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.