Game Theory (3)
I said flatly.
“You don’t need to feel too wronged. It would have come out sooner or later anyway.”
“There’s no way that—”
I’d moved on this information in the first place because, sometime down the line, a patent-troll company called Patrol would secure the rights and file a lawsuit.
The only difference was that they had been after money, whereas I was after the company itself.
“Anyway, I’m glad you came. I’ve just finished drafting the report.”
“The report?”
“Yes. A report exposing Cooloud’s unethical conduct.”
I placed the report David Lockhart had written in front of him. Rolf flipped through it with trembling hands.
“I’m planning to send this to Trish O’Connor at WST. It’ll probably turn into a massive scoop that shakes Silicon Valley to its core. Wouldn’t this be Pulitzer Prize material?”
That was a joke.
The Pulitzer wasn’t something you won so easily.
The color drained from Rolf’s face, leaving his already pale skin even whiter.
“Y-you’re going to expose this to the press?”
“Yes. The timing is perfect, isn’t it? The fallout from the Thomas Motors disaster still hasn’t fully settled, and then this story breaks. Wouldn’t that be worth seeing? Silicon Valley’s brightest star turned out to be a fraud. What better story is there to grab people’s attention? Every news outlet would splash it across the front page, and the internet would explode.”
“……”
I had no idea whether it would actually unfold exactly like that, but from his point of view, it could hardly have been pleasant to hear.
If I’d truly intended to do it, I wouldn’t have needed to tell him anything—I could have sent it straight to WST.
The fact that I was bothering to tell him face-to-face meant I had no immediate intention of pulling the trigger.
Under normal circumstances, he would have understood that easily enough, but right now it seemed he couldn’t think that far ahead.
He was cornered that badly.
After a brief silence, he asked in a trembling voice, “What do you want from me?”
“Just what I told you yesterday. Sell your shares and leave the company. That’s what we want.”
Rolf shouted as if he’d been wronged. “Cooloud is my company! You’re trying to take my company away from me?”
“More precisely, it’s the company you founded after stealing Mimir. Without Mimir, Cooloud wouldn’t have existed in the first place.”
Rolf said defensively, “Even so, I built the company! I’ve done more than enough!”
“What exactly did you do?”
“Do you think starting a company is easy? I barely slept, poured myself into development, fixed every bug one by one, hired and managed employees, handled customers. I gave three full years of my life to Cooloud!”
He did have a point.
If it hadn’t been for him, the Cooloud of today wouldn’t exist either. In that sense, I had to admit he was gifted as a businessman.
That was why he’d been able to become a billionaire at such a young age.
“And I poured all my money into it too!”
He had founded Tinting at the age of twenty, sold it to Matching Group for $1.2 billion, and then sunk $900 million of that into Cooloud.
Once you factored in the money he would have lost in other ventures, he had effectively put his entire fortune on the line.
Of course, he could only have done that because he was certain he’d make more than enough to justify it—and in the end, he had.
“Do you think Jason could have done what I did?”
“No, he couldn’t.”
Unlike Rolf, who had started a company before he’d even grown up, Jason had never run a business of his own. Even if he’d had the talent for it, he wouldn’t have had $900 million to throw around.
“Think about it. If I hadn’t used it, Mimir would never have made it into the world at all. It would’ve been buried somewhere on a server and disappeared.”
“Hmm…”
It was bullshit, but there was a certain persuasive logic to it.
Aside from Jason Kim himself, Rolf Buchi was the only person who truly understood Mimir’s value. If he hadn’t stolen the program, Mimir would have remained asleep in a cloud server forever.
In that case, Cooloud might never have been founded, and Syd would probably have kept working at TalkIt, the company he’d been at before.
Maybe he would never have worked on cloud systems at all. Or if he had, he might have used a different program entirely instead of Mimir.
Then Pangaea might have been delayed—or perhaps it might never have appeared at all.
Rolf kept piling on excuses.
“And Mimir was nothing to begin with.”
Mimir was an AI program capable of deep learning.
Cooloud had spent three years training it. If the Mimir we had was a newborn infant, then Cooloud’s Minerva was already more like a ten-year-old boy.
“It grew because it met me and evolved the way it did. If Jason had handled it, it would’ve been a pathetic program.”
“……”
Strictly speaking, it hadn’t grown because it met him—it had grown because it met Syd. But since he’d been the one to hand Mimir over to Syd, that wasn’t entirely false either.
Even a child with the same genes can become a completely different person depending on when and how they’re raised.
And Mimir had met an excellent caretaker in Syd, so it had grown beautifully.
In the real world, raising two geniuses required twice the effort. But in digital space, you could just make a copy.
And in fact, Mimir would go on to be used in every field that could be digitized. Through all of them, everything would be connected through Pangaea, and a new future would open.
So if you really looked at it that way, it was because Rolf Buchi had stolen a dead friend’s program that the future I knew had come into being.
He was garbage as a human being, but in his own twisted way, he had made a major contribution to the world.
Not that it meant his actions could be forgiven.
The way he kept making excuses made it seem like he still felt wronged more than guilty.
“No matter what you say, it doesn’t change the fact that you stole Mimir. I’m sure you know that.”
Having nothing to say in response, he bit his lip.
I waited for him to speak first. The one who was at a disadvantage always opened his mouth first.
Sure enough, Rolf was the one who finally broke the silence.
“What can you do for me if I sell my shares?”
I wanted to say nothing at all.
But when a rat is cornered, it bites the cat.
If he decided to go for broke and drag me down with him, I’d have no answer for that. So for now, I needed to soothe him.
“I’ll make sure you avoid criminal charges and lawsuits. It wouldn’t look good for someone hailed as Silicon Valley’s genius to keep shuttling back and forth between the prosecutor’s office and the courthouse for stealing a dead friend’s program, would it?”
“How much can you buy it for?”
I named the number I’d already settled on.
“How about $1 billion? That seems about right.”
“What!?”
Apparently, it was far less than he’d expected.
“Only $1 billion?”
“A billion dollars isn’t exactly ‘only,’ is it? If you don’t go around wasting it on pointless nonsense, you won’t be able to spend it all in your lifetime.”
“I invested $900 million into Cooloud!”
“Yes. That’s why I offered $1 billion.”
I wanted to drive the price down even further, but if I offered less than what he had invested, there was no way he’d agree. I at least needed to give him the impression that he wasn’t being forced into a pure loss.
“That’s even less than what you offered me last time!”
He owned 31.16 percent of the company.
Based on the $5 billion I’d offered previously, that share was worth around $1.95 billion.
Apparently, that was the minimum he wanted to get.
“This time, the condition is that you drop the criminal and civil suits. Just the royalties for unauthorized use up to now would amount to quite a lot, wouldn’t they?”
In truth, even for us, this was a heavy concession. It meant giving up one of the most powerful cards we had.
But if I didn’t do it this way, he’d never hand over his shares.
“Even so, how does it make sense to hand over my shares for such a pittance?”
If Cooloud was worth $100 billion, his shares were worth about $31 billion. Being told to give that up for $1 billion had to sting.
“If the company goes under, it’s worth zero anyway. Wouldn’t it be better to sell for a billion than end up with nothing?”
Rolf ground his teeth. “Do you really think Cooloud is going to collapse that easily without Minerva?”
“What if you don’t have Syd either?”
“What?”
“If the acquisition doesn’t go through, I’m planning to take Syd and all the developers with me.”
“D-do you think that’ll work? Syd owns 20 percent of Cooloud.”
“Wouldn’t it be better for him to take Mimir and build his own company than to sit there holding shares in a company that’s collapsing under lawsuits and public contempt? And you know Syd’s personality, don’t you? The moment he learns Minerva is a stolen program, he’ll probably quit on the spot and walk away from everything. If Syd leaves, the developers will follow him.”
“……”
He had nothing to say.
More than anyone, he’d watched Syd up close, so he knew his personality better than most.
In fact, when Syd found out, he’d immediately exploded and said he’d give up his shares and leave.
Of course, at that point, it had been 5 percent, not 20.
“If you don’t believe me, should we call Syd in here and ask him?”
Without Mimir and Syd, Cooloud was nothing more than an empty shell of a company. A shell with significant value, to be sure, but still only a shell.
I told him, “If Cooloud goes under like this, we can always build a new company. But for you, this is the worst possible outcome.”
“Why?”
“Because not only would you lose every cent of your investment, you’d be remembered by everyone as the man who stole a dead friend’s program and destroyed the company with it. Wouldn’t it be better to sell your shares and at least walk away with some money?”
Even so, if Cooloud collapsed, I’d be the one in the worst position.
With my intervention already changing the future, I needed the acquisition to go through as cleanly as possible.
Alex would never sell his shares cheaply, so I had no choice but to buy Rolf’s.
My mind was anxious, but I kept my expression as relaxed as I could.
“I have one condition.”
“Is avoiding criminal charges and lawsuits not enough?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Then let’s hear it.”
“Keep everything about Minerva secret.”
“Pardon?”
David looked dumbfounded. I imagined I looked much the same.
“That’s a bit difficult.”
“Why?”
“When we signed the contract, I promised his wife that I’d tell the world it was a program developed by Jason Kim.”
“Wait. You even put that in the contract?”
I shook my head.
“No. I just promised.”
Rolf looked faintly relieved.
“That’s a relief. If it was only a verbal promise, then you don’t have to keep it, do you?”
“Hmm…”
I didn’t know what to say.
Then again, with a character like him, of course he’d steal a dead friend’s program and use it however he pleased.
When I looked at David, he seemed to be holding back the urge to punch someone. I understood the feeling perfectly.