Game War
Game War — Tiffany Yoo, Youngest Registered Director in Chevron History! — Chevron Board Evaluated Solely on Merit!
Tiffany’s appointment as a registered director became breaking news overnight, dominating headlines across every major outlet. Even the Washington Post and Time, papers her aunts could influence, ran prominent stories. Surprisingly, almost no negative coverage appeared. The Washington Post and Time were no exception; most pieces were either favorable or strictly factual. It seemed her aunts had finally accepted that they could no longer keep up with Tiffany.
Of course, it hadn’t always been this way. Tiffany explained that her aunts had opposed her appointment to the very end during the board meeting. Only after Frederick sharply rebuked them did they fall silent. He had asked whether they weren’t afraid of the consequences. The succession race wasn’t over, but Tiffany was clearly in the lead. If she became Chevron’s next owner, could they handle the aftermath? Faced with that question, both her aunts and the opposing directors had nothing left to say.
A year earlier, such a scenario would have been unthinkable. Now it was not only possible but the most likely outcome. Once the opposition was neutralized, everything proceeded smoothly. Yoo Jae-won never even needed to deploy his secret weapon—Chevron shares. From the moment Tiffany’s potential succession became visible, he had instructed Vincent Greenhill of ID Investment to quietly accumulate Chevron stock in dispersed lots. A large single purchase would have triggered disclosure requirements and tipped off rivals. They managed to secure 12 percent; the original target had been 17 percent, but Chevron’s rapid price surge made that goal difficult. Still, the acquisition proved successful. While the shares weren’t used to directly support Tiffany, the profit from the rising stock price was enormous. Chevron’s investment return had already exceeded 800 percent. ID Investment had bought at an average of $45 per share; the stock recently touched $390.
The market reacted instantly to the news of Tiffany’s appointment. Chevron’s share price climbed again.
Some analysts warned that the current price already contained significant bubble. Even with the Irkutsk oil field secured, they argued, immediate production and revenue were not yet possible. Shale gas, too, would lose profitability once oil prices stabilized, they claimed. Yet the actual market responded to Tiffany’s appointment—the very move that had secured both shale gas and the Irkutsk field—by driving the stock higher. The greater Tiffany’s influence grew, the more she could contribute to the company, analysts concluded.
In contrast, shares of ExxonMobil and other oil majors declined. While Chevron demonstrated repeated innovation, legacy players had offered no meaningful response. The instability in the Middle East caused by the Iraq civil war hit ExxonMobil especially hard, as many of its fields lay in the region. The result was a reversal in market capitalization ranking between Chevron and ExxonMobil.
Though seismic shifts were occurring in the oil industry, from a global perspective the story was merely one of many breaking items. Far larger news was pouring out of Silicon Valley, enough to overshadow Chevron entirely. IDDC 2003 was in full swing. On the second day, the official release of ID Office 03 for AI Eyes sent shockwaves through the computer industry.
Surprisingly, many people already felt comfortable with the concept of artificial intelligence; it had long appeared in films, novels, and other media. What had been missing were practical applications of genuine AI. Familiarity aside, actually implementing it had always seemed impossibly difficult. No one had expected such technology to reach real-world use so quickly—and with such impressive performance.
Buyers who purchased the Android S3 and ID Office 03 for AI Eyes the day before immediately began converting paper documents into electronic files. Document work was a daily reality for anyone handling company tasks, school assignments, or research. Until now, people had either typed everything by hand or relied on expensive OCR software with its noticeable error rate—and a dedicated scanner. Now a single Android S3 and the office suite were enough.
OCR companies and specialists were baffled. How could machine-learning AI, announced only months earlier, already deliver such overwhelming performance? Inquiries flooded into ID Technology. Most corporations would have guarded the underlying principle as trade secrets, but ID Group did not. They simply revealed the secret behind the extraordinary recognition rate: the CAPTCHA project.
When the truth came out, countless people were stunned. CAPTCHA had been a standard macro-detection tool since the mid-1990s. It required users to read distorted numbers or letters on screen and type them into a field. The system had spread widely because of macros. The trigger was an internet poll asking which engineering school was the best. Posted on the massive North American community site 2CH.com, the vote quickly turned into a heated rivalry between MIT and Caltech students. In the ensuing battle of school pride, someone introduced macro programs. Their performance was so strong that 2CH.com’s powerful servers crashed. The incident reached Yoo Jae-won, who introduced CAPTCHA to prevent recurrence. From then on, every vote required passing a CAPTCHA, ending the macro arms race. No macro could ever surpass it.
Thereafter, CAPTCHA was deployed across ID Group’s internet services and offered free to other companies. Because it could be used even for commercial purposes, it became the perfect defense against trolls, macro abuse, and spam. Millions of people used it daily. The accumulated data, processed through machine learning, became the core engine of AI Eyes’ character recognition. Even handwritten text from old books or heavily degraded photocopies could be read with impressive accuracy. It was not yet perfect, but it approached human-level performance. Moreover, when users corrected confirmed errors, those corrections fed back into AI Eyes, improving quality with every additional user.
Thanks to this performance, controversy over the shift to a subscription model largely subsided; people accepted the unique nature of AI Eyes. Critics who once questioned Yoo Jae-won’s claim of preparing AI since the 1990s had now vanished entirely. ID Technology’s stock price rose sharply on improved profitability. Its revenue model had long centered on product sales—from Android smartphones to semiconductors—allowing highly profitable operations from a near-monopoly position. Yet the portfolio had one weakness: exposure to semiconductor supercycles. Consumers could easily skip a generation or two without major inconvenience. Even with the S3’s launch, anyone uninterested in AI Eyes could continue using the S2 without issue. Gamers in particular felt little difference; the S3’s hardware upgrades were limited to tensor cores for AI processing and an improved camera module.
The introduction of ID Office’s subscription model added a new source of recurring revenue on top of cloud services. While cloud operations remained in the red due to massive infrastructure investments, software subscriptions generated profit from day one. Shareholders welcomed the development. ID Technology remained Intel and AMD’s largest buyer of top-tier server chips, continuously expanding capacity to meet surging demand from online games and internet services. Profits were immediately reinvested in equipment. Cisco’s flagship gear was practically exclusive to ID Group. Aggressive reinvestment kept the cloud division cycling between modest gains and renewed losses, yet Yoo Jae-won had no intention of slowing investment. Cloud servers were the alpha and omega of ID Group.
The next day, IDDC 2003’s third day began. Normally, excitement peaked on the first day of a major event and gradually faded. This time was different. Netizens’ interest on day three burned hotter than on day one or two. The reason was simple: while the Android S3 and ID Office had appealed mainly to buyers, today’s announcement targeted a far broader audience—games.
“We proudly present the second title in the Fantasy Universe series: Legend League!”
With Stephan Barber’s upbeat voice, the massive main-stage screen played Legend League’s cinematic opening. The three-minute, twenty-eight-second sequence, crafted with painstaking care by the same graphics team behind Dragon Ball RM, delivered movie-quality visuals. Heroes scattered across dimensions fell through a storm of time and space into the legendary canyon. The sequence also hinted at the secret behind their arrival on the summoner’s battlefield. Not only heroes from existing IPs but original Fantasy Universe characters native to the canyon appeared as well. Audience members cheered loudly whenever their favorite characters flashed on screen.
“Hey! I’m Goku.”
The loudest roar erupted for Son Goku. Dragon Ball RM had finished its weekly NBC broadcast months earlier. Its twenty-four episodes achieved unexpected success; the finale posted a 6.1 percent rating—equivalent to 18 million viewers, the highest ever for a North American network anime. Reruns still aired on cable, making Goku essentially the face of Fantasy Universe–Legend League.
The game’s popularity translated immediately into downloads and concurrent users. Thanks to Yeong-sik’s efforts as Supreme Network General Manager, no service outages occurred. Yet the surge of gamers easily surpassed even the traffic spike from Yoo Jae-won’s first-day appearance at IDDC 2003. Yeong-sik had successfully weathered the storm, but he could not relax. A notification chimed.
Even after clearing the major hurdle of Fantasy Universe–Legend League, Yeong-sik remained tense because of a message from Yoo Jae-won. Two days earlier, Jae-won had asked him to investigate why the prosecution had called. The reply arrived with remarkable speed. With trembling hands, Yeong-sik opened the ID Talk message.
“Ha, seriously…”
Voice phishing. The tension drained away, replaced by relief. Then, deep in Yeong-sik’s chest, anger flared. With a single phone call, those bastards had tormented not only him but his mother in Korea for days. Letting it slide felt impossible. He wanted to strike back immediately and deliver a crushing blow.