Mount Fuji Collapses
“Oh, right! The Japanese Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office might investigate this too.”
“The Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office?”
“It’s basically Japan’s version of the CIA. Since Abe’s name came up, they’ll definitely get involved.”
Yoo Jae-won combined his past-life memories with the current situation and concluded that the most likely move from the Japanese cabinet would be for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office to dig into the journalists behind the leaks—and, naturally, into whoever had fed them the information.
“Hmm. If you say so, Chairman, then Japan will almost certainly respond that way. But are you hoping our tip-off stays hidden?”
“It wouldn’t matter if it came out. The fact that Abe is involved is true. I’m only worried it might put President Vincent in a difficult spot.”
Being tailed by investigators was stressful even when you had nothing to hide—especially when the organization doing the tailing was a massive, state-level intelligence agency. The pressure was unimaginable.
“There’s no reason for you to stay in Japan anymore. Why don’t you come back to the States?”
Yoo Jae-won knew exactly how terrifying that kind of scrutiny could be; he had been thoroughly investigated in his previous life. That was why he wanted to spare Vincent Greenhill the stress.
“Ah, I understand. Thank you for your concern, Chairman. But from a broader perspective, if the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office starts thrashing around trying to catch my tail, wouldn’t that actually end up tying the Japanese cabinet’s own hands?”
Vincent Greenhill chuckled and brushed off the worry. He even seemed ready to turn any investigation into an advantage for their goals.
“Besides, I’m an American. ID Group and you are behind me, and we have plenty of friendly politicians in Washington. Even if it comes out that I was the source, what could the Japanese cabinet really do? It would only push public opinion further toward confirming Abe’s involvement. That would only increase our chances of success in Japan.”
Yoo Jae-won had already considered that possibility. Still, he had voiced his concern and suggested leaving the country because he didn’t want his own people to suffer unnecessary pressure. Yet Vincent was willing to weaponize even that pressure for their Japan strategy. The loyalty warmed something inside him.
Moreover, Vincent wasn’t wrong. Japan might throw its weight around in Asia, but it groveled before the United States. Especially when the opponent was ID Investment, which had direct lines to the Clinton administration—Japan would be powerless. More precisely, the connection ran through the Clinton family’s personal assets, which ID Investment managed.
The Clintons were the second-largest long-term investors in ID Investment after Yoo Jae-won himself. Their funds weren’t in a separate account; they were pooled with everyone else’s in the same Nasdaq IT-sector products. Whenever the couple asked about their holdings, Vincent personally explained the situation, and that relationship remained active.
“Understood. We’ll do it your way, President Vincent. Just increase your security detail and pay extra attention to operational security.”
“Yes, Chairman. Ah, and I’ll send you the summarized report on the profits realized from liquidating all of Sector A.”
A file arrived shortly after, and the ID Talk conversation with Vincent Greenhill ended.
Instead of opening the file, Yoo Jae-won immediately messaged his security team to strengthen Vincent’s protection. The profits would be reinvested into the Japan operation anyway, so there was little point in reviewing the numbers beyond confirming the war chest had grown. Besides, Vincent was the type who would downplay any need for extra security—“the monk can’t shave his own head,” as the saying went—so Yoo Jae-won had taken the initiative to order the measures himself.
Time flowed like running water. A week could feel long, yet for those racing against the clock, each day passed faster than an arrow finding its target. That was exactly how the people at Ilseong Electronics felt. The first default had occurred, and they had been granted exactly one week’s grace period. If they could raise twenty billion dollars and repay the matured bonds within that window, they would survive. If not, formal bankruptcy proceedings would begin. Nerves were stretched taut.
“Ilseong Electronics default confirmed!”
Just as the television news had splashed the headline across the screen, the default was official. No matter how hard Ilseong Electronics scrambled, they had no way to raise twenty billion dollars overnight. The group itself would have to provide the funds, yet Ilseong Group’s support was conspicuously half-hearted.
“Looks like they’re just letting Ilseong Electronics go under.”
Yoo Jae-won, who knew far more than the news reported, couldn’t help but voice the obvious conclusion.
“Why? The memory semiconductor business is an incredibly promising field.”
Yeong-sik, sitting beside him, immediately countered. These days, Yeong-sik was almost always at Yoo Jae-won’s side. After following him into Stanford’s Computer Science department, he spent weekdays on coursework and weekends interning at ID Technology. Stanford’s workload was legendary, and juggling both academics and the internship was brutal, yet Yeong-sik showed no signs of strain. The computer prodigy Yoo Jae-won had once singled out found the department’s classes manageable; only the flood of term papers gave him trouble.
The place where the two friends were chatting was the data center built beneath ID Technology’s headquarters. One level deeper lay Coyote City’s first data center—the commercial facility open to the public—while this underground facility was a secret research installation. Its scale was in no way inferior to the Coyote City site. In raw system performance it was actually superior: twenty-five thousand six hundred cloud nodes, twice the number in Coyote City. While Coyote City still ran older CPUs, the machines here boasted 1 GHz clock speeds and were equipped with Intel Xeon server processors—the fastest cloud system in the world.
Yoo Jae-won was currently developing a program to run on that cloud, and Yeong-sik was helping him.
“Of course it’s promising. But not right now.”
Memory chip prices had collapsed. The decline that began last year now threatened to crash straight through the floor. The unintended chicken game between Ilseong Electronics and Mirae Electronics was to blame. Memory semiconductor manufacturers existed in only three countries: Korea, the United States, and Japan. When the IMF crisis struck, both Ilseong and Mirae desperately needed foreign currency and began flooding the market with memory chips. The other nations quickly followed suit. The race to the bottom had begun.
As production volumes rose, unit prices kept falling until they now hovered near manufacturing cost. Survival now depended on who could cut labor expenses and who could mass-produce the next-generation high-density chips. Computer users benefited enormously; capacities once considered unattainable were suddenly affordable. Finished-PC makers also gained pricing power. Yet overall PC sales showed no corresponding surge. The high-performance PC market had already matured with the arrival of 1 GHz processors, and no new killer application had emerged to drive fresh demand.
Mirae Electronics, at least, had one lifeline the others lacked: flash memory chips. Digital mobile phones were spreading worldwide, and demand for flash memory was steadily rising. Only Toshiba and Mirae Electronics possessed the production infrastructure for flash memory at scale, and Toshiba had not built large-scale facilities. Mirae Electronics effectively held a near-monopoly.
Ilseong Electronics, by contrast, had seen its once-golden semiconductor division turn into a liability. To survive the price war it might have to sell chips at a loss, yet it lacked the resources to do even that.
“Whoa! So what happens if Ilseong Electronics goes bankrupt? Are you just throwing away the two billion dollars you lent them?”
Yeong-sik looked genuinely alarmed.
“It’s a secured bond, not a piece of paper that vanishes. We can seize factories or inventory worth two billion dollars. Ilseong Electronics must have real estate at the very least. If the rest looks decent after due diligence, the White Tiger Fund can acquire it.”
“Ah. So you’re slapping a red tag on it? That’s a relief, at least.”
Yeong-sik’s expression was one of sincere relief. He still couldn’t fully grasp the scale of two billion dollars, but the thought that his friend’s money wouldn’t simply evaporate was comforting.
Of course, they weren’t at the stage of literally slapping red foreclosure notices on Ilseong’s factories or headquarters yet. The creditor group would first convene to begin formal default procedures. With the situation already stabilized, Choi Kang-wook would lead those creditor meetings. The exact outcome remained undecided, but one thing was certain: the final plan would maximize Yoo Jae-won’s interests.
“I’m done. Are you?”
“Huh? Already?”
Yeong-sik scrambled at the question. While Yoo Jae-won had continued typing even while talking, Yeong-sik’s multitasking skills were still catching up. Every time they conversed, his work paused, leaving a substantial backlog.
“Still not finished? Then I’ll run mine first.”
“Wait, just a second!”
The program the two had been building was a search robot—a specialized web crawler. Traditional crawlers visited every page to keep a search engine’s index fresh. The robot Yoo Jae-won and Yeong-sik were creating worked differently: given a keyword, it would locate only the sites containing that keyword. It inverted the usual search-engine workflow.
Scanning the entire internet in real time would yield the freshest data, but the sheer volume made it impractical—hence the rise of conventional crawlers. Yoo Jae-won understood that limitation, yet he possessed a trump card the others lacked: a natural-language machine-learning program that had been running since the internet’s earliest days. When combined with the search robot, the synergy would be extraordinary. Once complete, users would be able to query the live web with a level of precision far beyond anything existing search engines could offer.
During development, however, Yoo Jae-won and Yeong-sik had disagreed on several implementation details. Rather than dismiss Yeong-sik’s ideas, Yoo Jae-won suggested they each build their own version and let the results decide whose approach was superior.
“Jae-won! I’m done too!”
While Yoo Jae-won had been lost in thought, Yeong-sik had finished his setup.
“Yeah? Then let’s start.”
“Huh? We still need to set the search parameters.”
Yeong-sik reminded him of the missing step.
“Set the region to Japan and the keyword to ‘Abe.’”
“Got it!”
“All right, hit enter on three. One, two, three!”
At Yoo Jae-won’s count, both of them pressed Enter. Japanese characters and URLs began flooding across their monitors—the sign that the search was running properly.
The reason for searching “Abe” in Japan was simple. Ever since the exposé linking Abe to the Kobe Steel quality-falsification scandal, public outrage had been mounting. Ordinary Japanese citizens were furious and ashamed; calls for Abe and Kobe Steel to “self-destruct together” were common. Abe, meanwhile, was busy denying any involvement. Meanwhile, performance tests on Kobe Steel products kept revealing substandard results, each new revelation sending fresh shockwaves through public opinion.
Yet the reaction still fell short of the explosive level Yoo Jae-won had hoped for. He needed a perfect storm, not a drizzle. The timing to deliver the final blow to Abe was approaching, but the public’s response remained too muted to pinpoint the exact moment. That was why he had built the search robot—to scan the entire internet and predict when anger would peak, allowing them to strike with maximum impact.
The search would take more than eight hours on either machine.
“This is going to take a while.”
“Still better than searching the U.S. Japan’s internet is less than a tenth the size.”
“True enough.”
They were effectively data-mining every publicly accessible Japanese website—an early form of big-data search, primitive by twenty-first-century standards but still remarkable given the hardware available.
“Want to play a game while we wait?”
Nothing killed time faster than gaming. Yoo Jae-won launched StarCraft and the two began a cooperative mission. One-on-one matches had grown stale; they now preferred working together.
Several hours later, a soft chime sounded.
“Is it done?”
Yeong-sik, who had been eating a hamburger while focused on the game, whipped his head around—only to realize the alert wasn’t from the search. It was Yoo Jae-won’s phone ringing. The caller ID on the Tiffany phone read: Choi Kang-wook, Vice Chairman.