The first time Dave became the most powerful man on earth, he was nineteen and wearing a second-hand hoodie.It was the winter of 2041. The Central Committee had been decimated by a bio-engineered flu that targeted only Han Chinese DNA above the age of forty-five. Overnight, the Politburo Standing Committee shrank from seven to zero. The Party, terrified of collapse, did the only thing it could think of: it looked for the youngest person in the country who already owned half of it.Dave owned fifty-one percent of the quantum-cloud monopoly, the national payment grid, and the only private space-launch company licensed by Beijing. He had been born in a village outside Harbin with nothing but a cracked Lenovo tablet and a mother who died when he was nine. By fifteen he had reverse-engineered the Ministry of State Security’s surveillance algorithms and sold them back to the government for nine figures. By seventeen he had bought the debt of three provinces. By nineteen he was the only civilian the PLA trusted to keep the lights on.So they made him President. Not Acting President. Not Chairman. President. The title had been extinct since 1975. They resurrected it just for him.He accepted on one condition: that he be allowed to keep living in the same cramped apartment above a noodle shop in Zhongguancun where he had coded his first billion lines. The generals thought he was joking. He wasn’t.That was the night he met Lin Xia.She was twenty, studying comparative literature at Tsinghua, and she wandered into the noodle shop at 3 a.m. because she couldn’t sleep. Dave was eating alone at the corner table, hood up, arguing with a holographic spreadsheet only he could see. She asked if the seat across from him was taken. He glanced up and forgot how to speak Mandarin for three full seconds.She had eyes the color of wet ink and a voice that made him think of snow falling on cedar roofs. Within a week he had memorized the way she stirred her tea clockwise exactly nine times. Within a month he had written her name into the root permissions of every server farm from Shenzhen to Urumqi, so that every time she sent a text message the entire nation’s routers lit up with microscopic hearts only he could read.They never officially dated. Dating was for people who had time. Instead they lived inside parentheses of stolen hours. He would land Marine One on the roof of the Tsinghua library at midnight, climb down the emergency ladder, and find her waiting with two cups of awful vending-machine coffee. She would proofread his speeches while he debugged the central bank. When the world demanded he execute a corrupt governor, he would lock himself in the bathroom of the Great Hall of the People and call her just to hear her say, “You are not the verdict, Dave. You are the boy who once fed stray cats behind the train station.”He believed her. That was the first mistake.The second was the night the doctors told him she had six weeks.It was a rare autoimmune storm triggered by a childhood vaccine batch that had been buried in official records. Her organs were shutting down in alphabetical order. The best hospitals in Beijing became shrines of white coats and whispered apologies. Dave sat outside her glass room in a plastic chair and aged ten years in ten days.On the eleventh night he made the bargain.He had found the thing quite by accident, buried in a forgotten server beneath the Forbidden City—an artifact from the Cultural Revolution days when the Gang of Four allegedly experimented with Tibetan necromancy and quantum entanglement. It looked like a black jade Go stone. When he touched it, it spoke with his own voice inside his skull.Name your price.He didn’t hesitate. “Her life for whatever you want of mine.”Everything, the stone said, amused. Souls are all-or-nothing.“Fine.”He felt it leave him the way you feel a tooth pulled under anesthesia—sudden absence, then the sick throb of something forever missing.The next morning Lin Xia opened her eyes and asked for congee with century egg. The doctors called it a miracle and scheduled press conferences. Dave stood in the hallway and vomited until his ribs shook, because he already knew what miracles cost.She recovered completely. Within a month she was laughing again, loud enough to startle the nurses. Within two months she moved out of the hospital and into the apartment above the noodle shop that Dave had never officially left. She cooked for him—badly—and left wet towels on the floor and kissed him like the world was still allowed to be gentle.He should have noticed she stopped saying “forever.”He should have noticed she started taking calls in the stairwell.He did notice, but noticing required believing, and believing would have killed him faster than any demon.It ended on a Tuesday in early spring. He came home early because the Politburo had tried to stage a soft coup and he had dissolved it with three lines of code and a national address that lasted forty