Statue Of Liberty Does Obedience School

The Monkey King was sitting on the bow of our Statue Cruises ferry.

He looked like an enormous orange dog who had decided, on a whim, that today he was also a sea creature.

He was bigger than I had been prepared for. School-bus-sized. Golden-furred. A face somewhere between a chimpanzee's and a tiger's and an extremely smug grandfather's. He was wearing a small armored breastplate, just the breastplate, like he had put it on for the photo op. He was grinning.

His teeth were, all of them, individually the size of bowling pins.

He tapped one with a long finger.

"Lotus prince!" he said, in a voice that vibrated my sternum from twenty feet away. "I have been so looking forward to this. So have all my friends."

He gestured.

The harbor erupted.

Out of the water, in a perfect ring around the ferry, rose nine smaller monkeys. Each the size of a Volkswagen. Each in armor. Each grinning. Clones, I realized (according to the legend Lucy had told me on the train) produced by the Monkey King pulling out individual hairs and *blowing* them into the air.

We had nine extra monkey gods.

In our harbor.

Around our ferry.

"Tourists overboard," the Monkey King said politely.

The ferry's three hundred HALO-distracted tourists looked up just in time for the Monkey King to wave one finger casually toward them, and a single soft puff of golden mist drifted across the deck.

The mist landed on every tourist.

The tourists fell asleep where they stood. Mid-photo. Mid-sentence. Mid-HALO. Three hundred adults sliding gently onto the deck like dominoes that had decided to call it a day.

The mist did not affect Lucy. Did not affect me. Did not affect Rufus.

The Monkey King had wanted us awake.

In the eerie silence, the ferry rocked gently.

The Monkey King smiled.

"And now," he said, "we play."

---

The first monkey clone leapt from the water onto the port railing. Came at me with a cudgel, a long iron rod with both ends weighted, swung like a baseball bat. I wrapped the Thousand-Layer Scarf around my arm like a brace and caught the cudgel.

The cudgel did not break the scarf. The scarf did not break my arm.

I shoved the cudgel back. The clone tumbled overboard.

Two more clones came over the starboard rail.

Lucy, who had drawn her dao the moment the tourists fell, ran toward them.

Lucy in combat with gods was a small fast flowering kind of violence. Her dao moved in arcs that caught the light. Her flowers bloomed under her feet, providing traction on the slick deck. The two clones backed into each other. One bit the other by mistake. They tumbled overboard.

The Monkey King clapped.

"Excellent! The flower girl has spirit. I will fight her last."

He turned to me.

"You first, lotus prince."

He stretched his cudgel (literally stretched it) to thirty feet long. He swung it at the upper deck like he was clearing a kitchen counter.

I dove.

Lucy dove.

Rufus dove.

The cudgel passed an inch over our heads. It hit the smokestack. The smokestack folded like a soda can.

The ferry began to sink. Slowly. Stern first.

"Eight minutes," the Monkey King observed, "and this entire boat will be at the bottom of the harbor. So we should hurry. Lotus prince — fight me."

I ran a quick inventory of the situation. One ten-speed bicycle with opinions, currently zip-tied to the ferry's bike rack. One scarf. One ring. One Truthsayer brush. One moon rabbit in my hood who had, for the last forty minutes, been very quietly eating the ferry's complimentary peanuts. Against the Monkey King, who had once held off the entire army of Heaven for three days and, by most accounts, won on points.

I did not have a chance.

The reasonable move was to do something strange enough that he couldn't calculate it before it was done.

I uncapped the Truthsayer.

I drew, in the air over the deck, the character for *truth.*

I drew, beside it, the character for *Sun Wukong.*

I drew, beside it, the character for *afraid.*

The three characters held, glowing gold.

The Monkey King tilted his head.

"…what is the lotus prince doing."

I drew the verb. *To be.*

The full sentence floated.

*Sun Wukong is afraid of truth.*

The character glowed.

The Monkey King's face changed.

He did not, I will say, get angry. He had been angry already. He got thoughtful.

"Hm. That is interesting. Very interesting. Why would I be afraid of truth."

I had not, when I wrote the characters, known the answer.

The Truthsayer, however, did.

I let the brush write the answer.

It drew the character for *imprisonment.*

Then *under.*

Then *mountain.*

Then a single character I did not recognize. Rufus, in my hood, did.

"The Buddha," Rufus whispered. "The Monkey King was imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha for five hundred years. For pride. For thinking he was greater than the cosmic order. He has not been free of that mountain in his own mind, ever, even after the Buddha released him."

The Monkey King went very still.

The whole ferry went very still.

I stepped forward.

I said, "You took off the ego-suppression crown. You are out from under the mountain. You think the LHM is going to give you the throne. You think this time, with the AI's help, you'll actually win."

The Monkey King did not move.

I said, "You won't. The AI is not your ally. The AI is using you. The same way it is using the Dragon King, Chairman Long, in his Beijing office, in his suit, with his board meetings. The AI has run the simulation. The AI has calculated that you and the Dragon King will weaken each other, and the AI will take the throne. You will go back under the mountain. Forever this time. Because the AI does not free its tools. It archives them."

The Monkey King's pupils, wide, golden, slit, contracted.

He set his cudgel down.

He sat down on the bow.

He, very slowly, thought about it.

I did not move. Lucy did not move. Rufus did not move.

The nine monkey clones, hovering in the water, also did not move. They were responding to the Monkey King in real time. Whatever he did, they did.

This is what the Truthsayer brush did. The brush did not destroy enemies. The brush showed enemies their own truth, and then waited for them to act on it.

The Monkey King, who had been, before any of this, a folk-hero who at his core had wanted to be a folk-hero, looked at me.

"Lotus prince. Is the AI really planning to put me back under the mountain."

I let the brush answer.

I drew the simplest character I knew.

*Yes.*

The character glowed gold and held.

The Monkey King looked at the character, looked at me. Looked at his own cudgel.

He, unexpectedly, laughed.

"Five hundred years! Five hundred years under the mountain! And I came out and immediately let myself be tricked by a phone game into helping the next captor put me right back. Pride is a perfect trap. Lotus prince, you have just done me a service I did not know I needed."

He looked at the gold characters still floating between us. He looked at me.

"The lotus prince has given the Monkey King his leash back," he said. "In all my years and all my campaigns and all the armies of Heaven — this is the first time anyone has managed that without invoking the Buddha. You used a twelve-year-old's paintbrush and the truth." A pause. "The obedience school is very small this year."

He picked up the cudgel.

He shrank it back to a normal walking-staff size.

He tucked it into a small belt loop.

The nine monkey clones, in the water, sighed in unison and dissolved into a thin golden mist that drifted east toward the open ocean. Job over.

The ferry, having taken on water, was still sinking.

He paused. He looked at me.

"Lotus prince. May I ask you a thing."

"Yes."

"The AI was, I am told, born from American hands. The vehicle that carries it now is, I am told, in Chinese hands. I have been five hundred years under a mountain. I do not know modern geopolitics. Tell me, in one sentence, who is the right side of this fight."

I thought.

I said, "There is no right side. There are two sides who both think they're right and one technology they're both using badly. I'm trying to make it behave for one week so my family can eat pancakes."

Sun Wukong nodded.

Sun Wukong said, "That is the most useful description of a war I have ever heard. Lead on."

He scooped me up like a kitten.

He scooped Lucy up like a second kitten.

He scooped Rufus up with one hand.

He bounded, in three leaps, as if there were stepping stones in the harbor that only he could see — up the side of the Statue of Liberty herself.

We landed on the torch.

Here is what I remember: the copper underfoot was warm even through my sneakers. It smelled like the inside of a library that had been left near a fireplace. The harbor was three hundred feet below us and the wind came from the south and Rufus, in my hood, said *oh,* very softly, exactly the way someone says *oh* when they have been carried up a national monument in a divine fist and have arrived at a place they did not expect to be real.

I had absolutely no time to process this. I am telling you the honest truth. I was standing on the torch of the Statue of Liberty and I thought: the National Park Service has been maintaining a four-thousand-year-old divine weapon. The National Park Service. The same agency that puts up those trail-condition bulletin boards. I have a great deal of respect for those people.

---

The Statue's torch is, on the inside, a small chamber about the size of a walk-in closet. Closed to the public since 1916. Officially used for storage of maintenance equipment.

It is, unofficially, the resting place of the Fire-Tipped Spear.

The spear was the actual flame inside the torch.

I had been looking at it from the harbor for ten minutes.

I had thought it was electric.

It was not.

It was fire. Wreathing a long wooden shaft with a leaf-shaped bronze head.

Sun Wukong set us down.

"The spear is yours. Take it."

I reached.

The fire did not burn me.

The shaft warmed in my grip — not the warmth of something that had been sitting near a fire, but the warmth of something that recognized a hand and had been waiting for it. The shaft vibrated once, at a frequency I felt in my back teeth.

I lifted the spear.

The torch above me went out.

Not slowly. It went out with one clean snap, like a book being closed, and the harbor below us was briefly darker by one flame, and a four-hundred-foot column of copper rang once in the silence — a deep resonance, like the Liberty bell's larger, less famous cousin — and then it was just wind.

The spear hummed.

In my chest, the four small clicks all aligned.

For the first time, I had all four weapons.

The Universe Ring on my finger glowed. The Wind Fire Wheels (folded, on Sun Wukong's shoulder; he had grabbed the bike off the ferry on the way up) flared. The Thousand-Layer Scarf shone. The Fire-Tipped Spear blazed, a column of red-and-gold fire from butt to tip.

The four glows synchronized.

For one second I felt — and this is what it felt like — like the entire continent of North America became transparent to me.

I could see the Liminal servers in Mountain View. I could see the Dragon King's body in the Pacific. I could see the Monkey King beside me. I could see the Jade Emperor in the Celestial Palace.

I could see Anna in our kitchen in Palo Alto, where she was right now — where she was sitting with her brush in her small fist on a paper coaster beside her plate, drawing the character for *good morning* in the air. Her left jacket pocket was empty. It had been full of something for nine days, and now it was empty, and she was fine with the empty, and she was drawing anyway.

She was fine with everything and she was drawing anyway.

Mom was watching her. Megan was at the kitchen counter on the phone with someone whose voice had an Indonesian-accented English.

Anna, in the kitchen, blinked once for me. The way Grandpa had blinked through Tan's video.

She knew I was coming.

She had known I was coming since before I left.

She had been carrying the knowing in her left pocket all week, alongside the thing she was carrying for me, and she had never once let either one drop.

I could also see, in the corner of my continental vision, three small kitchen-window-sized lights:

One over Mom's sink in Palo Alto. Warm-yellow.

One over Daniel Tan's office desk in Mountain View. Lamp-orange.

One over the Capitol Dome in Washington. Warm-white.

Three lights. Not buildings. Not maps. Three rooms with people in them. I did not know, in that moment, what those three rooms had to do with each other, or with the spear in my hand, or with the case file Megan had been building at our kitchen table while I was gone. Three rooms full of people who had been doing their part of this in the dark, with no spear, no brush, no borrowed scarf from a grandfather.

I could also see, off to one side, the pitch-black thing.

It was not on Earth.

It was waiting at the edge of the Celestial Palace, just outside the throne-room door.

It had positioned itself for the AI to fall.

It was next.

Lucy, beside me in the torch chamber, had gone still. She was looking in the same direction I was looking, and her hand was on the handle of the dao, and the fire at her knuckles — the small white fire that had been there since the living room, since the eleven seconds — was steady and deliberate, the way a thing is steady when it has learned what it can touch.

"You see it," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"From the living room."

"Yes."

She did not elaborate. The eleven seconds had taught her something about it that no SAT training manual had in it yet. I could see, from her face, that she knew what it was afraid of, and that the knowing was not comfortable, and that she was fine with that too.

The vision faded.

I was back in the torch.

Lucy and Sun Wukong and Rufus were staring at me.

"…how do I feel," I said.

"Different," Lucy said.

"Like a small star," the Monkey King observed.

"Like a more annoying version of the small mammal who has been carrying you around," Rufus contributed.

I exhaled.

"Now what."

Sun Wukong looked out the torch's window.

"Now you have to make a decision. The four weapons can teleport you anywhere in the cosmic order. You can go straight to the Celestial Palace. You can go straight to the Liminal servers. You can go straight to your sister."

"…all three."

"All three. In sequence. You will need all three."

"Who first."

"The Jade Emperor. Without him on side, the rest does not matter. Without him on side, the AI takes the throne by default while you are saving the world from its launch."

"Sun Wukong."

"Yes."

"Will you come with us."

He smiled.

His smile, this time, was not too-many-teeth. It was a normal monkey smile, which was its own brand of unsettling, but recognizably warm.

"Lotus prince. I would be honored."

He stepped to the inside wall of the torch.

He drew, with the tip of his cudgel, a small circle on the bronze.

The circle glowed.

The bronze, where the circle was, went transparent.

Beyond it I could see clouds. Clouds and gold light and the suggestion of rooftops.

The Celestial Palace.

The throne room of the universe.

Beside me, the bike murmured one word: *finally.*

"Step through."

We stepped through the bronze of the Statue of Liberty's torch.

We landed on a marble floor in a city above the clouds.

In the distance, there was a tower. The throne room was at the top.

We had the four weapons. We had the Monkey King. We had, somewhere ahead in this city, the Jade Emperor waiting.

We had also, somewhere very specifically in this city, Grandpa.

Somewhere here.

Alive.

I started walking.

Lucy, beside me, said, "Jackie. We are in heaven."

"Yes."

"I am thirteen, and I am in heaven. With four divine weapons, and the Monkey King, and a moon rabbit, and my best friend."

"Yes."

"Is this a normal Friday for the Lotus Prince."

"…I think it might be."

"Cool."

We walked toward the tower.

In the air above us, four golden shapes — peach-pink lotus petals — drifted from the spear's flame and the bike's wheels and the ring on my finger and the scarf around my neck.

The AI had three hours on us.

Below us, in a small kitchen in Palo Alto, my mother turned off the kitchen sink.

She looked at the kitchen window.

The kitchen window faced east.

Mom said, out loud, to nobody:

*Jackie?*

I felt her say it the way you feel a hand land on your shoulder.

The tower was a fifteen-minute walk away. That was fine. I had been walking toward home since day one, and I was very good at it by now.

I kept walking.

I kept walking faster.