Don't Lie to Me
"Hanaaa~ I missed you so, so much!"
"Mmph—waaah..."
I was taking the full brunt of Chairman Kim Sehee's nuzzling assault. She had meant to come the moment I got back, but some matter or other had kept her from rushing over right away. Even so, of everyone I knew, she arrived the fastest. The instant she laid eyes on me, she locked me in a crushing hug. I tried to wriggle free, but in a room that small there was nowhere to run, and for a good long while I had no choice but to be the chairman's toy. Of course, I was the one who had left without a word. Whether it was guilt or something else, I had already decided to spend the day as her plaything.
Whatever she had been through, it showed. Her face was haggard, and in a single month she seemed to have become an entirely different person. The chairman, this thin? Just looking at her made my chest ache. To put that face back the way it belonged, I suggested we go eat something delicious. When someone had wasted away like that, meat was what brought them back, and at my proposal the chairman nodded her agreement.
"It's all right if I take Hana out for a bit, isn't it?"
"Of course. If it's Chairman Kim Sehee, you're welcome to her anytime."
I rode into the city in the chairman's car, and at an extremely upscale barbecue place I managed to eat far more meat than she did. On top of that, she seemed to enjoy watching me eat. While she grilled, her eyes kept flicking up to my face. I thought I had something smeared on it. I didn't.
And so I spent the day talking with her about all sorts of things. Sure enough, the chairman really couldn't do without me. We had only been apart a month, and already she looked like this. If it had been two, I had a feeling she would have come back a completely different person.
By all rights, the fruit that was good for hair loss ought to have been managed under Starlight Food as well. But Starlight Food had grown into a much heavier weight class, and once you heard what this fruit could actually do, it seemed simpler to found a new company and put the work there. Starlight Food was already overloaded on the plants it was growing alone. And judging by the fruit's effects, it was obvious the thing would sell worldwide.
So she picked one of Starlight Food's subsidiaries and ran the project through it. As long as it stayed under Starlight Food, it was all the same anyway—nothing more than moving something from the left pocket to the right. There was also the option of taking it public. Starlight Food itself had no plans to list, but when she spun up other companies, a listing was no bad thing. She fully intended to keep management control no matter what.
Success was a foregone conclusion, so founding a new company carried no real burden. Dawdling when you were guaranteed to succeed would have been the strange part.
Production would draw on lines from the Starlight Food factories already built, so there was no need to worry about output. Ever since Hana's cherry tomatoes had been discovered, factory construction had never once stopped. They would be turning out even more goods from here on, and the number of plants Starlight Food already owned was staggering. Keeping that staggering complex running without a gap was Kim Sehee's job as well.
The seeds Hana had brought were given a farm of their own. Part of the reason they could scale so quickly was that the plants grew at an uncanny speed. Compared with ordinary crops that needed four or five months to fruit, Hana's plants bloomed in a week. No wonder the whole thing moved at the speed of beans roasted in a lightning flash.
Nor was there any shortage of people to run the project. They had already hired plenty of new graduates and experienced staff, so manpower was not going to be the problem. Perhaps that was why a founding that should have taken months was finished in less than one.
The factories were already there. So was the company building, and the capital, and the people. At that pace, a company coming together so quickly was, in a sense, only natural.
"Hana, what do you think would make a good name?"
Kim Sehee asked Hana what to call the company about to be established. Of course, so Hana wouldn't have to brood over it, she had already pulled together a few examples. Hana looked them over and, before long, picked one. It was a name Kim Sehee liked as well.
A name that promised to make wellbeing—she liked it very much. Folded into it was the hope that, going forward, they might overcome not only hair loss, but other illnesses and other troubles besides.
"Um... I came to sign up for the trial..."
A young man who looked, at a glance, like he could have been a model walked into the hospital. Raise your eyes above that face, though, and what stood out was a scalp gone bleak and bare. He was handsome, yes, but with the hair gone from the crown he had ended up looking like a character out of a cartoon. Had hair loss never found him, he would surely have been the sort of man who made women weep. That one enormous obstacle had turned him shabby.
"Ah, yes. You're here as an applicant recruited by Starlight Food? May I have your name?"
"It's Kim Jiho..."
"All right, you're confirmed. Please fill out these forms and wait."
Starlight Wellbeing had not yet launched, so for the time being the trial was being run under Starlight Food's name. And the fruit Hana had brought had not been made into a medicine, or a treatment of any kind. It was slated for production not even as a functional health food, but as a dietary supplement. Doing it that way let them cut a great many preliminary procedures.
Spread the word that it was a fruit good for hair loss, and consumers would come looking on their own. There was no need to grind through an FDA clinical trial or any of the other complicated processes. The fruit wasn't a drug. Proof enough was the endless stream of people showing up to join the test.
They had done nothing but stick a notice on the Starlight Food website, with no advertising at all, and yet—wherever they had heard of it—tens of thousands filled out applications saying they wanted in. Whether the bald had some separate community of their own, she couldn't say, but the pace of recruitment was not normal. The posting had been up for barely a week.
They had already finished, successfully, a trial with animals and a small number of people, and Starlight Food decided to partner with a separate hospital to see whether the effect held for a larger group. The hospitals that took part in Starlight Food's hair-loss experiment were paid a handsome fee for their trouble.
"Ugh..."
The moment Kim Jiho stepped into the ward, the gloomy air of the place made him flinch. The ages varied, from men in their twenties like him all the way to old men in their sixties, but the men all shared one thing. Every last one of them was bald.
It was a six-person room, so things were a little crowded. They had said the trial would run for three days, and Kim Jiho meant to take part with everything he had. He had even burned annual leave to come. He wasn't hoping for a complete cure. If it eased things even somewhat, he would bow to the company until his forehead hit the floor.
What they were dressing up as a clinical trial could take no more than about five hundred people. The supply was fixed, and only a handful of hospitals in Seoul had agreed to join the test Starlight Food proposed. Perhaps that was why an astonishing number of people applied. Somehow or other, there were even those who came to headquarters to protest—and the protest, of course, was about not having been chosen.
The trial, which wasn't even particularly secret, ran for about three days. There were no dangerous side effects to speak of, and it proceeded without a hitch.
A few people posted reviews online. Starlight Food requested the posts be taken down under the confidentiality clause, and perhaps that was why they vanished not long after they went up.
Most people didn't believe the reviews. Articles claiming hair loss had been conquered had been turning up in that same April Fools tone for decades. No one believed a word of it.