I

Liudaokou can be found on the north side of central Beijing. Some people say that there was a belief in ancient times that Liudaokou—“six ways crossing”—was an intersection at the six paths of reincarnation; others maintain that it was just one of several numbered intersections—“sixth crossing,” then—which have since been given more contemporary names. Li Yingmei preferred the first explanation. A mysterious place deserved a mysterious name.

Li Yingmei had learned about Liudaokou after her son told her to download Douyin. She took to scrolling through short videos during her breaks at the pork plant. There was no way to nap, anyway, since the sound of carcasses slapping down onto the conveyor belt was too noisy, even in the break room, so she took to flicking through the beautiful glimpses of the world that the app offered her: there were towering whirlwinds of butterflies rising from South American forests, whales sinking slowly into the ocean, the Northern Lights blazing over the Arctic...She realized that these videos always had comments scrolling across them, where people would toss wishes out into the digital void—a wish for such-and-such a person to strike it rich, or stay in good health, or have a happy marriage...They flecked the screen like whitecaps on waves. Someone would invariably say something like, “There’s no sense in making wishes on an app. You need to go to Liudaokou!“

At first, Li Yingmei assumed “Liudaokou” was another one of those indecipherable slang terms that young people on the internet came up with, but after hearing it spoken of so many times, and with so much confidence, she looked it up, and found that it was a real place. Some claimed that the National Random Number Generation Center was located there. Since it was completed in 2027, the center transmitted all of the country’s random numbers on encrypted cables. An algorithm buzzing away in Liudaokao decided with those digits everything from which questions would be asked on standardized exams to who would match with each other on dating apps. Some people believed that the numbers coming from the National Random Number Generation Center were not random at all, but the product of a powerful artificial intelligence—the Supreme AI—that was capable of calculating the outcomes of its choices in such a way that it could shape human destinies—and some went further in their claims, suggesting that the AI was discreetly benevolent. It could reward the virtuous. The AI absorbed enough information from so many sources that it must be aware of every thought and deed, but some held that the closer one got to Liudaokou, the more attention the data received. That was why it made sense to make a wish at Liudaokou—the benevolent supercomputer was listening more closely to people in its proximity. Fueling these beliefs was the fact that someone had installed at Liudaokou a wishing spot. Li Yingmei had seen in videos a stainless-steel plaque marked “Liudaokou Wishing Spot.”

Li Yingmei didn’t tell her son that she was going to Beijing to make a wish. It was two months before her son was going to write the college entrance exam, and she wanted him to do well. If he knew she was going to make a wish, he would laugh at her, she knew, so she told him that she had been dispatched by the pork plant to a training seminar in the capital. The slaughterhouse had sent a few workers to a training session, she knew, even though she hadn’t signed up. It was no big deal to get time off work, anyway. The slaughterhouse went through seasonal waves, and it happened to be in a quiet time of year. She boarded a high-speed train to Beijing and arrived a few hours later. It was easy enough to follow the instructions in the videos on how to take the subway to Liudaokou. From the station, it was a fifteen-minute walk to the Liudaokou Wishing Spot.

When she saw the plaque, Li Yingmei sighed with relief. She hadn’t been completely convinced it was a real place. It didn’t seem to be a flashy tourist spot, either. Rather than layers of advertisements, the walls bore posters promoting spiritual civilization. It put her mind at ease to see the stern security guard scanning visitors warily. Li Yingmei had been scammed in the past. She knew that anyone who grinned at a stranger was already reaching for their wallet.

There were two lines on either side of the guard. Those in line on the left to enter the center wore serious expressions. Li Yingmei could not read the faces of those who streamed out to the right of the guard. She joined the line to the left and shuffled forward with the crowd. When it came time to step across the threshold, an alarm blared.

“You don’t have an appointment,” the guard said. “You didn’t know you needed to make one?”

She apologized and found the booking app on her phone under the guard’s instructions. It turned out that the place was booked solid for the next three days.

“Try your luck at midnight,” the guard said. “That’s when they open up slots for upcoming days.”

II

Li Yingmei dreamed that she was the supreme AI. Just a second earlier, she’d been lying in a capsule hotel bunk, frantically trying to snatch a wishing slot on her phone for three days later. In the blink of an eye, she found herself in a bright white abyss. She couldn’t tell if she was sitting or standing. She wasn’t even quite sure that she any longer had a body. She realized in an instant that she was the supreme artificial intelligence charged with shaping human destiny. She waited for people to come to her with their wishes. She would make her judgment.

A voice came from a dark shadow below her: “Most esteemed Supreme AI, my name is Zhang Zhongxin. In three days, my daughter will have surgery for synovial sarcoma. My wish is that the operation is successful and she recovers fully.”

Li Yingmei thought back to the nights she had spent in the hospital with her own son. She nodded into the void. The dark shadow turned a color that Li Yingmei was not sure how to describe.

“Dearest Supercomputer,” Li Yingmei heard a voice call, “I wish for Sanmen Group stocks to rise and Dianjia’s stocks to fall. If you can make Sanmen go up by a point and Dianjia fall by a point, I will transfer a hundred million yuan as a donation to the National Random Number Generation Center. I give you my solemn vow. If I break my word, may lightning strike me dead.”

Li Yingmei was dumbfounded. Even though she had no particular connection to the National Random Number Generation Center, she felt insulted by the offer of a bribe. After a moment, the shadow changed its form again.

“My name is Huang Zibing. I broke up with a girl named Du Yihan. She was cheating on me with a guy called Sun Jingbo. I wish, Supreme AI, for nothing more than for them to get in a car crash and suffer excruciating pain. They should have no chance to survive it. When I hear that they’re dead, I’ll kill myself.”

Li Yingmei refused.

“Most cherished Supreme AI, I come today to make a wish for my son Cheng Yuzhi. He’s writing his entrance exam this year, and I want him to get into Tsinghua University.”

Just as Li Yingmei was about to assent, she recalled her own son and his preparations for the exam. She awoke with a jolt. When she glanced at her phone, she saw that it was 6:27 in the morning. She flicked open the booking app and saw that she had managed to secure a spot before falling asleep.

Li Yingmei went out to buy a couple baozi for her breakfast. Even the modest stuffed dumplings cost twice as much in Beijing as they did back home. She went back to the capsule hotel and sat down in the lobby to eat. She couldn’t get the dream out of her mind. She often dreamed, of course, but nothing like that!

A young woman sidled up to Li Yingmei. “You had the dream, did you?” She raised an eyebrow.

“How did you know?” Li Yingmei asked.

“Everyone who comes to Liudaokou has the dream—the dream that they’ve become the Supreme AI. It’s part of the alignment algorithm.”

The woman seemed to have come to Liudaokou to make wishes before. She was only too happy for an excuse to tell Li Yingmei her story. Her name was Wang Xia, and she had come to Liudaokou after losing her job. She’d made nineteen wishes altogether. She wanted only to be very rich. It hadn’t happened yet, but she managed to find enough work in the Liudaokou area to stick around.

“Have you ever heard of AI alignment?” Wang Xia asked. “That’s how the Supreme AI regulates itself—learning from human morality, in this case—so it doesn’t go rogue. Basically, the AI in charge of wishes checks itself against human judgments, sending a few wishes to disinterested strangers to learn how they rule.”

“Can AI even get into our dreams?”

“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?” Wang Xia said. She lowered her voice and went on, “It’s the phone. That’s the secret. Once you make a booking on the app, your phone starts hitting you with electromagnetic waves and some kind of ultrasound. It puts you to sleep and guides your dreams.

Wang Xia winked at Li Yingmei, who clutched her phone to herself.

“Now,” Wang Xia said in a voice just above a whisper, “if you get my wish in your dream, make sure you agree to it. I’ll do the same for you. Let’s help each other out, make our dreams come true...Don’t forget my name: Wang Xia.”

III

Before arriving in Beijing, Li Yingmei had not considered how a wish should be structured. “I hope that my son can exceed expectations”—that might be how they’d say it on a TV drama. But after her dream, she realized that the wishes were a bit more complicated.

She noticed that most of them went like this: a respectful address to the Supreme AI, followed by the wish itself, then a vow of some action to be carried out after the wish was granted. She explained this three-step plan to Wang Xia, who said it sounded good to her.

Li Yingmei found herself disappointed by the city. She had seen the Douyin videos of Tiananmen, the Palace Museum, Tsinghua, and Peking University, but tickets for those needed to be booked days in advance. She didn’t want to make the same mistake as she had at the Liudaokou Wishing Spot. She crossed those places off her list. She took a trip to the former imperial garden and ruins at Yuanmingyuan, but neither the flowers and trees, nor the old buildings impressed her much. She had the same things back home. In the evening, she visited Nanluogu Lane. She found in the shops all the same foods—Changsha fermented tofu, miniature Beef Wellington, seafood boils, rose lattes—that she saw the influencers in her hometown eating. The only difference between the food back home and the food here was that it cost five times as much.

The intelligent industry center on the west side of Liudaokao, where AI enterprises were gathered in a sprawling skyscraper complex, was more impressive. She had seen videos of it online. People called it “the center of the universe.” The videos were impressive, but it was only after walking among the glass and steel giants, her head tilted up to try to figure out where they ended, that she had a sense of the weighty power gathered there. The buildings glowed like fish bowls full of stars, the glass seeming always on the verge of splitting open and releasing a monstrous deluge.

Li Yingmei did her best to see the city, but she was preoccupied by the problem of making a wish. She couldn’t stop herself from studying the faces of people in the crowd, trying to figure out what their private desires were. The elderly people who gathered in the gardens of Yuanmingyuan would have wished for good health and grandchildren, she imagined. In Nanluogu Lane, she watched the young people rushing around in their fancy clothes, chirruping to each other the whole time. She could read on their faces many sorts of emotions, but Li Yingmei guessed that many of them would have made their wish for true love. They were still at the age when love seemed more important than anything else. The people around the intelligent industry center were harder to gauge. On all of their faces, whether the managers in sharp suits or the programmers shouldering rucksacks, there was a fresh, raw anxiety. Li Yingmei wasn’t quite sure what was on their minds, but she guessed that most of their wishes would mention significant promotions and big raises.

While walking, Li Yingmei refined what she would say. It went like this: “My wish is for my son to exceed expectations on his entrance exam. If he is successful, I promise to give up my job at the pork plant.” She knew there was a saying that went something like, “Put down the butcher’s block; become a Buddha in an instant.” Slaughtering animals was certainly not a way to win merit in this life. Although she had never actually killed a pig herself—they were suffocated in a carbon dioxide chamber before being sent down the line for processing—and robots did most of the work, she was still involved: she had to race to the line when the machines failed to slice an overly thick joint, or a set of ribs snapped and snarled the mechanism, or an undersized organ failed to be registered by the scale...She decided that she was implicated deeply enough in the slaughter to offer her job as a bargaining chip.

That night, exhausted from the day, she fell into a deep sleep, and dreamed again that she was the Supreme AI.

IV

The second time she took the role, she already knew what to do. Li Yingmei was an experienced Supreme AI. She waited for the shadows to approach and make their wishes and then disappear, just like hogs rolling down an assembly line.

“I want to be beautiful,” called one of the shadows. “I don’t want acne ever again. And I want Ah Bo to love me forever.”

“I wish for my experiment to be a success. If my p-value isn’t under point zero five, I’ll never graduate.”

“I want our country’s Gini coefficient to drop a bit further.”

“Please make the price of real estate go up. I don’t want to be underwater by the time I pay off my mortgage.”

“Instead of water, I want it to rain pure ethanol.”

Li Yingmei sent her thoughts into the void. She admitted that some of the wishes made little sense to her, and she was unsure of how to judge their merits. The void didn’t answer. She decided that nothing too crucial would be left to the judgment of a pork plant worker.

Another voice: “Let my daughter get into Tsinghua. I promise to go vegetarian for three years.”

Li Yingmei could not imagine staying vegetarian for three years. She had loved meat since she was a girl. When she got the job at the pork plant, it felt like destiny. To give up all meat for three years seemed too weighty a sacrifice—and she wasn’t even sure it was the sort of thing she should be encouraging as the Supreme AI. If vegetarianism spread, not only would the pork plant go under, but she would no longer be able to eat her favorite food.

“Bring my son back to me, Supreme AI. I want him the way he was before he went to university in Beijing. If he’d never gone to the city, he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

Li Yingmei wasn’t sure that she could bring someone back to life. But she nodded her head, anyway.

“I—Li Sanjun—want to be the richest man in the county!“

Yingmei thought back to her agreement with Wang Xia. She worried that granting this man’s wish for wealth might have a negative impact on her desire.

“I want my son to get into a triple first-class school. You can choose whichever you like, but I’d prefer one in our province.”

Li Yingmei was taken aback. She knew the hierarchy well. Her son’s class teacher had explained it to them at a parent-teacher meeting once: the top schools were Tsinghua and Peking University, followed by the triple first-class universities, then the double first-class universities, and finally the single first-class institutions. Her son’s school had never before sent anyone to Tsinghua or Peking University, but a triple first-class school was a reasonable goal. To get in, her son would need to be among the top five thousand students in the province. If she granted the man’s wish, her own son’s chances would be ever so slightly diminished.

She decided to be selfish. She denied the wish. She could imagine how disappointed the father would be, but she comforted herself with the thought that her judgment could not be taken as final.

Li Yingmei woke up at nine o’clock the next morning, still tired. She felt as if she’d had too much to dream the night before. Staring at the ceiling of her capsule, she suddenly realized that her own wish was flawed. If she were willing to coolly reject pleas for kids to get into good schools, then other people would do the same. And vowing to give up her job at the pork plant seemed suddenly absurd. Who would care if she quit the slaughterhouse?

Whether she wished for her son to get into Tsinghua or a triple first-class school, it seemed likely that anyone with a vested interest would turn her down. Li Yingmei felt as if her pilgrimage to Beijing had gradually become meaningless.

She decided to spend her final day in the city at the Beijing Zoo. She had seen the pandas on Douyin. She paid the extra five yuan admission for the Panda House and stood among the visitors to see the bears. A sheet of glass separated a pair of pandas from the crowd. As she watched the animals methodically grab and gnaw stalks of bamboo, Li Yingmei had the impression she was watching a looped video on a screen. The crowd filed closer, snapped photos, then shuffled out.

The polar bear, lying motionless on the concrete box that held the enclosure’s air conditioner, was nothing like she had seen in the videos online. The golden eagle paced its cage restlessly. The giraffe tried in vain to nibble the bark of a tree wrapped in wire. The snub-nosed monkeys clambered over a fake mountain. Had any of these animals made a wish—a wish to be confined to this zoo in Beijing, with all their fellow animals as neighbors, with plenty to eat...? she wondered. Maybe some of them wanted to get out of the forest and see the world!

Li Yingmei realized how ridiculous that sounded. No animals wished to come here. They were here only because people wished to see them.

The city was powered by desire. As Li Yingmei rode the subway home, she looked out on Beijing’s nightscape. Lights streaked by on both sides of the train, each point of light, each window representing a fortune in real estate. She thought of the videos she had seen on Douyin from people trying to make a living in the capital, and the astronomical figures they gave for rent and a mortgage. She wanted to see into the windows rushing by outside, and to get some sense of what made life in Beijing so special, but the train was going too fast. She couldn’t see anything clearly. A million points of light—a million bundles of real estate assets—blurred into an unbreaking stream, like raindrops flowing into a river.

V

The day finally arrived for Li Yingmei to make her wish. She spent a sleepless night, worried that she would blank on her wish at the last second, that the wording still wasn’t quite right, that the Supreme AI would, like a movie devil, twist her desires in some wicked way...She managed only a daze—not quite awake, not quite asleep—in which she imagined herself sometimes as the Supreme AI and sometimes as the petitioner.

She arrived an hour early at the Liudaokou Wishing Spot. She knew that entry was only granted a half hour before an appointment, so she took a seat on some nearby steps and ate some baozi. The buns in Beijing were bland and expensive. The pork filling tasted freezer-burnt. She wished Beijingers could get a taste of the fresh pork baozi sold from the shop across the street from the slaughterhouse.

The Liudaokou Wishing Spot had two security checkpoints. At the first one, petitioners needed to provide proof of an appointment. Li Yingmei slipped through without any problem. She recognized the security guard, but he seemed to have forgotten her. At the second checkpoint, petitioners needed to shed any electronic devices they might be carrying. Li Yingmei put her things into one of the lockers provided for that purpose.

The interior of the wishing spot reminded Li Yingmei of her capsule hotel. There were dozens of chambers off of the long hallway, each with an electronic signboard over the door. She looked for the chamber with her name—number thirty-two. Her name came after Xie Chengbo, Xue Jinghan, Liu Dongzhi, Peng Jianguo—the people who had come before her to make their wishes. Everyone was given three minutes alone in the chamber. Li Yingmei did a bit of math in her head: the wishing spot was capable of serving more than ten thousand people a day.

The four guests for chamber thirty-two came and went, and then it was Li Yingmei’s turn. She stepped inside. The door locked shut behind her, sealing out all noise and distraction. The lights in the room came up. There was no sound. She saw a single chair arranged in front of her.

“Please be seated,” a voice said. “You may make your wish.”

The sound seemed to be coming from the screen that had just lit up in front of her, showing the three-minute countdown.

She sat and took a deep breath.

“Esteemed Supreme AI, my name is Li Yingmei, and my wish is for health and happiness for my family, especially my son. In return, I will do my best to be a good person. I will work hard. I will be kind to those around me. I will help those in need. And I’ll do my best to raise my son to be the sort of person that can contribute to society.”

Except for the digital tones of the seconds falling from the countdown, there was silence in the chamber.

The time ran out.

“I have received your wish,” the voice said. “The fulfillment of your wish depends on your own choices and your efforts.”

The chamber darkened, and the door slid open. Li Yingmei knew that it was time to leave. She collected her things from the locker and joined the crowd shuffling out.

It was nine thirty in the morning, rush hour for Liudaokou. The streets between the subway exits and the tech companies were full of young people in glasses and backpacks, the crowd sweeping along like a current. Li Yingmei quickened her pace to match the stream of people. Somewhere up ahead, she spotted a sign announcing the National Random Number Generation Center. It was housed in a semi-transparent cube of glass, with a sign over the doorway reading, “Restricted area. No entry.”

A memory came to Li Yingmei: many years ago, “merit seekers” used to show up at the pork plant waving signs and holding up the livestock trucks delivering hogs to slaughter. For a while, the protesters proved to be quite disruptive. The workers sometimes came out to argue with them. There was even occasional violence. But the manager of the plant came up with a solution: rather than resisting the protesters, he told the security guards to take them aside and negotiate a deal—for a few thousand, they could “liberate” one of the pigs being delivered by the trucks. The pigs trotted off toward the forest behind the plant, and the merit seekers went away satisfied. Of course, the workers at the plant always went the next day to get the pigs back. All of the swine ended up butchered. But the merit seekers were already gone by then, their work complete.

Was the Liudaokou Wishing Spot the same sort of scheme? Without a place to make wishes, would the same petitioners be marching on the National Random Number Generation Center? They’d probably hold up their phone to livestream the whole thing, barging into every office, dropping to their knees, and praying to the employees—making such a scene that no one could get any work done.

Li Yingmei wasn’t sure.

She stopped by Daoxiangcun to buy some pastries. Her son had a sweet tooth, and Wang Xia had recommended the jujube paste cakes. She boarded her train at noon. The skyscrapers gleaming in the sun slowly receded, but the city still blazed with its hundred million stars.

Author’s Note: Back in early June 2024, my friend and I decided to check out ZamZam, the famous Pakistani and Indian buffet at Liudaokou, Beijing. On our way there, the name “Liudaokou” set our imaginations running wild. I was brainstorming a story about wishes at the time, and that mysterious name seemed like the perfect backdrop for it. And just like that, the story began to take shape. Oh, and by the way, if you ever find yourself there, be sure to try the fresh mint iced drink—it has a truly one-of-a-kind flavor!

Illustrations by Xi Dahe