Sunnyside
Stephen S. Power
CHARLIE
Charlie considers logging off, but that might look too much like them peeking back at Ville, so they addresses the challenges. To counter the BRICS’s increased use of solar, wind, and wave power, Dubai lowered its oil prices again, but demand still hasn’t rebounded. Meanwhile, another temperature spike has made working conditions so dangerous that the New EU has issued sanctions. As a result, Charlie’s lost 25% of their development funds. With their Biraq just a proposed street grid, they must now choose to slow construction overall or prioritize certain districts.
They know what Ville would do: Build the revenue districts and let the desert keep the rest, but Charlie plays differently. They created a mod that enables a Biraq’s population to decide. The game designers didn’t like it. Despite having created the game to crowdsource countless iterations of Biraq so they could choose the build with the best evolution to actually construct, they wanted to maintain topdown control of the game the way they would the real city. And Ville hated the mod. He wrote a dozen forum posts on how it could only lead to muddled design. You might as well put it to a vote of the passengers where a train should go. Nevertheless, he spearheaded the campaign for its acceptance.
Charlie told Ville that apparently irony was as lost on him as it was on the designers. Ville said big cities need designers, but citizens should design their own little lives. So, he would have them design theirs. Which Charlie heard as, I like you. They’ve built Biraqs every night since, often falling asleep in their goggles together, then dealing with new challenges over breakfast.
Charlie fires up the mod. A few seconds later, the population chooses something they love – a new way to self-define a city.
A green flare appears. Charlie blinktaps it and Ville’s avatar, a white whale, takes its place. “Where are you?” the whale asks.
“On the T,” Charlie says. Ville makes a disgusted sound, and they laugh. New Yorkers only call the Second Avenue subway by its letter name to annoy people from Boston. “You?”
“Grand Central. My train arrived less late than I figured. Wait. Check your build. What’s gone wrong?”
“Nothing. Isn’t it amazing?”
AUSTEN
Her surprise turns to suspicion when, after some very slow, but very intense dancing in the former bank’s vault, Finn cancels the car and gets an autotel instead. She wants to say it’s alright, yoga helps her back endure the bucket seats, but Finn’s already tapping his watch.
“Why the splurge?” she says.
“Things should be special,” Finn says, then grabs her hand and leads her outside. The autotel is only a few blocks away.
Austen bounces on her toes as the little green dot on his watchmap approaches. She knows what Things should be special means. He’s such a clown.
“And I got a promotion today,” Finn says.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Austen kisses his hand. “What is it?”
Finn nods toward the street. “Here we go.”
The autotel slips out of a vehicle swarm on Greenpoint and stops at the corner of 46th. It’s long and tall, a featureless glass teardrop the size of a delivery van. The glass is already blacked for privacy, and unlike budget rentals there’s no signage for strips clubs, casinos, and weed shops. The door reveals itself by sliding open, and the orangey tang of sanitizer makes Austen blush. They last used an autotel on her twenty-seventh birthday, when Finn also made things special, and the smell acts like an aphrodisiac. Which was probably part of his clever plan.
They tumble onto the bare black mattress, and the door reseals. Adele’s Someone to Watch Over Me starts playing as the vehicle remerges into the swarm.
A screen beside the bed displays Finn’s order: scenic route, clean linens, no time limit.
Finn disentangles himself from Austen to get sheets and pillows from a locker, but Austen traps his hips beneath hers and clamps his wrists over his head. “No time limit?” she says. “This is about more than a promotion, Mr. Moneybags.”
“It’s not like we’re going into the city. I’m not selling a kidney for street tolls. We’ll cruise down Greenpoint.”
She jabs a thumbnail into his palm. “Confess,” Austen says.
“I—” he says, then his body deflates.
She sits up. “What’s wrong?”
For a second she thinks, Was he planning to propose, but lost his nerve? Finn’s just that sweet and old-fashioned, isn’t he? He has to know she could never accept. It’s tough for her, too, losing a Tuesday night, or any night, given the crazy quilt of freelance gigs she’s constantly assembling. Who knows where she’ll be in four years. Or four months. How could she override the life her rent, loans, and expenses have designed for her to create one with him? This, their moment, will have to do.
Then Austen gets it.
“What’s the promotion?” she says.
LUISA
Its dot is yellow, though: a bad bulb.
Years ago, the building had a maintenance staff – and a hotel and a Nordstrom’s. Now, thanks to zipvans letting travelers sleep in transit and pattern retailers letting customers design clothes from home, the Tower has twelve more floors of condos and Luisa. Así es la vida.
She gets a flashlight, bulbs, and a stepladder from the maintenance closet, then takes the freight elevator to the top.
The doors open and a light snaps on to reveal a concrete foyer painted white. It smells dusty. The drone vacs that scour the condos each week with orange sanitizer can’t get out here. Luisa taps her watch to hold the elevator, then holds her watch near a featureless metal door also painted white. It buzzes and slides aside.
After the Tower was built, a few condos were finished for showings, and a couple from Singapore actually lived in one for a week. The penthouse, though, like the rest of the apartments, is empty, having only the basic lighting system. The glass walls, red with dusk, deepen the gloom. The space hardly seems worth $300 million.
Yet that price is the genius of Midtown’s megatowers. The condos’ owners don’t need places to live. They need places to store their wealth. So, instead of putting their money in a bank, the condos act as virtual vaults, their wealth appreciating as the real estate market improves. And the city’s best views go unseen like investment art put into storage.
Luisa considers this is a terrible shame, which is why she likes changing light bulbs. It justifies her looking out the windows. And dreaming of a life that’s more than a series of lonely shifts. And long commutes. She can’t afford the city.
The windows will be her reward.
But first, she plays her flashlight over the floor so she doesn’t trip on the pipes sticking up and discovers the bulb didn’t blow. It was removed and left beside a stepladder standing beneath its fixture.
Luisa gently sets down her own ladder and the bulbs, then draws her shockgun. She holds her flashlight alongside the barrel, aims both into the huge empty space, and calls, “Who’s there?”
CHARLIE
“No, only the streets.”
“Streets are the city. No one ever built a city before there was a street to put the first building on. Are you going to throw up buildings randomly and let your population also decide how to travel between them?”
“Sure. I love desire lines. They reveal exactly where people want to go.”
“Except that’d be crazy outside a park. Much as I hate to say it, the Commissioner’s Map made Manhattan perfect. Without it, New York would just be a wicked tangle like Boston.”
“If by ‘wicked’ you mean ‘aesthetically pleasing’, I agree,” Charlie says, “and Boston’s roads will improve once zipcars are doing all the navigating.”
“You’ve never been on Route 1 in Saugus, have you?” Ville says. “Look, passengers will still want to feel in charge too, and that starts with feeling like the streets were designed with them in mind, not some Dutchman driving his goats. Would Paris be as great without Hausmann? Would D.C. without L’Enfant?”
“Would New York without Moses? Absolutely. He ruined beautiful old neighborhoods. He cut an island off from the water. He would’ve built elevated highways across Midtown.”
“Moses built for drivers passing through,” Ville says, “not for the city itself.”
“So, let’s see what the city – the people – does for itself.”
Ville snorts. “And in a century the people will finally complete something, like that subway line you’re on.”
The subway pulls into the 34th Street station. That was quick. Charlie’s cheeks get hot. One more stop to go.
“You know,” Charlie says, “when Europeans first came to Virginia, they didn’t think the Native Americans grew crops, but of course they did. They just didn’t put them in neat rows surrounded by hedges. They grew them all jumbled together like a meadow. Why should a city be any less organic? Have a local power plant next to housing next to retail. Instead of mixed use, call it maxed use.”
“Nice name, but Biraq’s supposed to be the city of the future, not the past. Why live over a bar I can hear through your mic? You want to go deaf from turbines too?”
“This from the person who lives behind Fenway.”
“And near The Fens. Why not live in a quiet residential district within walking distance of the actual T?”
“Are you asking me to move in with you?” Charlie says.
“No, I was only making a point. Wait. Do you—”
Charlie’s cheeks seem to catch fire as the subway stops at 42nd Street. Why did they have to joke about that? “I have to get off,” Charlie says. “See you in a bit.”
Charlie logs out, flips up their goggles, and once everyone else gets off hurries onto the platform. It’s so bright. So loud. So, strangely, odor-free. The first thing you lose in New York is your sense of smell. It all sets Charlie even more on edge.
Ville would be coming down, he said last week, to check out his cousin Finn’s apartment because he’d be moving out soon, and Ville asked Charlie to go to Sunnyside with him. They’ve been thinking it’d be nice to have him closer. They could debate whether Sunnyside Gardens, one of America’s first planned communities, developed the way it should have. Plus, there’d be less lag when they were goggling. What Charlie hasn’t wanted to think about: Is Ville actually building a road to Boston for them? What would that mean? Argh. “This is worse than arguing with him,” Charlie mutters. They haven’t even decided whether to hug him when they meet.
Maybe if we played The Sims, Charlie thinks, I’d be better at life.
The subway doors close. Charlie trails their fingers across the car as it leaves. There’d be a downtown train in two minutes. They could get on it and go home. They don’t need Sunnyside. Couldn’t a Biraq be enough?
AUSTEN
Finn looks away. “Adecco sold my work contract to Randstad,” he says. “They’re making me a human capital supervisor—”
“Which is… great?” she says.
“—and shipping me to Biraq.”
Austen releases his wrists. “Where’s that?”
“Nowhere yet. It’s a new city Dubai is planning. They’re shipping in half of Alabama to ready the land, and they need English-speaking managers, but…”
“You’ll miss me.” She can barely speak. It’s one thing to refuse a proposal. It’s another to be refused one.
He kisses her hands. “I wanted to say no.”
“That would’ve been stupid.”
“Yes. If I said no they’d fire me, and my non-compete wouldn’t let me work anywhere in HC for ten years.”
She pulls her hands away before he can kiss them again and gathers them into her lap. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.” Finn looks at the roof. “For two years. Three, if they exercise their option. Long enough to pay off my loans, at least, with my new salary.”
Our two years, Austen wants to say, our moment, but something else boils up inside her. “So all this, Finn, the bar, the autotel, the whole night, is your goodbye? Look at me.”
He can’t. “I said I wanted things to be special.”
“When were you going to let me in on it? After you dropped me off? After you boarded the plane?” A tear falls from her eye onto his cheek. He flinches. She hopes it stung.
“I figured—” Finn starts, but Austen pulls away to stab the screen and cut the music.
She sits against the soft inner wall of the autotel and crosses her arms, trying her best to magnify the little space between them. “Why not work remotely?”
“Dubai wants me on site,” he says. “We could holochat.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No.”
“Could I go with you?” Austen can’t believe her mouth said that.
“A woman in Dubai?” Finn shakes his head. “Even if we were married—”
Now she says, “No,” unsure if she’s relieved that she feels relieved.
“It’s not like we didn’t know this could happen,” he says. “How many of our friends…”
The autotel is turning, and Austen unblacks the sideglass to discover they’re not on Greenpoint. They’re on Queens Boulevard where the road soars over the Sunnyside Yards. She watches the trains moving on their own, coming home to sleep, turning off their lights, nestled together in rows; each empty and alone, waiting to go back to work tomorrow on the same old tracks. That’s what her life will be like without Finn, however many roommates are lined up on air mattresses in her bedroom.
She could find another boyfriend. That’s easy. Two taps on her watch, and it would send out a signal like Aquaman. But she couldn’t find someone else who’d desperately want her to come hold him because he also hates to be alone while also being willing to wait until she wants to come. If only she could treat Finn like another gig, the way anyone who’d answer her signal would treat her.
Damn companies. It should be less unsettling, given how they could have expected something exactly like this at any time. She’s just angry at herself for missing him already. And for wasting the autotel. Finn does look cute when he’s pathetic. Stupid floppy hair. Stupid brown eyes.
That’s not what she wants anymore, though. Austen looks over her shoulder, sees where they’re headed and gets a better idea. She taps the screen to input a new route.
LUISA
Wind hisses against the glass walls. The building sways. Creaks. Luisa steadies herself. She smells… perfume?
“Don’t shoot.” A young woman. Who sounds Middle Eastern. Beyond the flashlight’s reach. Not pleading. Demanding. “My father owns this place.” Sure he does.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Luisa says. “You’re not in the log.” She wants to tell her watch to summon the cops, as per policy, but a report in their file would mean one in hers too, asking how the intruder got past her, so Luisa closes on the voice, shockgun poised, to handle the situation herself. Her light finds a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket and gray scarf, standing, hands at her side. She has no watch, which is strange, but she’s palming something. Behind her is a fully-stuffed duffel bag.
“What’s in the bag?” Luisa says. Please don’t be a bomb.
“Clothes.”
Hmm. “And your hand?”
The woman holds up a green UAE passport. “I am Samya Al Maktoum.”
“Slide it over.” The passport’s also strange. Being physical.
The woman drops the passport and kicks it to her with a sneaker worth twice what Luisa makes in a month. Luisa taps its chip against her watch, which confirms her name and her presence on the owner’s approved family list.
Samya doesn’t know this, though, and Luisa doesn’t like her tone. “How’d you get in?”
“Jim. I asked him not to log me.”
Asked. Jim, the Tower’s day shift, has three unemployeds at home. He always needs cash.
“Why are you here?” Luisa says.
“Last place my father would look.”
“But he owns the place.”
“You think he knows that? This is just another asset on a very long balance sheet. I am too, except daughters are sold, not held.” Samya leans toward Luisa. “Not me. I’m not going to Biraq.”
Playing the sympathy card, Luisa thinks. But she can’t afford sympathy. “If you stay, I have to log you.”
“Do that, and you’re putting me on a plane.”
“If I don’t, I’m putting myself on the street.”
“I can pay,” Samya says, aggravated, clearly unused to paying for anything.
“Money’s not work,” Luisa says. “I need my job.”
“Is it your job to make sure the husband chosen for me rapes me every night, should he so choose?”
And now the sister card. Next, the tears.
They don’t come. Instead, Samya says, “Fine. Burn me, and I’ll tell my father we had a deal for me to stay here, then you got greedy, like you people always do. When you demanded more, I said no, and you reneged, now hoping for a fat reward. My father hates delinquent daughters, but he hates deal breakers and double-crossers far more.”
“Go ahead,” Luisa says. “I’ve worked here twenty years.”
“You think that matters?” Samya smiles. “You’re a busted light bulb to people like him, waiting to be replaced.”
Luisa is alarmed to see her flashlight beam become unsteady.
“Now log me, or let me stay till morning, when I’ll leave. Go ahead. Choose.”
CHARLIE
A shoe scrapes the concrete right behind them. Charlie, startled, slides away from the tracks and spins around.
“Sorry,” Ville says. He shuffles back, goggles bouncing on his head.
“You said you were in Grand Central,” Charlie says.
“A tunnel connects it to here, so what I told you was true… from a certain point of view.”
“Nice save, Obi-wan.”
“And I wanted to surprise you. What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that it’s weird, this point of view,” they say. “Your voice coming from lips.”
“And you don’t look like a dragonfly,” he says.
For a moment Charlie examines the platform between their shoes.
“Did you know,” Ville says, “this concrete was specially formulated to resist gum and absorb human fluids?”
Charlie looks up. “Really?”
“No,” Ville says, “but you looked up.”
They grin and realize that their cheeks have cooled. “It’s also weird that I can see you. In Biraq you’re just all around me.”
Charlie watches him resist the urge to say, “Like the Force?” and instead say, “I could walk behind you. Whisper over your shoulder.”
“OK, that’d be much weirder.”
“Let’s just walk then.” Ville looks around, spots the sign for the 7 and takes a step.
“I don’t want to go to Sunnyside,” Charlie says.
“Why not?” Ville says. “That was the plan.”
“I don’t know, and I know.”
“We could go to Biraq for a while. See what your people have done.” He reaches for his goggles.
“No,” Charlie says. “We should be non-virtual. That was the plan too.”
Ville slumps. “I have no idea what to say.” Then he wrinkles his nose, “Does it always smell like this?”
Charlie smirks, then it fades, then they scrutinize the platform some more until the downtown train arrives. Ville watches the people getting off and says, “Let’s try it your way then.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie says, but Ville’s already approaching a guy in a suit.
“Excuse me,” Ville says. The guy flips up his palm and keeps moving.
Ville does the same to a woman with her black hair in the latest knots. “No time,” she says and walks faster.
“What are you doing?” Charlie says. “You can’t just talk to people.”
“I want to ask them where we should go.”
“Like tourists?”
“I am a tourist,” Ville says.
“If anyone says anything, it’ll be ‘Go to the Oyster Bar’.”
“Why?”
“First thing they’ll think of so they can get away from you.”
“Wouldn’t that suggest your mods, your whole build strategy, is misguided?”
“Wait,” Charlie says, “is that where you’re really going with this?”
“No, but it does go to show—” Ville looks at the concrete. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I promised myself we wouldn’t argue about Biraq.”
“So did I,” Charlie says. “Hey, look up.”
He does. His lips are soft. His eyes, pretty.
“I’ve decided,” they say. “Let’s go to the Oyster Bar.”
Ville nods. “Challenge addressed.”
They walk toward the tunnel.
“I don’t actually like oysters,” Ville says. “Or bars.”
“Neither do I,” Charlie says and takes Ville’s arm, the path before them clear and brightly lit, a city of themselves ahead, waiting to be designed together.
AUSTEN
Austen jabs the screen to turn it off, then tightens her lips.
Finn lies back, unblacks the roof and watches the el fly overhead. Austen sees stripes of shadow and light fly over him until the autotel circles left and the lines become pure white light. Finn says, “We’re taking the Queensboro? I may be suddenly flush, but that doesn’t mean I can afford the city’s street tolls.”
She tries not to smile. Or say, It’s the 59th Street Bridge. “This is my treat. There’s a place I’ve always wanted to go, and I want to go with you.”
Finn reaches out and guides her onto the mattress beside him.
“I’m still mad at you,” she says.
Now he tries not to smile.
The autotel comes off the bridge, curls and turns, glides under the bridge on York, then turns left onto Sutton Square, where it stops. The door opens, and Austen leads Finn into the yellow wash of an old streetlamp. Instead of the usual cameras, the lamppost has signs reading Tow Away Zone, as if people park anymore, and Dead End, except it’s not. Beyond the lamp, a small brick plaza with a bench overlooks the river.
“This feels familiar,” Finn says. “Where have I seen this place?”
Austen grabs his hand and draws him to the bench. The autotel glides away, trailing the scent of orange sanitizer.
For a moment they sit apart, looking at the skeletal towers rising across Queens, listening to the beat of tires on the FDR below and the bridge above, smelling the musky river and a fresh breath of wind, until their gravities pull them together.
“You know what I adore about this city?” Austen says. “They can build it up and tear it down, stuff us in and shove us out, but they can’t take it away from us. This bench is ours now, whoever sat in it before. That bridge is too. The bar. All of Sunnyside.”
“Compared to the city we’ve made,” Finn says, “Biraq will be just another office park.”
“So you’ll come back?”
After a moment Finn says, “I wouldn’t ask you to wait. I’m not that old-fashioned.”
She says, “But will you?”
“If you’re here,” he says. “You’re my Sunnyside.”
Ahead a police patrol boat struggles downriver near the froth covering Roosevelt Island. Black water bursts into bright foam around the bow, the incoming tide stronger than it seems as it tries to drown more of the city.
“We shouldn’t make too many plans, though,” Austen says.
“Probably not.”
Or too few, she thinks. “When’s your flight?”
“10:30. I’m already packed. I’m subletting my space to my cousin Ville.”
“So we could stay ’til dawn. I’ve heard it looks pretty from here.”
He kisses her head and says, “I could use some pretty.”
“Then it’ll be ours too,” she says and settles into his chest, her eyes bright, her cheeks brighter.
She couldn’t have designed a better moment.
LUISA
Samya says, “Thank you.” Luisa hears, Dismissed.
Luisa tosses Samya her passport and takes her supplies to the elevator. For the next five hours, Samya in the penthouse will feel like a burr in her brain. She’s barely relieved to think that, if anyone finds out, she could just say Samya ordered Luisa not to log her. The elevator descends. After a few floors something else starts to nag at her. By the time she reaches the bottom it’s clicked, and Luisa has to go back up.
She considers knocking, then just lets herself in. Beyond the glass walls, the city has become inverted. The white lights of Queens shine like stars, while the night sky, washed out by their glow, is as featureless as the sea. The condo remains dark, though, a hole in the sky.
Luisa hears a soft voice by the 58th Street windows. Her flashlight exposes Samya prostrate on a rug, pointed uptown, her scarf now covering her head. Luisa aims her flashlight at the floor and waits.
Samya sits up. She looks over her right shoulder and mutters something, then looks over her left, gasps to see Louisa, and mutters again. Finally, she cups her hands, mutters one last thing, and stands. She doesn’t turn around. “You’re back.”
“I have to change the bulb.”
“Why?”
“If I don’t, my relief will see the same alert I did. She’ll come up too. And she doesn’t ask questions first.” Carmella once shockgunned an unhoused girl for standing near the front doors.
“I didn’t think of that,” Samya says.
“No. You imagined someone couldn’t see you this high up without the light on.”
Samya turns around. “You could have let your relief burn me.”
“Yes.” Luisa climbs the stepladder and screws a new bulb into the ceiling fixture. It flickers on, and Luisa sees a problem with the woman’s story. “If you father wouldn’t know about this condo, why do you?”
Samya carries her rug to the bag and kneels. “The executive who bought it told me.”
“Why would he?”
“She,” Samya says, carefully packing the rug. “She’s British. Terribly pale, but such a mouth. Such eyes. My Zaynab.” She pulls off her scarf and twists it through her hands. “Once she took me to the top of the Empire State Building, like tourists do, and she pointed out all the places she’d bought for my father that rose higher than the observation deck. We dreamed of the lives we could have in each. Lives of our own design. Here I’m an artist, and she’s an architect. Not that either of us can draw. Yesterday, my father found out.”
“Ah,” Luisa finally says.
Samya knots the scarf around her neck. “He sent Charlotte to Manchester, then fired her. As for me, he took my watch, cut me off from the cloud, blocked my accounts, and announced this morning, ‘A husband awaits you in Biraq, a designer, a real one not some gamer, he’ll make a proper wife of you.’ If he hadn’t forgotten about my old passport and the existence of cash for gold, I couldn’t have done anything after I ran.”
Luisa climbs down the ladder and stands over the young woman, stone-faced but shivering inside, embarrassed at having misjudged her. She will fix this too.
Luisa holds out her hand and says, “You can stay with my niece, Austen, in Sunnyside.” At Samya’s look she adds, “Queens. She’s a nice girl. Doesn’t have much room, but her boyfriend’s about to propose. Finally. Maybe you can take her space if they get one together.”
Samya nods as if thankful and lets Luisa help her up, but doesn’t release her hand.
Luisa pulls free. “We’ll leave at midnight. Austen won’t mind. She’s always working late. Like we people always do.” She heads for the door, hoping she’s not making a mistake.
“I treated you horribly,” Samya calls after her. “Why would you help me? What’s your game?”
Luisa stops. “We can’t design our own lives anymore,” she says, “but maybe we can help others design theirs.”
“A pretty view,” Samya says. “If true.”
Luisa instinctively looks out at the city’s controlled chaos.
“Yes,” she says. “A very pretty view.”
Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Sunnyside at Bluesky.
Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)