Content warning: Discussion of self-harm.

Julian locked his bedroom door and closed the blinds.

He sat down in front of his birthday gift — a 32-inch 4K monitor. He’d lied and told his parents he wanted it for gaming.

He opened IRC, logged into his alt account, and checked the Altiora server. There were thirteen new posts in #photos. His mouse hovered over the channel, but he didn’t let himself click.

Don’t indulge your instincts. Use the ritual, even where it’s safe.

Julian took three long breaths: in through the nose, out through the mouth. He thought about the beta blockers under his mattress — no. Not today. For his first run with the new equipment, he’d go all-out.

Headphones on. Volume up, but not so loud he couldn’t hear a knock. Play ambient mountain sounds. Open #photos.

Credit: Kelly Repreza

Julian’s toes curled. His mouth was dry. His heart sped up. He leaned in close to the screen; on the new monitor, his peripheral vision vanished. He was on the mountain. He was sitting on that cliff. A few inches forward, and he would feel gravity take him.

He closed his eyes and imagined the valley floor rushing toward him, wind roaring, stomach flipping, no choices to make, no future, only the fall and one moment when the great crushing force of nature would swat him like a bug—

Julian released a quiet moan. No one else heard.

God made the world, and he made it full of mountains. These were the crucibles — where Satan tempted Jesus and walked away snarling, where Moses looked down from Sinai and felt the call of the void but shook it off to carry the Commandments. They were a constant reminder that God gave humans a choice — a few moments of ecstasy or eternal salvation. And they were a source of pride for all those who kept themselves close to the ground.

Heights were a test for every man, or at least 95% of them. Few had the twisted brain chemistry that allowed someone to look down from on high and walk away. A few bold science fiction writers imagined worlds where the call had been “cured”, and humans built vast cities of gleaming metal or floating platforms above the clouds, lethal drops as far as the eye could see.

Julian’s school district banned those books. He’d read through bootlegs, and they gave him a few small jolts, but without photos it just wasn’t the same. (Some people tried to generate images, but the better AIs would kick you off just for suggesting it.)

He wasn’t looking for death. If someone wanted to fall, they’d find a way. No buildings more than three stories tall, nets below every bridge — didn’t matter. There were heights everywhere for those with eyes to see; you could find a forest and climb a tree.

But that was a total waste, when God made the mountains. Why fall sixty feet onto the forest floor when you could enter the void? Enjoy eight, nine, ten seconds of ecstasy?

And why make a single jump, when you could imagine it a thousand times instead? He wasn’t an animal; he could satisfy his lizard brain and still have a great life. (On his alt account, Julian claimed not to believe in Hell — but that was one more reason to be safe.)

He knew his obsession wasn’t normal. Billions of people on Earth, and only a few million fell each year. Only a tiny fraction of those hung around in places like Altiora, feeling the thrill without following through. But even if it was a weird thing to do, it was healthier than the alternative.

Why look at a thousand photos when there were ways to get so much closer?

Julian snuck out at 3:00 am and got into the van. He’d started taking long morning runs before his lifeguard shifts; his parents were used to waking up and finding him gone. They didn’t know he’d swapped shifts today.

The van drove out of town and down I-24. Sean the driver and his two friends were callproof; at the checkpoint, they flashed the stickers on their licenses and the mountain guards waved them through. Julian hid under a blanket on the floor.

They reached the end of the road. There were no parking lots out here. Camping on Lookout Mountain required you to be in the lucky 5% or take a bunch of psych exams and wait a year for your license. Few bothered; there were plenty of nicer places to set up a tent, places without armed guards who would throw you in prison if they caught you taking drop photos.

On IRC, Sean had told Julian not to worry about prison; he knew this mountain well. No one was around this time of year. As heights went, it wasn’t high-risk enough to get attention from the rare callproof rangers who could patrol it without dying. Julian believed him; they were all in this together.

An hour into the hike, he was grateful for the morning runs. No one had ever carved a real trail here, and they weren’t even halfway up. They kept to the deep woods. Sean, Mary, and Omar led the way, headlamps shining, keeping him away from rhododendron thickets and accidental views of the valley. It wasn’t so different from his old Boy Scout walks, aside from the darkness — and the elevation, which felt like it was trying to drag him back down the mountain, making his calves and thighs and lungs burn with effort.

The others weren’t struggling; they had better shoes and more experience. They exchanged playful insults and gossiped about their classmates. They were all at UTC, part of a callproof club that hiked regularly and sometimes took money from people like Julian who wanted a glimpse of that life. He was breathing too hard to talk much, and he wouldn’t have known what to say; he didn’t want to sound like the earthbound high schooler he was.

The elevation got a little better near the top. When they stopped in a clearing, Julian pulled out his beta blockers. He thought about it for a minute, as the others unpacked the equipment.

No. You spent your entire summer salary to be here. It may be the only chance.

“Go all-out,” he murmured, stuffing the pills back into his pocket.

“What?” called Omar.

“Nothing!”

“We’re ready,” said Sean. “Come over here.”

They put a harness on him and tied a rope around it. Julian recognized the harness — it was for rock climbing. (The sport was only legal in a few states, but he’d seen videos on Altiora.) Then they gave him a stiff helmet to wear. And finally, handcuffs, which would keep his arms locked in front so he couldn’t untie the rope.

“Tell me what’s going to happen next,” said Sean.

“Right before we crest the ridge, you’ll tell me to stop.”

“Good. And then?”

“You guys will hold me while Mary sets the anchor and loops me in.”

“Right. And you will do what?”

“Nothing. I’ll stay still. You can trust me.”

“If you do anything surprising, what will we do?”

“Drag me down the mountain until I calm down.”

“Right. Greg vouched for you, so I don’t expect any of this to happen, but we are deadly serious.”

“Yes sir.”

Sean’s brow furrowed. Omar chuckled. Why did I say “sir”?

“I mean, yes. I’m also serious.”

“Good.”

They walked another hundred yards or so. Sean and Omar helped Julian keep his footing, since he couldn’t use his arms to balance. Mary was already at the top with the anchor.

The trees were sparser up here, and the sky had been lightening over the last hour. Just as Sean and Omar pulled him to a stop, Julian saw clouds glowing orange on the horizon. He felt his heart racing, and it was more than just the hike. He took deep breaths, nose in, mouth out.

Mary returned, took the rope, and carried it up to one of the last big trees. Julian saw metal glinting as she tied the rope to the anchor. It took her a long time to finish the knot.

“Ready!” she shouted, finally. 

“Okay!” Sean shouted back. 

He turned to Julian. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

Omar and Sean let go. Julian took his last few steps up the hill, and then.

Credit: Matthew Jungling

His feet found bare rock. He could see the valley and the city. They were below him. Everything was below him. He had never seen so much below. And ahead. Ahead the rock ran out and there was air. Void.

He tried to stop, take in the view, but his feet were moving beneath him. He took one more breath and then he was screaming, screaming, sprinting with his hands behind his back, somehow keeping upright and taking a shallow breath and screaming, the rope was running out and he should slow down but instead he kept running until YANK the rope ran out and he jerked to a stop. The harness dug into his skin. His feet slipped out from under him and he fell hard. Pain shot through his left shoulder.

“Ow!” Julian’s scream cut off. He lost the view for a moment — he could only see rock. He got his feet under him and rose, unsteadily.

Sean and Omar and Mary jogged over, saying something or other that he no longer heard because he was at the edge now, he could see the forest and every house in the city and he was two thousand feet off the ground, ten seconds of ecstasy away from God’s green earth.

Someone clapped hands around his eyes. “No!” he shouted. “No!”

“Julian!” Mary shouted, directly into his ear. He flinched. The howling of the void was quieter now, but he couldn’t unhear it. 

Omar grabbed his arm. “You good, buddy?”

“Untie me, please, untie me—”

“Nope.”

“We’re all here, Julian,” said Sean. “We’re not going to let you jump. We’ll let you look, but you have to stop talking. Okay?”

Julian took a few seconds to breathe. He felt… he didn’t know how to describe it, nothing else compared. Like a grizzly bear was chasing him, and he had to run over that cliff to escape. Like Samantha Williams from his biology class was disrobing in midair a few feet out past the ledge, calling him over to kiss her thighs. Like God himself was waiting on the ground to bring him home.

But it was dark, and quiet now, and the void was almost like a dream. His heart began to slow.

“You sure he’s ready?”

“They say the first pull is the hardest. If you get past that, people calm down.”

“I guess he’s secure. I just don’t want him to fight us all the way back.”

“Julian?” Mary again. “Are you ready to see again? Are you going to fight us?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’m okay now. That was… really intense. But I— I think I can take it. If I go crazy again, just cover my eyes and pull me away. Once I can’t see it, I know I’ll be fine.”

“We will definitely pull you away,” said Sean. “Last warning. Okay, let him see.”

Sunlight returned. Julian stood three feet from the edge and saw infinity. He fought back another scream — and it worked. He hugged his hands to his chest, while Sean and Omar held onto his biceps. His shoulder ached, but like everything connected to his body, it didn’t really matter.

There were birds below him. The clouds were still above, but so much closer now. Dawn was breaking. Row after row of houses lit up gold. The forest and the city were like a model train set; he could reach out and pick them up.

This is how God feels. 

He’d heard it many times in church, but now he understood. This was the lesson of the void — humans weren’t built to look through God’s eyes. (And good callproofs kept it to themselves.)

Julian could still feel the call, almost gentle now. It wanted him, body and soul. Two steps forward, one flex of the knee, and he would feel the mercy of the universe.

“Like what you see?” said Omar.

“Ssssh!” said Mary.

“We should bring shoulder pads next time,” said Sean.

“Ssssh!” said Mary.

Julian couldn’t speak. But in a few minutes, he’d let himself be led away, back to the ground where he didn’t belong.

On his first day at Divine Eagle Academy, Tetsu felt at home. This was a school for winners. The weight rooms stank with effort at the end of each day. Olympic hopefuls circled the tracks. Professional scouts bought parking passes in the principal’s office.

Tetsu liked to watch the afternoon buses roll in, full of doomed athletes from other schools. Some looked at the gleaming entrance and visibly swallowed. Others kept their eyes to the ground. Hours later, they’d limp away, tears making tiny marks on the sidewalk.

As a first-year shortstop, Tetsu had no hope of starting, but he was happy enough watching his seniors mercy-rule their opponents. He knew he’d get his chance. His training was scientific — broad jumps, power cleans, reaction drills, ice baths. He wasn’t first to arrive or last to leave, but that’s only because every one of his teammates was equally dedicated. They’d won the Koshien five years running, and #6 was guaranteed.

47,000 fans screamed as Matsuda hit the grand slam that would seal the final game.

Then the center fielder from Muddy River High ran up the wall and caught it. Four meters off the ground. Three outs.

But he didn’t stick the landing. He left the field on a stretcher, surrounded by his teammates. There were only ten. 

Tetsu counted them again. That’s… three pitchers and no backup fielders? How did they get to the finals?

No matter. It was still 4-1 in the bottom of the ninth. Their ace reliever, Suzuki, was fresh. The Divine Eagle Band played his fight song as he took the mound. Tetsu imagined sprinting out of the dugout, joining his comrades to wave the navy pennant.

Suzuki struck out the first batter with a splitter, the second with a sinker.

The third, a beanpole whose glasses glinted in the stadium lights, fouled off eight pitches before walking.

The fourth, one of the scrawniest high-schoolers Tetsu had ever seen, laid down a desperate bunt and beat the throw.

The fifth batter, Tetsu recognized. It was Izaya, who was expelled from Divine Eagle last year after a brawl with Suzuki over some girl. The pitcher stared him down, then brushed him back with an inside fastball. Izaya yelled something, Suzuki yelled back. Tetsu couldn’t make it out over the fight songs and cheer squads.

Izaya hammered Suzuki’s next pitch right back at him. It hit him in the nuts — ow! — but Suzuki somehow controlled it, stopping anyone from reaching home. Then he hobbled off the field with his arm around Coach Takashi’s shoulders.

Takashi handed Suzuki off to his assistants. He looked to the dugout. Ushida, who’d pitched a shutout the night before, rose to his feet.

“He’s mine.”

“Are you sure, Ushida? How’s the arm?”

“He already struck out twice tonight. He can’t touch me in his condition.”

After a long look, Takashi nodded. Ushida trotted out to the mound. Tetsu felt the impact as 94,000 hands began to applaud.

But they weren’t applauding Ushida. That center fielder was back — hobbling to the plate. The scoreboard announced him as Mizuno Ryota.

What is happening? He can’t even walk!

As he took his stance, both schools’ bands inexplicably fell silent. The cheer squad captains lowered their megaphones. Tetsu could hear the players clearly.

“You already failed twice!” Ushida cried out. “And now you’ll be the final out! Why so stubborn?”

Do they know each other?

“Baseball is like life!” replied Mizuno. “Everyone gets out sometimes! But even if you fail twice, one for three still makes a great player! I’m not done yet!”

“You’re pathetic!”

“No!” Mizuno lifted his bat, swaying slightly with the pain. He pointed to the left-field wall — a called shot. The crowd gasped. “I’m going to be a great ballplayer! I am… the Boy with the Golden Bat!”

Tetsu’s teammates were cackling, but he didn’t join in. He was getting a funny feeling about this whole situation.

Mizuno settled into a stiff crouch. Ushida hurled a fastball straight past him, then another. The bat never left his shoulder.

“This is the last one, Ryota Mizuno! I’m ending your career today!”

“Bring it on!”

Ushida released the pitch. Mizuno whipped around with a cry of pain, practically flinging his bat in front of it. Tetsu’s mouth fell open at the sound — the purest crack! he’d ever heard. The ball flew over the left field fence.

Ushida punched the ground. Tetsu’s tears made tiny marks in the dirt.

“I still can’t believe what happened,” said Tetsu. It was the first lunch period after summer break. He sat with three friends, desks pushed together into a square.

“One of the craziest games I’ve ever seen,” said Kenji.

“One?”

“I still think our final was worse. We were up by 20 with six minutes to go, and this punk with bleached hair hit seven threes in a row. I wanted to give up on basketball forever.”

“You should’ve seen the volleyball final,” said Naoki. “They had this kid — must’ve been 160 centimeters tops, but he could jump as high as Kuroba!”

“Soccer wasn’t even fair,” grumbled Daiki.

“You lost to a foreigner, right?”

“He’s half-Japanese, half-Brazilian. I looked him up. His grandfather was, er, Pelé.”

“What?”

“His Brazilian dad showed up at the match. They were hugging each other and crying. Apparently he spent the guy’s whole childhood in prison on false charges.”

“I mean, good for them, but it does suck for you.”

“Have you seen Twitter?” asked Kenji. “People are calling us Second Place Academy.”

“Because we went one season without a championship? That’s stupid.”

“Yeah. Next year will be different. No more freak accidents.”

Next year was not different.

Nishikawa, the school’s tennis ace, made the national finals but lost to some nobody who started two years ago — and was dating Nishikawa’s ex-girlfriend.

Mihara, Tetsu’s girlfriend, lost her most important kendo match to a full-blown gyaru who tripped over nothing and struck the winning blow by chance.

In the national meet, their relay team lost to a team of… horse girls? They all wore headbands with animal ears and impractical shoes and won by forty meters.

Second place, second place, second place.

Tetsu ran three miles every morning and lifted weights three times a week. He made the baseball starting nine, and they swept the regular season. But in the Koshien, they were shocked in the semifinals by some industrial school with no baseball pedigree. They were enormous — Tetsu knew about steroids, but could steroids also make you taller? They smashed five home runs and played ironclad defense; Divine Eagle never stood a chance. 

As he endured a series of crushing handshakes from men shaped like refrigerators, Tetsu spotted Muddy River High’s team in the stands. Their glasses kid was scribbling notes. Mizuno — sorry, “Golden Bat” Mizuno — looked worried.

Tetsu skipped the finals, but couldn’t stop himself from watching the last innings on TV. Mizuno, who had acquired a black eye somewhere, came up with two outs in the ninth. His shallow fly caught a freak gust of wind and bounced off the left fielder’s swollen head for a home run.

After summer break, the atmosphere was terrible. It didn’t improve.

The Divine Eagle sumo captain got tossed out of the ring by an ex-judoka who, according to his own Twitter, took up the sport after becoming “addicted to pizza”. (Tetsu now spent his evenings on Twitter, defending his school’s honor in #SecondPlaceAcademy threads.)

The new American football team, a group of bitter refugees from second-place teams across the school, cruised through its matches with sheer athleticism — until a team of juvenile delinquents left them bleeding in the dust.

Tetsu’s new girlfriend — Mihara had left school to train her swordsmanship in the mountains — set a national record on the balance beam. This was immediately broken by a girl with violet hair who got the highest possible score, looking bored the whole time. Then some guy in a gi jumped out of the stands and proposed to her. She broke his nose with a kick and fled the gym as he stood there with his bouquet, blood gushing down, still smiling.

In his third year, Tetsu tore his ACL. No more baseball.

At first, he staggered out to practice on crutches. But he couldn’t stand the mournful glances from his teammates, or the thought of watching another second place.

He took to spending his time in the library, scrolling Twitter and watching scrappy outsiders beat objectively better teams. The contagion was spreading; no champion was safe.

One day in June, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see three students — a short boy with a binder, a tall boy with thick glasses, and a shockingly beautiful girl — crowded around his computer.

“You’re Hayashi Tetsu, right?” said the girl.

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

“Looks like you’re a real sports fanatic,” said Binder. 

“You could say that.”

“We’re starting a team,” said Glasses. “A fantasy sports team.”

“What are fantasy sports?”

“It’s a big-time thing in America,” he replied. “You pick teams of players from different schools, and score points if they do well.”

“This is its first year as an official sport in Japan,” said the girl. She had pink hair, and her uniform broke at least three rules. “All the best academic schools are favored; they have huge teams. Everyone here plays a sport, so we can’t even find a fourth member.”

“But then we saw you!” said Binder. “It looks like you have time — no offense — and we could use someone with real experience to give us a leg up. Someone with an eye for raw talent, who can see past the numbers and pick the right underdogs.”

“With your help,” said Glasses, “we could make this year a real… Allsports Fantasy!”

“A what? Why is your voice like that? Why are you putting emphasis at the beginning of those words?”

“All great questions, which we will gladly answer in the clubroom. Fair warning: It used to be a broom closet.”

“Are you in?” asked the girl.

Tetsu thought for a moment, then sighed.

“Guess I’ll give it a shot. I know a winner when I see one.”

I’ve added thousands of words of new material to the Genie of Medium Wishes wiki.

New sections include:

• Wishing for money
• Wishing for health
• Abstract and impossible wishes
• “Meta” wishes (don’t do it)

If you’ve wondered about using your wish to negate someone else’s, changing the speed limit in Virginia, or cashmaxxing by wishing for a golden statue, this is the update for you.

And with that, it’s time to take a break from genieposting! I may return to this later in the month, but will write something realer tomorrow.

This is part 2. Start with part 1.

Living room, India. Ganesh statue on a corner shrine. The genie hovers like another statue.

The mother makes her wish.

“Aisa hi hoga.”

Her husband sweeps her into a dance. The phone dips to a small boy rubbing his eyes, then returns to the parents.

James checks the translation: “I wish for Aarav and Arjun to be the best students in all their classes, and enough money to pay all their school fees through university.”

You really shared this where other parents will see? Now they know their kids will always be second-best, and it’s your fault. Good for the classmates, though — they’ll always have an excuse for why they missed that one question. And good for WishDB — one more file for the file gods.

Box of money. Long lives for the Chen family. Make me feel young again. Box of money.

A hundred years of bountiful harvests.

“Nahin.”

Ugh. Can’t wish that far ahead — infinite ways to go wrong.

“I wish for 100 million yuan in my bank account, and a sexy dream with Lu Yuxiao.”

“Ru ni suo yuan.”

And the bar goes wild. Is that a celebrity? Oh, she’s a babe. She’ll be trending in the morning. Sucks to be her. Sucks to be him?

Nope. He’s a guy, Weibo’s going to meme the shit out of him, but he’ll be a folk hero. Could’ve gone much worse. Pretty clear wish for someone in that state.

If the genie gives you a dream but you’re blackout drunk, do you remember it?

Box of — no, money in the bank. Smart. Keep our family safe from harm. Heal my son’s mind. Heal my daughter’s marriage. Make me a famous actress. Box of money. A whispered wish he can’t hear. That’ll be a pain to track down.

Busy street. Night market. Who’s the wisher? Oh, god. The guy is getting mobbed. It’s less common than you’d think — people tend to keep their distance and respect the genie, or something. But sometimes it just takes one desperate person, someone who needs the money or the miracle cure, and then everyone else jumps in.

“Sepuluh detik tersisa. Apa keinginanmu?”

Somehow, the genie always drowns out other noise. Most in the crowd step back, but a beggar dressed in rags is still holding the guy’s collar. He only has six, five—

He cries out to the genie. A box of money appears in the street. The beggar vanishes.

“Oh, shit.”

The crowd surges forward. One man tackles the wisher to the ground. Others tear open the box and grab fistfuls of bills, stuffing them into pockets before someone pulls them away.

The video continues. Whoever holds the phone decided not to join the melee, or realized they’d be better off selling interviews than trying for a pocketful of rupiah.

The wisher is surrounded. He curls up against the kicks and stomps. James watches, teeth clenched.

Shots ring out. People start running the other way. The phone’s owner huddles against a wall, but keeps recording as pedestrians stream past. Two police officers approach the crumpled form. The wisher struggles to his hands and knees.

The box is still there. Might have money. But the money belongs to a murderer, so the cops are probably going to keep it.

Wait. Is that… that’s the same beggar!

James turns to his other monitor. The translation is ready.

“Make me rich, and get this man away from me.”

Not “kill him”, not “get rid of him”. Just “get him away”. The genie must have teleported the beggar one street over. What a joke.

It isn’t James’s first mob; he’s thought about self-defense. You can’t solve everyone’s problems; the genie will vanish before you finish your sentence. If you help one person, that can be enough to soothe the crowd, but it depends on what you take for yourself, the way you’re dressed, the way your neighbors feel about the genie…

The best answer is to whisper. People almost never whisper; the genie is so loud and present that they feel the urge to shout. But he always hears you. And when he leaves, you just have to tell the crowd you wished for their health, or gave them all another year of life — whatever gets you safely home to the box of money in your bedroom.

From an intellectual perspective, this was an incredible wish. If they could figure out how much money the box held, they’d have a ballpark figure for the value of a minor teleport spell. If only the cash weren’t scattered across — he checks the location tag — Jakarta.

Things quiet down a bit. The genie never sleeps, but China does. Milo tends to pick up South American wishes; he’s half-Peruvian, and he likes to watch people celebrate in Spanish. James decides to catch up on the slush pile. He opens the team’s shared inbox—

A soft ping. Never mind. He opens Discord to read Benji’s message.

got a bad one for you
WWYD?

James hasn’t seen this one, but it’s not his first Indian wedding wish. The families aren’t rich: bare stone floor, bamboo canopy, plain lightbulbs on wires.

No one is watching the bride and groom. They’re watching the genie, and the man in the off-white kurta. It’s quiet for a crowd scene: two layers of reverence.

The man looks distressed. But he speaks clearly, before the ten-second warning. The video has an AI caption:

“A year of health and happiness for all of us here, and seven years for Rajesh and Sunita.”

“So it shall be.”

The guests stand and the shouting begins. The newlyweds and their parents will be the envy of the country this week. The wisher has to be pulled to his feet; he takes a moment to find his footing. James closes the video.

You first. WWYD?

definitely not boosting every single guest
just get a BOM and share it around. you don’t have to share the wish to share the proceeds. it’s tacky at a wedding but you can give everyone more money than they’ve ever seen and still keep most of it

You’re probably right. But easier said than done. Remember your first alarm?

Members of the Optimal Wish Project set genie alarms to ring at random times. You’d be at a party, or in the shower, or hooking up with someone, and your phone would go off and you’d have one minute to record a wish.

Once you have your wish locked in, the exercise isn’t too hard. But in its early days, some Owpers felt their “great ideas” evaporate as soon as they had to articulate them.

i had a hard problem, i’m trying to change the world
if you don’t want to optimize, just get the BOM

Any WOC updates?

no. still want luck, luck is the answer
we’re up all night to get lucky

Hope it works out better for you than Jesse.

jesse walked so i could get lucky
and he helped me write the new version
if it works i’ll make him a BOM with a very nice box
respect the brave wishers who failed for the cause

Well, good luck.

haha

Benji’s lifetime odds were half of one percent. James, the same. It was strange to have a hobby you would never really take part in. Like following football in a world where every team was a group of strangers who didn’t know the rules, while good players were trapped in the bleachers, leaning forward to yell instructions no one could hear.

James didn’t let himself think about his own wish. Too unlikely, and it would make every video that little bit more painful. He refused to become Benji, using every mistake under pressure as an excuse to armchair quarterback. The genie made wishes a human story, the same way NASA made the moon a human place. He wouldn’t go to space, but he could root for the astronauts.

Woburn, Massachusetts

The video shows a busy street. East Africa? Bright colors. Cool mural in the background.

In the foreground, the genie hovers.

Looks real, and the reactions remove all doubt. Cars have stopped in the middle of the street. People are pointing and shouting. A crowd is gathering, but they keep a few meters’ distance from the bearded giant floating over the sidewalk.

Wisher is young — eighteen? Says something to the genie, no response. Says something else. Still nothing. Hurry up, kid!

The crowd is chiming in, which doesn’t help. He starts again, but the genie cuts in:

“Sekunde kumi zimebaki. Unataka nini?”

Ten-second warning. He freezes up — no! — then spits something out. Long sentence.

“Itafanyika.”

The kid staggers, weak-kneed. Two men step in to hold him up.

“Nice.”

James gives a double thumbs-up to no one and turns to his second monitor.

GPT-6 has processed the video and prefilled the form. He scrolls to the “Wish” section:

“I want Samuel to get better, and not get sick again, and I want a big house in Muthaiga for my family, with no rent.”

Good compound wish. Kept his shit together.

The rest looks clean. Wish granted. Time to wish: 58 seconds. Male wisher, estimated age 20. Public appearance — city street. Swahili — nailed it. James knows the same twelve words in every common language.

He skims the comments. Nothing useful: “Very nice.” “God is great!” “I’d wish for…”

He sends the usual DM to request more info.

From the first day of the genie era, James was digging through every video he could find and throwing details into a crappy Airtable with two of his fellow Wikipedia mods. (The Airtable retroactively acquired the undeservedly dignified name of “WishDB v1”.)

He didn’t help with the nonprofit setup — he was an underemployed infovore, not a founder. But they hired him right away, employee #4.

WishDB got big: over a hundred staff, grants from several governments. They tried to promote him. But he wasn’t a manager either. He just liked collecting data.

It’s been a good morning; nothing sticky so far. Karen and Milo are keeping the queue clear with him, filing videos as soon as they arrive.

Once people got used to the genie, and stopped thinking it would curse them for filming, around 30% of all encounters were recorded as they happened.

Another 30% popped up later. People recorded themselves crying because the genie said no, or because he said yes. They showed off their boxes of money, or their cancer-free grandmothers with shiny white teeth and perfect squat form. In one famous case, the parents of Xander Meier (age 7) showed off the twenty-foot chocolate castle crammed precariously into their backyard.

That’s 1200 wishes a day. When you add government data, bounty submissions, and whatever the rest of the team hunts down, WishDB approaches 90% coverage.

Box of money. Box of money. Heal thy parents. Heal thyself.

Obvious fake. He’s a bad actor; his genie casts no shadow. Add his account to the fraud list.

On Weibo, an old man wishes for his family to live in eternal harmony. The genie says no. James winces. Chinese wishes hit harder, since he understands them without the buffer of AI translation. And the man reminds him of his mother’s father.

12-year-old girl. A kitchen somewhere in Asia.

Her parents are trying to coach her, but they end up talking over each other, and the phone swoops away as her mom gesticulates. When it comes back, the girl’s in tears.

“Sampung segundo na lang. Ano ang iyong hiling?”

She yells something at the genie, voice catching halfway through.

“Mangyayari ito.”

A wooden box appears. Cubic, less than a meter wide. James has seen enough Filipino wishes to know she didn’t maximize her money. The video suddenly shuts off.

James checks the translation:

“I want lots of money, and I want Mom and Dad to stop fighting!”

Could be good, could be very bad.

He reports the video to Madison, his Instagram contact, kicking off a chain of messages he hopes will reach the Philippines equivalent of family services.

One of WishDB’s specialties is noticing when a wish is inherently dangerous. Money is safe, if no one kills you for it. Health is safe, if you don’t party too hard and overdose the next day.

Relationships are dangerous. If you wish someone out of your life, the genie might edit their brain to make them fall for someone else — or edit their heart to make it stop beating.

James, and most of his colleagues, think the genie summons whatever fitting outcome was most likely to happen anyway. The girl’s wish could make her parents blissfully happy, make them divorce the next day, or lead one of them to an untimely death.

He watches the video again. There’s a cross on the wall. He remembers that the country is very Catholic. He checks something with GPT-6:

“Divorce is illegal for non-Muslim Filipinos.”

Shit! That cuts out one of the nonlethal outcomes. James sends Madison a follow-up.

 Continue to part 2.

Introducing a new setting.

April 12, 2026, 9:06 pm CST, Dongguan

The genie manifests in Zhao Lin’s dormitory as she puts on her pajamas.

He has horns, a long beard, and no shirt. His head nearly scrapes the ceiling; his shoulders span the bunk beds on either side of the room. His torso terminates in a wispy tail of smoke that hovers over the floor.

In perfect Mandarin, he speaks:

“I am Jinnī al-Amānī al-Muqayyad. What is your wish?”

Lin screams and falls over. Her roommate Sun Meili screams. Her roommate Liu Yan throws a chair at the genie. It passes straight through and clangs off Zhao Lin’s bed. The genie hovers in perfect stillness, arms crossed. It looks only at Zhao Lin.

Meili sprints out of the room. Lin forces her other leg into her pajama pants and hustles after her. The genie follows in silence, passing through the doorway like it doesn’t exist.

“What do you want?” shouts Yan. The genie ignores her as it leaves. She pulls out her phone and starts recording.

The genie phases through the floor and hovers between Zhao Lin and the building’s front door. Her screams have drawn a crowd, and she can’t easily retreat. She stands frozen as the genie speaks again:

“Ten seconds remain. What is your wish?”

The crowd startles at his booming voice.

Yan calls out: “Say something, Zhao Lin!”

Lin is speechless. The genie disappears, gone as abruptly as it came.

Yan posts the video on Douyin at 9:12 pm. 

By morning, there are thirteen other genie videos on the platform, and over a hundred scattered across Instagram, TikTok, Bilibili, and YouTube.

Tiruppur

Kavita Selvam, interrupted at her sewing machine, stares the genie down, even as younger garment workers scream and back away. Her supervisor, Ramesh, films with a shaky hand.

“Very well, sir. If you can grant wishes, take away all these aches and pains.”

“It shall be done.” 

The genie disappears. Kavita blinks. She twists her torso. She stands, eyes wide.

“What is this?” She bends her knees. “What is this?”

She flings herself into a girlish cartwheel. Ramesh drops his phone.

Lahore

Muhammad Qureshi lies prostrate, praying at a frantic tempo. The other old men prostrate themselves and pray.

Hamza, a younger man with modern instincts, continues to record. His legs have given out, so he leans back against the wall of the mosque. He hadn’t believed in jinn, but his prayers are the loudest of all.

The men pray. The genie hovers.

“Ten seconds remain. What is your wish?”

The men pray. No one answers. The genie disappears.

Bakersfield

“What the fuck!? It’s that genie! It’s here!”

Yvonne Duarte sits frozen on a wooden bench in the courtyard of Liberty High School.

The genie watches her. Nine phones record the encounter.

Her pizza slice is face-down in the grass. When the genie appeared, three of her classmates were already watching Reels of it. This tempers the shock enough that no one flees.

“Wish for a million dollars!” someone says.

“Are you stupid? Wish for a trillion!”

“Hurry up! It only sticks around for a minute!”

“I wish,” says Yvonne, “for… one trillion dollars.”

“No.”

The genie disappears.

The Genie of Medium Wishes Wiki has its first entry. More content coming soon.