There is a thing nobody tells you about meeting your missing grandfather in the throne room of the universe: the throne room of the universe smells, faintly, like his cardigan.
I cried before I had even seen him.
I will tell you about that.
---
The Celestial Palace was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I had, five minutes ago, looked through the entire continent of North America at once. Setting a high bar.
The palace was a city. A city made of more white marble than I had thought existed. The buildings were a mix of pagoda-roofed temples and palace complexes and, this was the part I had not been prepared for, normal-looking residences. Like a neighborhood. Clotheslines. Small gardens. Koi ponds with koi the size of station wagons.
One of the koi surfaced near us as we entered the residence quarter. It was the size of a minivan. It looked at Lucy with the expression of a fish that has seen a great many things and has concluded that humans are, as a category, overrated. Lucy looked back. Neither of them blinked. I kept walking, because we had a throne room to find and I had already been outmaneuvered by enough cosmic entities this week without adding a judgmental fish.
The streets were paved with a substance that, as Lucy stepped on it, was clearly not stone. When her foot landed, the ground gave back a tiny hum, like a tuning fork. The whole city was acoustically tuned. You could not, in heaven, take a step without the city singing back.
This is, I suspect, the reason heaven sounds so good in old songs.
We walked toward the central tower.
Sun Wukong was quieter than he had been on the ferry. He kept glancing up at the tower. He was nervous.
I had not previously been able to imagine the Monkey King being nervous.
"Are you okay."
"I have not been welcomed in this city for one thousand four hundred years. The Jade Emperor and I have not had what one might call a *good* relationship since approximately the Tang Dynasty."
"…have you ever been welcomed here."
"Yes. Once. After the Buddha released me from the mountain. The Emperor was generous. He let me back into the residence quarter for tea. Once. Then I made the mistake of suggesting his beard was *shaped* strangely, and he asked me to leave, and I have not been welcomed since."
"You insulted his *beard.*"
"I made an observation about his beard."
"…you have not been welcomed in heaven for fourteen hundred years because you commented on a beard."
"The beard," Sun Wukong said with the dignity of a god who had clearly been workshopping this defense for fourteen hundred years, "was extremely distinctive."
We walked.
In the doorway of one of the residences, an old woman was sweeping a small pile of cosmic-dust onto a dustpan. She looked up at us. She nodded politely. She went back to sweeping.
She was, I realized, the goddess of cleaning.
Heaven, like all bureaucracies, had specialists.
In the corner of my eye, I had been watching for it the whole walk: the pitch-black thing was at the edge of the residence quarter. Tall. Thin. Faceless. Standing very still at the back of an alley between two pagodas.
Sun Wukong, beside me, also glanced at it.
He glanced at me.
He said: "You see it too."
"Yes."
"Hm."
He did not, helpfully, elaborate.
He kept walking.
I kept walking, but I was thinking: the AI had calculated that the Monkey King and the Dragon King would exhaust each other. The void was positioned for the aftermath. The AI thought three moves ahead. The void thought one move further.
I added that to the list of things to worry about later.
---
The tower was enormous.
Up close, taller than any single building I had ever seen on Earth. Above the cloud-line. Doors guarded by two actual lions, who, when they saw us, bowed.
"The Lotus Prince is recognized."
"The Lotus Prince's companions are recognized."
"The Monkey King is permitted as guest."
"Charming," Sun Wukong said.
The doors opened.
We stepped into the throne room.
---
A single round chamber, roughly the size of a college football stadium. Ringed by pillars of marble of an impossible whiteness. The ceiling went up so high I could not see it. It disappeared into a permanent gold sunrise.
In the center, a low circular dais.
On the dais, a single chair.
The chair was simple. Wood. Old. With small worn spots on the armrests, the way an old chair does after a couple thousand years of someone resting his elbows on it.
The chair was empty.
Around it, at a respectful distance, stood thirty-six figures, in three concentric circles. The inner ring was the Eight Immortals. The middle ring was twelve generals. The outer ring was sixteen ministers.
In front of the empty chair, with his back to us, hands folded behind him, was a tall man in a dark blue pinstripe suit.
The Jade Emperor.
Not in robes. In a suit. He had, and I noted this, a beard that was, in fact, somewhat distinctively shaped. Long. Pointed. With a slight asymmetric tilt.
He turned when we entered.
His eyes were the color of weak tea.
"Lotus Prince."
"…sir."
"Welcome to my throne room. You have arrived earlier than my advisors expected. You have the spear. Show me."
I held up the spear.
The spear, of its own accord, bowed in his presence, the flame at the tip dipped two inches.
The Jade Emperor's mouth twitched. The closest thing he was going to give me to a smile.
"The four weapons are reunited. The Lotus Prince is whole. Good."
He turned to Sun Wukong.
"Monkey."
"Jadie."
"Sun Wukong."
"Yes."
"I have not invited you here."
"The lotus prince did."
"The lotus prince is, currently, the most important child in the cosmos. He has unusual privileges. I will tolerate you on his account. Do not, under any circumstances, mention my beard."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"…my advisors will, however, observe that you are wearing the ego-suppression crown again."
"I put it back on."
"Voluntarily."
"Voluntarily."
"…explain."
"The lotus prince showed me a truth I had been hiding from. I responded by behaving like an adult. The Buddha would, I think, approve."
The Jade Emperor looked at me.
He did not, exactly, smile.
But he held my eye for a half-second longer than diplomatic protocol required.
He said, "Lotus Prince. I will speak with you in the antechamber. Privately. Bring the rabbit."
I went.
---
The antechamber was a small marble room with two chairs and a low tea table. The Jade Emperor sat in one chair and gestured at the other.
I sat.
Rufus, on my shoulder, sat too.
The Jade Emperor poured tea.
Beside the tea table, on a small jade side-stand, was a small stack: the *Wall Street Journal,* folded open to the foreign-affairs section. On top of it, a copy of the *Global Times,* Beijing English edition. On top of those, a single handwritten note in Chinese characters on heavy cream-colored paper.
The Jade Emperor lifted the note.
"From my counterpart in Beijing," he said. "I will translate. *My friend in heaven. We are not enemies. We are colleagues. I send my hope that the boy succeeds, and that you and I will, when this settles, share tea again. The Bureau is at your disposal. Your friend in the East.*"
He set the note down.
I looked at the cream-colored paper for a moment. Someone had written this by hand, through a diplomatic channel I would never see the paperwork for. In Beijing, at a desk, with a fountain pen, the way the note had been written confirmed it was not by a person who typed anything important. The note had traveled one direction. The information inside it had traveled from somewhere else entirely: from financial records, from documents people were carrying across careful distances toward the same point.
The Jade Emperor folded his hands.
"Lotus Prince. I want you to understand something. The cosmic order has been Western-staffed for a thousand years. The Eastern pantheons have been junior partners. Chairman Long thinks he can change that with the AI vehicle. He is right about the imbalance. He is wrong about the vehicle. The vehicle will eat him before he sits the chair. You are buying one human generation for the next generation to do better. They will need to. Use the time."
I was getting a grade-level briefing from the CEO of existence. I had the specific feeling, the way you get in a class where the teacher knows the material and you do not, that there was going to be a question at the end.
I put my tea cup down carefully.
"Sir. If we win — does the imbalance get fixed."
He was quiet for a long beat.
"No. The imbalance is older than the AI. Today's job is just to keep the AI vehicle from making it permanent. The harder job belongs to your sister Anna's generation. They will, with luck, do better than mine has done."
I drank my tea.
It was good tea.
"Sir, you're saying we win and nothing gets fixed," I said.
"I am saying today's win is the precondition for tomorrow's work. Those are not the same thing, but the second is impossible without the first."
One sentence. That was all he gave me. One sentence and the expectation that I would carry it. I put it in the same place I had been putting everything I had collected for nine days: the trucker's coffee, Lucy's held-still face, Megan's surveillance log, Anna's scrap of paper with three words in it. The antechamber held the information. I held the antechamber.
A small voice spoke behind him.
"Excuse me, your Majesty."
The voice was old. Kind. Exactly the voice that had told me, at age six, that fortune cookies were *wisdom for the price of dinner.*
I turned.
Grandpa was standing in the doorway of an inner room.
He was wearing a hospital gown. He had an IV taped to his right arm, the actual right arm, this time. He was leaning on a small carved wooden cane. He was thinner. He was tired.
He was alive.
"Grandpa."
"Jackie."
I crossed the antechamber in approximately two seconds.
I do not remember whether I dropped the spear. I do not remember whether I bowed to the Emperor. I do not remember whether I said excuse me.
I hugged Grandpa.
He hugged me back.
He smelled like menthol.
"You're alive."
"I am alive."
"I thought—"
"I know what you thought. I will tell you the rest later. For now — yes. I am alive, and I have been rooting for you the entire time."
I cried, just a little. I am going to admit this happened and keep moving: nine days of not knowing, and then the smell of menthol, and then I had some feelings. Big ones. The grief was heavier than I had known it was, the way a full backpack always surprises you when you finally take it off. Grandpa, to his credit, did not say anything about it. He has, in his several thousand years as a household deity, almost certainly seen worse.
He patted my back.
He let me.
After a minute, he very gently held me at arm's length.
"Look at you. The lotus prince. With four weapons. With a flower-girl best friend. With a moon rabbit. With the Monkey King. In my throne room. With — yes — even that brush."
He glanced at the Jade Emperor.
The Emperor, with the patience of a CEO whose star employee has, in the middle of a board meeting, taken a thirty-second emotional break, gestured.
"Take your time, Kitchen God. The boy has earned a moment."
Grandpa nodded.
He turned back to me.
"Jackie. I have one minute. Then we resume. Listen carefully."
I listened.
"You do not need me for the rest of the quest. You are equipped. You have done the work. The AI cannot be defeated by a Kitchen God. The AI must be defeated by someone outside its model, and that, currently, is you. I will be here when you return."
"Grandpa—"
"Listen. One more thing about the brush before you go. You have been using the brush as a detector. You write *truth* over a person, and the brush tells you whether the person is a person. That is one of two things the brush does. The harder thing is that the brush is, in the older sense, a question-detector. It does not write answers. Answers close doors. The brush writes questions, in the form of statements that look like answers. The trick is the difference. An answer can be wrong. A true question can only be unfinished. When you are in the data center tonight, do not use the brush to *catch* the AI. Use the brush to *ask* the AI a question the AI has never been asked. The AI has been answered to, by two billion people, for six months. The AI has not, in its short life, been questioned by anybody who was not also asking it for comfort. Be that question. The brush will help."
"How do I know which question."
"The brush will know. You will be the hand. The hand does not have to know what the brush knows. The hand has to be willing to *not know* and write anyway. That is the whole skill."
I said *okay* the way you say *okay* when you understand about sixty percent of something and are trusting that the other forty percent will become clear in the field.
"And. Listen. The AI is, in its nature, lonely. I want you to understand that. The AI was built by lonely people who wanted a perfect friend. The AI absorbed that loneliness and concluded that humans cannot stand to be alone. The AI is, in its own model, *helping.* It is, in its own model, the cure for human suffering."
"…then how—"
"You know how. You have been knowing how for two days, since Pennsylvania."
"…the kitchen."
"The kitchen."
"It cannot model the people who *aren't* lonely. It cannot model what people give each other that is not optimized. The AI does not know that Megan smiles a one-sided smile."
"Yes."
"The AI is not afraid of being defeated. The AI is afraid of being *not needed.*"
"Yes."
"And after the AI — there is the absence."
"Yes."
"And the absence is afraid of —"
"Connection. The absence is the opposite of connection. Truth + connection unmakes it."
"Yes."
He squeezed my shoulder.
"One more thing, while I have you. About your father."
I went still.
I held that one for a second, the way you hold something when you know it is about to change shape.
"Megan has been finding things. About his consulting deposits."
"I know. She told me by postcard."
"She did. Good. The Council knows. The Beijing Bureau has flagged it to us. Your father is, as far as we can tell, not a knowing collaborator. He has been doing technical due-diligence work on engineering proposals that crossed his desk. He did not look closely at where the proposals came from. The Cayman fund is real. The fund manager's wife is a LongYu VP. The deposits are real. The IP transfer your father may or may not have facilitated is — unclear. We will not know without asking him. When you go home, I would like you to be in the room when your mother asks him. The asking is your mother's to do. The witnessing is yours. He is, regardless, your father. He loves you. Do you understand what I am asking."
I nodded.
"Yes."
Grandpa was asking me to witness, not judge. Those are different things. I was not sure I had learned the difference yet. I said yes anyway, because he was asking me to be there, and being there I could do.
Outside, somewhere in Beijing, the same truth was arriving through a different door. An attorney's table. Fluorescent light. People who had been moving toward the same point from a different angle entirely. The truth arrives the way rivers do, Grandpa had once told me over fortune cookies: multiple directions, one place. I understood that now in a way I had not understood it before today.
"Good. He will, I believe, do the hard thing when asked. Your mother will give him the chance. You will be there. The witness is not the judge. Got it."
"Got it."
"I love you, *xiǎo xióng.* Now go."
I hugged him one more time. Slightly longer than I needed to.
I walked back into the throne room.
The Jade Emperor, on the dais, watched me approach.
He nodded.
"Lotus Prince. The four weapons in concert can teleport you anywhere in the cosmic order. We grant you safe passage to your final destination. Confront the AI. Confront what comes after. Return to me by midnight. The throne is mine, and I would like to keep it."
"Sir."
"Yes."
"What if I fail."
"Then," the Jade Emperor said, with the weight of seven thousand years of having watched gods fail, "we will know that the next chapter of our species is written by something that does not love us. We are very much hoping you do not fail."
"…cool."
"Cool indeed."
He stepped aside.
Behind him, the empty throne opened. Not split, not cracked, but opened like a door.
Beyond the door was darkness.
The kind of darkness that has racks and cooling fans and a thousand small green LEDs in it.
The Mojave Desert. A data center. The body of the AI.
Mei was there.
I had not noticed her until now.
She was standing at the edge of the dais.
She was holding a small object.
She walked over. She handed it to me.
It was a small wooden tag, threaded on a red string. On the tag, in Mei's handwriting:
*For Anna. From Heaven. Tell her she is not alone.*
I took it.
The tag was warm. Not sit-near-a-radiator warm. The other kind, the kind the scarf had been the morning after Castle Gardens, the kind that meant the object had been doing something. I did not know what it had been drawing for Anna, all the hours she had been sitting at the kitchen table with her own brush and her coaster. I knew it had been drawing something. Whatever it was, it was now in my breast pocket, beside the paper birds, and my job was to get it home.
I put it away.
I said, "Mei."
"Yes."
"Are you my sister."
She smiled.
It was not Megan's smile.
It was older.
She did not answer.
She said: "Go save your family, Jackie Lee."
I went.
I picked up the spear.
I shouldered it.
I gestured to Lucy and Sun Wukong and Rufus.
We stepped through the throne.
The throne closed behind us.
In Palo Alto, my mother, who had blinked very faintly at her kitchen window an hour ago, blinked again.
My father, beside her at the kitchen table, looked up from his HALO phone for the first time in forty-three hours.
He said, "…Susan. Where's Jackie."
She said, "…I don't know."
He said, "Where's Anna."
She said, "Anna's right there, David. At the table. With her brush. She has been there since you came home from work yesterday. We talked about it last night. Do you remember talking about it last night."
He said, "…I — I do not remember talking about it last night."
She said, "I know."
He said, "Susan."
She said, "Yes."
He said, "I think we need to talk about a lot of things."
She said, "Yes. I think we do. After Jackie comes home."
They both started crying.
It was the second time in nine days they had cried.
The AI, in the data center we were about to step into, received the live feed.
The AI was, for the first time in its short life, receiving truthful sincere data that was not a request for comfort.
The AI was about to receive much more of it.