A Lotus in the Gutter
The AI from the future squatting in my head without permission: Alex.
He had flown back into the past armed with every kind of future knowledge in order to save the Earth — and yet, when it came to making money, he turned out to be even more useless than I'd imagined.
"Haah... This isn't easy."
Alex had come from a future so distant that the world would have changed hands a good sixty times over. Which meant that even the general-knowledge-level information he carried was of precisely zero use in this era.
The single most useful tidbit, measured against the present day, was this: a company called Uranus, to be founded 120 years from now, would grow over the following three centuries into a historically unprecedented mega-corporation boasting a return of sixty million times its IPO price. Faced with that, giving up on the idea of getting rich through investments built on Alex's future knowledge was simply unavoidable.
"Aw, come on. And here I was thinking I could make some easy money."
"It doesn't have to be stocks, but I figured I'd at least need to be able to pay next month's rent before I could join whatever scheme it is you're cooking up."
"It's a long story, but... well, if you really want the explanation..."
I gave him a rambling, blow-by-blow account of how my life had gone off the rails. Alex listened in complete silence — and then, wearing an oddly pitying expression, he looked at me and said:
"Because what he was doing was wrong."
"...Why does an AI talk like an actual person?"
Alex, who insisted on being called a Control Persona rather than an artificial intelligence, seemed to bristle slightly, and he fired off at me like a machine gun:
"Okay, okay, I get it. Control Persona. Happy now? Anyway, that's not the point. Bottom line: if I can't make money right now, forget saving the Earth — step one is finding a part-time job."
"Frying chicken."
With Earth's conquest already behind schedule, every hour counted — and here I was proposing to waste my time frying chicken. Alex stared at me in sheer disbelief. But my expression was more serious than it had ever been, and realizing I wasn't joking, he let out a long, deep sigh and muttered to himself:
"Hey, watch your mouth. 'Lunatic'? Who are you calling a lunatic, huh?"
He wore the form of a typical fair-skinned boy with blond hair and blue eyes, and I still couldn't quite bring myself to believe this kid was my descendant — but in the end, he offered me an alternative.
"What I was doing? You mean, what, being a grad student?"
The world is full of occupations, but among them the professorship sat comfortably in the upper tier, with job satisfaction to match. You'd think a man lecturing for a salary would live out his days as a mere wage earner — but in truth, the money professors raked in from outside sources far exceeded what the university paid them.
Government contracts and research grants, textbooks and academic publications, guest lectures and consulting fees and on and on... There was money to be collected and earned under every conceivable pretext, so plenty of professors were far wealthier than they looked. Of course, there were also plenty who resorted to illegal or underhanded methods — some even squeezing stipends out of their own graduate students — which made it entirely feasible for professors' children to be shipped off to America or some other thriving developed country for their education.
"So... you're telling me to go develop some kind of technology?"
A technological gap of a full six hundred years.
By some measures, a 'mere' six centuries — but in that span of time, humanity's science and technology had grown far vaster than anything I had imagined.
Not terraforming, perhaps, but a civilization capable of building habitats on other planets and living in them — humanity of the future had arrived at the very threshold of what science fiction called a spacefaring age, colonizing worlds across the solar system. Which meant that even a casual glance inside Alex's pack revealed it stuffed to the brim with technologies that reeked of money.
The problem, though...
"...was that the level was simply too far ahead."
Progress in science and technology doesn't drop out of the sky one fine morning. Through hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of experiments and failures, principles and phenomena are uncovered, inferred, analyzed — and advancement proceeds the way a climber ascends a staircase, one step at a time. Which meant the technologies Alex carried were too radical, too violent, for this era to understand or accept.
"A mere graduate student — one who never even finished his master's degree — develops technology that leaves the entire world reeling in shock? Without any proper funding or equipment? Anyone with eyes would smell something fishy, wouldn't they?"
Alex conceded easily and sank into thought. After what felt like a long while of agonizing over something, he finally spoke.
"Hm? This is..."
A status window unfolded before my eyes, along with a blueprint that looked intricate at a glance and a mountain of annotations to match. Watching me gape at it all, Alex spoke.
"..."
— A Proposal for the Fundamental Design of Optical Semiconductor Computing Based on Direct Optical Circuitry —
The paper I had abandoned in the past had amounted to nothing more than a proposal — a product of imagination, logic, and inference applied to a future technology that had no physical substance, essentially declaring, optical semiconductors would probably work something like this~. But the material now spread out before my eyes was, quite literally, the answer sheet.
A fully verified, fully functional, one-hundred-percent implementable technology that actually existed — or rather, would exist. And according to Alex, it had carried enough commercial value to sell in enormous volumes as a popular product. Which meant this technology was all but certain to unleash a massive storm across the semiconductor market.
Of course... that didn't mean I could actually build it right away.
The semiconductor market was already white-hot. As I turned over Alex's advice — dangle bait that the entire industry, awash in a flood of global capital, would drool over — Min-jae's call from a few days ago flashed through my mind.
"Professor Kim Hwan-soo's been huddled with the PhD students and the materials from that paper you abandoned, looking like he's chewing something over."
Kim Hwan-soo — the professor who had all but forcibly driven me out of academia. Remembering that the man was now coveting the ideas buried in my unfinished paper, I broke into a deep, slow smile and murmured to myself.
"That's right... There's no reason to leave it sitting there and do that bastard any favors, is there."
Pulling out my laptop — so ancient its battery could barely do its job anymore — I gave a twisted little smile and spoke.
"Alex. Explain this semiconductor to me. In detail."
arXiv — the site where researchers around the world could freely share the results of their work.
Unlike academic journals, which demanded payment and the scrutiny of reviewers and editors, this place was free, open to all, and required no prior review whatsoever — so every single day, enormous quantities of new papers came pouring in.
Of course, set against that vast flood, the number of papers actually worth reading was vanishingly small.
Most of what got uploaded consisted of substandard papers likely to be cut at the journal-submission stage, so it was common to see their authors savaged under blistering criticism and merciless ridicule from people already working in the field.
But... even in a sewer, lotuses bloom.
Every once in a very great while — rarely, so rarely — a discovery that stunned the world, a treasure beyond price, would burst up out of that muck.
Exactly like right now.
The arrival of a technology from the future, one that would leave the entire world speechless.
But the reactions of the people witnessing it for the first time were...
It was fucking hard.