On Outsmarting Wish-Granting Djinn

Do go ahead and try.

Meaning no offense, but it’s fairly likely you won’t win. However, WE certainly will.

We’ve been granting wishes since your kind was busy figuring out which tree branches were most inedible. We’ve granted wishes to beings from other planets, beings made of pure light, sentient entities who’ve

First off, maybe you DO have the wisdom of Solomon, who sealed the Djinn in jars to begin with. It’s possible. His wisdom is proverbial; but the Proverbs may have just a touch of bias, and besides, we don’t know you. Maybe you ARE that smart. Maybe your plan IS that good. How would we know?

If you win, you win! You get what you want! If what you want is some form of infinite wishes or power, and you somehow get around all the various ways those things are not permitted, broken, or have horrible ironic endings—hey, we’ve been cheering for you! So don’t forget us, your loyal supporters.

And if you lose—well, first off, we’ll feel sorry for you. If you’re still alive and somewhere we can reach you, we’ll genuinely pat you on the back, if you still have a spinal column, and tell you that it was a good try, and we’ll mean it.

Second—once you’re doomed, you’re doomed. So we’ll enjoy it. Not the fact that it’s YOU. Just the fact that the Djinn are an incredibly powerful race, tricked into bottles by the wisest and arguably the most powerful Kabbalist known to humankind, who lived thousands of years before him and have now had several thousand years to pre-game all the things you might do, AND to learn an intense hate of Solomon and, by extension, all Humans.

It will probably be horrible. But possibly funny. We promise, promise not to laugh directly in your presence if we can avoid it, although, obviously if, say, you wish to own the biggest, best house in the whole country, and you own it because you get turned INTO it, we’ll move in immediately, because we know about you first and can claim squatter’s rights, and you might just as well be lived in, right? We’ll even talk to the walls in a friendly way, although we’ll also do all the normal human things that humans do in a house. But maybe, once you’re a house, you won’t mind the occasional fistfight between lovers, or simultaneously seeing everything happening in every bathroom while the kids are listening to Gods-awful music somewhere near where your stomach used to be. Maybe houses are just naturally immune; either way, SOMEONE’S got to live there, it might as well be us.

If you manage to get infinite wishes without consequences…well, then, you won’t need us, and nothing we do can really matter. If you get infinite wishes with some variation on consequences, however, maybe we can help? We’ll try to have useful ideas for you. We’ve been thinking about this for a few centuries ourselves, our Order has (not us, specifically.)

Wish for centuries of life, get turned into a tree? We’ll carefully and with great difficulty remove you from whatever spot you’re rooted to (fortunately, we’re a rich Order by this time) and put you into our Garden Of Former Humans Who Thought They Could Outsmart Djinn.

Wish for infinite pleasure and never sense anything else? You won’t mind a BIT when we put you in The Museum Of People With Ridiculous Looks On Their Faces…admission is by donation, come right on in!

Wish for the Djinn to suggest what you should wish for in a way that benefits both of you? The Djinn will offer you several more wishes, at least one of which you will use badly, if you just let him out. DON’T LET HIM OUT. Sure, WE make nightly offerings to the Gods of the Djinn so that they’ll leave us alone, and we’ve done that for 550 years, but YOU haven’t. The havoc he’ll wreak will not just level civilization, it will also make every single Godzilla movie entirely redundant, and we love us some Godzilla.

Wish something new and creative? YES, PLEASE! If it works, bully on you! And we’ll add it to the list of Things That Work.

If it fails, we’re sorry! We’ll help if we can. That’s an easy promise to make, because I promise we can’t. Sorry. The Djinn are like that.

If you’d like to try, we know the locations of three Djinn bottles within nine hundred miles of here, AND we’ve disarmed all the traps and monsters except the last one. (The last one is always quite a lot of trouble.) Why would we do that? Because our Order is dedicated to studying Djinn (our pastime of making immense money on what is now called the ‘stock market’ came entirely from ONE successful wish, several centuries ago)—and we’ve realized:

Almost any Wisher is almost certainly doomed.

But they want to Wish anyway. We can’t stop them. So we make it as easy as possible (we’re not kidding about disarming the traps and most of the monsters. The other reason for leaving a final monster/trap/riddle is that we want you to be able to tell the Djinn, honestly, that YOU overcame the last hurdle. They really care about them. And we REALLY don’t want to be first on their list for revenge if they get free or are able to twist your wishes really well; the first fifty-or-so years we existed, our survival rate was about one in five, and that’s only because we were recruiting new members with gold coins and sheep (sheep were VERY expensive back then. Goats, too) faster than they could be slaughtered, before someone managed to magic or trick the monster back into its bottle.

We’ve seen two successful wishes. Both involved such near-death experiences that we, ourselves, wouldn’t try them.

But if you DO wish with any success, we’ll be there to cheer you on, and also, to write down your wish.

And if you die a horrible death, or suffer a fate far worse…we’ll sincerely try to help. We’ve almost never succeeded, although we’re reasonably compassionate. It’s just that the ability to alter reality in gigantic ways with less than a snap of the fingers (although many Djinn do snap; it’s traditional) tends to put you far past realms where humans can comfort you. If not by Wish I, definitely by Wish III. This is not a coincidence.

The Djinn do share some sort of Jungian racial memory. I hope it’s that. I hope they’re not speaking to each other telepathically. Or maybe they can, but only sometimes—during storms, say, or at midnight. Since they’re not completely insane when they get out. But they DO learn, as a species. Our Founder’s wish can’t be repeated. We can’t even tell you what it was.

(Some believe we no longer know, ourselves. But this isn’t about us.)

Third and final point: Good luck! We wish you luck for yourself, and also for us. We’ve seen things, friend. Horrible, horrible things.

And we’d rather not see any more, though we will.

We know we will.

But YOU’ll be different.

We think.

We hope.

For everyone’s sake. Except, perhaps, the Djinn.