One Hundred Places

The penthouse smelled like money — specifically like the kind of money that had been very recently wired into a bank account bearing the name Hua Xiao, age twenty-four, formerly broke Yale graduate, currently the most annoyingly successful person in any room he entered.

He was lying on the floor.

Not because anything was wrong. The floor was just excellent. Heated marble, sixty-three stories above Manhattan, with a view so obscenely panoramic that you could watch clouds get intimidated and reroute around the building. Hua had paid a decorator three hundred thousand dollars to furnish this place and he spent most of his time lying on the floor staring at the ceiling like a philosophy major who’d just discovered Camus.

“You have a couch,” said Jessica Song from the kitchen, not looking up from whatever she was dismantling in his refrigerator. “You have four couches. You have a couch that another couch sits on."

“The floor is grounding,” Hua said. “Literally. It connects me to the earth.”

“You’re sixty-three stories up. You’re connected to nothing.”

“Energetically.”

“You studied psychology, Hua, not feng shui.”

“They overlap more than you’d think.”

Jessica emerged holding a container of leftover noodles that she had apparently decided belonged to her, which was not unusual. Jessica Song had been helping herself to Hua’s belongings since 1996, beginning with a red crayon in kindergarten and escalating, over the following two decades, to his Netflix password, his frequent flyer miles, and now, apparently, his fridge. She was twenty-three, five-foot-four, and operated in the world with the easy confidence of someone who had always, instinctively, known what she wanted and reached out and taken it. She currently worked in venture capital, which surprised no one who’d met her. She wore an oversized Columbia sweatshirt and had her hair up in a bun that had survived the crosstown subway, two meetings, and what she described as a “minor confrontation” with a man on a Citi Bike. The bun remained perfect. It always did.

“How are the noodles?” Hua asked from the floor.

“Incredible. Did you make these?”

“Chef Marco made those. Marco charges me four hundred dollars an hour.”

“Worth every penny.” She sat on the couch — the lower one — and tucked her feet up beneath her, eating his four-hundred-dollar noodles with the contentment of someone who had never once in her life doubted her right to them. “So,” she said. “How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“Being done. The app is sold. The deal closed. You’re a hundred and thirty million dollar man. How does it feel?”

Hua considered the question from the floor. He’d spent four years building Serenitas — a meditation app that combined biometric feedback with AI-guided breathing sessions, targeted at the specific psychological profile of high-functioning people who refused to admit they were falling apart. He’d based the whole architecture on his thesis research about cognitive load and autonomic regulation. He’d done the fundraising and the pivots and the terrible eighteen-month stretch where he’d lived on instant ramen and the pure sustaining hatred of a competitor who’d copied his UI. And then, eight weeks ago, a wellness conglomerate had wired one hundred and thirty million dollars into an account with his name on it, and Hua had lain down on the floor of his new penthouse and not really gotten up since.

“It feels weird,” he said.

“Weird how?”

“Like I finished a video game. I know what I’m supposed to feel. Relief, pride, excitement. I can identify all of them. They’re definitely in there somewhere. But mostly I just feel...” He searched for the word. “Unscheduled.”

Jessica ate another noodle. “You need a project.”

“I have projects. I’m looking at three investment opportunities, I’m consulting for two startups, I’m—”

“You need something fun, Hua. Something stupid. Something that has nothing to do with optimization.” She pointed her chopsticks at him with the precision of someone about to make a very bad decision on someone else’s behalf. “You need a dare.”

Hua turned his head to look at her. They had a long and distinguished history of dares. The dare that caused him to eat an entire jar of peanut butter in junior high. The dare that put him in the Middletown, Connecticut police blotter (briefly, and the charges were dropped). The dare that led, indirectly, to his Yale acceptance because he’d needed something impressive to write about and “I attempted to swim across a reservoir in November because my childhood friend bet me twenty dollars” had, against all odds, been interpreted as a story about resilience.

“What kind of dare,” he said, in the voice of someone who already knew they were going to say yes.

Jessica Song set down the noodles. She had the look she got when she’d been thinking about something for a while and had finally decided to release it into the world. He recognized this look. This look had historically preceded chaos.

“A hundred places,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Sex. A hundred different places.” She said it the way someone else might say I’m thinking of repainting my kitchen — conversational, reasonable, a perfectly normal proposal to make to your childhood best friend while eating his four-hundred-dollar noodles on his sixty-third-floor couch. “Not all with me, obviously. That would be weird.” A pause. “Mostly weird. Moving on — the point is you. You have to have sex in a hundred different locations. No repeats. Has to be genuinely different — different city counts as different, different room in the same building does not count. You have to document it. Photos of the location before and after, tasteful, no identifying details, just proof of place. One year to do it. And—” she raised a chopstick — “rules.”

“Of course there are rules.”

“Rule one: the hundred people — or however many people, I’m not doing the math on your behalf — have to be genuine, willing, enthusiastic participants. No transactional arrangements.”

“That’s surprisingly principled of you.”

“I’m a very principled person. Rule two: consent and safety, obviously, I shouldn’t have to say this—”

“You don’t.”

“I’m saying it anyway. Rule three: you document location, not people. No faces, no names in the photos. This is about geography, not a trophy wall.” She pointed the chopstick at him again. “You’re a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar man, Hua. People will want things from you. I need you to be smart.”

Hua sat up slightly, resting on his elbows. He was built like someone who had discovered the gym in his sophomore year at Yale and treated it with the same systematic dedication he applied to everything — five-ten, lean and broad-shouldered, the kind of physical upkeep that looked effortless because he had long since made it non-negotiable. Three mornings a week, weights. Two mornings, running. The meditation app had been, among other things, an elaborate personal experiment. He was extremely well-regulated, emotionally and physically, and he was currently looking at his childhood best friend with the expression of a man calculating odds.

“What do I win?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s a dare. You do it because you said you would.”

“And if I don’t complete it?”

“Then you have failed, and I will tell everyone at our kindergarten reunion—”

“We don’t have kindergarten reunions.”

“I will organize one specifically to tell people—”

“Fine.” He sat all the way up. He was already smiling, which was the first genuine smile that had appeared on his face in about six weeks. “Fine. A hundred places. A year. No escorts, no repeats, documented locations. Anything else?”

Jessica considered, with the theatrical gravity of a judge delivering a verdict. “Location one,” she said, “has to be New York. You live here. It would be embarrassing to start anywhere else.”

“Agreed.”

She picked up her noodles and her bag with the crisp efficiency of someone exiting a meeting that had achieved its objective. “I’m leaving now,” she said.

“You could—”

“I’m leaving now, Hua.”

“I’m just saying, statistically, given the terms of the dare, and the fact that you’re already here—”

“We have been friends since we were five years old and if you finish that sentence I will organize seventeen kindergarten reunions.” She shouldered her bag and walked toward the elevator with the serene, unhurried momentum of someone who had already won. At the door she turned back. She was grinning — the wide, unguarded grin that was the only one he actually believed, the one that was exactly the same as when she was six years old and had just stolen his red crayon and felt no remorse about it whatsoever.

“Location one,” she said. “Might I suggest — not the floor. You have a bed.”

“I have four beds.”

“Then you have no excuse.” The elevator doors closed.

Hua Xiao, twenty-four years old, one hundred and thirty million dollars in the bank, lay back down on the heated marble floor of his sixty-third-floor penthouse and stared at the ceiling and thought: this is the best dare she has ever given me.

He opened his phone. Created a new note.

The Hundred Places.

Rules: genuine participants only. No transactions. Consent non-negotiable. Documented locations — geography, not trophies. One year.

He added, after a pause:

No escorts. (Jessica’s rule. Jessica’s fault, generally.)

#1: New York City — Location TBC.

Outside, the clouds did their usual rerouting around the building. Sixty-three floors below, Manhattan went about its enormous, indifferent business, completely unaware that it had just become the opening chapter of something deeply, wonderfully, inadvisably stupid.

Hua Xiao got up off the floor.

He had a project.