A Professor Who Knows Her Apps
From Seongsam Holdings came the safety and environmental team.
Kim Daewoo stared at the men in suits, dumbfounded.
Then, all at once, he noticed something strange.
...Why are they only looking at my work area?
The Seongsam employees didn’t even glance at the main building. They were combing through only the section Daewoo Geoneop had been assigned.
And that meant nothing more than the temporary fencing wrapped around the outside of the site and the landscaping zone where they were setting boundary stones in the flower beds.
“A-ah, hello! What brings you all the way down from Seongsam...?”
When Kim Daewoo forced out the words with a servile, fake smile, one of the safety and environmental team members asked back, “Who are you?”
“I-I’m Kim Daewoo, president of Daewoo Geoneop.”
“The president, then.”
“Yes, we’re under Ilgwang Construction...”
The safety team member cut him off mid-sentence.
“Good thing you came to work today. Daewoo Geoneop has been cited for a total of twelve violations, including subcontracting rule breaches, site safety rule violations, and failure to meet environmental regulations.”
“...What? Twelve? No, we’ve always handled things the usual way... and it was all cleared with Ilgwang, the first-tier subcontractor!”
“Subcontracting without the approval of the main contractor is plainly illegal. Didn’t you know that?”
Who didn’t know that?
They all did it, though.
Not just in Korea, but construction firms on the other side of the world would have done the same.
...What the hell is going on? Why me?
Earlier, a materials supplier he’d been on brotherly terms with for years had suddenly backed out on him. Now Seongsam was coming down on him like an iron boot.
It was all far too strange.
Whoosh.
The employee drew a heavy red line through the checklist in his hand and announced the result.
The sound felt like a sword slicing through Kim Daewoo’s throat.
“And that’s not all: no dust-control net, paint thickness below standard, workers improperly dressed... listing every violation would take too long. Due to these breaches, all work by Daewoo Geoneop is hereby suspended effective today.”
“W-Work suspended? Then the deadline for the project...”
“Correct the cited issues by tomorrow and submit to reinspection. If you fail, the contract will be terminated and delay damages will be claimed through Ilgwang Construction.”
“...?”
The world went dark before Kim Daewoo’s eyes.
To make the corrections they had just demanded, he’d have to buy all new materials and tear everything out and redo it from scratch.
But the supplier had cut off his credit. He had no money. And if he couldn’t keep the work moving, a mountain of penalties would come crashing down on him.
“N-No! How are we supposed to fix all that by tomorrow? It’s impossible! You know that!”
Kim Daewoo cried out as if he were being strangled, but the answer that came back was cold and indifferent.
“That’s your problem, sir.”
“...”
Kim Daewoo barely swallowed back his curses and bowed his head.
The Seongsam employees walked past him and, with no hesitation at all, slapped a demolition notice onto the painted wall.
That wasn’t the end of it. They started inspecting everything, here and there, every last thing.
Again, they paid no attention to the main building and focused only on Daewoo Geoneop’s assigned section, but it was obvious they were determined to find fault with at least one thing.
As he watched the backs of those headquarters employees, the laborers nearby called out to Kim Daewoo.
“Boss, we’re getting paid today, right?”
“Something feels off here... Even if we can’t work, we’re already here, so you still need to pay us.”
The workers’ eyes were sharp.
Normally he would have barked, “What, do you think I’m the kind of man who cheats people out of their money?” But now the words wouldn’t come.
“I-I’ll pay you! Damn it, who said I wasn’t paying?”
“Then hurry up and give it to us. Looks like today’s work’s been completely shut down anyway.”
“I said I’ll pay you! Who said I wouldn’t? Come to the office and I’ll settle it there, so wait!”
Kim Daewoo fled into the container office as if running for his life.
Thud.
The moment the steel door shut, he grabbed a plastic bottle on the desk and drained it in great gulps.
The lukewarm water slid down his throat, but it did nothing to cool the fire in his gut.
“Hah, hah...”
He collapsed onto the sofa.
Damn it... I came to work today thinking I’d have a grand time...
Usually his days were the exact opposite of this.
He’d show his face at the site in the morning, then spend the afternoon golfing or meeting clients, knocking back whiskey in a room salon while living the life of President Kim Daewoo.
But today was hell.
The materials supplier had cut him off, and Seongsam Holdings, the main contractor, had torn the site apart.
“What the hell did I do wrong...”
Then the phone he’d thrown on the desk rang furiously.
Bzzzt— bzzzt—!
[Assistant Manager Choi, Taeseon Construction]
Kim Daewoo’s eyes flew open at the caller ID.
The man was in charge of a pretty large apartment complex site.
Y-Yes! There was still this guy! If I get an advance payment here, I can plug the leak for now.
He cleared his throat a few times and answered as brightly as he could.
“Ah, Manager Choi! I was just about to call you...”
[Oh, yes. President Kim.]
But the voice on the other end of the line was just as cold as the Seongsam employee’s had been moments earlier.
[About the landscaping work in Zone 3 for June, we’ve decided to cancel it.]
“...Pardon?”
Kim Daewoo doubted his own ears.
“No, cancel it? We’d already reached a verbal agreement! I sent over the estimate!”
[It didn’t get approved higher up.]
“No, Manager Choi! How can you suddenly do this? I trusted you and even started looking into materials ahead of time...”
As Kim Daewoo desperately clung to him, Manager Choi let out an annoyed sigh and drove in the final nail.
[Looks like you must’ve done something wrong to me, President Kim.]
“...Pardon? W-What did I do wrong...?”
[You probably know better than I do, don’t you? Just what did you do to make people so far above us—tsk, anyway, the contract is off. We’re subcontractors too, so there’s nothing we can do. I’m hanging up.]
“W-Wait! Manager Choi! Let’s meet and talk—”
Click. The call ended.
“...?”
Kim Daewoo stared blankly at the phone. It wasn’t just this site that had gone down the drain. His future source of income, his livelihood in the construction world itself, had been severed.
“...Am I dreaming?”
He had come into work humming to himself that very morning.
And in less than half a day, his life had fallen into the abyss.
If it was a dream, then it was a nightmare.
Then the phone rang again.
[Hanna]
This time it was his mistress.
“Uh... what is it?”
[Oppa, we were supposed to go to Bali next week, remember? I came to the department store to buy clothes before the trip, and I found a dress I really love.]
Her voice was perfectly calm.
[It’s 1.3 million won. I can buy it with your card, right?]
“...What? 1.3 million?”
His voice cracked.
He’d barely escaped the site because he didn’t have the few tens of thousands of won he needed to pay the workers, and she wanted to burn 1.3 million won on a dress?
“Hey! Are you out of your mind? Right now I—”
Kim Daewoo started to shout, then bit his lip.
Pride. The pride that always had him bragging, “I make good money,” and “I’m the boss. Seongsam Holdings trusts only me with their work,” was grabbing him by the ankle now.
He hated the thought of telling his mistress, right now, that he was finished.
“...No, cash is a little tied up at the moment. Buy it later.”
[What’s with you? So cheap. You’re a boss and you don’t even have 1.3 million? You were thrilled when you got that Benz last month.]
The word Benz hit him straight in the pit of the stomach.
...Ah.
Two months ago. The foreign car he’d proudly bought while saying, “If you’re a boss, the only car worth driving is the three-pointed star.”
The lease payment alone was 2.5 million won every month.
The payment’s due... the day after tomorrow?
His breath caught.
Material costs, labor costs, office rent, corporate card bills, keeping his mistress happy, and the Benz lease.
Just the fixed expenses that drained him every month, even if he did nothing but breathe, were already well over 15 million won.
Normally he would cover it with progress payments and plug the hole with an advance payment from the next site.
That was how construction companies survived.
But every opening had been sealed. The money coming in was zero, and the money going out was a mountain.
[Oppa? Why aren’t you saying anything? Can I buy it or not?]
“...”
[Thanks, Oppa~ Love you!]
“...Don’t buy it.”
[What?]
“I said don’t buy it, damn it! Don’t you dare use my card! Got it?!”
Clack.
Kim Daewoo snarled and hung up.
Then, with trembling hands, he clawed at his own hair.
“I’m fucked...”
In front of the mirror at the entrance of my studio apartment.
Before heading to school, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, So this is the day classes start.
I felt strangely excited.
I hadn’t expected simply going to school to feel this good.
While I was thinking that, Zero spoke.
Master, Seongsam Holdings’ response has begun. All of Kim Daewoo’s funding sources have been cut off, and at the site he is effectively in the process of being expelled. He is expected to go bankrupt within two weeks.
Already?
As expected, fast.
I nodded in satisfaction.
I didn’t even need to dirty my own hands. I’d long known that Korean conglomerates were frightening for a reason.
The revenge is still only beginning, though. It’s not just Kim Daewoo; I’ve got plenty of other uncles on my father’s side.
Still, it felt refreshing.
The first lecture starts at eleven, so... I’ve got time to head out now.
I left the studio apartment and headed for school.
It wasn’t far from my place.
But Hankuk University was so huge that I had to take a bus from the front gate to get to my classroom.
So I boarded at the main gate and got off in front of Engineering Building 2, where my lecture hall was.
My first class was in Room 513 of Engineering Building 2.
The lecture was called Introduction to Computer Engineering.
It was a required major course for first-years, and exactly what the title said: a basic lecture.
I heard the professor for this first-year major course is pretty strict.
As soon as I stepped into the classroom, the strangely excited atmosphere turned toward me in an instant.
“Oh, Dohyun-hyung! Hello!”
“We were wondering when you’d show up.”
“I thought Hyung might be late on the first day.”
My classmates hurried to greet me one after another. It was probably thanks to the strong impression I’d left during orientation and the opening ceremony.
They seemed intimidated by me, since I was a year older, but also clearly eager to get close.
“Yeah, hey.”
I waved back casually and dropped my bag into an empty seat.
That was when it happened.
Rattle-thud!
The back door flew open with a bang, and someone came running in, breathing hard.
“Hahh, huff... S-safe!”
The man, drenched in sweat, barreled across the classroom and collapsed into the seat behind me.
It was senior Lee Jinwoo.
“Man, I almost died. I was about to get marked on the very first lecture for being late.”
“Did you run here?”
“Yeah. I was playing a soccer game this morning, and it went into overtime because it was tied.”
He’d played soccer on the first morning of the semester? And gone all the way to overtime?
He really did love soccer.
Lee Jinwoo fanned himself with one hand to cool off the sweat.
“Wow... there are a ton of repeaters in here. Is this a first-year class or a third-year major course? I’m a repeater too, though.”
He glanced around, then nodded with a deliberately grave expression.
“Dohyun, you can spot all the old-timers in here, right? Not just the freshmen?”
Come to think of it, the classroom looked odd.
Mixed in among the bright-eyed freshmen were quite a few upperclassmen who looked tired for some reason.
“This professor is a grade killer. She gives tons of assignments too. And if she thinks you’re even a little short, she’ll slam you with a C, D, or even an F without hesitation, so a lot of people come here to retake it. I’m one of them.”
“Ah...”
“She’s also famous for giving a full lecture from day one.”
So the rumor I’d heard was true.
“Still, if you’re retaking it, the professor gives a pretty generous score boost for effort. It’s kind of like a losers’ comeback round.”
Lee Jinwoo smiled bitterly and took his major textbook out of his bag.
Then the front door of the lecture hall slid open.
Click, click.
With the sharp sound of high heels, a young female professor with a short bob haircut walked in.
Maybe at some provincial private university, someone could become a professor through connections, but this was Hankuk University.
To become a professor here at that age meant she had to be exceptionally capable.
“...”
She wore a suit that seemed just tight enough to qualify as tailored, and her mouth was set in a hard line.
She really did look as strict as the rumors said.
The moment she stepped onto the lectern, the noisy classroom fell silent as if someone had poured cold water over it.
Lee Jinwoo shut his mouth at once and straightened up in his seat.
Without even looking at the attendance sheet, the professor said in a dry voice, “I’m Professor Ahn Su-yeon, and I’ll be teaching Introduction to Computer Engineering.”
“...”
“There may be students here who are seeing me for the first time, so I’ll make this clear in advance: lateness is treated the same as an absence. And so no one slips out halfway through, I’ll take attendance before the lecture ends.”
“...”
“Then let’s begin.”
Speaking in that cool, sharp tone, Professor Ahn folded her arms and slowly swept her gaze across the classroom before suddenly asking, “What do you think a computer is?”
“...?”
The room went as silent as a tomb. It was such a basic question that it became hard to answer.
It was like asking law students, “What is justice?”
Even the upperclassmen were only exchanging glances, their faces saying, So this is one of those classes...
As if expecting the silence, the professor pointed at the desktop computer on the podium.
“This is a computer. A machine that calculates and processes information.”
Then she pointed a finger at the laptop in the front row.
“A laptop is also a computer. It maximizes portability.”
Finally, she pointed to the wall-mounted TV in the corner of the classroom.
“In a broad sense, even a TV can be considered a computer. It has a chipset inside and operates according to programming.”
The professor’s gaze overwhelmed the room.
“But the ‘computer’ you must pay attention to as you major in computer engineering is something else entirely.”
She reached into her suit pocket and pulled out a small rectangular object.
Smooth curves, and in the center, the logo of a bitten apple.
“An Apple Phone.”
“...”
“This is the smartphone I used while conducting research in the United States over the last break. It hasn’t officially launched domestically yet, so some of you may be seeing it for the first time. And some of you may think this is just a phone, but it isn’t. This is a computer in the palm of your hand.”
The professor’s once-calm eyes flared with heat.
“Your goal in studying computer engineering may simply be to make games or manage server security. But I can say this without hesitation: the IT world of the future will be ruled by the programs that fit inside this small machine, by the applications.”
“...”
“Already, without you even knowing it, the world’s best programmers are waging war just to get into this tiny device.”
Her voice rang with conviction. The freshmen listened in a daze, but the quick-witted upperclassmen had already started scribbling like mad.
They must have sensed this would be on the exam, or maybe realized they were hearing information ahead of its time.
I took out my mechanical pencil too. I was a student, after all, so I might as well pretend to take notes when the professor spoke.
Though whatever shows up on the test, I’d get it all right anyway.
Then.
The professor’s calm voice gained force. She seemed a little excited now.
“Korea may not have entered the smartphone era yet, but the global application market is already flooding with hundreds of thousands of apps. Among them, there are two applications you absolutely need to analyze and pay attention to.”
She wrote on the blackboard, each stroke neat and deliberate.
The sound of chalk cracking against the board was sharp.
Scratch. Scratch, scratch.
FreeChat
Clear Cam
Seeing that, my hand paused in mid-note.
...Huh?
The professor lifted her smartphone with an expression that seemed to say she could hardly believe it herself.
“Those are FreeChat and Clear Cam. Both were made by a startup called Another Technology.”
“...”
“I believe these two applications proved the very reason smartphones exist. The innovation that shattered the old text-message system, and the technical prowess that overcame hardware limits through software... all of it is the crystallization of relentless thought about what the market, the customer, and human beings actually want, and how to solve that through computing power.”
“...”
“That is the very value you and I must wrestle with as we study computer engineering. It is not just about writing efficient code or making programs faster.”
She looked across the entire classroom as if making a declaration.
“Some people may say Another Technology’s FreeChat or Clear Cam are ordinary applications, but I would call them not technology, but magic.”
The room stirred.
What is she talking about that she’s saying it like that?
I’m seeing an Apple Phone for the first time. What is that thing?
It looks kind of like Romnia. I used Romnia before... but Romnia was so bad it was practically unusable.
Another Technology? Do you know someone at that company? ...Could you help us get hired there somehow?
The only person making an odd expression was me.
Hmm... The professor really knows her stuff. And her judgment’s sharp too. So this is a Hankuk University professor.
Indeed.
Then the professor looked straight at the students and said, “In that sense, since it’s the first day, I’ll give you an assignment.”
An assignment on the first day.
At those words, the freshmen let out soft gasps, while the upperclassmen wore faces that said, Here we go.
It didn’t matter much to me anyway, since I could finish any assignment quickly.
But then.
“Your first assignment is a report in which you research and analyze either FreeChat or Clear Cam.”
“...”
“Of course, I’ll personally review every report myself, and I’ll share feedback on all of them during class, so please keep that in mind.”
An assignment where I had to research my own app and analyze my own app.
And she was going to give feedback on it in front of the students, too.
Now that was... entertaining.