Blackwood International, Part One
Palo Alto’s JR Blackwood Hotel was the most luxurious hotel in the Blackwood International chain. Because it sat right in the middle of Silicon Valley, it was used more by business travelers than tourists.
It was a five-star hotel, and even the cheapest room cost more than five hundred dollars a night. If you didn’t book ahead, you’d be lucky to get a room at all.
I stayed here and, every morning, came down to the lobby café for coffee.
I had sounded confident when I spoke to Syd, but the truth was, I was anxious.
If the incident I was thinking of actually happened, I could solve this situation easily enough. But if it didn’t, I’d have to come up with another plan.
In the short time since I’d returned, I had already changed quite a few things.
I had prevented things that were supposed to happen, and made things happen that weren’t supposed to.
The moment I intervened, the future had begun to change little by little. Ten years from now, the world might look nothing like the one I remembered.
The problem was figuring out how far my actions had reached.
One sentence, one gesture—either could change the future. Natural disasters and the like probably wouldn’t matter much, but in the financial world, the impact could be enormous.
Even so, I didn’t think I’d directly affected that incident.
When exactly had it happened?
I remembered it as being around this time, but it was an old event, and I couldn’t be certain.
I was still thinking it over as I drank my coffee, when a small commotion broke out near the front desk.
“You can’t check me in? What do you mean, I can’t check in?”
“We’re sorry, sir, but the network is running slowly right now. Please wait just a moment.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“It should be resolved soon.”
Hearing that there had been an error, the guests waited for a while. But even after thirty minutes, there was no sign of the problem being fixed.
As check-in time drew closer, the number of waiting guests kept growing.
And still the network kept failing. At last, the manager seemed to decide they couldn’t wait any longer and gave the order.
“Check in the guests who brought vouchers first.”
“Understood.”
But these days, how many people even carried around a paper voucher? It was a blessing if they’d at least taken a screenshot of the mobile voucher.
“I already paid! You took my money and now you’re telling me it won’t work?”
“If you could just show us the voucher…”
“I need the website to load before I can show you the voucher, don’t I?”
“Well, yes, but…”
The guests, unable to hold back any longer, began to complain all at once.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“This is the service I get from a five-star hotel?”
“Cancel the payment right now. I’m going to another hotel!”
“Cancellation isn’t available at the moment.”
“So what are we supposed to do if you can’t check us in and you can’t cancel either?”
With no other choice, they started checking IDs by hand, writing everything down and processing check-ins and checkouts manually.
Things that shouldn’t have happened even in a neighborhood inn were happening inside a five-star hotel.
Watching the chaos in the lobby, I barely managed to swallow the cheer that tried to burst out of me.
So it really does happen when it’s supposed to!
I called Syd immediately.
“Yeah, hyung?”
“It looks like Blackwood Hotel’s network is down. Something seems to have gone wrong. Can you look into it?”
Syd didn’t even ask why.
“If I’m going to investigate it properly, it’ll take some time.”
“I don’t need certainty or hard proof. Just take a look and give me your rough impression.”
“Got it.”
Blackwood International.
Even people who had no interest in hotels had probably heard the name at least once. There was a branch of this chain in nearly every major city in the world.
The company’s founder was John Ronald Blackwood.
The son of a minor English nobleman, he had immigrated to the United States as a child. His parents hadn’t left him much wealth, but they had left him something far more important.
Namely, the identity of nobility and habitus.
After he married, he and his wife ran the inn she had inherited.
While he struggled to find a way to offer better service than his competitors, he decided to treat his guests as though they were aristocrats.
They loved it.
In that moment, he understood something crucial.
The class system hadn’t disappeared. Money was the new rank. The rich liked speaking and behaving like nobles, and they wanted to be treated accordingly.
So of course they adored that kind of service.
John Blackwood trained his staff to serve customers like aristocrats, and he went so far as to hire a large number of butlers and servants straight from Europe, further elevating the quality of the service.
The strategy was a huge success.
At a Blackwood hotel, even a single night was enough to make you feel like royalty.
Once the word spread, people with money flocked to Blackwood hotels, and when it became known that the chain was favored by the wealthy and the famous, even ordinary people started to dream of staying there at least once.
As the American economy exploded before and after the world wars, Blackwood grew into a massive hotel chain in its own right.
It later expanded successfully into casino operations in Las Vegas and Macau, and today it had become the world’s number one hotel group, with 5,300 hotels in 75 countries, along with thirty brands and ten subsidiaries.
Keeping pace with the times, it had also rushed to embrace digital transformation.
The company digitized customer information and used it to provide personalized service to each guest.
Customers were delighted, and repeat visits rose sharply.
Combined with growing travel and business demand, plus the conventions it kept attracting, revenue surged.
Blackwood International was praised for having successfully completed its digital transformation, and its stock price kept climbing.
Its current market capitalization was about fifty-two billion dollars.
And then...
Out of nowhere, disaster struck in the form of a network paralysis.
It wasn’t just happening at the hotel where I was staying.
The exact same thing was happening at all 5,300 hotels in the Blackwood International chain around the world.
Wrong rooms were being assigned over and over again, complaints were pouring in, and the hotel side had no real response to offer.
Watching the articles pop up in real time, I called David.
“I’m staying at the JR Blackwood Hotel right now, and it’s total chaos. What does the market look like?”
“Blackwood International’s stock is down six percent already. For now it looks like a system error, but some people are also raising the possibility of a DDoS attack or hacking.”
When something like this happened, rumors were bound to explode in every direction.
I knew this was going to happen.
Because it had happened the same way in my first life.
If I had gone short and bought put options in advance, I would have made a fortune. But I hadn’t done that.
There were two reasons for that.
First, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it would happen. From the moment I regressed, the future had already changed.
I hadn’t done anything directly connected to this situation, but there was always the chance that my actions over the past months had triggered a butterfly effect and prevented something that was originally supposed to happen.
Second, I wanted to avoid suspicion.
If I had bet on a stock drop before the incident even happened, what would people think? Obviously, it would be reasonable to suspect I had some connection to the whole thing.
If this kind of thing kept happening later on, the suspicion would only grow stronger.
But once the damage was already done, that was different.
I told David, “Short Blackwood International immediately. And buy any put options that have been issued.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. Put every asset we have into it.”
Apparently he didn’t think I was joking, because David spoke in a grave voice.
“How much more do you think it’ll drop?”
It wasn’t easy to predict how far a stock would fall after bad news hit or where the bottom would be. But I knew exactly.
“It’ll drop another thirty percent within two days.”
David seemed to have lost his voice.
It was rare for a blue chip of that size to crash that hard.
Of course, there was the fine (?) example of Thomas Motors, but this was a different case.
Thomas Motors had been a stock that rose on nothing but hype, with no revenue and no earnings. Blackwood, on the other hand, was a company with more than a hundred years of history, and it was number one in the industry in revenue, profit, and assets alike.
“If the servers are restored, the stock should recover quickly.”
“No. They’re never going to restore this.”
“Why do you think that?”
“This isn’t just a server outage.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a ransomware attack.”
If it were a simple systems failure, they could restore it in a day or two.
But if it was ransomware? They would never solve it so easily.
In the first case, the stock would recover quickly. In the second, it would fall much further.
“Do you have evidence?”
“Three things. First, the network went down all at once. Second, there’s a significant security vulnerability in the server.”
“And you’re certain based on that alone?”
In truth, the reason I was certain it was ransomware was simply because I knew the future. So logically, I didn’t have the confidence to argue it convincingly.
“That’s why the third point matters most.”
“What is it?”
“Syd checked, and he says it looks like ransomware.”
“……”
Wasn’t that proof enough?
David’s response came a little later.
“You want me to short the stock just because the CEO says so?”
I answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Of course. He’s a genius.”
“……”
“……”
David gathered the staff and relayed Han Miru’s message.
“Is it really ransomware?” Maurice Pearson asked, eyes widening.
“That’s what he says.”
Everyone’s expressions turned grave.
After the internet came into being, some crimes that had once taken place in the real world migrated online.
Hostage-taking was no exception.
In the past, kidnappers physically abducted people. In the modern era, they abducted the data stored inside computers and servers.
That was ransomware.
The word was a blend of ransom and malware, and it meant exactly what it sounded like: using malicious code to encrypt data, take it hostage, and demand payment.
Once criminals realized it was far more efficient to hold data hostage than people, they rushed into the business in droves.
In the past, a company’s assets were buildings, factories, and machinery. Now its most important asset was data.
That was why IT companies poured so much effort into security.
But if security was breached and that data leaked or vanished?
It was no different from having the entire warehouse looted. In fact, some companies had actually gone under because of it.
While everyone was still reeling from the word ransomware, Gabriella Chavez spoke up.
“Servers go down and networks get paralyzed all the time. Isn’t it a bit of a leap to say this is an attack?”
“The boss seems certain.”
“Why?”
David gave her the reason.
“He said even CEO Han Miru thinks it looks like ransomware.”
“……”
Everyone made a face at that.
After a short silence, Edward Benson folded his arms and spoke.
“Given that this is a hotel, if customer information has leaked, it could be catastrophic.”
Maurice Pearson shook his head.
“Even if ransomware is real, we still can’t be sure data actually leaked.”
“But do you think people will see it that way?”
“Fair point. Proving otherwise won’t be easy.”
Before long, everyone had started speaking as though ransomware was already a given.
David frowned as he thought it over.
He’s willing to put all our assets on the line with that little evidence?
If anyone else had said it, he would have dismissed it. But Han Miru was different. He had repeatedly pulled off things that should have been impossible, with complete ease, and David had watched it happen from the closest possible vantage point.
David asked the staff, “If the boss is right, what do you think happens next?”
Gabriella Chavez answered first.
“Then the real plunge starts now.”
In other words, a chance to make a ridiculous amount of money.
Fortunately, the Continue Capital account still held the 1.8 billion dollars Han Miru had just brought in recently. If they poured that into short positions and put options, they could drive the stock down even further.
Information lost value as time passed.
If the system wasn’t restored within a day or two, everyone would realize something was seriously wrong anyway.
Once the investment direction was set, they had to move quickly.
David gave the order.
“Proceed.”