The Future of Urban Housing

A shady San Francisco startup offers the ultimate solution to the city's ever-worsening housing crisis. -the Eds

Tish would probably still be alive if she'd just let up about the yellow wallpaper.She was drunk, of course. They all were: sweating and shivering in turns as the doors to the bar slid open and shut on the fogged up night, as the hyperloop stop out front poured revelers and mourners alike into the same place at the same time. A mess.

It was the fourth reference to yellow wallpaper that finally did it for Fran.

"My mom's bathroom!" Tish shrieked, taunting, right in Fran's ear. "It has, like, a dozen pictures of naked children in vegetable costumes. And wallpaper! In a bathroom! So horrid!"

Fran couldn't help it. Yellow wallpaper made her think of everything that had happened since she and Benn had first decided that the studio on Fuller smelled too much like cats that they'd never owned and the syntho-bourbon from the craft distillery would make the neighborhood unaffordable sooner or later, anyway.

It was thinking about Benn and all of the cats that they'd never own. The bourbon they'd never drink. The fundamental unfairness of the fact that she was the one who'd loved and lost and now she was the one who was supposedly to blame. According to Tish.

It was wallpaper itself, which was one of the things that she and Benn hated together when they were trying to find The Apartment. The Apartment that would fix everything. If they could just get to it before a dozen other young couples who wanted a little natural light and an ad-free experience got there first.

"Do you know what color it was?" asked Tish. Smirking. Leaning in for the kill.

Fran didn't let her finish. She knew what was coming.

Calmly, Fran threw her glass of non-syntho bourbon at Tish's nose, as hard as she could.

Tish let fly a solitary but operatic and satisfying screech.

Heads and hide-covered stools swivelled. Every conversation about real estate--and they were all, in some way or another, about real estate--slid off the grassy edge of its precipice.

What felt like seconds later, somebody yanked Fran's throwing arm behind her, hard, pulling her off her stool and into the crowd.

***

Detective Morgan despised cases like this. Too many kids in a Mission bar where the orange lights and their indoor skin made them look like chickens in the first stages of rotisserie. One of the chickens drinks too much and runs in front of a hyperloop pod in a hurry to escape the roaster, and suddenly it's a police matter, no longer a simple bar fight.

And the transcription software was down, too. Or worse, it wasn't down, but it was constantly glitching out, producing statements like, "And then he made me put the scarf on the elephant." The software tagged the word elephant in yellow, helpfully adding: "Elephants are extinct. Please follow-up with witness."

It was going to have to be old school. Nothing but a slender laptop and a set of underutilized 59 WPM typing skills. Morgan was going to have to ask the girl to repeat everything three times, which was going to feel like being drowned slowly in a vat of syrupy, double-synthesized bourbon.

It had taken a dozen incoherent interviews already to track down patient zero, her arm hanging loosely in a blue surgical sling.

"So, why would you say you threw a glass at your friend…Tishrish Regan-Stopper?"

Morgan couldn't help herself. "Is that her real name?"

"God, I hope not," snorted the woman. "But probably. And she's not my friend. She was—is—Benn's friend."

That tense change didn't escape Morgan. Usually it was the other way around: present tense, the remembering the reality, past tense. Benn, whoever he was, was still alive. In some form or another. Maybe in a nuthouse, she thought.

"Is that Bennet Fishkin?"

"Yeah," said the woman, trying to be casual, but Morgan could tell that the name hurt. "We were having a…remembrance drink, after the…"

"Funeral?"

"More like a memorial service. It seemed polite to drink with them. They invited me." She said it with such forlorn dignity that Morgan typed "forlorn dignity" into her notes. Her supervisors were always marking her down on evaluations for that sort of editorializing.

Morgan remembered deciding that she liked the woman. But she hadn't answered the question.

"So you still haven't told me why you hit…"

"You wouldn't believe me if I did."

And she was right. Morgan didn't believe her. But she typed it all out—-slowly—-anyway. Maybe it was the typing—TranscriptThis! made all of the stories seem like the same big block of text, yellow-spattered like urine stains on a subway wall—but whatever it was, Morgan remembered it for years afterward, and when Hometime Corp. finally announced its IPO, she shuddered and felt the bile rise in her throat like fireworks from a lake barge. They'd worked out the kinks, they said. No worries. The future of housing in crowded urban spaces.

"Benn and I—well, we were together for five years. And the apartment was just too small. We thought about buying, but Benn's browser history was a problem for underwriters. He'd collected stupid things after college. Old discarded celebrity iPhones. Expired colognes of the British Empire. We had to wait at least seven years for it to clear before any cryptomortgage company would consider converting our dollars into homecoins.

"We looked everywhere. But you know how it is. Everybody wants the same things: wood floors, high ceilings, a refrigerator that doesn't try to sell you rice milk every time you want a glass of water at night. And Benn didn't…well, he didn't work, not really. He wouldn't have wanted me to say that. He wanted to, but I told him it was fine. I made enough. I guess I didn't, though, because it was months before we found something and then it was only because of this guy I work with, Wendell.

"Wendell? No, yeah, that's his real name. And he insisted on it, too. Some people called him Wendy behind his back. Nobody to his face. He was twenty-fourth generation Harvard, or twenty-third generation Yale. It doesn't really matter, does it, I mean, for the record? Because I can't remember. These guys are all the same. They all row on the Bay every morning and they're all named after 19th-century Supreme Court justices.

"Anyway, though, I think Wendell kind of—you know. Liked me. Or at least he didn't look at me like the grit that gets in between your phone and your case. So he saw one day that I was hiring a realbot to do the legwork for us and he said, 'I can help.' I thought he was just going to give me the name of another search startup in beta, but instead, he said that he had an apartment, an actual apartment, and he could get me a deal on it.

"It was gorgeous. It had these floors—and skylights. You could see the old bridge, if you stood on a chair and looked at an angle and squinted and it wasn't foggy.

"You cops get housing," Fran said, pointing an accusatory finger. "You don't know what it's like out there. We didn't know. There was really only one weird thing, maybe. Before you went in, you had to enter this sequence on a keypad, then your thumbprint. Same when you went back out again, different numbers. Then there was a flash. Like, not like lightning, exactly. But they were insistent about it. House rule. Eviction-worthy offense. Legal action something-something. It was in the lease.

"It was fine. Everything was fine. Benn liked it at first, too. He really did. Don't listen to any of them. Tish. She thought I planned it. Whatever. That I ignored him. Maybe I did. Things were tough at work. I just needed him to like it. We were paying below market for the kind of place that they all wanted. Envy was part of it. That's why they've been so horrible.

"It was… I don't know. Three weeks in. Four. Three. Benn talked about headaches. Dizziness. That there was something wrong with the place. I told him to go to the doctor. He didn't, of course. He said that he could hear things at night. I couldn't hear them. I told him I'd talk to the neighbors, but I didn't. Why? Because before I got the chance, he said that the people he heard were talking about cars. About buying a car.

"That's when the ghost theory started. What was I supposed to say to that? He was crumbling right in front of me, but what was I supposed to do? You can't involuntarily commit a 32-year-old who you're not even married to because he thinks he's hearing century-old ghosts discussing transportation options. And I wouldn't. Anyway.

"The stories got crazier. The headaches got worse. I'd come home and he'd just be…staring at the wall, like he was trying to make it move and it wouldn't. I did take him to a doctor one time. I told him I'd leave him otherwise. The doctor said migraines--too much screentime. But it was ad-free, like I said.

"I screamed at him, because I thought he was browsing again. I went through all of our statements but I didn't find anything, so I accused him of having a secret account. The worst thing was, he just sat there and took it. At one point he said 'quiet' but it wasn't because he was mad at me but because he was listening to…

"One day I came home—yeah, I mean, I still had to work—and he was hitting the keypad with a hammer. I don't even know where he even got a hammer.

"I grabbed it and shoved him out of the way. But for a second, I thought I…I heard it, too.

"But it was ridiculous, you know? Utterly ridiculous. Ghosts. Hauntings. Jesus fuck.

"He told his friends somewhere in there, I guess. Tish, Belba, the rest of them. They say they told him that he should get out. Yeah, sure. He didn't, did he? Where would he have gone?

"He was talking in his sleep. 'The panel is key.' I told him maybe he was hearing himself talk at night. He went out and didn't come back for a whole day. He seemed…better after that. More reasonable.

"But we had a huge fight the next day. He burned dinner. I was annoyed, because I knew he burned it because he got that look on his face like he was listening to someone else. He told me that if I didn't believe him, he'd show me.

"He ran for the door. The key sequence he was supposed to hit--he didn't hit it. He just walked out the door, like it was a regular apartment. It was…I was thinking, 'Shit, it's broken. Anyone could just walk in here. We're going to get fucking evicted from paradise.'"

"I entered it, and there was the flash, and I looked out into the hall. He was gone."

Morgan inserted a link to the missing persons report here. The picture showed an ivory oval face, long eyelashes for a man. He was cute. Not handsome. But cute.

"I was out of the office for days," Fran continued, voice lowering "Then Wendell came to see me. He suddenly started rambling on about this startup he was involved in. And I wasn't listening at first because it was like, why would he be talking about this? Can't he see that I'm…?

"But then I started to listen."

"They were launching an 'innovative approach' to the housing crisis. That's how he put it. Him and a bunch of guys in the theoretical physics lab at Stanford, working the housing problem all night until they realized that the answer was actually simple. It wasn't a matter of space. It was time that was the key. Once you figured out that every subjective moment produced its own separate timeline, you just had to figure out how to separate them from one perspective. And then lay them back on top of each other from another. You could have hundreds of people sharing a single space, but not a time. Roommates who pass in the night. Roommates who never—well, usually never—have to wake up to a sink full of someone else's dishes. Roommates who never even know that they're roommates."

"The panel kept them separate. Or it was supposed to. That's why you had to enter the code each time. They were still working out the kinks. Sometimes the timelines overlapped at the edges, bled into each other like watercolors. That's what he said. Like watercolors. You could rent out the same place in as many timelines as you could create. It kept the prices down. When the…occupant wanted to move back to the original timeline, the code lined up the coordinates. Something like that. The thing is, it's supply and demand. Wendell said. When demand rises, supply falls. Prices rise. The only thing for it was to create more supply. Everybody deserved to live in a nice, affordable place, he said. If you just followed the rules, you'd be all right.

"But when Benn stepped out, he was—is—well, as the physicists put it, 'Impossible to find within current technological parameters,' " Wendell said.

Morgan paused in her typing, asked a half-question to give her some time to edit the typos and try to think of a way to figure out who was actually the crazy person in this story. It wasn't always obvious, like it was on the shows. "So, the yellow wallpaper…?"

"That stupid story everybody has to read in ninth grade for, like, feminism 101. I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm the woman. How fucking dare they? I'm the widow. I'm the grieving one. I just wanted her to stop… smirking."

Morgan didn't react. It wasn't her job. Tonight, she was transcription software.

"So you've moved out. Current address?"

Silence.

"You didn't move out."

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent apartment?" Fran sniffed. "That's why they all hate me, you know. Envy."

Morgan never found out what they did with Fran. She couldn't bring herself to check. Probably nothing. It was just a bunch of startup kids getting drunk in the Mission after their first collective tragedy. One of them lashed out. It was a tense room in the first place. Everybody on edge about where they were living. Where they wanted to live. How to get there. Who was in the way. End of story.