[The people, places, organizations, events, and so on appearing in this work have no connection whatsoever to reality and are entirely fictional, born of the author’s imagination.]
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After eating a hearty lunch, Henry set out for Manhattan despite it being Saturday.
Through the smooth window of the Rolls-Royce, Times Square in 1979 looked nothing like the dazzling tourist destination of 2026. The streets were packed with rows of yellow taxis and vagrants drifting between them like ghosts. There were the filthy long-haired remnants of hippie culture, and punks loitering at alley mouths, blowing out hazy cigarette smoke as they picked fights.
When the sun went down, women in skimpy hostess outfits, high on drugs, roamed the streets to sell themselves. It was, in every sense, New York’s shame laid bare. Henry was feeling with his whole body the infamy of Times Square, counted among the worst crime-ridden districts in America.
‘Wow, is this really the Times Square I know? This is basically Gotham City. When the hell do all those flashy billboards that tourists from around the world take selfies in front of show up?’
The future scenery plastered with electric billboards was still a very distant story. Henry sank briefly into thought, then jotted a short note in the notebook resting on his lap.
‘Or should I make it myself later after I’ve earned money? New York City would definitely love it and throw all kinds of benefits at me… For now, let’s just write it down.’
The car stopped in front of the One Times Square building, notable for its long horizontal exterior. The large bodyguard in the passenger seat quickly got out, opened the rear door, and kept sharp watch on the surroundings. Jay in the driver’s seat also swiftly joined him and surrounded Henry. Henry took his notebook and stepped into the building.
The first place he headed was [Enjoy].
When he entered the office, the employees’ enthusiasm was so intense that it was hard to believe it was Saturday. The engine driving them was the incentive of fifty cents per unit sold. Fifty cents might sound laughable, but considering the number of portable game consoles that would be sold around the world, it was by no means a small amount.
If this hadn’t been standard practice, it was an incentive Henry truly would have hesitated over. Since even the industry giant [Yatari] had continued it as a custom, Henry had followed suit as well, but once he actually did it, he found himself nodding and thinking it had been the right call.
‘As expected, the taste of capitalism is the best. In front of incentives, Saturday is no different from a weekday.’
Henry looked over the employees with satisfaction. In truth, the reason he was putting more effort into [Enjoy] was clear. He himself was at the center of the actual work, playing three roles at once: CEO, planner, and designer.
On the other hand, [Henry1 Capital] upstairs had nothing pressing to do right now. The position had already been established, and silver prices had not yet skyrocketed enough to begin pyramiding. All they had to do now was market research and report writing, and even that was Saturday work, so most of them had not even come in.
When he arrived at the game console company, the employees who greeted Henry were in an extremely lively mood.
He could still clearly picture them on the first day, wearing stiff suits, tense and grave-faced, but now they were all in comfortable short-sleeved shirts with relaxed expressions. Since he saw no dissatisfaction on their faces, Henry was satisfied for the moment. He believed that companies that sold fantasy, whether game consoles or games, maximized efficiency only when they properly loosened up everything from organizational culture to the atmosphere inside the company. Only then would creativity well up, and a healthy ecosystem form where even an offhand idea tossed out by the lowest-ranking employee would not be ignored.
There was the drawback that control became difficult, but Henry had never had the slightest intention of managing everything delicately by himself in the first place.
‘Management goes to professional executives, accounting gets double surveillance through the family office and the think tank. I become the cheat key who does nothing but point the company’s direction. That’s the most comfortable and certain path for a returner to succeed.’
It was something he had emphasized from the moment he first recruited Marcus Wayne. The company I create will be a horizontal organization that is free and unbound by customs or regulations. Marcus Wayne at the time had also vehemently agreed, saying, “That’s exactly the kind of company I’ve dreamed of.” Seeing him now laughing uproariously while trading jokes with an engineer, it seemed he had been sincere.
Henry lightly greeted every employee whose eyes met his with, “Good afternoon,” and entered his CEO office. Before long, Jay brought in fragrant coffee, and Marcus Wayne soon followed.
“Good afternoon, Marcus. Surely nothing much has happened today, right?”
“Haha, good afternoon, boss. Today has truly been nothing but peaceful.”
Henry took a sip of coffee and continued playfully.
“You said the same thing yesterday, but yesterday afternoon the liquid-crystal display team was in my room tearing their hair out as a group. They looked like they were about to cry, saying that trying to cram all eight stages of the gorilla’s arm movements I drew into the LCD had tangled the wiring so badly the whole panel might burn out.”
“Haha, those guys really suffered. Usually, calculator numbers are done with seven segments, but for each stage of the gorilla’s movement you gave us, they have to embed dozens of shapes into the LCD in advance. They said even they had never heard of overlapping that many images into a single liquid-crystal panel. Looks like the guys who only made calculator digits got cramps in their fingers when they tried to make art.”
“So, did they sort out the overlapping parts?”
“Yes. As you pointed out, boss, they decided to use common electrodes for the paths where the arms overlap. Thanks to that, they barely managed to squeeze in even the way the necktie flutters when the gorilla jumps inside the LCD. Looking at the samples produced by the Japanese factory, it does look fairly convincing, as if it’s alive and moving.”
Henry nodded with an expression of relief and was about to lift his coffee cup again when he suddenly paused.
“You squeezed in the necktie too?”
“Yes. In the sketch you gave us, there was the necktie the gorilla was wearing, and even the initials ‘DK’ clearly stamped on it, wasn’t there? Because of technical limitations, those detailed letters were too much, but we barely managed to preserve the texture of the tie. But I was curious. What exactly does that DK on the necktie mean? It isn’t our company name.”
“Ah, that DK?”
Henry set down his coffee cup and smiled as if relaxed. But inside his head, a 2026-model quad-core engine was already screaming at full power.
‘I unconsciously slapped the name from a game in my past life straight in there! Fuck. This is an obvious setting error… But I can’t just say, “My hand slipped.” I have to protect the genius image I’ve built up so far! Think, brain, show me that investing in the knowledge stat was worth it! Can’t you see Marcus’s sparkling eyes?’
Henry’s gaze passed Marcus’s shining eyes and landed on the world map hanging on the wall. At that moment, a plausible phrase flashed through his mind.
“Digital Knight.”
“Digital… Knight?”
Marcus tilted his head at the unfamiliar combination. As if he had been waiting for it, Henry added a spoonful of authority to his voice and gave it weight.
“That’s right. This little machine we’re making isn’t just a toy for children. From a narrative perspective, I wanted it to become something like a knight that protects the virtual world made of zeroes and ones—in other words, the digital world. This gorilla is the first sentinel who opens the gate to that world.”
‘Wow, I can’t believe this ridiculous bullshit is coming out of my mouth. As expected, when people are driven into a corner, their creativity explodes.’
“My goodness… Digital Knight! I thought it was just a simple character name, but it had such a philosophical meaning behind it!”
Marcus could not hide his admiration and carefully wrote the words down in his notebook as if they were a verse from the Bible. Henry was slightly flustered by how seriously Marcus reacted, but he soon brazenly drove the nail in.
“Of course, given our game’s title, we’ll have to modify the initials later, but for now, let’s treat that sample as a limited-edition concept symbolizing the ‘birth of the digital knight.’ The truth is, it slipped out without me realizing while I was conceptualizing a later sequel—the gorilla’s archenemy. Still, Marcus, I’m glad you noticed.”
“It’s an honor, boss! As expected, your insight is ahead of the times. You’re already thinking of a sequel…! I’ll tell the engineers right away. That what we’re making now isn’t a mere gorilla doll, but the ‘first digital knight’!”
Watching Marcus rush out in excitement, Henry wiped the cold sweat running down his back.
‘That was close. From next time on, I need to review the designs again first. Anyway, Digital Knight? DK? Then should I make one design cut in advance with the initials DK in the next work too, and later advertise through the media that it had this kind of intention behind it? And it only came out while I was talking, but making that the rival might be surprisingly decent. If I buy [Pixi] later, it really might be perfect as an animation. A gorilla and mankind that resembles gorillas. Somehow, the vibe fits, doesn’t it?’
After that, Henry’s on-site inspection continued.
When he stopped by the LCD team, he held an in-depth discussion about the afterimage problem unique to segment LCDs, saying, “I can’t have my gorilla looking like a ghost.” To the battery engineers, he applied pressure by saying, “If it can’t even last a week, this isn’t portable—it’s just pretty trash. Don’t forget that the clock function is the main body.”
He also discussed the LCD’s transparency with Marcus. If they packed the images in too densely, the background looked messy. Henry was forcibly transplanting twenty-first-century minimalist sensibilities into the technology of 1979, unintentionally pushing the technical standards to their limits in order to create something that, in his eyes, was highly polished.
.
.
.
Once he felt he had more or less handled the pending issues at the game console company, Henry headed to the investment firm [Henry1 Capital] located on the floor directly above.
The scene beyond a single door was completely different. It was the analog scenery of Wall Street in 1979, with people clutching receivers and placing orders almost as if shouting, constantly scribbling on slips. Henry slipped into his own room without saying much, not wanting to disturb the busy employees. Fortunately, since it was Saturday, there were fewer people in the office, so it was less awkward. In truth, Henry had come here not to do any grand work, but simply to show his face.
To be honest, Henry did not have the ability to discuss anything practical at this investment firm. The financial mechanisms of 1979 were far too unfamiliar to someone from the twenty-first century. The financial knowledge Henry had amounted to nothing more than the broad flow of major historical events.
‘From the end of ’79, silver and gold prices skyrocket like crazy, and because interest rates shoot up vertically, shorting bonds is a jackpot. That’s about it. As for detailed execution plans, I have to make them up every moment by banging my head against the ground.’
In his past life, Henry had been used to trades that ended with a click of a finger on a computer program or MTS. He was an ordinary person who had never even seen a complex pyramiding strategy. Now that such a person had to create an execution plan with a single piece of information, it was only natural that his head throbbed from digging through finance books every night.
Telephones, order slips, telexes—to Henry, the order methods of this era were trifling bits of history never taught in his past life. Novels might have given fragmentary explanations as background, saying it was like this or that, but the actual scene before him was an entirely different world. Calling it a battlefield was no exaggeration.
In such a situation, Henry could not bring himself to open his mouth in front of the veteran operators he had recruited at great expense.
‘If I pretend to know something for no reason and they figure out I don’t have financial knowledge, they’ll immediately look down on me. It’s best to just maintain the mystique cosplay.’
He drew a strict line and refrained from conversing with the employees. There was exactly one thing Henry did when he came to this shelter-like office. He sat at his desk and took a sketchbook out of the drawer. It was the work of carefully reviewing the designs he had drawn himself so as not to repeat a mistake like the “DK necktie” incident he had experienced earlier at the game console company.
“Fortunately, only that one sheet was a problem.”
Henry picked up his pen and began drawing a new picture. Games, comics, animations, and automobile designs that would bring him enormous wealth in the future—he drew them one by one as they came to mind.
Every one of these things was property, after all. He was turning them into cash before he forgot them. At first, he had drawn them at the game company.
But tired of Marcus’s frequent visits, fussing, and snatching them away, Henry began drawing at the investment company, his escape route, while also showing his face there. Because when he had been drawing at [Enjoy], Marcus, a ghost with an uncanny nose for the scent of money, had already caused countless new trademarks, design patents, and copyrights to be created.
Under the names , , and .
‘I can draw this much for now and explain the rest verbally later. Anyway, I don’t know exactly when it was released. Judging roughly by the graphics level and simple game structure, it feels like it should be right around this time. If I want to preempt it, do I need to settle it within next year at the latest? Or should I take this opportunity to borrow more money under [Enjoy]’s name and make a full-scale entry into the arcade game market too?’