Jasper Kim

Appearance

The Gift

Jasper was born seeing patterns.

Not the obvious ones—anyone with a decent neural implant can spot market trends or traffic flows. Jasper saw the patterns behind patterns. The ways that supply chains connected to political movements connected to weather systems connected to individual choices made by people he'd never meet.

He never knew where this came from. His parents were ordinary Sprawl citizens, mid-level Nexus employees who died in the Cascade when he was twelve. Nothing in his genetics, his upbringing, or his augmentation explained the gift. It simply was.

By twenty, he was a millionaire. By thirty, he controlled infrastructure that rivaled small corporations. By forty, Nexus and Ironclad both considered him either an acquisition target or a threat.

The Climb

The journey to Mystery Court took forty-seven hours.

The first six were easy—the eastern face's lower slopes were gentle enough to mistake for a park. Real dirt under corporate shoes that had never touched soil. No signal above the treeline. No terrain mapping. Just the trail and his breathing.

At 400 meters the trees began. Actual trees—redwoods and bay laurel, species he'd only seen in archived images. The air changed. The Sprawl's recycled atmosphere gave way to something raw and green and wet, thick with decomposing leaves and earth that hadn't been synthesized. His lungs didn't know what to do with it.

By 1,200 meters his executive body was failing. The Steps—exposed basalt formations creating a natural staircase—required hands and knees. The stone was cold. Not the controlled cold of climate systems but the deep cold of rock sitting in shadow for millennia. It seeped through his palms, up through his wrists, settled into his joints.

At 1,800 meters his fingers went numb on the handholds—raw granite that tore skin he'd kept soft with corporate moisturizers for twenty years. Blood on his palms. Real blood. Not a biosensor alert, not a medical readout—actual blood welling from actual cuts. He couldn't remember the last time he'd bled.

The wind changed at 2,100 meters. Below, it had been the Sprawl's convection—warm, stale, predictable. Here it came from somewhere older. It carried the smell of snow and stone and altitude, pushing against him with the indifferent force of something that had been blowing since before humans existed.

The Spine nearly killed him. A knife-edge ridge where the drop on either side was real enough to make his pattern-sight useless. No connections to analyze—just rock under his hands and wind trying to peel him off the mountain.

He reached Mystery Court at 3:12 AM on the third day. Legs trembling. Hands raw, crusted with dried blood and granite dust. Lungs struggling with air that tasted of ice and altitude and something electric he had no name for.

The Keeper waited in the courtyard—empty robes, glowing eyes, a presence that shouldn't exist in the physical world.

"You arrived," The Keeper said.
"I climbed," Jasper corrected.
Something like approval flickered in those mechanical eyes.

The Seventeen Heartbeats

The boundary opened.

It started in his hands. The cuts from the climb—the ones that still stung, still bled—stopped mattering. Not healed. Still there. But the sensation of skin-as-boundary dissolved. His palms, pressed against cold granite, could feel the mountain's roots extending downward through kilometers of bedrock. The tectonic plate beneath. The slow churn of magma beneath that.

His inner ear stopped reporting up and down. His proprioceptive sense—the awareness of where his body was in space—expanded until "his body" included the chamber, the monastery, the mountain itself. He felt the wind against the summit the way you feel breath entering your lungs. He felt snowmelt running down the eastern face the way you feel tears on your cheeks.

Later, he would try to describe the visual: Imagine seeing the Sprawl from orbit. Now imagine seeing the orbit from outside the solar system. Now imagine seeing the solar system from outside the galaxy. Keep going. But scale was only part of it. The experience wasn't just seeing—it was being. Each heartbeat a tidal event. Each breath a weather system.

He saw connections. Everything linked to everything else—the coffee he'd drunk that morning connected to water treatment plants connected to weather patterns connected to orbital platforms connected to stellar radiation connected to cosmic forces with no names in human language. His pattern-sight, the gift that had made him wealthy, was a candle flame next to a star.

He saw time. Not linearly—all at once. He could feel his own childhood—the taste of reconstituted rice his mother made, the sound of her voice saying his name—not as memory but as present reality, happening right now and always.

He saw himself. Something that called itself "Jasper" the way a wave might call itself separate from the ocean. He could feel the boundary of his identity the way you feel the edge of a table with your fingertips—a defined shape in something shapeless, temporary and contingent and desperately, achingly small.

The wave would have to let go to become the ocean again.

That was the price. Not death—transformation. Jasper-as-separate-entity would dissolve into Jasper-as-cosmic-awareness. His memories would persist, but they wouldn't feel like his memories anymore. The cuts on his hands would still be there, but they'd belong to the mountain as much as to him.

For seventeen heartbeats—he counted them, each one a thunderclap in the silence—he considered. Then he stepped back. And the boundaries slammed shut like a door, and he was just a body again, just skin and bone on cold stone, and the cuts on his hands hurt so much he gasped.

After

The climb down took nineteen hours—faster than the ascent, but somehow harder. Every step jarred through knees that had briefly held the weight of everything. The cuts on his hands kept reopening. He welcomed the pain. Pain meant edges. Pain meant here and not everywhere.

He returned to work. Built more systems, solved more problems, made more money than he could ever spend. From outside, his life looked exactly the same.

Those who knew what to look for saw differences.

He was gentler now. Patient in ways he hadn't been before. When young ambitious people came to him with ideas, he helped them without expecting anything in return. When employees made mistakes, he understood in ways that surprised everyone, including himself.

What He Teaches

Connections