Author Country South Korea Publisher Opus Press | Original title "독심술" Language Korean | |
Published in The Final Last of the Ultimate End | ||
"Mind Reading" (original Korean title: "독심술") is a science fiction short story by Korean author Kwak Jaesik, published in his 2015 collection "The Final Last of the Ultimate End". In the story, a man and a woman, who are working for a metal coloring company, try to win a deal with a smart phone maker, guessing the designer's thought.
Plot Summary
A man and a woman, who are employees of a metal coloring company, teamed up to win a deal with a smart phone maker. This smart phone maker wanted to buy colored metal cases for their newly developed phone from one of the metal coloring companies. The different metal coloring companies in competition wished the color order from the designer of the phone maker being one that are familiar with them, for example, one preferred RGB color model and another preferred CMYK color model. However the designer of the phone maker announced, "the color of the phone should be like a color of clean water from deep mountain". The description of the color was so vague that all the metal coloring companies could not easily make their sample.
One German company sent their employees to a deep mountain and tried to find the actual color of the water, and one US company performed big data analysis to get the statistically most representative color meant by the expression, "clean water from deep mountain". One Japanese company sent spies to know information about the personal preference of the designer. But the winner turned out to be the team of the man and the woman, who ran a small brain washing program that continuously gave a large number of images of clean water with their own color to the designer in various exposure route, such as TV commercials, signs, and illustrations of the books, all manipulated by them to be with clean water colored by their color.