The first to report that something was wrong, as always, was a graph.
Makoto's daily active users. The line chart Mio opened every morning before she even touched her coffee. As of a certain morning, it had lost its upward slope. The slope went to zero, the line lay down flat, and then—slowly, it began to point downward.
Mio traced the screen with a finger. Graphs don't lie.
In the year and a half since its founding, Makoto's user base had grown steadily. A social network that stubbornly upheld one single thing: not a single scam ad would ever flow through it. No flashy features, no celebrity promotions. But users who'd once discovered how comfortable this town square was recommended it to family and friends: "You can use this one without worrying." A generation that didn't want their relatives taken by fake ads targeting the elderly brought people in by word of mouth. With almost nothing spent on advertising, it had somehow reached a scale of several thousand people. It wasn't flashy, but the growth was real.
And that real growth was now being whittled away from outside.
"Kotoba, then."
From the seat next to Mio, Mikoshiba held out a tablet. On the screen was the familiar town square of Kotoba—one of the largest social networks in the country. Across the top, a banner that was not at all familiar now hung large. "Zero Scam Ads. We will never let you be deceived." A line that looked as if Makoto's ideals had been rewritten wholesale onto a giant's flag.
"Kotoba rolled it out with great fanfare at the beginning of last month. The tagline is—'Zero Scam Ads. We will never let you be deceived.'"
"Almost the same as our copy."
"They made it the same. On purpose." Mikoshiba's voice kept the usual temperature of a cool prince. But Mio didn't see the slight tension that went into his fingertips as he set the tablet down. "And here's where it gets real. Kotoba is handing out usage points to any individual who declares they've switched over from Makoto. Ad slots are being dumped at half the market rate. They're running TV commercials, too. —All of it at a loss. They're selling in a way that's guaranteed to lose money on every single unit."
"Stealing customers at a loss." Mio assembled Kotoba's user scale in her head. "A strategy of waiting for us to dry up first, using the stamina of their capital. Beat us on price, take the whole share, then recoup. —Ah."
Inside Mio, the scene of that conference room at her previous job rose up for an instant.
—As long as there's money, the substance doesn't matter.
"The one who wins in the end is the one who piles up the most money." The line a Kotoba executive had laughed out in a planning meeting had now become Sota Kiryu's wad of cash, coming to snap their line chart in two. Imitate the right thing with money. Same as ever.
"So," Mio said, folding the sentiment away there. "How much longer can our stamina hold out?"
Mikoshiba didn't answer right away.
"I'll pull up the cash flow numbers."
Mikoshiba opened his laptop. On the spreadsheet screen, lines for income and expenses had been drawn. Makoto's ad revenue, generated by the users who remained, was still coming in. But operating costs and personnel expenses had been built on the assumption of growth. If the assumption collapsed, the math was merciless.
The two lines crossed at a certain point. The point where the balance dropped below zero.
"If users keep leaving at this pace, and Kotoba takes our advertisers too—" Mikoshiba pointed at the intersection. "We hit bottom in a month and a half."
"What about inquiries for new contract work?" Mio checked, just to be sure.
"All gone." Mikoshiba's voice was flat. "Since last month, they all stopped at once. Kotoba has been working on our clients. Place an order with Sigma, which is fighting with that giant capital, and you'll incur the displeasure of a major player—go around whispering that, and most companies pull out. No new work is coming in anymore. I haven't factored any contract work into the projections. Our lifeline is nothing but Makoto's ad revenue, generated by the users we still have."
A month and a half.
The weight of the number sank quietly over the floor.
Mikoshiba didn't hide that number. The next morning, he gathered the regular employees who still filled the daytime seats—the young engineers and customer support staff they'd hired once the company entered its growth phase—and, without sugarcoating anything, showed them the spreadsheet screen exactly as it was.
"The company has a month and a half left. I won't try to keep anyone. Each of you, please make your own decision."
That was all Mikoshiba said.
Kotoba was even trying to poach employees, offering double Sigma's salary. A sinking ship, and a big ship loaded with cash. The employees were now coolly comparing which one to board.
Mikoshiba quietly closed his laptop. Beneath his usual temperature as a cool prince was a hardness he couldn't fully hide.
"—This is the moment of truth. Now we find out how much of our staff stays."
Mio stared once more at the intersection that wouldn't go away. No anger, no impatience welled up. There was only the recognition that a single item had been placed in front of her: "a problem that must be solved within six weeks."
That night, Mio didn't go home.
After Mikoshiba and Aya had gone to rest, Mio reinstalled the Kotoba app on both her own phone and a test device. It had been bothering her. Kotoba was flying "Zero Scam Ads." A sign identical to Makoto's, down to the last detail. That company, stealing customers through the violence of money—could it be that, on the inside too, it was actually stopping scams better than they were? If the gatekeeper was working the way the sign said, then that was worth seeing too. First, observe the one who's attacking you. It was the same thing she'd done on her last night at her previous job.
Mio's fingers began probing Kotoba's ad delivery from the outside. The behavior on the back side of delivery, invisible to ordinary users. Which ads passed review, how fast, and to what domains they redirected.
One alone said nothing. Mio created three advertiser accounts with throwaway emails. One with a legitimate front, one with the authentication information deliberately left close to blank, and one loaded with exaggerated hype—"Guaranteed to grow," "Limited time only." Phrases Mio's filter would drop before display, on Makoto. She ran the ad placement flow for each, at different times of day, from different devices. If you didn't scatter your samples, you couldn't see even what was there to see.
The behavior that came back was impeccably uniform.
The time to pass review was, in every case, a few dozen seconds. If a human eye had gone over them even once, they wouldn't line up like this. The account with blank authentication and the account laced with hype had passed at the same speed as the legitimate one. There was no sign that the destination domains had been rechecked either. Over a dozen samples, every last one, pointed to the same defenselessness.
"...There's no gatekeeper."
It was almost a murmur to herself. Pre-placement screening—the most expensive process, the one that stops suspicious ads before they're displayed—Kotoba didn't have it. Advertiser authentication was a formality too. If more than a dozen of varied types had all, every last one, slipped through the same hole, it could no longer be explained as chance. They had never intended to close the hole in the first place.
Without a gatekeeper, the feed should have been overflowing with scam ads. Put no gatekeeper at the town square, and those who want to deceive will surely come pouring in. But Mio scrolled through Kotoba's general feed for hours.
It was clean. Unnaturally clean.
True, things that looked like scam ads did show up here and there. And yet the ads with that nasty smell that led straight to real victims—the impersonation investment pitches and their ilk that Makoto's gatekeeper would knock down without a second thought—were overflowing nowhere in the town square.
"...It's true, there are no scam ads in sight."
Mio's fingers stopped.
No gatekeeper. And yet, clean. Those two things could not coexist.
She wanted to investigate a little further, but she had far too little slack to chase it right now. She was the CTO of a company that would hit bottom in six weeks. Mio merely stuck a small sticky note, somewhere out of sight, on that single phrase—"too clean"—and closed the screen. She had a feeling it would be needed someday. Why she felt that way, once again, she didn't know herself.