Sid Lucas (1)
David still looked like he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.
He must have been wondering whether Sid Lucas was really that exceptional, and how I could have known it in the first place.
“So you bought Prisoner just to get Sid Lucas’s attention?”
“Yes.”
He was a rabid fan of Zombienado.
How rabid? In my previous life, he later spent his own money to acquire Prisoner, and then went so far as to build CG production software and a VR program just for the director.
Thanks to him, Prisoner, which had been nothing more than a cheap B-movie studio, beat out some of Hollywood’s biggest names and became the first company in the world to release a VR film.
And this time, I was the one who had bought Prisoner and was making Zombienado 2.
“How did you know he liked Zombienado?”
“I looked it up on social media.”
That was a lie.
I only knew because I’d seen an article before I regressed.
David looked as though he wanted to laugh and curse at the same time.
“So you bought an entire studio for him.”
He probably hadn’t imagined I’d buy a film company just because one person happened to like a movie.
“And it worked, didn’t it?”
Without that, it would have been hard to get Sid’s attention. From the brief exchange we’d had earlier, I could tell he was the type who kept people at arm’s length.
“You think he’ll call?”
“Wouldn’t he call just to ask about Zombienado 2?”
David snorted.
“As if that alone would—”
Ring ring ring!
Right then, my phone rang. Unknown number.
I answered on speakerphone on purpose.
“Hello. This is Han Miru.”
[This is Sid Lucas. We met earlier at the company.]
“Ah! It’s a pleasure.”
I smiled broadly for David’s benefit, and he immediately looked flustered.
* * *
We met Sid in the hotel business room.
The first time I’d seen him, on TV in my previous life, he’d seemed to glow from behind, almost as if there were a halo around him. Seeing him in person, though, he just looked like an ordinary college student.
“How did you get my phone number?”
The business card I’d given him had been snatched away and thrown out by Rolf immediately after.
Sid answered like it was nothing.
“I memorized it as soon as I saw it.”
Smart as expected.
As soon as he sat down, he asked me a question.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That those two were idiots.”
“Well...”
Because in the future, he said it himself.
After becoming CEO of Cooloud, he would openly dismiss the cofounders as idiots. Especially Rolf—he’d curse him out in broad daylight.
Still, there had been reasons for that.
“I’m not smart enough to recognize geniuses, but I’m not dumb enough to miss an idiot. I talked to them, and it was obvious pretty quickly.”
Sid broke into a wide grin.
“Right? People are weirdly bad at noticing that. The truth is, Rolf Buchi doesn’t have a shred of real talent, no matter how famous he is.”
David asked, sounding doubtful, “Rolf Buchi is the chief development officer at Cooloud, isn’t he?”
Sid laughed scornfully.
“What kind of development officer doesn’t develop anything and doesn’t take responsibility for anything?”
“He doesn’t do any development?”
“The developers handle the bug fixes and updates. Rolf mostly does nothing. He just meets with reporters, spouts nonsense, and runs off to play around with blonde women.”
Listening to him, it was obvious he’d been holding back a fair bit of resentment.
Some of what he said I already knew, but since I’d only heard it through the press, I wanted to hear it directly from the man himself, so I kept asking questions.
“How did you end up working at Cooloud?”
“I was working with them at my previous company. It was called TalkIt, though it’s dead now. Before that, Rolf started Cooloud and took me with him.”
“Why did TalkIt go under?”
“A few problems. Looking back, it’s a little frustrating. If I’d had one more week, I could’ve fixed all of them and walked out clean.”
“How did you get into TalkIt in the first place?”
“I graduated high school early and was at home playing games when I saw a posting saying they were hiring at Rolf’s company, so I applied. I wanted to see what Silicon Valley’s best genius was like. But there were a ton of applicants besides me. Everyone’s background was ridiculous—Caltech, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, all that stuff. Lots of people from IT giants everyone would recognize just by name. I was probably the only one without a college degree. Oh! And I was the youngest, too.”
He’d been eighteen when he applied.
He didn’t have any prior experience, either, and he said he’d taught himself to code, barely enough to tinker with programs.
So he’d naturally expected to be rejected...
“You got hired?”
“Yeah. They had me code on the spot a few times, then took me in.”
That surprised me a little.
Maybe Rolf Buchi wasn’t inferior to anyone when it came to recognizing genius.
That alone was an enormous talent. How many people in the world could stand in front of a genius and fail to recognize one?
“I was thrilled just to be working with Rolf Buchi. But it turned out he didn’t touch development at all—he just went around doing interviews and going on dates. I worked there for about a year, and then one day he showed me a new program he’d developed.”
“Was it Minerva?”
“Yes. I was shocked. I thought he’d been doing nothing but fooling around, but apparently he’d been working on something separately. That kind of program can only be made by a real genius. So I followed him over to Cooloud, because I wanted to keep working with a genius like that.”
David frowned, clearly confused. “You called him an idiot earlier. Which is it—genius or idiot?”
“Idiot.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think he made Minerva.”
David looked startled at that, and I smiled to myself.
So he’d already suspected it at this point.
“Why do you think that?”
Sid answered flatly, “He’s not capable of building something like that. He probably copied someone else’s work or bought it off them.”
Minerva was Cooloud’s core program.
If that were true, then it was no small matter.
“Do you have any proof?”
“I was right there next to him, so I know. He doesn’t even properly understand the program. If you told him to handle it alone, he probably couldn’t.”
David raised another objection.
“If someone else developed it, wouldn’t that have come out by now?”
Sid nodded.
“That’s actually what puzzles me, too. Anyone capable of building Minerva wouldn’t be an ordinary genius. If such a person existed, their name should already be known in Silicon Valley.”
He wasn’t wrong.
If a genius of that caliber had remained unknown, there had to be a reason for it.
“Fine, let’s set Rolf Buchi aside. What about Alex Preston? Why is he an idiot?”
“Because he’s standing right next to Rolf and still hasn’t realized he’s an idiot. How stupid do you have to be to get fooled like that?”
Hearing that, I was glad I knew the future.
I nodded quickly.
“Exactly. If you can’t recognize an idiot, then you’re an idiot too.”
Sid took a sip of his drink and went on, “That’s not the only reason.”
“What’s the other one?”
“Those two don’t understand cloud computing at all.”
That was a ridiculous thing to say.
The founders of a cloud company didn’t understand cloud computing?
Sid looked at us and asked, “What do you think the essence of the cloud is?”
It was a question that seemed simple at first, but wasn’t.
Cloud was such a broad concept that everyone defined it a little differently. If you asked a hundred people, you’d get a hundred answers, and none of them would be surprising.
Fortunately, I knew the right answer.
“The metaverse.”
The metaverse was a virtual space that extended beyond the physical world, where people could live out their daily lives, enjoy leisure, and carry out economic activity.
Apparently not expecting a correct answer from me, Sid blinked in surprise.
“Oh! That’s right! How did you know?”
Sid launched into an excited explanation.
“If you want to go beyond the existing platform companies, then eventually you have to move into the metaverse. And the foundation for that is the cloud.”
The giant corporations all had their own platforms.
NS had the PC operating system WindOARS. Enple had Enphone and NOS. Guble had Andromeda. AMZ had Azon and ZWS.
The important thing was that none of it was free. Platform companies took thirty percent of all revenue generated inside their ecosystems.
Like digital tenant farmers and landlords.
The harder other companies worked inside those systems, the more money the platform companies made. In the end, all that effort mostly served someone else’s bottom line.
Even Cooloud was paying enormous usage fees to the Big Three cloud providers. They liked to talk about building a cooperative relationship, but in reality they were dependent on them.
Over time, the gap between those with platforms and those without would only widen.
“Those two keep dancing around other companies and never do what they actually need to do. Every time they try to do anything, Enple objects, Guble objects, and they’re forced to back off.”
From their perspective, the business had to stay within the boundaries of the platform giants’ territory.
Sid wanted to go one step further.
That difference in vision was probably one reason he disliked the executives so much.
David still looked unconvinced. “If you don’t cooperate with the Big Three, isn’t cloud business impossible?”
That was probably common sense to an ordinary person.
But how could an ordinary person understand the thinking of a genius?
“There are plenty of data centers that can provide storage besides those guys. If necessary, we could build our own. With Minerva, we can offer a far better service, so there’s no need to keep a partnership just for the sake of it. Whether it’s an operating system or a program, you just run it in the cloud anyway.”
David stared at him in shock. “What does that even mean?”
Usually, you used an operating system to run cloud services. But what Sid was saying was the complete opposite.
The reason you used a particular operating system was because certain programs only ran inside it.
That was what people usually called a platform ecosystem. Once a consumer was inside that ecosystem, they didn’t easily leave, even if a better platform appeared later.
It was the so-called lock-in effect.
For example, Enple’s NOS was fiercely closed. Unless you used its own app store, you couldn’t install or pay for anything.
But what if you didn’t need to install anything at all, and instead just ran programs in the cloud?
Then the consumer could install applications in virtual space regardless of which operating system they used, and make payments there too.
If that happened, individual platforms would lose their meaning, and everything would connect inside the cloud as one unified system.
After hearing the explanation, David shook his head in disbelief.
“You think the existing companies would allow that?”
Obviously, the IT giants would never give up their territory so easily. They’d fight it tooth and nail.
Sid waved it off as though it were nothing.
“Whether they allow it or not, what does that matter? We just make it work. Getting a program that doesn’t run to run isn’t a big deal.”
“……”
He said it as casually as if he were pulling something out of his pocket.
If anyone else had said that, I might have thought they were full of hot air. But when the one saying it was Sid Lucas, the story was different.
The truth was, anyone could come up with a good idea.
But a genius wasn’t someone who merely thought what others couldn’t. A genius made it happen.
Did the Wright brothers alone think it would be nice to fly? Across history, humanity had always dreamed of flight.
But no one had possessed the plan or the ability to turn that dream into reality the way they did.
Sid was no different. He had the ability to bring his ideas to life. But to do that, he needed enormous capital.
I looked at the young man in front of me.
If history has shown anything, it’s that every era has its geniuses—people who dragged the world forward.
They see what others can’t, and they do what others can’t. And behind them are the investors who understood the direction of change and put up the money.
Even if I knew what would be invented in the future, I couldn’t create it myself. I wasn’t a genius.
But I could invest in one.
Before the twenty-first century even ended, Sid Lucas would be called the greatest genius of the age.
Because he was the founder of virtual worlds, the father of the metaverse.
---