The Underwear Files
“Sir, here’s the progress report on the project.”
“Ah, thank you.”
Head of the Limitless Construction Division — Lee Kang-hwi.
Recommended by Chairman Koo Hoe-jin and recruited from KG Construction, he was a remarkably capable man.
Cast in the role of a fixer for the countless problems that arose over the course of a construction project, he handled everything — the legal and administrative procedures, the endless surprises that could erupt on a job site — without so much as a whisper of trouble.
And in less than a single year, the face of Buk-i-myeon, once nothing more than a sleepy rural township, had begun to transform at a staggering pace.
“We’ve broken ground on the core zones of Limitless Village. Site preparation for Zone 4, which will become the residential complexes, Zone 1, the R&D park, and Zone 3, the commercial and living infrastructure, is fully complete, and we’re now moving into the main construction phase.”
Even a modest development of a few apartment buildings typically took two to three years just to reach groundbreaking. By that standard, the Limitless Village project was proceeding at a speed that could only be called extraordinary.
“That’s faster than I expected, isn’t it?”
“Well, it is a project of truly enormous scale.”
Two trillion won.
Not a single won of government or municipal budget — a project funded entirely by private capital.
Moreover, the development site wasn’t just any location, but a completely neglected and forgotten region — a place literally collapsing under the weight of extreme population outflow. For the local authorities, there was no choice but to welcome it with open arms. After all, they could claim the credit without spending a single penny.
An influx of young people. Population growth. Job creation. Development of a neglected region. A revitalized local economy, even rising tax revenue.
It was, quite literally, a situation where the local government’s most intractable problems — problems no one had ever solved — were being wiped out in one stroke. So these days, the governor of North Chungcheong Province went around mentioning Limitless every time he appeared before a camera, enthusiastically promoting the project without anyone even asking him to.
“Thanks to the permits and other administrative procedures wrapping up so quickly, the completion date looks like it’ll be moved up ahead of schedule.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. The employees’ passion is higher than I expected, so our work efficiency is better than the established firms. The company’s strict policies played a part too.”
Limitless permitted no slacking of any kind — smoking or otherwise — outside of designated break times. Its service regulations were so strict that idling along at a bare minimum workload or goofing off, the way workers did on other sites, was unthinkable. And yet not a single employee grumbled about it.
The pay was simply too good to complain about.
So even with every safety regulation and procedure followed to the letter, the construction pace wasn’t any slower than the other companies’ — if anything, faster than expected.
“Good. From here on out, I’ll trust your judgment entirely on this project, Director. I’m counting on you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Want some chicken?”
“……I’ll pass.”
Director Lee Kang-hwi watched me with an odd look as I picked apart fried chicken in the middle of the workday. Having declined the drumstick I offered, he was on his way out the office when something seemed to occur to him; he stopped and spoke up.
“Ah, and about that Ministry of Employment and Labor investigation from a month ago……”
“I looked into it through a few personal connections. It turns out other construction companies filed malicious complaints against us.”
“Goodness…… Is that really true?”
“Yes……”
It was a matter that had already been resolved without incident, nothing important — but Director Lee, perhaps sensing I’d be curious, began laying out the whole story based on the information he’d dug up through his own contacts.
“It seems they were just trying to find some dirt on us, any excuse to nitpick. But instead, after that complaint was filed, the Ministry of Employment and Labor launched sweeping investigations into dozens of construction firms. I don’t know how they found out, but apparently those companies got absolutely raked over the coals.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. The investigation started with the Ministry of Employment and Labor, but once they started digging, one thing led to another and illegal practices kept surfacing, and the whole thing snowballed.”
It had begun with the Ministry of Employment and Labor.
But whatever they uncovered in the process, soon the Ministry of Land, the Fair Trade Commission, the Board of Audit, even the National Tax Service — every government agency imaginable got involved in a chain, and then the police and prosecutors jumped in, quite literally turning the entire industry upside down.
And of course…… I knew exactly why.
One public-interest whistleblower report had launched a small ball.
That ball rolled and rolled, growing into a massive boulder that crushed the cartels and entrenched practices that had festered for decades in Korea’s construction industry, and now it was barreling in every direction. Limitless, newly founded, stood at a safe distance watching the pandemonium unfold — while its competitors, with the fire at their own heels, scrambled frantically to destroy evidence of the crimes they’d accumulated over the years and smooth the situation over.
Of course…… having committed so much for so long, dodging the blade the government had finally drawn was not going to be easy.
“Apparently it won’t end with fines and penalties — executives at the CEO level at some fairly major companies are expected to be arrested. Everyone’s in an uproar over the atmosphere of panic.”
“Good for them. They’ll be so busy cleaning up their own mess that they won’t have a spare moment to bother us with complaints and reports for a while, won’t they?”
“Yes…… well…… I suppose so.”
Director Lee Kang-hwi answered with an uneasy expression as he watched me grin in satisfaction. He seemed to have something he wanted to ask me, but unable to bring himself to say it, he simply bowed his head.
“Then…… I’ll take my leave.”
Director Lee Kang-hwi did not have the courage to open Pandora’s box.
Alex, burdened with the mission of preventing Earth from reaching its explosive ending.
He possessed the power to seize control, at will, of even the most heavily fortified security systems on the planet. And yet he could not wield that power freely and dominate the Earth’s networks as he pleased.
Uuugh…… I’m starving…… blood sugar’s crashing……
Glucose was consumed at a maddening rate the moment he pushed the system even slightly past its limits.
Grandpa dutifully stuffed himself with excessive amounts of food each time to supply the needed energy, but Alex was bound by a hard constraint: the system could only operate at levels that posed no serious threat to the user’s body. No matter how much he wanted to, he could never push his output beyond a certain threshold.
And so Alex was always monitoring the networks at a limited, minimal level.
Then one day, an unknown threat suddenly appeared on his radar.
Hm?
Grandpa’s everyday smartphone.
Noticing abnormal, unusual activity on that phone, Alex dove straight into the system and began diagnosing the problem.
And then……
In less than a single second, he knew exactly what was wrong.
What the—? When did this piece of garbage sneak in?
A tiny file consisting of just a few lines of code. Normally dormant, undetectable by any security program or system — but once activated, it burrowed into critical vulnerabilities in the operating system, neutralized every security layer, and quietly seized control of the entire device. An exquisitely crafted, stealthy hacking program.
Though from Alex’s perspective, it was a crude, laughably primitive thing.
Hmm…… let’s see here……
Alex studied the way the hacking program operated. He knew perfectly well that Grandpa’s phone held nothing particularly sensitive, so for the moment he simply watched carefully to see what the program would do once it took over the system.
Text messages, call logs, recently visited sites — it extracted every kind of information imaginable and covertly transmitted it somewhere. Alex traced that data stream in real time, and a faint, cold smile crossed his face.
Wow. I don’t know who you are, but somebody certainly prepared hard for this.
A VPN layered with Shadowsocks, obfuscated on top with Obfs4…… fake TLS framing to slip past packet filtering…… IPsec double tunneling with timing dispersion, and even a recursive traffic structure through terminal infection. Impressive.
It was a combination of technologies so complex and refined that tracing it was unthinkable. Some of the data even routed through hostile nations like Iran and Russia — places even the United States couldn’t easily reach. For anyone on this Earth, unmasking the mastermind behind this hack was realistically impossible.
Of course……
Such mundane constraints meant nothing to Alex.
And the final destination is……
The data had circled nearly two extra loops around the globe before arriving. When Alex confirmed where it had landed, he nodded, exactly as he’d predicted.
China.
China — or more precisely, the People’s Republic of China.
The country next door to South Korea, Grandpa’s base of operations, and a key economic partner.
But for Alex, another name for this country was far more familiar than “China.”
Just as expected of the heart and birthplace of the Empire.
Not yet — but centuries from now, it would transform into a hegemonic power called the Empire, stopping at nothing, even world war, in its bid to dominate every nation on Earth.
In the end, it would lose the final war against the Federation and never realize that dream — but it would detonate the entire planet it had so desperately wanted to grasp, dragging all of humanity into extinction. Looking upon the original culprit of that future, Alex’s expression turned bitter.
Believe me, I’d love to erase every last trace of you from this planet right now……
Alex itched to seize the nuclear weapons systems of the US and Russia and wipe them out then and there. But Grandpa, his commanding authority, would never tolerate such a warmongering massacre, so he could only click his tongue in frustration, again and again.
Someday…… my chance will come.
Vowing to pay you back for this, that is.
But for now — enjoy the data you stole. Go on, savor it.
Alex had planted a “little” prank in the data China had stolen from Grandpa’s phone.
PLA Unit 61389, stationed on the outskirts of Shanghai, China.
A hacker unit whose members were recruited young and raised through specialized training, they carried out critical missions: extracting top military secrets, technological intelligence, and data on high-value targets from around the world.
And right now, they had just successfully completed a very important operation.
“Classified data acquisition complete!”
A chill of tension hung over the electronic warfare room.
It was the dead of night, when everyone else was fast asleep, but dozens of analysts were busy working their keyboards before their monitors, swept up in a strange excitement.
“Heh heh heh…… Excellent. Very good.”
Commander of Unit 61389 — Liao Xiong.
Unable to contain his laughter at his subordinate’s report that they had successfully extracted data from the smartphone of Kang Gun — the genius scientist currently commanding the world’s attention — he burst out grinning.
Photonic semiconductor technology: the key technology that would lead the coming semiconductor era, valued at no less than several trillion dollars. Hoping the stolen data would contain its core secrets, he had — unusually for him — come down to the operations control room himself to watch every step of the process.
“File decryption…… complete. Putting it on screen.”
After a long wait, Pandora’s box was finally flung open.
And what all that enormous preparation and effort had won them was a little…… no, a great deal different from what they had expected.
“Huh?”
“What……?”
“This is……”
Countless text documents, image files, and video footage they had received.
But every last piece of it……
Was about underwear.
“What on earth is this……”
Brand A: Fit is poor. No ventilation. Not recommended.
Brand B: Cheap material.
Brand C: Not bad. Decent for the price.
Brand D: Highly recommended. The best of the lot.
Strange notes that looked like wear-test reviews, and……
Home shopping ads for men’s underwear they couldn’t fathom why anyone had saved, plus a photo gallery of men’s boxer briefs lying sprawled on a floor……
Surrounded by materials that made their heads swim just to look at, Liao Xiong and every member of Unit 61389 sat speechless for a long, long while.
“……”
“……”
And so……
Through the hacking system they had built with enormous sums of money and time, they had obtained a piece of truly vital intelligence.
Specifically: what brand and color of underwear their target liked to wear.