Chapter 82
I’m translating the chapter straight into the required HTML structure now, preserving the first-person narrative voice and turning the dialogue into separate paragraph blocks.CHAPTER_TITLE: The Fair Price of Wisdom (2)
Rolf Buchi had been a genius since childhood.
He understood one thing the moment he heard ten, to the point that he genuinely seemed to believe everyone other than himself was an idiot. He had never cared much for schoolwork, so he threw himself into computers instead.
He started coding at nine and built his first program at twelve. By seventeen, he had already sold a piece of software he made to a major corporation for three million dollars.
He entered MIT to study computer science and there developed a dating app called TINTING. The app became a sensation, and two years later he sold it for 1.5 billion dollars.
Holding an 80 percent stake, he suddenly found himself with more than a billion dollars in his hands and became a Silicon Valley star.
The media, as if competing with one another, rushed to write up his success story, and he moved among famous names, scattering rumors with Hollywood actresses and Victoria’s Secret models.
The paparazzi hounded him, and his photos filled the gossip pages.
Rolf was not satisfied with that.
He wanted greater fame and greater wealth. He believed he was still young and could climb far higher if he wanted to.
But the companies he founded after that performed poorly.
Some had terrible software, some were beaten by competitors, some offered services no one wanted, and some simply had no viable way to make money.
After a string of failed ventures, he even burned through money.
He still had enough assets to live idly for the rest of his life, but in Silicon Valley his reputation was slowly sinking.
The media’s attention also faded, and they stopped writing about him. New geniuses and fresh startups took his place instead.
That was when he realized an important truth.
There were a lot of geniuses in the world.
He had only ever been a little ahead of them and lucky enough to catch the right moment. He might once have been a genius, but now he was just one particularly capable developer among many.
Rolf grew more and more anxious.
I need one big score.
But the market was not kind.
Competition grew fiercer by the day, and the company he had built was collapsing while eating through investor money. The media no longer cared about his firm at all.
Then, in the middle of it all, he received a call from a former MIT classmate.
Jason Kim.
They had not been especially close, since Rolf had dropped out before even completing two full years of college. He still had only a faint memory of him.
The Jason Kim he remembered was timid, bad at speaking, and just barely smart enough to avoid failing outright.
He had been completely different from a genius like himself.
Jason asked him to evaluate a program he had made.
The program was called Mimir.
It was an AI program that collected and analyzed data.
A program made by some idiot like that? I can already guess how bad it’ll be.
Normally, in keeping with his own personality, he would have brushed it off as a pointless waste of time and refused outright. But for some reason, he agreed.
He’s begging me this hard, so I might as well take a look.
If it was a lousy program, he planned to mock it without mercy.
But then……
The moment he saw the program Jason had made, Rolf was stunned. It was still unfinished, but it was nearly perfect.
The reason it contained so many errors and failed to run properly was simply that it had not yet secured enough computing resources.
That idiot made this?
It was almost impossible to believe.
What was more, Mimir could be used in any number of fields. With deep learning based on data analysis, it could power self-driving cars, robots, games, and more.
If I built a company around this……
It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance—not only to make money, but to recover the reputation he had once lost.
He quickly proposed a partnership to Jason Kim.
“How about starting a company with me? I’ll put in the money.”
When the famous Silicon Valley innovator and genius held out his hand and asked to work together, Jason Kim practically jumped at the chance and agreed.
The two of them talked a great deal after that.
“Mimir was my work alone.”
“My wife doesn’t really know what I do. She can barely use a smartphone, let alone a computer.”
“I haven’t told anyone we’re going into business together. When you show up on the day we launch, everyone’s going to be stunned, aren’t they?”
“Thank you for helping me, Rolf.”
“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have known what to do on my own.”
“It’s all thanks to you.”
“I’ll work hard so I don’t hold you back.”
But just as the founding was about to begin, something no one had expected happened.
Jason was killed in a traffic accident!
The launch was, of course, canceled.
Rolf, who had been in the middle of winding down his existing company and starting a new business, was left stunned. His once-in-a-lifetime chance had vanished right in front of him.
While he was mired in despair for a while, a thought suddenly struck him.
Jason is dead, and the program was never released to the world. The only people who know about it are me and Jason. But if Jason is dead……
Then only he knew the program existed!
Then why don’t I just release it myself?
Jason, too, would not have wanted the program he had created to be buried like this.
Yes. This is something I’m doing for Jason, too.
With that justification, Rolf founded Cooloud on the basis of Mimir. When Alex Preston joined him, the funding issue was easily solved as well.
Thanks to Mimir’s outstanding performance and the aggressive investments made at the start, Cooloud grew like a company with wings.
The media once again praised his genius, and he enjoyed wealth and fame just as he had before.
He bought a penthouse in San Francisco and drove supercars. Interview requests and lecture invitations came flooding in from everywhere, and whenever he dated a famous actress, the paparazzi would trail after him.
The public gladly showered him with praise and applause.
When he explained the program at lectures, there were times he even found himself wondering whether he had really created Mimir himself.
He had the life he wanted in his hands.
He enjoyed it to the fullest. And yet, from time to time, a nagging unease would rise in some corner of his heart.
Among the people watching him, wasn’t there someone who knew the truth?
Sometimes he could not sleep without alcohol.
If this gets out, what happens to me?
He might lose everything he had built until now.
No way. Three years have passed and nothing has happened.
The dead tell no tales. No one would ever notice.
But then……
One day, someone appeared before him with the truth in hand.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
When Rolf saw the documents, he went pale and started shaking all over.
Noticing something was wrong, Alex nearly snatched the papers from his hand and read them. As he went through them, his expression changed by the second.
Alex asked, as if interrogating him, “What is this?”
“As you can see, it’s a lawsuit notice. I came here because I wanted to hear Cooloud’s position before filing in California court.”
“What exactly are you trying to sue over?”
“The unauthorized use of the program you call Minerva at Cooloud.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you truly unaware of it? Or are you pretending not to know?”
“I’m asking you what you’re talking about.”
I turned my head and looked at Rolf.
“Mr. Preston might not know. But you, Rolf Buchi, shouldn’t be ignorant. Right?”
“……”
I kept speaking to him, though he could not bring himself to answer.
“The name of that program isn’t Minerva. It’s Mimir. And the developer wasn’t you, but Jason Kim. The same Jason Kim who died in a car accident. Your friend.”
At my words, Rolf sprang to his feet and shouted, “What bullshit is that!? Got any proof!?”
“Calm down. If you yell like that, it makes you look guilty.”
“W-what?”
Judging by how quickly he had started shouting, it seemed he had never imagined something like this would happen.
Alex gripped Rolf’s shoulder and tried to calm him down before asking me, “Do you have proof?”
“Of course I do.”
Rolf cried out in shock. “What!?”
“In the twenty-first century, important records are usually stored in the cloud. Jason Kim left the entire development process of Mimir there. If you compare Jason Kim’s program with the early version of Minerva, anyone will easily see that it’s the same program.”
Alex said calmly, “Even if some parts of the program are similar, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was copied.”
“This wasn’t a matter of borrowing ideas or stealing a few pieces. You stole the entire program, didn’t you?”
“How can you be certain it’s the same program?”
“Why not compare the code?”
“So now you’re asking us to release the source code?”
When someone creates something new, someone else copies it.
Even now, countless companies around the world were tied up in lawsuits over exactly that. But proving it was never easy.
Cooloud would hardly hand over materials that worked against them, either. If this went to court, it would take a long time before any ruling came down.
“Well, why go through all that trouble?”
At my glance, David handed Rolf another set of printed documents and said, “These are the emails Jason Kim exchanged with you. He kept every single one of them carefully, without missing a thing. Just from the emails alone, I can tell how much he respected you. We don’t even need to wait for a trial result. Once these are made public, everyone will know who developed that program.”
Unable even to look, Rolf stood frozen while Alex examined them instead.
His expression darkened more and more as he read, as if he now considered the evidence undeniable.
“My, my. Truly astonishing. The founder of a company once hailed as an industry innovator turns out to be a fraud who stole his dead friend’s program and passed it off as his own. I wonder what customers and investors will think when they hear this.”
A company’s purpose is to generate profit.
But social responsibility is also regarded as important, no less than profit itself. This is especially true in the advanced industries of developed countries.
By now, the term ESG management was just beginning to emerge.
In management, not only financial factors but also nonfinancial ones—environment, social responsibility, and governance—had to be considered.
That was because consumers valued those principles.
Consumer groups organized boycotts against companies that destroyed the environment, exploited children or workers, bullied their suppliers, or supported dictators and corrupt governments.
As a result, investment firms and pension funds also came to regard ESG as an important criterion and reflected it in their decisions.
“Cloud companies live and die by security, and yet you’re using stolen software. I’m not sure whether it’s safe to trust a company like this with our data.”
Unlike the trembling Rolf, Alex remained cold and composed.
“Even if this is a problem, it’s something Cooloud and your side need to resolve. What standing does Continue Capital have to interfere?”
“That’s fair. But the thing is…….”