Sid Lucas (2)
Metaverse.
It was a portmanteau of universe, meaning the real world, and meta, meaning the virtual. A virtual world linked to reality. Another reality that copied the real one. A space where everything impossible in the physical world became possible.
For now it was a term known only to a few people, but within a few years it would be used every day, because that world would actually open.
The man who would create it stood right in front of me: Sid Lucas.
He would go on to build Pangaea, the enormous metaverse platform that would unite the internet world. Pangaea would change even the appearance of the real world. Just as thousands of employees gathered to work inside office towers, towers and offices would rise inside virtual space, along with concert halls and event venues.
Once you logged into Pangaea, you could leap beyond the limits of physical space and enjoy everything—games, work, leisure, travel, performances.
It sounded absurd, but only thirty years ago very few people had imagined shopping malls, banks, and government offices living on the internet. Change always moved faster than people’s sense of it.
Because Pangaea existed, virtual-reality games could emerge, and the future I knew would unfold.
After talking for a while longer, Sid brought up a different complaint.
“Ah! You know what’s really annoying?”
“What is it?”
“The company name is awful. What the hell is Cooloud supposed to mean?”
I nodded along.
“I think so too. I mean, they slapped the word ‘cool’ in there so obviously that it somehow comes off completely uncool.”
Sid clapped his hands.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”
“So what would you name it instead?”
“I’ve already got one in mind.”
“What is it?”
“Snow Crash.”
“Isn’t that taken from a novel title?”
By the way, this was the first time the word metaverse had come up.
Sid’s face lit up.
“Oh! You know it.”
Of course I knew it.
Later on, after he took over as CEO, he would change the company name to that. The abbreviation was SC.
“That’s a good name.”
“Right? I suggested it when we first founded the company, but they shot it down.”
Snow Crash would later rise past Enple, NS, and AMZ to become the largest company in the world. The person who made that possible was the young man sitting in front of me.
Sid still didn’t realize just how extraordinary he was. Then again, that made sense; from the beginning until now, he had only ever worked under Rolf.
“But why are you still working at Cooloud? Have you never thought about moving to another company?”
“I’ve never worked anywhere else. They pay well too. Oh, and they gave me stock.”
As one of the key members who had joined alongside Rolf in the company’s earliest days, Sid had received 10 percent at first.
But then they carried out a capital increase to bring in additional investment. His share would have been diluted sharply, so the two of them made sure he was taken care of, and he currently held 5 percent.
Even that was worth nearly two trillion won.
Seeing that, it was clear the two of them understood Sid’s importance very well.
So that was probably why Rolf had exploded when I handed him my card.
But the Cooloud shares Sid had received came with a five-year no-quit clause. If he left the company before then, he would have to give everything back.
That was a common Silicon Valley practice. Because you voluntarily bound yourself to the company, they called it golden handcuffs.
“Honestly, money doesn’t matter that much to me. It’s not like I ever spend it anyway. But working at Cooloud is pretty fun. No other company would have a huge program like Minerva. When I look at other programs, I just think they’re nothing special, but Minerva—even if someone told me to build it again from scratch, I don’t think I could. That thing was made by a real genius.”
“Not some idiot like Rolf?”
“Yeah. If I knew who it was, I’d want to meet them.”
Watching him talk with his eyes shining, it was obvious he really did love working at Cooloud.
For some reason, I felt a little envious.
Being passionate about something was a good thing.
Then Sid seemed to remember something.
“Ah! But what was that thing you said earlier?”
“What thing?”
“You said Zombienado 2 was going to start filming again.”
“Ah, right...”
Sid gave me a suspicious look.
“You weren’t lying, were you?”
“It’s true. Because I bought the studio.”
Sid’s eyes went wide.
“Prisoner?”
“Yep. Prisoner is mine now. And the first thing I ordered after the acquisition was for Zombienado 2 to resume filming.”
“Wooooah!”
Sid threw both arms in the air and cheered. He looked genuinely thrilled.
“So Zombienado 2 is really happening!”
He probably wouldn’t have been this happy even if a stock he owned had hit the upper limit.
A little later, he asked as if something had just occurred to him.
“Then you must have met Director Peter Boyd in person too.”
“Of course.”
“Did you happen to hear where the zombies inside the tornado came from? That’s what Zombienado fans are most curious about.”
“If I tell you, it’ll be a spoiler.”
I hadn’t heard it directly from the director. But I knew it from having followed the series in my first life.
Sid pleaded, almost whining.
“It’s okay, just tell me. Please. I get so curious about it that sometimes I can’t even sleep.”
Looking at David, his expression seemed to say, What could possibly keep you up over that?
Still, if the man himself said it was fine, then fine.
I told them the reveal that came in the third film.
“There’s a portal to another dimension inside the tornado. Those zombies were from another world.”
It was, literally, a setting from the other side of the grave.
“Mm.”
Shocked, David let out a low groan, while Sid clenched his fist and shouted, “I knew it! I knew it! I’ve been insisting it had to be that setting all along. But there are so many idiots out there claiming the people sucked into the tornado and killed from ancient times to the present became zombies. I was fighting on the message boards for days over that. I knew it!”
“...”
What kind of pointless thing were they having keyboard wars over?
In any case, since the series was built around a portal inside the tornado, by the time it kept going, all sorts of things started bursting out of it.
By around the sixth installment, didn’t a zombie dragon come flying out? That was partly because the budget had finally loosened up.
Sid went on and on about Zombienado’s story and his impressions of it.
The last version of him I remembered was a once-in-a-generation genius who had created Pangaea and become the CEO of the world’s largest company.
If this had been my first life, he would have been someone I wouldn’t even have dared to speak to.
Maybe that was why, for a moment, it felt as if a halo were glowing around him. But looking again, he just seemed like a younger brother.
Sid looked at me and asked, “Can I call you Hyung?”
I leaned back in my chair.
“Whatever’s comfortable for you.”
* * *
When I thought about the plans ahead, Sid was absolutely necessary to me. That was why I felt I needed to build a relationship with him now.
I’d worried a bit about how to talk to a genius, but those worries vanished almost immediately. We got along far more easily than I’d expected.
Who would have thought the greatest genius of the twenty-first century would end up calling me Hyung?
After Sid left, David looked at me and asked, “What’s the plan?”
“The plan?”
“Then did you flirt with Cooloud’s head of development without having one?”
“I just wanted to get back at them for refusing my investment.”
“...”
“I was kidding. I still have no intention of changing my mind about investing in Cooloud. But since they have no interest in taking my money, I’m going to shake the company up a little.”
“Are you planning to pull Sid Lucas out of Cooloud?”
“That won’t be easy.”
It was true that I had earned some of his goodwill, but it was still too soon to say he was fully on my side. He’d spent all this time working with Rolf, after all. And there was the stock issue too.
In fact, my plan had been set from the very beginning.
I was going to swallow Cooloud whole.
Once Cooloud changed its name to Snow Crash, it would reign as a company that surpassed Enple, NS, and AMZ alike.
But at that point, most of the equity belonged to the early investors.
So what about this time?
I’d take it all.
I would seize and control the megacorporation that would dominate the world in the years ahead. It sounded impossible, but if not now, then there would never be another chance.
Of course, I wasn’t chasing a goal without a plan. Cooloud had one fatal weakness.
“Wasn’t there something interesting in what Sid said earlier?”
David thought about it for a moment, then said, “You mean the part about Rolf maybe not having made Minerva himself?”
“Yes.”
I nodded.
“Not just because of what Sid said—I’d already been suspicious. I looked into Cooloud and did some digging of my own, and from the businesses Rolf has run so far, it looks like he focused mainly on promotion and marketing rather than actually developing programs himself.”
“You mean he isn’t a genius?”
“Not exactly.”
If he weren’t a genius in the first place, he would never have created a program at twelve or gotten into MIT. By ordinary standards, someone like me would still have to call that genius.
“Have you ever heard the saying that a kid called a genius when he’s young ends up ordinary when he grows up?”
The reason is that they bloomed earlier than everyone else, but their ceiling was fixed from the start. If you looked around, cases like that were surprisingly common.
“Five years ago, he may have been a singular genius, but if you look now, there are plenty of people at that level.”
“But even after his teens, he kept building businesses, and three or four of them turned out reasonably successful.”
“They were all partnerships, though. Isn’t it possible someone else did the actual programming? There are plenty of cases where someone with almost no real ability gets a high reputation. For people, for companies—it’s the same thing. Do you remember Mercedes Watson, who was still being called Silicon Valley’s innovator until just last year?”
David nodded.
“You mean Therapis.”