Chapter 167: The Copycat With No Soul

The Vance Method Corporation tower in Yeouido was as quiet as a server room and about as warm.

Down corridors of stark white tile, hundreds of employees in ash-gray uniforms worked inside soundproofed glass cubicles, eyes locked on their monitors. At each throat, a thin metal band glowed green — a monitor for heart rate, blink rate, breathing, set to buzz a warning at anyone who sighed too often or let their focus drift.

Click.

The CEO's office door opened. Lucian walked in with his hands in his pockets, Evelyn behind him with a magitech wrench she hadn't bothered to put down, Sylvia with an armful of files.

Behind a reinforced-glass desk sat Park Tae-Jun — late twenties, rimless glasses, hair combed flat, a gray suit without a crease in it.

Park Tae-Jun set down his pen, stood, and bowed a precise ninety degrees.

"Chairman Vance. Have you come to review our labor-optimization results? Our per-capita output leads the sector."

Lucian pointed through the glass wall at the rows of collars.

"You put breathing monitors on people's necks and program them to buzz when someone sighs. Who signed off on that? Which one of them chose it, versus needed the paycheck?"

Park Tae-Jun opened a drawer and produced a black leather notebook: Quotations From the Management Thought of Mr. Vance. He flipped to a marked page and read, crisp and pleased.

"Page forty-two. From your remarks at Oakhaven Dungeon: 'A meaningless smile pulls half a percent of focus off the task and slows your read of the room.' We simply execute the principle at scale. Eliminate the waste, preserve the margin."

Lucian's temple twitched.

"I said that while casting a spatial ward so a monster wouldn't bite me in half. The 'room' was a collapsing dungeon. What monster is coming through your accounting software, exactly?"

Park Tae-Jun turned to another page, unruffled.

"Page fifty: 'Cut the emotional variables to protect the margin.' Closing the arts and literature departments frees fifteen thousand square meters and forty billion won a year. We are building a society with the variance engineered out. Precisely your model."

Lucian stared at the notebook, breathing hard, hands closing into fists.

He raised his right hand.

Hmmm.

The red Admin Console flared up in front of him — and this is where he learned, in real time, what the console would and wouldn't do.

[ADMIN CONSOLE — REQUEST EVALUATED]

• Requested action: revoke Vance Method Corporation's legal existence.
• RESULT: NOT AVAILABLE. The System has no authority over sovereign legal registries. It cannot delete a company, a license, or a person. It can maintain infrastructure. It cannot un-make a legal entity.
• Available instead: technical and maintenance actions within authenticated Vance systems only.

Lucian read that, and his hand kept rising anyway — not toward a button that didn't exist, but toward the phone in his pocket. He already had the other plan half-built in his head. Buy their debt through three shells. Trip the loan covenants. Blacklist them from every supplier he had leverage over. Fund a hostile competitor and starve them out inside a quarter. He could erase this company from the market by lunch, legally, and never touch a System command at all.

Grab.

A grease-smudged hand settled on his shoulder.

Evelyn had pushed her goggles up. She looked at him steadily.

"I can see you doing the math, Lucian. Don't." She nodded at the glass. "You want to solve a company that controls people through pressure — by controlling it out of existence through pressure. You'll win. And you'll have proven their whole thesis for them: that whoever's strongest gets to engineer the variance out of everyone else. You'll just be the biggest one doing it."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"They're using my name to gut art schools."

"Then take your name back the slow way. In public, in court, in front of their own employees." She let go of his shoulder. "If you want to fix a bad system, you don't get to use its worst trick to do it. Make them take the collars off. Don't rip the collars off and put a bigger one on the building."

Lucian's hand stopped over his pocket.

The autumn wind thinned against the glass.

Slowly, he lowered it.

"Fine. The slow way." He looked at Sylvia. "Legal, not force. First: file for trademark and likeness — they're using my name and my quotes commercially without a license, and I never granted one. Cease-and-desist on the branding today, suit tomorrow. Second: those collars almost certainly breach labor law — get the regulators a formal complaint with the device specs attached. Third: quietly brief their major shareholders on the turnover and sick-leave numbers; a board that thinks it owns a productivity miracle should know it owns a resignation machine. Fourth—" he glanced at Evelyn "—we back a competitor. A firm that treats people like people and still turns a profit. Give the market somewhere better to go."

"And him?" Evelyn tipped her head at Park Tae-Jun.

"Him I argue with in public. Where his own staff can hear it."

...

That evening, on international channels, phone feeds, and a scatter of outdoor screens across a few cities, Lucian went live from his office. No suit of ceremony, no charts, no abacus.

He put a recording up first — a veteran's testimony, filmed in a field hospital after the Windbroke Ravine campaign. A young soldier who'd lost an arm, hunched in a cot, clutching a battered paperback to his chest while someone read him the last chapter aloud. The book was The Elegy of the Nameless Knight. He wasn't reading it for information. He was reading it to have a reason to make it to morning.

Reactions online forked instantly — some going quiet, some arguing in the comments that it was manipulative, some just watching.

Lucian looked into the lens and spoke plainly, without polish.

"I'm Lucian Vance. Since people started listening to me, I've talked about almost nothing but money. Cost. Margin. Optimization. And a lot of you took that and ran somewhere I never pointed."

He nodded at the recording.

"I optimized the machines so people would stop dying for nothing in the dungeons. I built the railways so food moved faster. I made money so we'd have the afternoons free — to eat a popsicle, read a bad book twice, sit with someone we love and do absolutely nothing productive."

He kept it flat and specific.

"Optimization is a tool for taking pain out of a life. It is not the point of the life. If you engineer out everything you can't put on a spreadsheet, you don't get an efficient person. You get an expensive one who quits — I have the turnover numbers, they're in the filing. That's not philosophy. That's a bad quarter waiting to happen."

He looked at Park Tae-Jun, frozen at the edge of the frame.

"You didn't copy my method. You copied my worst sentences and threw the reason away."

...

It didn't cascade across the world in an hour. It moved like real things move.

In the Yeouido tower, a woman in her twenties reached up, unlatched her collar, and set it on her desk — didn't hurl it, just set it down and looked at it. A few others followed on her floor. Others didn't; a supervisor two rows over told his people to keep theirs on until an official policy came down. By the end of the week the labor complaint had teeth and the collars were coming off across most of the building, floor by floor, argument by argument — not all at once, and not everywhere.

Park Tae-Jun did not fall to his knees weeping. He picked the notebook up off his desk, closed it, and set it in the drawer.

"The turnover data," he said stiffly, after a long moment. "Send me the actual figures. Not your press version. If the resignation rate is what your filing claims, that's a defect in the model and I'll revise it." A pause. "I'm not conceding the philosophy. I'm conceding the number, pending audit."

"That's more than I expected," Lucian said. "Take the win, Sylvia, before he reads another page."

Ting.

[SOCIAL DATA — PARTIAL, MEASURED]

• Vance Method Corporation share price: down. Two board members requesting review.
• Reported collar removals at flagship site: majority, not all.
• Arts-department sponsor withdrawals: three reversed, four still pending.

[SYSTEM NOTE: This is a shift, not a resolution. The System cannot report that anyone 'changed their heart.' It can report that fewer collars are switched on tonight than last night.]

...

Near midnight, on the balcony of the Gangnam penthouse. The rain had stopped; stars sat in the black river below.

Lucian leaned on the glass rail, hands in his pockets, watching the lit-up city.

Click.

Eleanor came out in a wool robe with two cups of hot chrysanthemum tea and handed him one. She rested her head lightly against his shoulder.

"You were sharp tonight, my little merchant."

Lucian sipped. "Sharp or not, we lost another chunk of the arts-funding fight this month, and I just promised to bankroll a whole competitor out of spite." He almost smiled. "Growth is expensive."

Eleanor laughed softly and leaned in a little closer against the cold.