The offices of Chain Softwareworks sp. z o.o. were housed in a refurbished building in the heart of Poznań, a stark contrast to the glass-and-steel corporate boxes on the city's outskirts. This one had been built in the 1950s, its original socialist-classical facade standing with a kind of stoic dignity. Now, it was a phoenix of brick and mortar, freshly renovated by the local municipality. The air inside was unnervingly clean, carrying the faint, optimistic scent of citrus-scented cleaning agents, fresh paint, and new carpet.
A man in a crisp, button-down shirt stood in the open-plan space, a polished aluminum clipboard held tightly in his hands. His eyes scanned a list, his foot tapping a silent, impatient rhythm on the polished concrete floor. He spotted a woman emerging from a lab, her focus on the tablet in her hands.
"Did you finish the project?" he said, his voice cutting through the quiet hum of servers and ventilation.
The woman looked up, her expression unreadable but for a faint glimmer of exhaustion and triumph in her eyes. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and gave a single, definitive nod.
"Yes," she said, her voice calm but firm. "We finished the reverse engineering. Every last line of code is mapped. The core architecture is… surprisingly elegant. It's like we just dissected a beautiful clockwork."
…
A notification hijacked his focus, blooming in the corner of his screen with all the charm of a digital panhandler.
[ALERT] Your McAfee Anti-Virus subscription has EXPIRED. Purchase now to stay protected!
Dong-seung's lip curled. "Shut your bitch ass up," he muttered, stabbing the 'No' button with a force that threatened to break his mouse. "Like I'd pay a ransom to a company founded by a gun-toting maniac who allegedly faked his own death. My PC is safer without that resource-hogging bloatware." He made a mental note to finally install that open-source alternative he kept reading about.
The interruption, however, served a purpose. It snapped him out of a micro-fugue state. Right. The finance program. EASYMONEY.
He became acutely aware of Seo-yeon's presence. She had pulled herself so close he could hear the soft rustle of her clothes. Her eyes weren't just watching; they were dissecting his every keystroke, a silent, curious shadow.
"Watcha doing?" she asked, her voice a soft intrusion into his code-filled world.
"Work," he replied, the word a dry, efficient wall. He didn't have the spare mental cycles for elaboration. The architecture of EASYMONEY was materializing in his mind, and he was in the zone.
He returned to the forge. The core logic was solid; now it was time for the polish, the features that transformed a utility into an experience.
The Calculator: He embedded a simple, elegant calculator into the input bar. It was a small touch, but it prevented the jarring context switch of opening another app. A seamless user experience was built on a hundred such small conveniences.
The Mascot: The cartoon duck, now christened "Quackers" in the code comments, was promoted from a mere welcome screen graphic. Dong-seung built a primitive but functional help system around it—a Clippy for the modern age. He programmed a series of canned responses for common queries: "How do I delete an entry?" "What's the difference between an expense and a liability?" The duck would waddle onto the screen, adjust its thick-rimmed glasses, and deliver the answer with a friendly quack. It was cheesy, but it had personality.
Accessibility Suite: He expanded the "Easy Reading" mode into a full suite. A toggle switched the entire UI to a colorblind-friendly palette, swapping problematic reds and greens for distinct blues and oranges. He felt a flicker of pride. Take that, boomer aesthetics.
The Sentinel System: Finally, he built a robust reporting system. It was two-fold: User-Initiated, with a simple "Report a Bug" form; and Automatic, a silent watchdog that, with user permission, would ping his server with anonymized data on crashes or errors.
Of course, he wasn't a rookie. He wrapped the reporting functions in debounce logic to prevent spam and sanitized every input until it was cleaner than a surgeon's scalpel. No script injections on his watch.
He was done. For now, at least. The code was a solid, functional prototype. He leaned back, a satisfied smirk playing on his lips as he typed out the final description on Gumroad.com:
EASYMONEY
A beginner-friendly financial tracker with intuitive visualization and robust data management. Clean, accessible, and powerful.
A fine description, sure to be overlooked by his robotic HYUNG, who only cared about the bottom line. And the bottom line was a price of 200,000 won. Yes, it was steep for a single program, but he wasn't selling just code; he was selling peace of mind. He could market it as the anti-boomer finance app—no confusing spreadsheets, no cluttered interfaces. Just clarity.
SNAP.
The thought echoed in his mind, solid and real. This was it. This was the one.
It was in this moment of quiet triumph that he felt it—a sudden, gentle pressure on his left arm. The world, which had shrunk to the dimensions of his screen, abruptly expanded back to include the room and her.
Seo-yeon had inched closer, and now she hugged his arm tight, resting her chin on his shoulder. Her presence was a warm, distracting weight, and the faint scent of her perfume cut through the static electricity and coffee fumes that were his natural habitat.
"So what now, my D-e-a-r?" she whispered, her voice laced with a playful, possessive intimacy.
"Huh?" he exclaimed, the sound less a word and more a system crash—a blunt, undignified noise of pure, unadulterated confusion. His brain, a moment ago orchestrating complex algorithms, was now desperately parsing a single, impossible phrase: My D-e-a-r?
DING—DONG!
Seo-yeon ran towards the door.
"Amazon Delivery! I got this package for you, madam."
THUD—CLICK
"Ahhh! It's an air fryer, godsent!"
An air fryer—a very practical gadget. You can easily cook fries, chicken, and even fast food like pizza! A great invention. Supposedly, some people even put oil inside the tray. Yep, you heard right; he saw some "reels" where someone actually did that. It's a mystery how that guy's house is not on fire.
Now, you might ask about air fryer radiation. It's negligible; the banana you ate yesterday probably had more. What about the 4G/5G towers? Well, they aren't doing anything harmful. They are heavily regulated, and if a provider did something bad, they would be looking at federal prison.
A moment later, the machine was installed. Or rather, it was plugged into a socket—a revolutionary way of connecting things, don't you think?
"Look! It makes a humming noise! You can even select the duration and temperature, just like a regular oven!"
HUMM—BING
The chicken was unseasoned, but it still tasted good. Though it was probably smarter to use the oven for that task. Why "overload" the fryer when you have an oven that is likely more efficient and long-lasting?
Or is it? No. An air fryer is logically more efficient because it doesn't draw as much energy; an oven, on the other hand, often requires preheating, which also wastes energy. But what if the fryer wasn't built to an engineer's standards? In today's world, almost everything is engineered to be fragile.
He scratched his head. He felt like an AI stuck in a reasoning loop. The concept of bias, even unconscious bias, was familiar, but avoiding it was practically impossible if he didn't know he had one in the first place.
…
Back to the drawing board after eating a well-seasoned chicken and a big portion of crisp fries prepared by his roommate. He decided to return to his EASYMONEY program. What else could he include? An Easter egg would be inserted into the app itself, so it wouldn't be an Easter egg per se.
But he would immortalize them in a pro gamer leaderboard, which was already baked in. A new leaderboard, of course, was added.
His new Easter egg idea was simple: a chess game. The system gave him nothing, so his own brain had to be the engine.
First, he coded the basic rules—castling, promotion, and en passant. He even stuffed it with endgames from grandmaster databases, a cheat sheet for the final act.
Now for the core: Alpha-Beta pruning.
His mind framed it like a real game. If I make this move, what's the worst my opponent can do to me? That worst-case scenario was his floor, his Alpha—the minimum score he'd accept.
Then he'd consider another move. If he immediately saw a counter-move that put him in a worse position than his Alpha floor, he stopped. He didn't waste time calculating how much worse. He just pruned that branch and moved on. That was the Beta cutoff.
It was how a human thinks, but with a computer's relentless patience. The engine's brain was permanent, constantly calculating, a brute-force attack on the future even while the opponent was still thinking.
Next, he gave it a memory. A transposition table could store evaluations of positions it had already painstakingly calculated. Now, when the same configuration of pieces appeared from a different sequence of moves, the engine would simply pull the answer from its cache instead of starting from scratch. This was basically pattern recognition, similar to someone who had played the same position a hundred times.
To combat its blindness, he built a quiescent search. This forced the engine to look beyond its normal depth when the position was still "noisy"—when captures and checks were pending. This stopped it from falling for simple, one-move traps, the digital equivalent of not walking into an obvious ambush.
He didn't stop there. He raided online archives, grafting a massive opening book of Grandmaster moves onto its brain, letting it cruise effortlessly through the first dozen moves of any game. For the endgame, he hard-coded perfect play from tablebases, making the engine a demi-god capable of beating FIDE National Masters. But it was still crude compared to Stockfish and other, more powerful engines.
The final piece was the evaluation function. He moved beyond just counting material. He taught it to value control of the center, to sense pawn structure weaknesses, and to prioritize king safety. It was no longer just adding up points; it was developing a personality—primitive, of course.
When he finally leaned back, his spine cracking in protest, he had created a monster. It wasn't just a simple Easter egg anymore. It was a formidable opponent.
He asked his trusty HYUNG to estimate its ELO.
2,200 ELO.
Not bad. He wasn't sure how much ELO an NM had, but 2k sounded impressive.
At last, he built an Excel-like clone inside the finance program. It didn't have fancy functions or programmable formulas, but basics like coloring, subtraction, and addition were, of course, possible.
Some bug fixes here and there, and voilà—200,000 won for this masterpiece made especially for boomers. But he learned a valuable lesson: he should avoid spending excessively and finally decided to build a proper LLC and hire employees. Or at least an advisor. He could still, in the future, add tutorial videos about finance, which he could integrate as a free course inside his program. Of course, at no charge, unlike other "gurus."