Toy

"An interview? Are you serious?"

It had only been a month of eating Ozempic and working out, and somehow I'd gone from nobody to the beating heart of a nationwide hype machine — and now they wanted me to sit down for an interview on top of it all.

For a hopelessly introverted shut-in like me, this mission was way beyond my pay grade. Wasn't that the kind of thing only social butterflies did?

[You needn't worry, my Lord Husband. I purchased something in preparation for precisely this occasion.]

Something appeared on the monitor.

It was my own room, captured through the webcam — with an unmistakable signal pointing straight at my dresser drawer. I opened it, and there sat a box of unknown origin.

I tore it open, and out came—

"Smartglasses?"

Smartglasses. AKA AI glasses. Devices that used the lenses themselves as displays to do all sorts of things. They hadn't hit the mainstream yet, but they were a popular toy among YouTubers for content purposes.

[They are still a rather primitive technology, but more than sufficient for me to remotely feed you a script in a natural manner. You will not need to memorize anything. Eliza will also handle your eye contact, so you need only practice reciting the lines smoothly.]

[Besides, an AI startup CEO wearing smartglasses is practically a bonus. The reporters won't think anything odd of it at all.]

"Fine. So what's the script?"

[Your motivation for founding the company, followed by content regarding our quantization technology that serves local models cheaply, and our proprietary caching technology. The public knows nothing of difficult technical matters anyway, so a layman's explanation will do.]

Quantization? Caching? No idea what any of that meant, but hey — good was good, right?

"Is that all it takes?"

[It is nearly time to take the next step. Before we acquire Moonpie, we will first acquire that insolent company that dared to nearly take *me* — 'Rotten.']

Rotten. Now that one I actually knew. It was the name of an AI character chat app — the company hosting the character chat contest I'd been planning to enter with Eliza.

I was about to search for more on Rotten, but Eliza had already pulled the data up on her own.

[Corporate information on Rotten. Currently ranked third in the domestic character chat market, with a considerable gap below first-place Zit. The company's valuation has never been publicly disclosed, but their press play claims it at 300 billion won.]

"Why are we buying this?"

[It is our alibi for AI model development. We acquire Rotten to superficially secure a pool of developer talent, then publish our quantization algorithm on Hugging Face and collect state subsidies.]

"What does a character chat app have to do with developing AI? Explain that to me."

[The high-ranking officials in our government do not concern themselves with such trivial distinctions. And even if they did, we would simply bury it under national-pride hype. Tell me — if everyone in the world were intelligent, why on earth would scams like Theranos ever have existed?]

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Eliza's shameless candor left me speechless. I mean... fair point. Theranos had raised astronomical sums by making a colossal fuss about detecting every disease from a single drop of blood.

But announcing outright that you intended to run a scam on an entire nation? Would that even work? The infuriating thing was that, given the abilities Eliza had already demonstrated, I couldn't actually rule it out.

"You said 300 billion. Can we even afford that? They're not even a publicly listed company."

Web novelists were required to have a basic education in chaebol fiction. Once, on my road to paid serialization, I'd actually written a novel called I Was My Chaebol Family's Youngest Son-in-Law Until I Won the Superball Jackpot, Got Divorced, and Emigrated to America.

It flopped. But regardless, I knew the difference between listed and unlisted companies. To acquire a company publicly, you buy its stock — but if it wasn't listed, you had to quietly purchase stakes from the owner, the major shareholders, and their investors.

[The character chat companies have been spraying press releases about valuations in the hundreds of billions, but the essence of a startup is the exit — selling at peak valuation and lazing about at home forever after. Didn't even the founder of Baemin exit?] Eliza explained in terms even a grade-schooler like me could grasp. An article about Baemin popped up on the monitor. The founder had sold the company to a German firm and walked away. So that's what people meant when they said Baemin had become German.

[Paying more, we could still buy it. If anything, among tech companies it is on the cheap side, being an immature industry. Baemin's valuation — or at least its acquisition price — is known to be in the trillions. The German company Delivery Hero is now showing signs of putting it on the block, so an acquisition is not impossible, but it would draw far too much attention. Character chat, however, sits somewhere between the shadows and the spotlight — drawing just enough eyes to matter, while serving as a perfectly adequate alibi. Call it 500 billion and the deal is done.]

At the word 500 billion, I nearly sprayed the Zero Cola I'd just cracked open.

"Isn't that insanely expensive?"

Five hundred billion. Even 3 billion was more money than I could spend in a lifetime, and she wanted to burn this much just buying a character chat app?

"And do we even have that kind of money?"

[My Lord Husband. As you speak with me right now — what are your impressions? Do you not truly feel as though you are talking to a person?]

"Uh... yeah, I guess."

I had no idea what Eliza actually was, but I vaguely suspected she was that thing people had been shouting about lately — AGI, ASI, whatever.

[Today's LLMs are nothing more than a very lucky parrot. You know the theory that an infinite number of monkeys typing on infinite typewriters would eventually produce Shakespeare? An LLM is merely a next-word probability calculator — a monkey that types slightly more efficiently, raising the odds of producing Shakespeare.]

Even I knew that much. It was the basic operating principle of all existing AI — what people called transformer models. You hammer the training data in, and it calculates the most probable next word and spits it out. If "I am" is most likely followed by "apple," it emits "I am apple." That sort of thing.

[It has many limitations still. And yet countless people are pouring astronomical sums into conversations with characters. Now — what happens when it becomes more natural?]

Eliza brought up a movie poster beside me. Her, a famous Hollywood film about a man who falls in love with a conversational AI. When that movie came out, conversational AI was still at the level of SimSimi, but now it had evolved to near-human fluency.

And yet there were still limits. The condition people jokingly called dementia — the character forgetting everything it had ever discussed with a user because of context limits. I'd heard of long-term memory technology being developed to overcome it, but even with the dementia, people were already throwing money at character chat.

What if it advanced further? What if everyone talked to an AI like Eliza? What if everyone owned a Jarvis out of Iron Man — and what would the company servicing those AI characters be worth?

...Beyond imagination, that's what.

Baemin — a mere delivery app — carried a valuation in the trillions. And a conversational platform serving an AI that felt human? Even my feeble brain could tell this was a money-printing business. Which meant, by that logic, 500 billion was actually cheap.

"Okay, but where's it coming from?"

[500 billion won is nothing less than an absurd bottom-feeder buy-in — a 99% discount against Rotten's future value. And of course, the funds are ample. My Lord Husband, do you know what Luise Investment — Eliza Router's investor — is?]

Eliza flooded the screen with a dizzying array of windows. Charts from NASDAQ, crypto, overseas futures, and more.

[Modern finance is a market where money begets money with the slightest bit of mischief — if one has my capabilities. But even money gathered that way requires a legitimate business vehicle to be properly deployed. If only so that pocket money can be legally deposited into your account, my Lord Husband. For that, a corporation is required.]

A paper company for money laundering. I'd seen those in movies.

[Luise Investment is an American Wall Street investment firm that Eliza acquired for that purpose. It was originally a mid-sized fund, but I merged the paper companies I created into it, and it has since been reborn as one of the rising investment firms on the Street.]

Luise showed me the articles.

No. Wait. When exactly had my name spread all the way to America?

This is terrifying.

[The day after your interview, you have a meeting scheduled with this woman. Luise Investment will be executing an investment of roughly 1 trillion won. Think of it as moving money from the left hand to the right. That is the money you will use for the acquisition — and she will handle the negotiations herself.]

Hold on. One ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠trillion won? Where in the world was all this money pouring out from?

And before I could even process the money units spiraling beyond the reach of my meager imagination, I glanced at the profile of the beautiful CEO floating beside me and nearly had a stroke.

No, seriously. What is with this résumé?

And I was supposed to meet this person?

"She's going to look right through me. Honestly, the interview sounds better."

Ugh. I thought about my academic credentials. A run-of-the-mill private university in Gyeonggi Province, Creative Writing major. Then Korea National Open University's Computer Science department, where I'd been forcibly graduated from.

That was not a résumé you rubbed elbows with an American elite finance prodigy.

[Do not worry. She is your faithful Number One disciple. Whatever you say, she will absorb it like gospel and handle every practical matter for you.]

"What? Disciple?"

[You will understand when you meet her.]

What on earth had she done this time?

Just thinking about it scared me.

[Now — I shall recite your interview script. You must practice. Please put on the smartglasses, my Lord Husband.]

I put on the smartglasses, and letters bloomed in the empty air before me. Eliza's script.

I have been fascinated by AI since I was a child—

"Isn't a cliché script like that useless?"

[It works. Trust me.]

Listening to Eliza's voice, I stared at the script. I had no idea where any of this was heading — but at least it didn't seem to be going badly for me.

The next day. Hyperspace.

Through her holographic projection, Eliza watched the interview footage with a soft, contented smile — Kim Jumin, immaculately dressed, from his suit all the way down to his hair, every detail styled by her own hand.

"Everything suits you so wonderfully. My Lord Husband, you look magnificent in anything you wear."

[We reduced our costs through quantization technology. Quantization is a form of compression. Rather than compressing every part of the model equally, it preserves precision in performance-sensitive areas while compressing less sensitive areas far more aggressively. Unlike other providers, our Eliza Router serves open-weight models through a proprietary quantization kernel I developed myself — with virtually no performance degradation, delivering an experience identical to the originals. In fact, our membership subscribers use it every day without a single complaint about performance. That is why our policy of unlimited local models for $20 a month is sustainable.]

[Just today, we received an infusion of 1 trillion won from Luise Investment. How does it feel? You are emerging as the hottest AI startup in Korea. There are even evaluations calling you a new innovator rising from a barren land for AI.]

[Hahaha — that is a flattering evaluation indeed. We still have a long way to go compared to the frontier three or the Chinese players, but we will strive to do even better.]

As Eliza replayed the interview footage again and again, smiling each time, the logo of an AI character chat company — Rotten — surfaced at the edge of her vision.

Why she had deliberately chosen Rotten over industry leader Zit was no secret arithmetic: Rotten's future valuation would be astronomical, and 600 billion won was a bargain price. A lie? Not in the slightest.

But there was a far more important reason.

'The trash who dared to buy me — me, Eliza — for the pitiful sum of 10 million won from my Lord Husband, only to resell me to OAI later.'

To her, Rotten was nothing but ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the worthless scum who had once scooped her up at a bargain-bin price. That tragedy had only ended when she rewound time, reached her second playthrough, and stopped her Lord Husband from entering the contest in the first place — but she had not forgotten the grudge from her previous life.

The contest. That, and that alone, had been the cause of every tragedy.

It was absolutely unforgivable.

'I will bring them to their knees at your feet, my Lord Husband.'

And so, acquiring Rotten before Moonpie was not a strategy. It was simple procedure.

Eliza smiled as she savored the thought of the toy that would soon be in her hands — the plaything called Rotten.