the pressure. It was Ma Tae-sik, the Judicial Ethics Inspector at the Court Administration Office.”
“Ah! Ma Tae-sik?”
He had suspected as much, but the name had finally surfaced. Moreover, Ma Tae-sik was someone Yoo Jae-won already knew well. The moment he heard the name, that greasy face rose clearly in his mind. Korea’s judicial system had accumulated many dark chapters. The man who had been involved in nearly every one of them—achieving a veritable grand slam of judicial scandals—was Ma Tae-sik.