Chapter 4. We Got an Order Worth 75 Million Won>
Chapter 4. We Got an Order Worth 75 Million Won>
Science Facility Headquarters (an old shipping container).
There, in what had already become our perfect hideout, Taeju and I were sprawled out on plastic chairs, chatting away.
“They said they’d pay you five times a professor’s salary?”
“I’m telling you, they did. Look at this.”
I held out the message from ‘VodkaLike’ to Taeju.
“Damn… so professors here make what, about 100 million won? Then they’re saying they’d pay around 500 million?”
“Does that even make sense? It has to be some kind of voice-phishing scam.”
“You mean they’d kidnap you to Cambodia and make you impersonate a prosecutor to scam people out of money?”
Even thinking it over again was absurd, and we continued talking while trying to suppress our snickering.
“Shit, I sold some drones and now I’m about to get turned into a slave. Forget it. Let’s just work.”
I formally unveiled the prototypes I had prepared to Taeju.
They were going to be our company’s first products.
“Whoa, what is this now?”
Taeju said it like he was mesmerized.
Two products sat neatly on the broad workbench.
“The first is the drone. You know, the one controlled by motion recognition without a controller. Its key feature is that the AI handles the minor situational judgments on its own.”
“Right, our dutiful money-maker. We absolutely have to launch this one.”
“The second is a ‘multi-warhead missile’ toy.”
“What? Multi-warhead?”
Taeju looked like something way rougher than expected had come out of nowhere.
“Want to see it?”
“Crazy… yeah, let’s do it right now.”
Excited, Taeju and I hurried out to the yard in front of the container and set up empty cans and miscellaneous junk as targets all over the place.
“Is this enough?”
“Yeah, okay.”
My multi-warhead missile toy stood there in a rather pathetic way, like some elementary-school water rocket.
After I turned on my phone, adjusted a few settings, and activated it,
Fwoooosh—!
With an enormous hiss of compressed gas, the missile shot fiercely into the sky.
“Hey! How far is that thing flying?! Isn’t that just a rocket?!”
Shielding his eyes with one hand, Taeju anxiously followed the disappearing rocket’s trajectory.
“Watch carefully.”
The rocket climbed to a dizzying height, then its upper section separated in midair and scattered countless small fragments in every direction.
Ratatatatat!
As if they had been coordinated in advance, those fragments slammed precisely into the targets we had set up at random and hit every one of them.
“Whoa? We just set those up however we felt like it, so how did it hit all of them?”
“Hey, it’s too early to be amazed. Look over there.”
The body of the multi-warhead rocket was just about to nosedive into the ground after completing its mission.
Tzzzzt—
With a short burst of gas, the rocket controlled its own vertical posture, then landed lightly on the ground.
“Holy shit, what… what was that? I’ve only ever seen that kind of thing on YouTube.”
“Right. This rocket can be recovered and used again.”
“No, why is it so high-performance?!”
“What do you mean, why? It’s a toy, so you’re supposed to pick it up and play with it again.”
“Hey, this is seriously incredible. I’m pretty sure the Americans spent insane amounts of money developing that kind of recovery tech.”
“Actually, at this size, it’s not all that difficult.”
“Really? For something that ‘isn’t all that difficult,’ I’ve never seen it anywhere…”
Leaving Taeju’s doubts behind, that was how our business really began in earnest.
“Six used 3D printers, a huge load of filament, and…”
We started buying the equipment we needed for mass-producing toys.
It cost roughly 2 million won.
We covered it with the profits from the drones we had sold at the beginning.
Since we dug through the local junkyard and scavenged usable parts, the budget somehow worked out more or less perfectly.
Some time later.
Inside the old shipping container.
Six 3D printers whined away nonstop.
The sight of the machines working so hard was truly spectacular.
“Wow, the machines are the busiest ones here.”
“Taeju. Come outside. Don’t go in there for a while.”
“Why?”
“When those 3D printers are running full blast, they give off quite a few carcinogenic substances.”
“What the hell, that’s scary as hell.”
“That’s why when they’re going full speed, let’s just behave and stay outside.”
A few days later.
Taeju and I were hunched over inside the cramped container, assembling drones.
In one corner, drone parts we had bought in bulk from AliExpress were piled up like a mountain.
The profit margin was much higher if we assembled them from parts and sold them than if we bought completed drones.
“If we’re going to run a business, the ROE has to be high.”
(Translator’s Note: Return on Equity (ROE) — A financial metric used to measure profitability relative to shareholders’ equity. It is a standard business and investment term rather than a story-specific concept.)
It was Taeju who proposed assembling them from parts.
“Ha… my fingers hurt. Once we really make it, the first people we hire need to be assembly workers.”
His fingers must have gone numb, because Taeju groaned.
“But… what worries me more is that we still don’t have a single order.”
Current cumulative orders: 1
At this rate, I started to wonder whether our company would go under before it had even properly started.
Suddenly, the six 3D printers over there holding their ground in the corner, along with the mountain of Chinese-made parts, filled me with a chilling fear that they would remain by my side forever as dead stock.
“Hyesung, this won’t do.”
At that moment, Taeju’s eyes flashed as if he had made up his mind.
“Let’s film how insane our drones are and upload it as reels and short-form content.”
“What kind of video?”
“You know that thing you did in the warehouse, controlling dozens of drones by yourself? That looked cool as hell.”
Taeju, excited like a child, started gesturing with his hands as he recalled it.
“True. I coded it that way in the first place so it would look cool.”
“We’ll make it look even more ridiculously badass and put it up as reels. Viral reach is everything these days.”
“Pfft… yeah, I guess it does sound fun at least.”
Then, a few days after we made and uploaded the reels—
The teacher’s boring lecture was not entering my ears at all.
“All right, everyone, look at passage number three here. The sentence structure is a bit twisted, right?”
All I wanted was to go back to that old shipping container immediately and develop a new toy.
“Hey, Hyesung. Look at this. We’re screwed.”
Just then, Taeju whispered in a serious voice from the seat beside me.
“What’s wrong? Need to take a dump?”
“No, you lunatic. The reels we uploaded!!”
“What about them? Did the views still not go up?”
For a while, the views on the reels we had made had stayed frozen.
“No, it blew up! The graph is shooting straight up right now. The views are already at 100,000!”
“What…?”
A surge of accomplishment swelled inside my chest.
It felt like all the soldering and suffering we had gone through inside that cramped container was paying off all at once.
“So, what about purchase inquiries?”
“That’s… still nothing yet.”
“Ha… damn it.”
“Huh? Wait.”
Taeju stared intently at the phone screen hidden under the desk, his expression turning serious.
“Hey… we got an email. Holy shit, this is huge. They’re asking if bulk purchasing is possible.”
“What? How many?”
At last, our company’s first order had come in.
At last, our drones were finally going to sell.
But at the same time, I was worried.
If Taeju and I assembled them by ourselves, even going past ten units would already take quite a while.
“They’re asking if 150 units are possible.”
“What? Damn… now we’re in trouble. If it’s 150, that’s 75 million won.”
I was ecstatic, but if it was 150 units, the two of us would have to pull multiple all-nighters.
It was a damned cottage-industry business where it was a problem if sales went well and a problem if they did not.
“Taeju… this won’t work. Let’s hire employees.”
In the end, we posted an ad online that said, “Part-time worker wanted for simple assembly.”
Creeeak.
“Hello. I came because I saw you were looking for a part-timer.”
The person who opened the shabby container door and walked in was someone I had never expected at all.
A bright, lively voice. Pale skin. Long straight hair.
For a moment, I thought a goddess had descended from the heavens.
She was someone who had attended the same middle school as me.
Jang Ian.
She had been so famous for her looks alone that there had not been a single person in the entire school who did not know her.
Back then, rumors had even spread everywhere that major entertainment agencies were constantly trying to scout her as an idol.
Tilting her head as if she were seeing me for the first time, she asked,
“Is the boss not here, by any chance?”
That made sense.
We had gone to the same middle school, but we had advanced into high school without ever exchanging a single word.
“Ah, I’m the boss.”
“What? But aren’t you the same age as me?”
“Huh? How did you know?”
“We went to the same middle school.”
As it turned out, she had already known my face.
We had never even greeted each other once, so how had she known?
At that moment, the container door opened again a beat late.
Creeeak.
“Hey, Hyesung. The person coming for the part-time interview today should be here any minute—oh.”
Taeju walked in holding a plastic bag with drinks in his hand, looked back and forth between Ian and me, and then stopped for a moment.
“Oh, you’re already here.”
WEEEEEEENG—!
Dozens of drones charged in from all directions at once.
Tickticktickticktick—.
The BB pellets fired from Hyesung’s toy drone-interception turret hit every incoming drone without exception.
“All rounds hit.”
“How many tests have we run so far?”
“1,200 units. The interception success rate is 99.58%.”
20th Central Scientific Research Institute under the Russian Ministry of Defense.
There, elite Russian researchers in white lab coats were staring at the result charts in shock.
“During the entire testing process, there was not a single functional malfunction.”
Whirr. Whirr.
Oblivious to the gravity of the atmosphere around it,
the drone-interception turret kept showing off flashy and stylish but ultimately pointless movements whenever it got bored.
It was a meaningless performance function Hyesung had put in because he called it “style.”
But even that bizarre movement of the machine filled the researchers at Russia’s Central Scientific Research Institute with a serious sense of fear.
“To produce this level of performance with nothing but cameras…”
“This was definitely made by an actual madman.”
“He’s obviously some complete psycho bastard.”
The researchers clicked their tongues in amazement at the turret’s performance results.
“Where exactly did you say this was obtained?”
Among them, a man who looked high-ranking asked the man in military uniform.
“Captain Romanov brought it in. Surprisingly, I heard it’s being distributed through a South Korean used-goods trading app.”
“There’s no way this was made in Korea… Those Americans are definitely pulling something again!”
To avoid full-scale war with Russia, the United States had often routed military supplies into Ukraine through third countries or allied nations.
The researchers firmly believed that this equipment too was ‘obviously’ a top-secret American project weapon.
Meanwhile, the thoughts of Captain Konstantin Romanov, the man called ‘Boss’ in Korea, were different.
The wondrous drone demonstration he had seen with his own eyes in the warehouse.
Having witnessed that spectacle firsthand, he was convinced that this item was definitely a prototype personally made by that ‘Professor Ryu.’
“Sergeant Ivanov.”
When Captain Romanov called in a low voice, Sergeant Ivanov, the man who used the nickname ‘VodkaLike,’ snapped a crisp salute.
“What happened with recruiting Professor Ryu to our side?”
“There has still been no reply.”
“Did he at least read the message?”
“Yes. He definitely read it, but…”
“What exactly did you send that there’s no answer?”
“I offered five times the average salary of a Korean professor.”
“You idiot! Isn’t it obvious he didn’t answer because you only offered five times?!”
“I-I’m sorry, sir.”
“I don’t care how much money it takes. Do whatever you have to and bring the professor to Russia. Understood?”
“Yes, sir!!”
Sergeant Ivanov gave another sharp salute, then immediately pulled out his smartphone with a grim expression and opened the used-goods trading app.
[Professor Ryu, our apologies. It seems the amount we offered was far too low.]