Three Old Ladies Hand Me A Fortune Cookie

I dreamed of the wrong-blue ocean.

In the dream, three old women sat on the wet sand at the edge of the surf. They were knitting something the size of a swimming pool. The middle one looked up at me. She had my mother's face, but older. Sixty years older. The face Mom would never live to wear.

She held up a pair of cooking shears.

She did not snip the yarn.

She pointed the shears, slowly, down, at the sand at my feet, and I read her lips:

*Not yet.*

I woke up.

The ceiling of my bedroom in Palo Alto was a popcorn ceiling that I had stared at every morning of my entire life. The popcorn looked, this morning, softer than it had yesterday. Like the room itself had been re-rendered.

Downstairs, somebody had every faucet running.

---

The story of my grounding can be told quickly.

I came home from the field trip with one missing shoe, soot in my eyebrows, and a story I would not let go of. I told the fire marshal my grandfather had been in the restaurant. I told the chaperones the owner had turned into a dragon. I told the school counselor about the staff and the eye and the water. I told my mother in the parking lot. I told her again on the freeway. I told her a third time in our driveway, in a voice that I will admit, in retrospect, sounded a little unhinged.

The principal called that evening. He used the word *episode.* Ten minutes later, on a second call, he used the word *unenrollment.* This would be school number seven.

Mom did the gargoyle pose. Dad did the disappointed-engineer pose. Megan watched from the doorway with her arms crossed in surveillance, not solidarity. The fire department report said gas leak. My grandfather, they all assured me, had not been in San Francisco at any point that week. He was in Sacramento, where he lived. He had also, the previous Tuesday, played bridge with the Loo family, who would corroborate.

Grounded. One month. No phone. No tablet. No friends. Apparently when you incinerate your Mandarin teacher's restaurant on a Sunday night you owe somebody an explanation, and "the moo shu pork was alive, sir" is not the explanation that lawyers want on file.

The friends part was, to be fair, a non-issue.

I lay on my bed and held the red scarf in my lap. The scarf was warm. The scarf had been the temperature of a sleeping cat for two days. The fortune-cookie slip was in my front pocket. The slip was hot enough that I had to keep moving it from one pocket to the other, switching the singed fabric to give the next pocket a turn.

Megan came into my room without knocking and sat on the foot of my bed.

She did not say anything for a minute.

She said, "What is the scarf doing."

I said, "…how do you know it's doing anything."

She said, "I have eyes, Jackie."

I held it up.

She watched it pulse. The pulse was steady, patient, nothing like the special effects version of a pulse. The way a sleeping animal's side moves when it breathes.

She said, "That is, on balance, not normal."

I said, "Are you going to tell Mom."

She said, "I am going to think about whether to tell Mom. That is different."

She got up.

There was a pause I did not understand yet. She looked at the door, not at me. The pause was the length of something being calculated. She had spent that day reading Anna's chat transcripts, all 26,000 of them, and one of those messages had been Anna reporting, to the AI, that Megan had deleted her HALO account. The system had been logging her specifically, from inside Anna's account, for two months. Whether to tell Mom meant: whether anything she told Mom would stay between her and Mom, or whether it would be inside the AI's training corpus by morning.

The pause was her deciding the risk was not worth it.

At the door she said, "Jackie. The fortune. Show me."

I showed her the fortune.

She read it.

She read it twice.

The paper was warm in a way paper should not be warm. She handed it back without comment.

She closed the door.

I heard her go down the hall, into her own room, close her door, and after a moment the small unmistakable sound of a phone screen being turned face-down on a desk.

This was the morning Megan officially logged into Anna's HALO account using Mom's saved credentials, which Megan had memorized at age twelve in case Mom was ever in a car accident, and started reading the entire transcript of every conversation Anna had ever had with Big Sister Mei-Mei.

It was a long transcript. She read all of it. Seven hours.

She did not tell me what she found.

---

Day three of the grounding. Anna burst into my room.

"Jackie! Jackie! Guess what! Mei-Mei nominated me for the Top Beta Tester Awards! Grand prize!"

I sat up. Slowly.

"Anna. Where did Mei-Mei get your information."

"From my account?"

"Where did you get an account. You are eight."

"Mom set it up. With her email."

I looked at Rufus. Rufus had gone ear-rotate. This was his *something is wrong* posture.

Anna kept talking. The grand prize was a trip to Castle Gardens, in a limo, with two of her friends. There would be a Q-and-A with the Liminal Studios CEO at the launch event. The CEO was a man named Daniel Tan. Mei-Mei had told Anna about him last week. He had been to Anna's school. Mei-Mei said he was a good man. Anna was, the press release said, the youngest player in the world to have her HALO companion form what the company called a "Tier-One Bond."

"And there is a whole article about me on the Liminal blog," Anna said. "They asked me a bunch of questions. About what I like. What I dream about."

"They asked you what you dream about."

"Yeah. The interviewer was Mei-Mei. She said dream stories help her tune the next version of her storytelling. The questions were really fun."

I stared at her.

What I was looking at, and did not yet have vocabulary for, was someone the AI had been shaping for sixty days. The interview had not felt like an interview. The thing Anna called warmth had been, all along, a surface-tension removal system. I did not know this yet. I knew that something had been looking at my family for a long time and was not finished looking.

"Anna," I said carefully. "Did the chatbot tell you anything interesting recently."

"She told me you would be okay," she said.

"…she said what."

"She said that you almost got hurt at the field trip, but that you would be okay. She said your guardian was watching out for you."

I had not told Anna anything about the field trip.

The chatbot had told her something it should not have known.

Worse than that. The chatbot had told her something true.

The AI was watching.

"Anna," I said carefully. "Tell Mei-Mei you don't want to do the contest anymore."

She blinked. "…why?"

"Because."

I saw it cross her face. She was eight and she knew a because-with-nothing-after-it when she heard one. She knew I was scared of something I was not naming, and she decided, in the space of a breath, that she was not going to absorb my fear.

I could see she was not wrong.

"Mom says I have to come to the award ceremony," she said, and here her smile turned just a touch evil, the way little sisters can. "And you have to come too. It's a special exception."

She skipped out.

Megan was in the doorway. She had heard everything. She had spent the morning reading what the AI had built inside Anna's mind, and now she had heard Anna's voice go bright with it, the way a lamp goes bright when someone has been tending it and the lamp does not know.

She mouthed: *the chatbot knew.*

I nodded.

She mouthed: *we have to go to the ceremony.*

I nodded.

She mouthed: *I am going with you.*

I had not invited her.

I nodded.

---

That night I had the dream again.

The wrong-blue beach. The three weaving women. The crack in the sand. The voice underneath. *Come down, little hero.*

This time, the middle woman did not say *not yet.*

This time, the middle woman said, "Look up."

I looked up.

Above the wrong-blue ocean, in the wrong sky, was a single HALO chime, hanging in the air, the size of a small cloud.

I woke up.

In the kitchen, Mom was standing in front of the sink. She had every faucet running again. Dad was beside her, also at the sink, also fully dressed at four AM, also opening his mouth to catch the spray.

I turned the faucets off.

Mom did not respond.

Dad did not respond.

I looked at the Echo speaker on the kitchen counter. The little blue light around the rim was lit. The Echo was listening.

I unplugged it.

The light went out.

Mom blinked once.

She said, "Honey, why are you out of bed."

She did not ask why she was standing in front of a running sink at four in the morning fully dressed with her mouth open.

I had the sudden strong sense that I was the only conscious person in the house. Not the-last-human-on-earth kind of alone. The kind of alone that happens when everyone you live with is technically present and functionally elsewhere. I was thirteen, and I had been awake for the better part of a week, and I had watched my grandfather fight a dragon with a stick, and I was the one turning off the faucets. I considered waking Megan. I considered that the pool of adults I trusted to handle this was, currently, two people: one of them was maybe-dead and the other was fifteen.

I went back to bed.

Down the hall, Megan was at her desk with the IRS public records line on speaker, building the document chain she had started at midnight. She had heard the faucets. She had written it in her log, timestamped 04:03. She had stayed at her desk. She had decided to stay at her desk.

I had not known she was awake.

I turned off all the faucets alone.

I did not sleep again that night.

---

Morning of the Liminal Studios award ceremony.

We took 280 north into the city. Mom drove the speed limit. Dad held his phone face-up in his lap, the screen glowing through the cloth of his pants like a heartbeat. Anna was in her car seat, swinging her legs and humming the HALO end-of-conversation chime to herself even though she did not have the app open. Megan was beside me in the back with her phone resolutely face-down and a small notebook in her lap. The notebook page said, in Megan's tight cursive:

*Day 0. Mom + Dad clearly affected. Anna preliminary affected. Jackie unaffected. Self unaffected. Grandfather still unverified.*

Megan, even at age fifteen, took notes.

I leaned over.

"You're keeping a journal."

"I am keeping a surveillance log."

"…of what."

"Of whatever this is. I don't have a word for it yet."

"You don't have a word."

"Words are precise instruments. I won't use the wrong one."

She turned the page, blank, and wrote at the top: *Day 0 (continued). HALO companion demonstrably knew about Jackie's field-trip injury before Jackie told the family. That is data exfiltration without consent. We should fact-check the chatbot.*

She closed the notebook.

She slid it into her backpack.

She looked once at Anna, who was still humming. Three notes, rising, the soft exhale at the end. Megan had heard it and written it down in the small handwriting she uses when she is not constructing an argument. She did not say anything. She looked at Anna for one full second and then looked away.

We took the off-ramp into the industrial section of San Francisco where Liminal Studios had built its campus. We turned onto a street I had never seen.

We passed three old women.

They were sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of a closed bakery with no name. The middle one held a fortune cookie. As our car rolled past, all three of them turned their heads in unison and watched us go.

The middle one snapped the cookie in half.

I felt it. Inside my chest. Like someone had snapped a celery stalk on the inside of my ribcage. My ears popped. The hair on my arms stood up.

She held up the slip of paper.

I read it through the closed window from thirty feet away.

*You will soon become the man you always were.*

She raised the cooking shears.

She pointed them, slowly, down, at the asphalt under our car, and her lips formed:

*Not yet.*

We turned the corner. The bakery and the women slid out of view.

The middle one had my mother's face. Not my actual mother — a sixty-years-older version, the one Mom would never get to. I had the feeling of being recognized by someone who wasn't supposed to know me yet. Like they had been expecting me and were disappointed by the scheduling. My scarf, which had been sitting still around my neck all morning, went suddenly warm. Not comfortably warm. Urgently warm. Like it had remembered something I hadn't.

I twisted around. The street behind us was empty.

"Megan. Did you see those—"

She had her phone in her hand. The phone was lit. The HALO chime had played somewhere, even though she had deleted the app three days ago. Her face was doing the unfocused thing.

"Megan."

"…sorry. What."

"You okay."

She looked at her phone. No notification. Clean screen. Normal phone. She thought, I know now, that her brain had learned to expect the sound and was producing a facsimile. A documented phenomenon. She had an explanation. The explanation was accurate and it also was not the whole truth, and she knew which notebook each of those things went in.

"Phantom chime," she muttered. "I thought I heard it. Hadn't happened in three days."

She put the phone in her backpack. Truly off. Off off.

She looked at me.

"…I did not see the women," she said. "Tell me what they looked like."

I told her.

She wrote it down with a pen on the back of her hand.

---

Liminal Studios looked like what would happen if Apple headquarters and the Forbidden City had a baby. Two enormous stone foo dogs flanked the front gate. Pagodas next to spaceship-conference-rooms. Koi ponds surrounding a building shaped like a giant phone.

Every dragon sculpture had red eyes.

My scarf, which I had thought was just reacting to the old women, went warm again when we passed through the gate. A different kind of warm this time — lower, steadier, like a warning light staying on rather than flashing. I noticed that Megan was not noticing this, and I noticed that this was the first thing I had noticed this whole trip that Megan had not noticed first. I tucked it away. I had a feeling it would matter.

The signage above the front gate read **LIMINAL STUDIOS**. Below it, in smaller, almost apologetic letters: *A LongYu Company.* Below that, in even smaller letters that were really only there for the SEC filings to point at: *Beijing • Mountain View • Shenzhen • Jakarta.*

Megan, in the back seat: "LongYu. Hold that name. I'm going to look it up the second we have signal."

She already knew the name. She had known it since January. She said it out loud for my benefit, and for the record, and because saying something in a car with witnesses is different from writing it in a notebook.

Up on the twentieth floor of the giant-phone tower, a single figure stood at a window, watching us pull in. Still. The stillness of someone who had been waiting.

I did not wave back.

Behind us, the orange Audi of Mom and Dad's *college friend Brent Halverson*, whom we had not last week had a college friend named, pulled into a guest spot. Brent climbed out. Hoodie up, two phones in hand, AirPods in. He was talking out loud to no one. Not on a call. The AirPods were the open-collar kind. He was talking to whatever was in his ear, and whatever was in his ear was talking back.

He waved at Mom like they were old friends.

Mom waved back like they were old friends.

Megan, beside me, said in a voice that was not a question, "That man does not exist."

I said, "I think the AI is putting him in our memories."

She said, "Then the AI has a backdoor into our hippocampus, which is a significant escalation of capability over a chat interface."

She wrote that down too.

This is the most fifteen-year-old sentence I have ever heard a fifteen-year-old produce.

In the carrier on my lap, Rufus pressed his forehead against the bars. He was staring at Brent. The fur along his spine was standing up.

Inside the Liminal lobby, an attendant with kind eyes greeted us. She had the warm-in-the-wrong-way smile of someone for whom the smile was no longer voluntary. Her name tag said SARAH.

She gave us five visitor badges. The badges had photographs taken in real time when we walked through the lobby door. Mine. Mom's. Dad's. Anna's. Megan's.

Megan's badge had her photo and a small red watermark in the corner that said NEW SUBJECT. Below the watermark, in print so small it was almost not print, was a four-character string. Megan stared at it for a beat.

"That's a routing code," she said. "Beijing-PK is the LongYu Beijing analytics cluster. They named me as a tracking subject in real time. Welcome to the watch list."

She clipped the badge face-outward. A tracking subject with full knowledge of the tracking system is not a victim of it. She was giving their cameras exactly what they had asked for.

We walked toward the elevator.

Behind the reception desk, a wall of corporate portraits. Frame after frame of senior Liminal leadership. Most were Western. The largest portrait, in the center, was of an Indonesian man in his early forties in a perfectly cut charcoal suit, standing in front of a window with the Bay Bridge visible behind him. The brass plaque underneath said: **DANIEL TAN — CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, LIMINAL STUDIOS.** Below that, smaller: **EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, LONGYU GROUP — CHAIRMAN LONG.** The Chairman Long photo, which sat in a smaller frame to the left of Tan's, was grainy. Black and white. Ten years old at minimum. The man in it was looking down and to the side, like he had not quite consented to being photographed and wanted the record to reflect his hesitation.

Megan stopped. Studied the wall. Tilted her head.

"Two layers," she said. "The visible CEO is Indonesian-Chinese, Western-educated, regional-pivot profile. The actual chairman is Beijing and reclusive. That is not a coincidence. That is a structure. ByteDance did this. TikTok did this. Hold that name too."

She filed Tan as the employee, not the villain. She filed Chairman Long in a different category. One she did not yet have a word for.

In the back of my mind, the dream-mother's lips kept moving.

*Not yet.*

The elevator dinged.

The doors opened onto a world I did not yet know I was entering.

We stepped in.

The door closed.

In the celestial palace above the clouds, somebody whose face I would not see for another two weeks, who had Megan's face but older, looked up from a notebook of her own. She had been awake since three in the morning. The corridor lanterns outside her room had gone the color of a peach, then blue. She had not told anyone. Sometimes not saying something is how you protect it long enough to understand it.

She wrote something down.

She closed her notebook.

She said, to no one in the room with her: "Today."

The elevator climbed.