The Chaebol Who Flies From Space - Chapter 4
Only Noblemtl
4. Wake up anyway
[Andre, further drinking is dangerous.]
“Iriel! Are you awake now?”
It was AI Ariel who was turned off while the funeral was taking place.
[The pre-determined time limit has passed.]
“Is it like that already?”
[I advise you to put down your glass. If you continue to drink, I will contact your physician as per the regulations.]
As science has advanced, the capabilities of personal computers have increased.
A trend that is popular among wealthy people like me is to implant AI made of proteins into the inside of the skull.
“They said they spent a lot of money on the 7th generation, but now I see they’re just complainers.”
The price was also very high, equivalent to the price of a decent nano-quantum supercomputer. Up until the 6th generation, there was no much nagging, perhaps because the artificial intelligence was lacking, but the 7th generation nagged at me more than my average wife.
So I secretly regretted spending so much money on the upgrade. Only inwardly.
The moment I say those words, I go crazy.
What the hell is this AI that’s upset at its owner for being upset!
There was no way I could win if I fought Ariel. I couldn’t hold out any longer, so I quickly poured the last of my remaining alcohol into my mouth.
[Oh my god, you drank all that alcohol. Are you out of your mind? I’ll call Joseph right away.]
“Do it or not. This is space, so it won’t be easy to contact.”
[This is. Inside the spaceship. I’ll contact you the moment we land on a nearby colony with communications.]
Ariel assessed the situation in an instant and followed the entered protocol.
“······.Surgery!”
[Life-extending treatment through brain wave transplantation has already become popular, so anyone can benefit from it.]
Treatment using artificial organs is a treatment that most people use. However, the farm people were a minority of naturalists who refused life-extending treatment using artificial organs.
If my mother had received life-prolonging treatment, she would have easily lived a hundred years longer.
The farm people all wanted a natural death and refused to replace their God-given lifespan with artificial organs.
If you have money, you can cure all kinds of diseases with simple surgery to grow and replace organs. However, people with faith accept death calmly.
I don’t mind artificial organs, but brain wave transplants are a different matter.
This is changing your body into a completely different body and storing your brain waves and transferring them.
Who can be sure if that’s really me or someone else?
Besides, the company involved in brainwave implant surgery is my biggest rival, HMT. I don’t know how many secret fights and conspiracies there were to secure the first place among the space age companies.
I couldn’t entrust my body to people I couldn’t trust at all.
I never wanted to live that long.
Actually, there were some things that were tiring.
In his youth, he traveled the universe piloting a spaceship.
It was a time when there was no fear of death.
Even in the space century, the unexplored territory is full of all kinds of dangers that lurk like landmines, targeting pioneers.
I took a moment to reminisce about those days and poured myself a drink despite Ariel’s objections.
Maybe it was because it was a spaceship, but I got drunk quickly after one drink. I lay down in the same spot where my mother had been lying and reminisced about her.
And then I fell into a deep sleep.
I felt the warmth of my mother’s body, hugging me tightly like when I was a child.
How long had I fallen asleep, thinking of my mother’s embrace? Then, a sharp chest pain came, along with a feeling of tightness and blockage in my chest.
I tried to wake up screaming, but I couldn’t wake up, as if I was stuck in a deep swamp.
[Emergency, emergency. Emergency plan……..]
I thought this was how I would die. I could hear Ariel speaking softly.
I saw my mother’s figure far away in the sky. As I was going up to where the bright light was shining, I was hit by an impact that hit me all over and I was blown up.
***
I flew up so high that I didn’t have any strength in my body.
Did I do something wrong and end up in a vegetative state?
I clearly told you not to do brain wave treatment.
I forced my eyes open. It was hard to open them, as if there were metal cages attached to my eyelids. After trying for a long time, I finally managed to open my eyes.
The ceiling that I saw was so unfamiliar.
“Iriel, what happened to me? Iriel? What the hell is this off-mode again! Iriel on! Is this damn can broken?”
I raised my body with strength and tapped the back of my head. Still, there was no response. The latest 7th generation bio-AI malfunctioning is not even a 1 in 10 million chance.
What on earth is going on?
A vague sense of anxiety welled up in me. I sat on the bed, dazed, unable to come to my senses, and tapped the back of my head. I tried to ignore the pain, hoping that Ariel would wake up as soon as possible, but then suddenly I heard an unfamiliar voice.
“Are you crazy, oppa?”
A young woman I had never seen before came in and looked at me with a look of astonishment on her face.
“Who is it? This is my first time meeting you. How did you get here?”
“Are you kidding me again? Oh my! I didn’t know when I was young, but I’m old enough now that it’s time to stop.”
“···.”
I was speechless for a moment. I couldn’t understand what this young woman I was seeing for the first time was saying.
“Good job. If you play all night and collapse, when will you come to your senses? If you wake up and play, is that a game of amnesia?”
“Do you know me?”
“This is really going to happen! If you keep doing this, I’m going to get really angry!”
It was a little cute to see her putting her hands on her hips and trying to get angry, but I didn’t feel like accepting this kind of prank. I was already anxious because Ariel didn’t respond. I didn’t have the mental capacity to accept a little girl’s prank.
“Look here, little lady. I don’t know who asked you to do this, but stop it. Did Paul tell you to do it? Or Eric?”
I called out the names of the subordinates who would play such an obvious prank. I told them to at least give them some mental education when they got back, but they dared to play such a prank on the CEO!
“And I don’t know who you are, but I’m a reader and I don’t have a younger sister. I’ve never had a younger sister in my entire life. Do you understand? Is this a hospital?”
The more I spoke, the more my head became dizzy with an inexplicable pain. It was similar to the feeling I had when I was drunk a long time ago.
Ignoring the little boy who was speechless at my words and just opening his mouth, I suddenly felt the urge to urinate and went into the bathroom. When I saw my reflection in the mirror, I couldn’t help but say things I thought I would never say in my life.
“Fucking Asshole! You little shit! Who the hell are you?! Ouch! I’ve been kidnapped!”
After spewing out harsh words for a while, I came to my senses a little bit.
“Dad! My brother swore at me!!!”
There was a huge uproar, but it soon became quiet.
“So I’m Jo Yong-won? And your eldest son?”
Somehow, I thought I could see thick tendons on the forehead of the handsome middle-aged man in front of me, but I tried to ignore it. After all, he looked much younger than my actual age.
“What does Dr. Kim Yong-won think of that guy’s condition?”
“It seems like amnesia.”
“What is that?”
“It’s what people commonly call amnesia. Whether it’s temporary or permanent depends on the condition. You can think of it as a tangled memory caused by a small cerebral hemorrhage. I think that’s why the symptoms of delusional disorder appeared.”
It was too harsh to be said in front of a person. Delusional disorder? Doesn’t that mean I’m crazy?
It was too realistic for a kidnapper’s work.
“Hey Doc, Really I’m crazy? Aren’t you crazy? (It’s not me who’s crazy, it’s you who’s crazy?”)
“It certainly doesn’t look to me like he’s in his right mind. I’ll prescribe him a tranquilizer and watch his progress a little longer.”
“Even I don’t think he’s in his right mind.”
“Wow! Brother, your English has improved a lot. When you went to study abroad in the US, you seemed to be just chasing after girls and having fun, but you must have studied English a lot. Your pronunciation is just like a native speaker.”
The man who said he was the father answered the younger sister’s words.
“Even though I played around in college, I’m sure I’ve picked up at least one thing in English. I’m glad that it doesn’t seem like all the money I invested went to waste.”
“That’s right! That’s right. The pronunciation sounded plausible.
“It was so good that I could almost say it sounded native.”
“Then, should I learn English from you?”
“How could that guy do something like that? He’s the kind of guy who would use the shares I gave him as collateral as he pleases.”
Strangely, the conversation between the father and daughter, excluding the person involved, was very tense. And yet, the look in my father’s eyes was serious.
It was a mystery, I didn’t know what had happened and I couldn’t understand how I, who was on a spaceship heading to my own colony, ended up lying here.
The two men’s actions were too familiar to be called kidnapping, and the image I saw in the bathroom mirror was of a young man with an unfamiliar appearance that I had never seen before.
My mind was a bit confused, but soon I fell into a drowsy sleep, perhaps due to the effects of the tranquilizer the doctor had prescribed.
I could vaguely hear the conversation between the father and daughter, who were talking even before they fell asleep.
When I woke up, my body felt much lighter, as if the tranquilizer had worked. It was early morning, and the light was coming in dimly outside the window.
And as soon as I opened my eyes, what I saw was my younger sister.
“mirror”
“here”
I felt like I was going crazy and jumping for joy, but the image I saw in the mirror was of a young man with a thin appearance, barely 180 cm tall, different from my original manly appearance.
Damn, it’s so flimsy that it could fly away if the wind blows.
My original appearance was a sturdy build, 198 cm tall and 120 kg in weight. A sturdy build was essential for working in the space mining industry.
In high school, he also served as a lineman for the American football team.
Even after entering college, I continued to practice various martial arts and was active in the Wall Street Colony, where I was called a brown bear.
I’ve heard many times that I’m the kind of person who would easily survive even on a hell planet.
I really didn’t like the fact that I, someone like that, had such a shabby appearance.
The little girl, who identified herself as Jeongyeon, stuck her mouth out and grumbled, as if she didn’t like the sight of me frowning while looking in the mirror.
“You look in the mirror and all you do is frown.”
“I was just annoyed because I looked thinner than I thought.”
I carefully talked to Jeongyeon and figured out my situation.
People who know me say I’m like a snake.
It looks like a brown bear on the outside, but it contains dozens of snakes inside or something like that.
Anyway, after thinking about it calmly, I realized that for some reason, I had lost consciousness in my personal spaceship, but my mind had entered the body of a man called Jo Yong-won.
I wondered if this was a dream, so I pinched my thigh to avoid Jeongyeon’s chattering gaze, but all I felt was a sharp pain.
“So my name is Yongwon Cho, I’m 27 years old, I graduated from New York University, I graduated from Columbia University, I served in the military as a short-term enlisted man, and then I got a job at a securities firm? It’s 2001?”
“Yeah, when my brother said he was going to get a job at a securities firm, do you know how much chaos there was at home? My grandfather was furious, and my father was really angry. The whole house was on ice all day long.”
It was an incomprehensible sound.
“Why are you angry? If it’s a securities firm, it’s an investment bank. You must have gotten a lot of money. Why would your family object?”
“This idiot, is it because you don’t remember? Anyway, my brother is the only man in the family, but he didn’t even think about helping my grandfather with his business and got a job at a securities firm without saying anything, so that’s why.”
At that point, I thought I knew what the situation was. If a family-run company had a child who got a job at another company without asking, a conservative person would have been extremely angry.
There were many people like this in the space age I lived in.
“I can’t tell you how lucky I am that my mom went on a trip to France with her friends at that time. If she had found out that my brother was causing trouble, I can’t imagine how much of a fuss she would have made.”
As I looked at Jeongyeon’s expression of relief, her whole body trembling, I had a strange thought. I couldn’t understand what it was like to be relieved when you didn’t even know that your child was in the hospital.
“They said it was amnesia, but it seems like everything in your head has been completely emptied. Huh! Once you experience it, you’ll understand right away.”
Let’s skip over it since it’s not an important fact.
“But why am I in the hospital?”
“Ugh! I guess you don’t even remember that.”
“Yeah, I don’t remember.”
I felt a little upset at the sight of Jeongyeon looking at me with pitiful eyes, but I calmly waited for her next words.
“You borrowed money from your brother’s inheritance to invest in a trust? Anyway, you were going to set up something like that with your senior, but Dad caught you. That’s why the house was turned upside down. I think it’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen Dad get so angry.”
“so?”
“I don’t know what happened next. I found my brother passed out in his room in the morning.”
Even I think he was an immature guy. You shouldn’t touch the inherited shares of a company so carelessly.
Since most inheritances are passed down after carefully calculating inheritance issues and management rights, it was a foolish act that could easily result in the company being taken away.
Anyway, if he was thinking of creating a financial company with the inherited shares, it seems that the company his grandfather runs is quite large.
“What kind of company does your grandfather work for?”
I wondered how much a child could know, but as soon as I started talking, detailed information about the business run by the family flowed out from his small mouth.
He was a little kid who was brimming with pride.
I looked out the window. It was a sunny day. Flowers were blooming in succession under the blue sky.
At times like this, the image of farms preparing for spring farming, competing with the mighty waters of the Mississippi River, comes to mind.
Soon, the roses in the Rose Garden will be in full bloom.
And the first person who comes to mind in that memory is my mother.
Feeling a sense of longing, I closed my eyes and smelled the scent of flowers seeping in through the window.
This is what the little boy told me.
The food company run by my grandfather has a capital of 45 billion won, sales of 130 billion won, and operating profit of 8 billion won?
Although the scale is small because it is a food company, the content is not bad. In this type of industry, once you secure a market share, sales continue to grow steadily.
The little boy could be proud of the company his family runs. It was a company that made money and gave back to society.
I especially liked the ones that supported programs to care for orphans or provided financial support for sick children.
Perhaps because I lost my biological parents at a young age, I spent a lot of money every year on children.
According to the information I confirmed after sneaking out of the hospital and going to a crowded PC room, Rose Garden did not exist in this world.
At the same address as the Rose Garden, a small factory with no relation to the farm was standing there.
Is this what physicists call a parallel world?
Anyway, for me, who lived in the year 789 of the cosmic calendar, this era was truly an incredibly frustrating time.
No matter how much I looked around, it didn’t feel much different to me than the time when primitive people were wielding stone knives and setting out to hunt mammoths.
This was incredibly bad news for me, who was filled with anticipation that I might see my mother again in this world, but I quickly came to my senses after being shocked.
I’ve heard that the man I am is resilient. He would survive even if he were left alone on a desert planet.
I need to take my time and do some thorough research, but it seems like there is no one in this world who was the former André de Revue Codagin.
No, since we went back so far in time, it was a time when even the parents weren’t born.
shit!