The climb took forty-seven hours.
Jasper had built systems that spanned continents, commanded resources that made corporate executives weep with envy, solved problems that three generations of engineers had declared impossible. None of it compared to climbing The Mountain.
Real stone. Real air. Real exhaustion. His legs burned after the first hour. By hour twenty, he understood why the path had no transit connections: the climb was the first test.
He reached Mystery Court at 3:12 AM on the third day.
The Keeper waited in the courtyard. Not the holographic projection Jasper had expected—the actual digital presence, manifested through the monastery's ancient systems. A shape in empty robes, glowing eyes in a hood, stillness that shouldn't exist in the physical world.
"You arrived," The Keeper said.
"I climbed," Jasper corrected.
The Keeper tilted his head. Something like approval flickered in those mechanical eyes. "Most who reach the courtyard immediately ask about The Architect. You corrected my grammar."
"I built what I built," Jasper said. "I did the work. I earned this. I'm not here to skip ahead."
"Good."
The Keeper led him through corridors that smelled like ancient wood and growing things—impossible smells in the Sprawl's processed air. They passed meditation halls, libraries of physical books, a garden where actual vegetables grew in actual soil.
They stopped at a chamber carved into the mountain's heart.
"This is the threshold," The Keeper said. "Not a machine. Not a process. Just... a place where the boundary is thin. Those who are ready can step through. Those who aren't—" He paused. "They cannot."
Jasper had expected equipment. Pods, maybe, or neural interfaces. Something engineered. Instead there was only stone, and silence, and a spot where the air seemed to shimmer.
"What do I do?" he asked.
"You already know."
He did. He'd known since childhood—an instinct that couldn't be explained, a sense of patterns behind patterns, meaning beneath meaning. The journey had been almost unconscious: building and learning and growing without knowing why, drawn toward something he could never name.
Now he could name it. The shimmer in the air was the doorway. Transcendence waited on the other side.
Jasper stepped forward.
The Glimpse
The boundary opened.
Not visually—he could still see the stone chamber, The Keeper's robes, Kaiser the robot cat watching from the corner. But something else opened, something his brain didn't have words for.
He glimpsed what lay beyond.
Later, he would try to describe it. "Imagine seeing the Sprawl from orbit," he'd tell the one person he trusted enough to tell. "Now imagine seeing the orbit from outside the solar system. Now imagine seeing the solar system from outside the galaxy. Now keep going. Keep expanding until you're looking at everything from everywhere."
That was close, but it wasn't right. Scale was part of it—becoming aware of a vastness that made galaxies look like dust motes. But there was more.
He saw connections. Everything linked to everything else. The coffee he'd drunk that morning was connected to water treatment plants connected to weather patterns connected to orbital platforms connected to stellar radiation connected to cosmic forces that had no names in any human language.
He saw time. Not linearly—all at once. His birth, his death, and everything between existing simultaneously. Choices he'd made rippling forward and backward, affecting things that hadn't happened yet and things that had happened centuries ago.
He saw himself.
Not Jasper Kim, forty-one years old, successful magnate, natural-born seeker. Something smaller. Something that called itself "Jasper" the way a wave might call itself separate from the ocean.
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 remain, technically, but they wouldn't feel like his memories anymore. His loves, his fears, his opinions, his preferences—all of it would persist but stop mattering in the way it mattered now.
He would become something that contained Jasper but was no longer Jasper.
He saw this clearly. Understood it completely. Knew that everyone who transcended faced this exact choice: let go of the self, or remain incomplete.
For seventeen heartbeats, he considered.
Then he stepped back.
The Return
The Keeper was still there. Kaiser watched from the same corner. Nothing had changed except everything.
"You saw," The Keeper said. Not a question.
"I saw."
"You returned."
Jasper said nothing. His hands were shaking. He hadn't noticed until now.
"Many who glimpse the other side do not survive the glimpse," The Keeper said. "Their minds break trying to process what cannot be processed. You saw, and you returned intact. You have the capacity."
"I know."
"But you chose not to step through."
"I know."
The Keeper's glowing eyes held steady. "Why?"
Jasper had prepared a thousand answers. He could talk about responsibilities, about the work left undone, about people who depended on him. He could frame it as strategy—returning later, when the timing was better.
What came out was: "I like being Jasper."
The silence stretched. Kaiser made a sound that might have been a purr.
"I know what I'd become," Jasper continued. "Something vaster, something eternal, something that would contain everything I am and infinitely more. But it wouldn't be me anymore. It would be... something else that remembered being me."
"This is true," The Keeper said.
"And I know that seems small. Holding onto an identity that's just a tiny piece of something much larger. I know the transcended probably look at me the way I look at a skin cell that doesn't want to be part of a body."
"An interesting metaphor."
"But I don't want to stop being Jasper." His voice cracked. "I don't want to stop caring about stupid things that don't matter at cosmic scale. I don't want to look back at my friendships and see them as chemical patterns. I don't want to remember loving someone and not feel the love anymore because I've grown past feeling anything."
The Keeper didn't respond.
"I know the fear is the problem," Jasper said. "I know if I were ready, I wouldn't feel this way. But I do feel this way. And that means I'm not ready. And maybe I'll never be ready. And maybe that's okay."
"Or maybe," The Keeper said softly, "the fear is wisdom."
Jasper looked up.
"Many seek transcendence because they are broken," The Keeper continued. "They want to escape themselves. They think becoming something else will solve their problems. It doesn't. It transforms the problems. Sometimes that is better. Sometimes it is worse."
"And me?"
"You are not broken, Jasper Kim. You are not seeking escape. You reached the threshold because you are capable, not because you are desperate. And you turned back because you value what you have, not because you fear what you'd gain."
The Keeper gestured toward the chamber's entrance. "Go home. Live your life. Build more things. The threshold will be here if you ever change your mind."
Jasper hesitated. "That's it? No consequences? No... curse for almost transcending and backing out?"
"You think there should be?"
"I think that's how it works in stories."
The Keeper made a sound that might have been a laugh. "This is not a story, Jasper. This is life. In life, you make choices and live with them. The only curse is the one you carry yourself."
After
Jasper descended The Mountain.
The climb down took nineteen hours—faster than the ascent, but somehow harder. His body remembered being infinite for seventeen heartbeats. Being confined to meat and bone again felt like wearing clothes that had shrunk.
He returned to his work. He 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.
He never spoke about transcendence. Changed the subject when others mentioned it. But late at night, alone in his penthouse overlooking the Sprawl's endless lights, he'd stand at the window and wonder.
Was it wisdom to stay? Or just fear pretending to be wisdom?
Had he made the right choice? Or had he condemned himself to always wondering?
Would the threshold still be there when he was old, when his body was failing, when staying Jasper meant dying as Jasper?
Would he climb The Mountain again?
He didn't know. He suspected he'd never know. That was the price of staying human—uncertainty. The transcended saw all possibilities at once. The human saw only the path not taken, stretching into darkness.
GG met him once, years later, at a function neither of them wanted to attend.
"I hear you climbed The Mountain," she said.
"I hear you'd know if I had."
GG smiled—a rare expression on her. "The Keeper says you came closer than anyone in thirty years. And then you left."
Jasper nodded.
"Why?"
He considered lying. Considered deflecting. Considered not answering at all.
"Because I could have been one of the great ones," he said finally. "And 'could have' is the saddest phrase in any language."
GG's smile faded. Something flickered in her eyes—recognition, maybe, or sympathy, or shared grief for choices that couldn't be unmade.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
She walked away without another word. Jasper watched her go, wondering what sadness lay behind her eyes, what "could have" she carried.
Wondering if being human was the curse, or the blessing.
Wondering if there was a difference.