The All-Seeing Lens
The data center in Coyote City—the technopia of the 21st century—held special meaning for Yoo Jae-won. It was the very place where he had first championed the Information Superhighway project to escape the crippling slowness of modem connections. It was also where he had built the world’s first 12,000-node cloud server farm for his internet business. As a result, it was one of the oldest facilities among ID Technology’s data centers. Even Center Manager Joseph Wilson was entering his eighth year of service. Yet the center never felt outdated. That was only natural; whenever Intel or AMD released a new CPU, this facility received it first. Its relatively modest size of 12,000 nodes made the difference. When first constructed it had seemed enormous, but the data centers now sprouting up across the globe were all 100,000 nodes or larger. With fewer machines to manage, system upgrades were far easier here than at the newer sites. The proximity of Intel’s and AMD’s headquarters only added to the convenience.
The Coyote City system had recently been upgraded to AMD’s latest server CPU, the Opteron 64. Each chip was dual-core, and a single specialized server board could hold eight of them. That meant sixteen cores per server. Across 12,000 servers, the facility boasted 192,000 cores in total. Of course, because it was a cloud environment, raw core count did not translate directly into equivalent performance. Even so, the installation surpassed most supercomputers in capability, and its construction cost made the value proposition overwhelmingly attractive.
“Jae-won!”
Yoo Jae-won had been feeling a rare surge of emotion at the sight of the Coyote City data center he had not visited in some time. The sound of his old friend Yeong-sik’s voice pulled him back to the present.
“Come on, let’s go!”
Yeong-sik was visibly excited. It was understandable; he had just finished a task that had been assigned to him long ago.
Yeong-sik took the lead and Yoo Jae-won followed. Passing through security that was several times stricter than any airport checkpoint looked completely natural for Yeong-sik. After all, he had come here to stamp his attendance card every day after school. During vacations he had practically lived inside the server room. When ID Group introduced an eight-hour workday, Yeong-sik had been the most disappointed of all. He had once treated the Coyote City server room like his own home; now he could only stay for eight hours at a stretch.
It was absurd for a student to work full-time rather than take a part-time job, yet—like Yoo Jae-won—Yeong-sik had never been ordinary. Yoo Jae-won passed every security checkpoint without exception, then rode the elevator down to the server room.
Having just finished setting up the CIA’s massive 300,000-node cloud system the day before, the 12,000-node installation looked almost intimate. But there was one decisive difference: the CIA’s servers belonged to the U.S. federal government, while these belonged to him. The depth of his attachment was on an entirely different level.
At the center of the server room stood the master computer that directly controlled the cloud cluster. While the ground-level control room monitored hardware health, this central machine was where the actual system brain lived. From here one could access system files, launch or terminate services, even reboot or power down the entire farm. Naturally, not even Joseph Wilson was allowed unrestricted access. Yeong-sik, however, could sit down whenever he wished. Yoo Jae-won had created a special position for his childhood friend precisely because of his extraordinary talent in networking.
As Senior Cloud Server Manager, Yeong-sik oversaw both the administration of the cloud infrastructure and the development of new cloud technologies. His only direct superior was Yoo Jae-won himself. Although he did not outrank Joseph Wilson, the center manager had no authority to interfere with Yeong-sik’s specific duties.
“Looks like you’ve opened a PC bang in here,” Yoo Jae-won said with a chuckle.
The central console station resembled a high-end gaming café. A plush executive chair promised all-day comfort, and an array of caffeinated drinks stood at the ready. Instant noodles were present as well. Leftover wrappers had been neatly cleared away, and emergency rations and energy bars were stacked in orderly rows. The space was surprisingly tidy.
“How’s school going?”
“Ah! Y-yeah, it’s fine!”
Yeong-sik’s flustered reaction was obvious. In truth, school had become an afterthought; far more of his time and energy was spent right here.
“Made any friends? Got a girlfriend yet?”
Yoo Jae-won’s question about “school life” had nothing to do with grades. In his previous existence he had attended Seoul National University as a mature student; this time he had enrolled at Stanford. Looking back on both experiences, he always felt a lingering regret—not over academic results, but because he had never enjoyed a normal university life.
In his first life he had been an older student with no peers his own age, struggling just to keep up with lectures. This life had been equally unusual. Although he had entered the prestigious Stanford, he had once again focused on life as a developer and executive rather than as an ordinary student. It had been unavoidable, yet the ache of missed experiences remained.
“It’s fine! We’ve got a successful role model right here,” Yeong-sik said, pointing at Yoo Jae-won without the slightest awareness of his friend’s inner thoughts.
Being called a role model left Yoo Jae-won momentarily speechless. Forcing someone to live a life they didn’t want was pointless, so he simply shook his head and sat in the adjacent chair.
“Me?”
“Yeah! Just follow half your example and you’re already successful!”
Had this been ordinary business, Yoo Jae-won would have moved straight to the main topic. But because it was Yeong-sik, the conversation had taken a pleasant detour.
“All right, enough small talk. Show me the program.”
“Got it!”
At Yoo Jae-won’s request, Yeong-sik clicked a plain shortcut icon on the desktop. A very simple application window opened. The interface was minimalist: a single search field, a button labeled “Search,” and a small gear icon for advanced settings—nothing more.
“Any keywords you want to monitor? Just name them.”
Yeong-sik radiated confidence. He had run countless tests before Jae-won’s arrival, and every keyword had produced clean, accurate results.
“Hmm… Xbox,” Yoo Jae-won said. It was the project currently receiving the full focus of ID Group’s resources.
“Xbox—coming right up!”
Yeong-sik typed the word into the long search bar and pressed Enter. A new window appeared, and internet posts containing the keyword Xbox began scrolling rapidly upward. A conventional search engine would have displayed popular pages in ranked order. This program behaved differently. Posts and social-media timelines containing “Xbox” poured down the screen without pause, the results continuously scrolling rather than settling.
After several seconds, another window opened. Where the first had been text-heavy, this one displayed images: Yoo Jae-won’s announcement of the Xbox at last year’s IDDC 99, netizens’ speculative drawings of the console, parody images of every kind.
“Can it track locations as well?” Yoo Jae-won asked, watching the images cascade.
“Of course!”
As if he had been waiting for the question, Yeong-sik adjusted the program. A high-resolution world map appeared—created from satellite imagery purchased from Keyhole. Yellow dots began popping up across the globe. Each dot represented a real location where Xbox-related keywords or data had been detected. Naturally these were not private home addresses but the public regional addresses of the users’ internet service providers. When aggregated, the dots produced valuable visual data: search volume for “Xbox” could be seen at a glance for every city on Earth.
“Shall we run PlayStation 2 at the same time? Multitasking should work.”
“No problem.”
Yeong-sik launched a second instance of the program and entered “PlayStation 2.” The same pattern repeated—text, images, even video clips flooded the screens. The difference appeared on the world map: alongside the dense field of yellow Xbox dots, pink dots for PlayStation 2 began to appear. The layers could be viewed separately or overlapped for easy comparison.
“Ah, Xbox is falling behind,” Yoo Jae-won observed.
The visualization made internet popularity rankings instantly intuitive. The gap was not small. Netizen interest in the PlayStation 2 was a full fifty percent higher than for the Xbox.
“A simple comparison might be misleading,” Yeong-sik pointed out reasonably. “The latest Xbox article is already a week old, but PlayStation 2 had fresh news today.”
It was a fair observation. Netizen reactions moved at lightning speed, and variables such as article volume and timing could easily skew results.
“True,” Yoo Jae-won conceded.
Yet even accounting for those factors, the difference in both quantity and quality of search traffic was undeniable. This was the inherent penalty faced by any latecomer. Moreover, the PlayStation brand had dominated the video-game industry for five years. More than one hundred million units had been sold worldwide, creating an enormous, loyal core fanbase that now carried over to the next-generation console. The activity visible on the screen was exactly the kind of passionate engagement those fans generated.
To break through such a solid foundation, there was no shortcut—only harder work.
“What do you think?” Yeong-sik asked, a trace of nervousness in his voice.
“Better than I expected—exactly as I hoped!”
Although it was disappointing to see the Xbox trailing, a monitoring tool this powerful and intuitive probably did not exist anywhere else on the planet. At Yoo Jae-won’s genuine admiration, the tension drained from Yeong-sik’s shoulders.
“Whew, what a relief. So… my assignment is finished, right?”
The “assignment” Yeong-sik referred to was this very internet monitoring program. If the big-data search engine delivered to the CIA was an electron microscope for the digital world, then this program was a telescope. The internet changed trends in real time; the success of any online service depended on how quickly those shifts could be detected. No matter how much future knowledge Yoo Jae-won possessed, losing synchronicity with the present would drastically reduce its value. He had needed an objective instrument—a telescope—to observe the flow of the age.
Of course he could have built the tool himself. He had assigned the task to Yeong-sik because he understood the danger of trying to do everything alone. ID Group was maturing. Ten-year veterans were now common, and President Vincent Greenhill had begun speaking of retirement. Without properly grooming successors, even the strongest organization could suddenly develop weaknesses. That was why he was deliberately nurturing the next generation—people like Yeong-sik and Gilbert. As an added benefit, it also reduced Yoo Jae-won’s own crushing workload. Two birds, one stone.
“Actually, the Google guys helped a lot,” Yeong-sik admitted after a brief hesitation.
Yoo Jae-won’s expression remained unchanged. The “Google guys” referred to the search engine that had been adopted as NextCom’s next-generation engine. It had been created by two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Their core technology, PageRank, assigned weights to pages containing genuinely important information amid the hundreds of thousands of new websites appearing daily. They had originally called it Googlplex, but Yoo Jae-won—finding the name awkward—had suggested the simpler, more familiar “Google.” The pair had readily accepted, and the company was renamed accordingly.
“Well done. If something creates synergy, we should use it aggressively.”
Endless internal competition could drive efficiency, but pooling strengths to maximize capability was often more effective. Yoo Jae-won was especially pleased that Yeong-sik had leveraged company colleagues to finish the monitoring program ahead of schedule.
“Is this something only we use in secret?”
“No. We should refine it and release it as a paid service. How about calling it Next Trend?”
The tool could also function as an analytics platform, extracting various datasets by adjusting search parameters. One could scan the entire global internet, limit it to a single country, or focus on specific sites. It could even be installed on intranets for specialized internal use.
“You’re saving all the search results, right?”
“Of course! How could I forget when it was your request? But… why do you need them stored?”
“Hmm. It’s a secret. I’ll tell you later.”
It was a shame he could not reveal everything to Yeong-sik. The monitoring program his friend had created was far more significant than simple trend analysis. It had been designed from the beginning with integration into artificial intelligence in mind.
When combined with the AI that would power ID Group’s unified enterprise system—scheduled to launch by the end of the year—enterprise-wide management would become possible.
And as a bonus, we’ll be ready for 9/11 as well.
The sudden reference to 9/11 was not random. Yoo Jae-won knew the algorithms of the big-data search engine supplied to the CIA intimately. The system—soon to be officially named Prism—would soon begin collecting internet data autonomously, without human operators. ID Group, which had built the North American Information Superhighway, could not possibly be excluded from its targets. They had signed an agreement to cooperate within legal bounds, and even that limited cooperation yielded enormous amounts of useful intelligence.
Although Prism strengthened the intelligence network, Yoo Jae-won believed preemptive detection of the September 11 attacks would still be difficult. The various American intelligence agencies barely cooperated with one another; rivalries ran deep. If the authorities continued to fumble in the dark as they had in the original timeline, he intended to make subtle, artificial adjustments to the raw data Prism collected so that the coming atrocity could be caught in advance.
It was a complicated workaround. Yet openly declaring that the terrorist organization al-Qaeda planned to carry out an attack on September 11, 2001, would have been far stranger.
In the car on the way home, Yoo Jae-won opened his iWorks laptop and began organizing the results of his eastern business trip. Preparation for the U.S. presidential election, completion of the Prism Project, the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, and now the internet monitoring system. He had assembled every essential piece required for the 21st century’s techno renaissance.
“Hmm?”
His fingers paused above the keyboard. The phrase “techno renaissance” felt slightly off. In the end, he replaced it in his memo with a single word: Technopia—a utopia achieved through technology.
All preparations for 21st century Technopia completed.