The year 2004 was drawing to a close, but for the rest of the world, the true digital revolution was still a half-decade away. People were still proud of their thin flip-phones and their bulky MP3 players. They saw computers as tools for the office, not as extensions of their souls.
I stood on the balcony of my new office in the ASEM Tower, overlooking the Han River. The "Aegis Holdings" logo was etched into the glass—minimalist, silver, and sharp. Beside me, Choi Yuna was reviewing a stack of international wire transfers. She had officially taken a "leave of absence" from the university, a move that had caused a scandal in the legal world until her father saw the first quarterly dividends from Aegis.
"The buy-in for Apple is complete," Yuna said, tapping a stylus against her palmtop computer. "At the current price of roughly $1.30 per share (adjusted for future splits), we are now one of the largest individual shareholders outside of the board. But Jiwoo... the analysts are calling them a 'legacy computer company' that's peaked with the iPod. Why are we dumping sixty percent of our liquid capital into a company that's barely profitable?"
I looked at the smog-tinted horizon. I remembered 2007. I remembered the day the world changed—not with a bang, but with a capacitive touch screen and a slide-to-unlock animation.
"Because the world is about to shrink into the palm of a hand," I said. "And the man in Cupertino is the only one who knows it yet."
"And the other forty percent?" she asked.
"Google," I replied. "They just went public in August. Everyone thinks the search engine wars are over. They don't realize that information is the new oil, and Google is the only refinery that matters."
Yuna sighed, but she didn't argue. She had stopped questioning my "hunches" the day the Park family's liquidation check cleared. "We have a visitor in the lobby. He doesn't have an appointment, and he refused to give a name. He just said he's an 'old friend' from the Economics Club."
I tensed. I hadn't thought about the club in months. The Park family was in prison, their assets scattered like ash. Who was left?
"Send him up," I said.
A few minutes later, the elevator doors slid open. A man walked out, but it wasn't the "Prince" I expected. It was Park Dohyeon.
He wasn't wearing a designer suit. He was wearing a cheap, ill-fitting blazer and jeans. His hair was long and unkempt, and the arrogance that once defined his every movement had been replaced by a hollow, jittery energy. He looked like a man who had been living in the shadows of a name that no longer carried weight.
"Jiwoo," he said, his voice cracking. He didn't come close. He stayed by the elevator, as if he expected a blow.
"Dohyeon," I said, not moving from the window. "I thought you were in the countryside, waiting for the appeals."
"The appeals are over," he said, a bitter, dry laugh escaping his throat. "My father took the fall for everything to keep me out of a cell, but he couldn't keep the creditors away. I have nothing, Jiwoo. Not even a room to sleep in."
He looked around the sleek, high-tech office with a mixture of awe and resentment. "You did it. You took the world I was born into and rebuilt it for yourself. I came here to ask... why? Why did you hate us so much? You were just a freshman. We didn't even know you."
I walked toward him, my footsteps echoing on the polished stone floor. I stopped when I was a few feet away. I looked into the eyes of the man who had stood over my broken body in another life, and I realized that I felt... nothing. No anger. No satisfaction. Just the cold realization that the past was finally dead.
"You didn't know me," I said quietly. "But I knew you. I knew what you would become if no one stopped you. I didn't destroy you because of what you did, Dohyeon. I destroyed you because of what you were going to do."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a single, black credit card—a corporate account with a modest limit. I held it out to him.
"This will pay for a flight to the States," I said. "Go to a community college. Change your name. Become a person who earns his own way. If you ever come back to Seoul, or if you ever try to contact Yuna or my mother again, I won't use the law. I'll use the silence."
Dohyeon looked at the card, his hand trembling as he took it. He didn't say thank you. He couldn't. He just turned and stepped back into the elevator.
As the doors closed, Yuna walked up beside me. "That was surprisingly merciful of you."
"It wasn't mercy," I said, turning back to the window. "It was an investment in a world where I don't have to look over my shoulder."
The sun was setting now, casting long, golden shadows across the city. The era of the chaebols was beginning to tilt, and the era of the ghost-tech giants was rising.
"Yuna," I said. "Call Chairman Kang. Tell him we're skipping the 2005 real estate plan. We're going to build a data center in Jeju. And tell him to start hiring every AI researcher he can find in Russia and Silicon Valley."
"AI?" Yuna asked, confused. "Jiwoo, it's 2004. Computers can barely play chess."
I smiled, a genuine, dangerous smile.
"Then we're going to give them a lot of practice."