No One Bit the Bait
“Goddamn it.”
My paper — the one I'd poured my heart and soul into, burning through two full weeks of sleepless days and nights to complete.
Deep down, I'd been expecting that the moment it was released to the world, it would send shockwaves through the academic community and turn me into an instant celebrity, a superstar of the field. Instead, the reaction I got was so far beyond anything I'd anticipated that the curses came spilling out of me on their own.
Apparently someone had gone and scribbled down another pile of outlandish self-indulgent theories. Difficult. Dense. Unfamiliar.
Scattered across Reddit and every other researcher community were nothing but grumbles and scathing reviews from people who couldn't even begin to grasp what they were looking at — and yet my inbox, nearly a full week after publication, remained dead silent.
That alone told me everything. My paper had been buried alive under a mountain of indifference, treated exactly the same as the dozens, the hundreds of trash submissions that didn't even deserve to be called papers.
[ Tsk. The intellectual level of the humans in this era seems even lower than I expected, Grandpa. ]
Alex clicked his tongue at the sight of me heaving sigh after sigh over my empty inbox. But I couldn't bring myself to agree with him.
“No, to be fair, it was difficult. I only understand it because I've been listening to your explanations this whole time — the first time I looked at it, I didn't have a clue what any of it meant. It's got theories that haven't been properly established yet, and formulas that don't even exist yet, all mixed in there.”
Semiconductors weren't the kind of thing that belonged to any single discipline.
Mathematics, physics, materials science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science… It was the distilled essence of advanced science and technology, a product forged from the combined knowledge of every specialized field under the sun.
Which meant that for any single researcher to fully understand a hundred percent of my paper was, realistically speaking, next to impossible.
[ Tch… Fair point, but I still dumbed it down as much as I possibly could. How exactly am I supposed to simplify it any further than that? ]
“Well, you've got a point there.”
The paper had been built on Px-12, the optical semiconductor of the future.
It was a prototype of a prototype — a design stripped of every peripheral component, containing nothing but the core elements. To include such a semiconductor in the paper, the foundational theories underpinning it all had to be laid out in full, which meant there was simply no room to lower the bar any further.
If I had, the whole thing would have become unimplementable — nothing more than worthless garbage cataloguing the delusions inside my head.
[ Still, this is a problem. If nobody takes the bait, and we keep going like this, you're going to end up frying chicken for a living. ]
“Honestly, that doesn't sound so bad?”
[ ……. ]
“Kidding! Just kidding. Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
Alex was uniquely sensitive to any waste of time. Under that withering glare of his, I quickly declared it a joke and changed the subject.
“Speaking of which — is this what it's like the whole time you're running? I've lost ten kilos in a single month.”
[ That's unavoidable when the job calls for massive computation — future-prediction simulations, wide-scale information gathering, system infiltration, that sort of thing. ]
Ordinary conversation was fine, but whenever Alex performed complex calculations or connected to a network to do whatever it was he did, he demanded staggering amounts of energy. Each time, I'd been hit with ravenous hunger and stuffed my face with every high-calorie meal and snack in reach — and yet my stomach didn't bulge an inch. If anything, it had caved in so far I barely recognized myself.
[ Besides, I've been burning your excess body fat first and converting it into fuel, so it's actually a net win for you, Grandpa. Your body fat has dropped considerably, and you're probably in better shape than you've ever been. ]
“Well… I can't argue with that.”
This was a world where people exercised themselves to death every day, agonized over their diets, and even injected themselves with treatments costing over a million won — all in the name of losing a little weight. Doing absolutely nothing while a bio-chip embedded in your brain incinerated every unnecessary gram of fat in your body? However you sliced it, that was pure, uncut jackpot.
“Hold on… if I play this right, I might actually get abs out of this.”
A stomach flatter and firmer than it had ever been, even in the springy prime of my teenage years. I was lost in the thought that a little exercise now would give me a genuinely respectable physique when Alex frowned deeply and spoke up.
[ There you go, planning something pointless again. ]
“Pointless? Come on, this is a great chance to get in shape. Good for my health, too.”
[ I can manage your health down to the individual cell, so don't worry about it. Let's focus on what actually needs doing right now. ]
“Which is?”
[ Nobody's biting the bait we threw into the internet, and we can't exactly just sit here sucking our thumbs, can we? Time to pound the pavement. ]
“Pound the pavement…?”
[ Yep. I've been taking a long, hard look at the state of the semiconductor industry lately, and I think I've found some places that might actually be interested in what we have. ]
Several status windows unfolded before my eyes. They were dense with technical jargon, but the reports had been summarized as concisely as possible, and as I skimmed through them, I understood what Alex meant by pounding the pavement — and narrowed my eyes.
“So what you're saying is… we go straight to a company with the capability to develop an optical semiconductor and hand over the technology. That's the pitch?”
[ Exactly. We could build it ourselves, but your capital is laughably inadequate for that, Grandpa. You've got no development staff, no infrastructure to speak of. If you tried to commercialize it from where you're standing now, you could dump money into it until the end of time and it'd still take five years minimum. ]
I was a penniless jobless bum with no factory to my name — hell, not so much as a single proper piece of lab equipment. No matter how good the technology was, actually realizing it was practically impossible, which made Alex's proposal eminently reasonable.
“Hmm… but would Asung Electronics even be interested in our technology?”
[ Far more likely than any of the others. They've lost the initiative in the semiconductor industry right now — their entire standing is wobbling. ]
Asung Electronics had once commanded overwhelming influence across the globe, perennially claiming the number-one spot in the memory semiconductor market. But lately, more and more people had begun to view the company's future with skepticism.
“A Market in Flux. Asung Electronics in Crisis.”
“Falling Behind on Technology? Asung Electronics Needs sweeping Innovation.”
“Asung Shares Plummet on Grim Outlook — But What's the Fix?”
Asung Electronics had made a critical misjudgment: choosing immediate profits over investment in future technology.
The Asung Group was, by any measure, the supreme corporate power in South Korea — and its crown jewel, Asung Electronics, was now losing its grip on the world's number-one position. That was why Alex had judged it the perfect target for my approach.
[ If they fail to pull off a real technological breakthrough, they can scrape by for another five or ten years, maybe. But within twenty or thirty, they will collapse. If they don't want to go under… well, like it or not, they'll have no choice but to take your hand, won't they? ]
Alex wore a faint, cold smile as he prophesied the fall of that colossal enterprise. I nodded along, then quickly dashed off a brief email to the address he'd given me and hit send.
This time, hoping for a reply.
Ontel. A comprehensive semiconductor company that had once boasted world-spanning influence, now all but winnowed out of the market by its own technological decline — a company of tragic circumstance.
Bleeding revenue and watching its earnings slide, it had thrown itself into massive restructuring and headcount reductions, kicking and thrashing in a desperate bid to survive. But the situation was not kind.
And at the helm of Ontel in this hour of crisis stood Jonathan. As chief executive, he furrowed his brow with a complicated expression as he listened to the CTO, who had barged in without warning.
“I simply cannot make sense of this, Kevin. An optical semiconductor? Out of nowhere?”
A proposal to attempt the development of an optical semiconductor — a lunatic's idea. Had anyone said such a thing in a boardroom, they'd have been slapped down for spouting nonsense and fired on the spot. But the man making this particular proposal was none other than Ontel's Chief Technology Officer, so his words could not be casually dismissed.
“So, if I'm summarizing what you've just told me correctly — assuming that everything written in this paper is true, then it may be possible to develop an early-model optical semiconductor. Is that it?”
“That's correct.”
“And that's the final conclusion handed down by the 'Campus'?”
Ontel's R&D technology division — the place informally known as the Campus — was where its development efforts were coordinated. Jonathan glanced over the analysis report assembled there by a gathering of experts and posed the question, and Kevin answered with the faintest hint of a smile on his face.
“After a comprehensive discussion among the specialists, we judged the odds of success to be high. To be sure, there are portions we haven't fully understood, so further review and research will be necessary — but if the development succeeds, it would be on a level capable of completely overturning the paradigm of the entire semiconductor industry.”
“……”
“You look like you don't believe me.”
“Frankly? I don't.”
Jonathan didn't bother to deny it; he nodded and answered with brutal directness. Lacing his fingers together and resting his chin on them, he pressed the point.
“A completely unknown researcher — no track record, no verification of any kind — publishes a paper containing technology that could reshape the entire semiconductor industry? And on some random internet site with zero academic credibility? Anyone would be suspicious. You'd have to be.”
“If it really contained technology like that, it would have been designated a national strategic asset from day one, classified and buried under the protection of a government agency.”
It was an eminently sensible, reasonable judgment on Jonathan's part. But Kevin merely chuckled, as if the objection didn't concern him in the slightest.
“True. That's exactly what I thought at first, too.”
“But the world doesn't run on common sense, does it. Sometimes… things happen that make no sense no matter how you turn them over. Absurd things.”
“Ha.”
Jonathan let out a hollow laugh. Kevin had always struck him as a little eccentric, but now the man seemed to have gone entirely off the rails. Still, he looked down seriously at the report in his hands and, before long, asked:
“The name of the author who wrote this paper… it's an unusual one.”
“Isn't it? It caught my eye too, the first time I saw it. Gun. Who's named Gun?”
“Have you made contact with this person?”
“I intend to send a formal meeting request — with your approval.”
“Approval? What approval?”
“Myself and the expert researchers at the Campus will conduct a thorough verification. But if it turns out the way we're judging internally — if this technology really is realistically implementable, or even simply worth attempting to develop —”
“— then we will sign a technology transfer agreement on the spot, no matter what it takes. For that moment, I'd like you to grant me full authority over this matter, so that I can negotiate whatever terms are demanded of us.”
“……You'd sign a technology transfer agreement right then and there? Isn't that rather hasty?”
For a moment, the sheer audacity of the demand left Jonathan at a loss for words. But Kevin only grinned in response.
“I have no intention of kicking a lump of gold out the door just because I failed to recognize it.”
“……”
Jonathan stared at him the way one might stare at a madman. But then he let out a long, deep sigh and spoke.
“Fine. Do as you see fit. But whatever figure you propose, the amount has to be something the Campus can absorb.”
“I'll do my best.”
“Ah — and remember this. The board's mood has turned ugly lately, what with the falling revenue and the dismal numbers. As you well know, we're in a situation where a single small mistake could put your position on the line.”
“Kindly make sure I don't have to fire you and put the Campus through another round of restructuring.”