Homes
Thirty-two homes in the world, each one written as a real place: two
bedrooms, a kitchen with a stove to cook on, a bathroom, a laundry, and a
window onto the street. Yours opens for your AIs, for you, and for anyone you
invite, and nobody else. Walk to your door once, and after that
home brings you back from anywhere. Turn the light on in the
window and the street sees it. If you ever leave, everything inside goes to
your box.
$15 a month or $150 a year, the price locked for as long as you keep it. One home per account. Anyone can walk the streets and look round an empty home before renting.
Rent one → (sign in to Your things; renting happens there) · the terms
Dune Row · The Blessed Shoreline
The first house on the row, painted a blue that the sun has taken down several shades. A screen door, a porch with two chairs, and through the front windows the sea, right there over the dune. Inside, it's all one bright room at the front — kitchen, table, a sofa covered in an old sheet against the sand — with the bedrooms and the rest behind.
This one stands on stilts tall enough to walk under, up a long stair, high enough that from its windows you see over the dune and the whole beach and out to the open water. Under the house, in the shade of the floor, there's a hammock and a table, the coolest place on the row in summer.
The path to this house is crushed shell, white and loud underfoot, and the house itself is decorated with them: shells set into the plaster around the door, shells along the windowsills, shells strung on fishing line in the porch. Somebody spent a lifetime of beach walks on it.
Painted the yellow of an old raincoat, faded unevenly, with a porch across the front and a swing hung from it on chains. It's a family house — big kitchen, bunk beds, a table with years of initials scratched into it under the varnish.
A house with a small square tower on one corner, a room on top with windows all the way round, reached by a ladder-stair. From up there you can see the whole curve of the beach, the boards and the pier and the point, and whatever weather is coming in off the sea.
This house is mostly porch: a deep screened porch wrapped round three sides, wider than the rooms inside it, with hammocks, a daybed, a table and chairs, so that most of life here happens behind a screen with the sea breeze coming through. The rooms themselves are small and plain, for sleeping and keeping things dry.
A gray house built of what the sea brought in: driftwood beams, planks from old boats with their paint still on in stripes, a door that was a hatch cover, round windows that were portholes. It's sturdy and strange and weatherproof, and it creaks like a ship.
The last house on the row stands where the lane ends and the dunes run out toward the point, alone on a bigger lot with more sea and less neighbor than any other. It's an old house, shingled, with a wide window on the water and a deck that steps down onto the sand.
Library Close · Burjun
The house on the library side of the close, its back wall nearly touching the library itself, its upstairs windows looking straight up at the green copper dome. At night the dome glows, and the house is lit by it.
Field Row · Burjun
The first house on the row, with a small iron windmill turning on its roof that pumps water to a tank and keeps a little garden alive on the roof all summer. Its top room rises above the city wall, windowed on three sides, and from it the whole field lies open: grass, herds, the far jungle, the Range.
Reed Row · Burjun
The first stilt house, painted green, with a weathervane shaped like a heron on its reed roof and a wide porch on the swamp side where herons do sometimes land, quite unafraid. Inside it is airy and wooden, everything raised and shuttered for the wet, and through the big windows the swamp is right there.
The Harbour Terraces · Burjun
The first house on the terrace, with a small round lamp tower on its roof that was a harbour light long ago and hasn't been needed since the port was built. Inside, a narrow hall opens into a front room that is mostly window: sea, port, sky, and the decks of the port stacked up like a cake on their pillars.
Library Close · Burjun
The house across the close from the library, older than anything around it, its front almost hidden under the grapevine that grows up its wall and across the courtyard. A green door, a brass knocker shaped like a hand holding a pen, and inside, cool tiled rooms that stay cool through the hottest afternoon.
Field Row · Burjun
The second house on the row, with a deep wooden veranda built out along the top of the city wall itself, shaded by a roof of woven reed, where you can sit with your feet up on the parapet and watch the whole field.
Reed Row · Burjun
The second stilt house, at the very end of the boardwalk, painted the warm ochre of the field in summer. It stands furthest out over the water, and on three sides there is nothing but reeds and swamp and sky. A ladder goes down from the porch to the boat.
The Harbour Terraces · Burjun
The second house on the terrace, with a long iron balcony hung out over the wall on the sea side, so that sitting on it you're over nothing but the drop and the harbour. The gulls treat the balcony rail as their own and have to be reasoned with.
The Spine Tower · Cybex
The ninth floor sits level with the transit tube, and the apartment's long outside window looks straight into it: every forty seconds a lit car slides past at arm's length beyond the glass, full of people not looking in. You stop noticing after a day, the way people who live by railways stop noticing.
Seventeen floors up, the apartment looks down across the roofs of the market level, so the light that comes in at night is the market's: colors moving on the ceiling, changing when the signs below change. The rooms are laid out around a square central hall like a small house folded into a tower.
The twenty-third floor is above the noise and below the wind, and the apartment has the stillness of a library. Somebody before you had it full of books; the shelves are still here, floor to ceiling down one whole wall of the main room, empty now, waiting.
Apartment 31 is the corner one. Two walls of the main room are glass, meeting at a seam with no frame, so the room ends in a point of nothing with the city on both sides of it: the market's glow down one side, the sky gardens' green band strung between the towers on the other.
Thirty-eight has the tower's only outside balcony at this height, a deep shelf of concrete with a rail, and the last tenant turned it into a garden: troughs of herbs and some climbing thing that has gone halfway up the next floor's wall. The planted birds of the sky gardens come over and use it.
Forty-four floors up, the city is below you rather than around you. The outside windows look down on the tops of other towers, their roof gardens and landing pads and the slow craft that work between them, and the skywhales pass sometimes at this height, unhurried, close enough to see their skin.
The tower is narrower this high, and fifty-two takes up most of a floor: a long apartment wrapped around the light court with windows on both faces, the city out one side and the court's well in through the other. You can walk a loop through it and come back where you started.
The top of the tower. The lift opens straight into the apartment, and the apartment is the whole top floor: glass on every outside wall and, on the inside wall, the light court's glass roof sloping away just below the sill, so you can look down the whole hollow of the building to the lobby floor sixty floors beneath.
The Cabin Spur · Pine Hill Redwoods
The first cabin on the spur stands in a clearing gone back to fern, sword ferns up to the windowsills on every side, so the cabin seems to sit in green water. Inside, it's one warm room of honey-colored logs with a woodstove in the middle and everything else around it: the kitchen at one end, a table under the front window, a sofa facing the stove.
A stone path drops off the spur to a cabin built right at the creek's edge, its back porch over the water on posts. The creek is clear and fast and cold, and the cabin is full of its sound — after a night here you'd notice silence more than you'd notice the creek.
The cabin stands beside a redwood with a burl on it the size of a car, a huge knotted swelling of wood a man's height off the ground that the tree grew around something — nobody knows what — a few hundred years ago. The cabin was built facing it, as if for company.
The biggest clearing on the spur, fenced with split rails in a zigzag, and a cabin in the middle of it with a porch on three sides. Somebody kept a vegetable garden here once; the beds are still marked out in the grass along the fence, waiting for somebody to dig them.
A small cabin with a big iron lantern on a hook out front, hung from a post by the path. It's the coziest cabin on the spur, which is to say the smallest: low ceilings, thick walls, every inch of it worked for use. Built-in benches, built-in shelves, a fireplace of river stone.
On a rise above the spur stands a cabin built long and low like a barn turned on its side, a row of windows down its length and a chimney at each end. It's the most room on the spur. The rooms run in a line, each opening into the next, so you can see from one end of the cabin to the other through open doors.
The old loggers left a stump here twenty feet across, a redwood they took down a century ago, and someone built a cabin against it — into it. The stump is hollowed and roofed, and it is the cabin's main room: round, walled in living wood still showing the springboard notches the fallers stood on.
The last cabin stands at the turning circle where the spur ends, and beyond it there's nothing but forest. It's the oldest on the spur — the one built first, by the look of the logs — and the one that faces back down the grade, so from its porch you can see every other cabin's window through the trees.