6 Homer St. · Chapter 1
Arrival
The van stopped where the asphalt stopped.
Rachel Weiss had half expected a wall or a gate. Instead there was a long, low car park, and beyond it a street with no cars on it at all. The driver, a heavy man from Chalandri who had talked the whole way from the airport, switched off the engine and folded his arms.
"This is as far as I go," he said. "From here, you walk. Or you take their bus."
"Their bus," said Marcus Bell, as if testing the phrase for an audience.
"Little bus. Comes every few minutes. You wave, it stops. You say where, it stops there." The driver shrugged. "No ticket. Nothing. It's a madhouse."
The radio was still murmuring on the dashboard. It had been murmuring since the airport, and for forty minutes it had talked about almost nothing else. A minister in Athens, promising that the Constitution would be "respected in every community, including that one". A bishop, promising the opposite. A professor from Thessaloniki calling prosopocracy "the most dangerous idea in Europe since 1789", and meaning it as praise. Then the international bulletin, read by a woman with a tired voice: a government in the Gulf had recalled its ambassador from Athens; a council of clerics elsewhere had declared the "Greek abomination" a threat to God and promised that it would not be allowed to stand; in the capital of a one-party state that the woman did not name, three students had been arrested for writing a single word on a wall.
"Which word?" said Tom Kowalski.
The driver turned off the radio. "Which word do you think?"
"You don't like Neo Psychiko," Rachel said.
The driver thought about it longer than she expected. "My wife eats in Neo Psychiko every Sunday," he said at last. "Pays in euros — the same prices as everyone. She says the food is better than ours." He looked out at the empty street. "My cousin works in Shanghai. He cannot type the name of this place on his phone. It disappears. Some days he cannot type 'Greece'. Some days the whole country is gone from his internet." He shook his head slowly. "So I think: what kind of place makes a billion people lose a word? And my wife says: a place where the food is good." He unlocked the doors. "I don't like it. But I drive here three times a week."
*
The visitors' office was a white room at the edge of the car park, with a long table and a young woman behind it who could not have been more than twenty. A card on the table gave her name and number: Χρύσα · Chrysa, 04217-20060312-F-04.
"Press," she said, looking at their passes. "You have an office on Kifisias Avenue — the old bank. The keys are inside. You are the three hundred and twelfth news team to open an office here. The Japanese came yesterday. Al Jazeera has two." She almost smiled. "You are permanent residents for the purpose of work, but you are visitors for the purpose of the law." She slid four sheets of paper across the table. "Please read these now. I'm required to watch you read them."
Tom, who was twenty-six and had never been required to do anything, read his twice.
The rules took up one side of the page. Faces and hair uncovered, except by a hat. No religious dress or symbols of any kind. No public prayer. No weapons. No public violence, no pornography. Speeches only in the speech stadium. Swimming in the pools: in a swimsuit, not in clothes. At the bottom, in bold: Visitors who break any law are expelled for life.
"Any law," Marcus said. "Jaywalking?"
"There are no cars," said Chrysa. "You cannot jaywalk."
Daniela Ortiz had stopped reading. She was looking at the small gold cross at her throat, which her grandmother had given her in Queens when she was nine, and which she had stopped noticing years ago.
Chrysa saw her looking. Her voice did not change. "We have a box," she said. "You can leave it here and collect it when you go. Or you can wear it inside your shirt, where it is yours and not a sign to anyone. Many visitors do that."
"And if someone sees it?"
"Then it is a sign."
Daniela was quiet for a moment. Then she slipped the cross inside her collar, where it lay cold against her skin.
"Thank you," said Chrysa, and meant it, Rachel thought — as if Daniela had done her a kindness rather than the other way round. Then she had the four of them stand, one by one, against the white wall, photographed each of them, and printed their IDs: first name in Greek and Latin, a number, and beneath it the word ΕΠΙΣΚΕΠΤΗΣ · VISITOR.
Rachel turned hers over in her fingers. Ρέιτσελ · Rachel. No surname.
"Where's my last name?"
"For official business," said Chrysa. "This is not official business. This is living." She handed Marcus his. "You must carry it. You don't have to wear it. There is a camera in this room, for the IDs, but there are no cameras outside that know your face. Face recognition is not allowed in public here. If you see a camera on a lamp-post, it belongs to a journalist."
She pushed one more sheet across the table, smaller, printed in a dozen languages. "If you want to understand what you are filming, the Prosopocracy School has seminars every day, for anyone who is interested. English at ten and at six. Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, many others. Free." This time she did smile. "Most journalists come once. Then they come back without their cameras."
*
The bus was a small electric thing, white, with wide windows and room for perhaps twelve. The driver was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair. Rachel waved; it stopped. She said "Sophia Square"; the driver nodded and pulled away without a word.
Neo Psychiko slid past them: low apartment buildings, balconies thick with plants, bitter orange trees along the pavements, children on bicycles in the middle of the road, where the cars used to be. An old man was sitting on a folding chair outside his building, reading a newspaper in the full width of the street, as though it were his. In a way it was — his to use, as it was everyone's. Rachel wrote that down.
"It's quiet," said Tom.
"It's Monday," said Marcus. "Everyone's at work."
"It's quiet," Tom said again, and Rachel understood what he meant. It was not the quiet of a place where nothing happened. Somewhere a saw was running, and someone was practising scales on a trumpet, badly, and there were voices from the balconies. What was missing was the engine-roar underneath everything, the sound she had lived inside her whole life and had never heard until it stopped.
And Marcus was wrong about the other thing, too, though none of them noticed yet. It was half past eleven on a Monday morning, and the balconies were full.
*
Sophia Square had been Agia Sofia Square until two years ago. The church that had given it its name still stood on its north side, but it was a nursing home now. A plaque in Greek and English beside the door read: Repurposed by the agreement of the citizens of Neo Psychiko, 29 February 2024. Through the open doors Rachel could see beds where the pews had been, and an old woman in a cardigan doing a crossword under the dome.
Everything else in the square was open. Restaurants, cafés, an ice-cream bar with a queue of children, a bar where men in their seventies were playing tavli under an awning. On a screen outside the ice-cream bar, a document scrolled slowly past: CERTIFICATE OF DEFINITION · HC-2026-0045 · Quality of life is everyone being in a position to pursue their own self-actualization unhindered if they wish to. Beneath it, in red: Counterexamples welcome. Challenge it. Tables spilled out across the paving in every direction, and at the centre of it all, on a plain stone base, stood three bronze figures.
Daniela had her camera up before Rachel had read the plaque.
Three men — one in a short ancient tunic, one barefoot and broad-faced, one in an eighteenth-century coat — stood in a close circle with their hands stacked at the centre, one on top of another, all six of them, like a team before a game. The plaque read: THALES OF MILETUS · SOCRATES · THOMAS PAINE. The Deism Point.
"Thomas Paine," said Marcus. "Our Thomas Paine?"
"The Age of Reason," said Rachel. "He got run out of most of the English-speaking world for writing it."
"And here he gets a statue next to Socrates."
"Here he gets the middle of the square."
Marcus looked at the old church, then back at the statue, and Rachel watched him find his opening line. "In a town that has banned religion," he said, in his broadcast voice, "the only shrine is to reason."
"They haven't banned religion," said Tom, who had read his sheet twice. "That statue is their religion. Deism. What they've banned is dogma — pseudo-religion."
Marcus waved this away. "Nobody in New York is going to hear the difference."
They were not the only ones filming. A crew from Brazilian television had set up on the far side of the statue, the reporter rehearsing the same three sentences into the wind. Two young Koreans were taking turns photographing each other in front of the stacked hands, laughing. A German couple in matching rain jackets were reading the definition on the screen aloud to each other, word by word, as if it were a menu in a language they almost knew. Around and between them, the people of Neo Psychiko went on with their Monday — drinking coffee, arguing, reading — with the faint, practised patience of people who have lived for two years inside the most photographed square on earth.
Daniela panned slowly across all of it. At the edge of her frame, under a bitter orange tree, a young man stood alone — not drinking, not talking, his face lit by his phone — watching a table of young people laughing on the far side of the square. He did not look up once. Tom found him days later, in the edit, and could not have said why he kept the shot.
*
They ate at a restaurant called ΚΗΠΟΙ — Gardens, Daniela translated from her phone — because it was the first place with a free table. The table stood under a lemon tree that grew up through the middle of the terrace. The menu was long and had no prices on it. A woman in a white apron came out to them, dark-haired, quick, wiping her hands.
She glanced at the IDs the four of them wore — pinned to their chests, hanging from their necks. Visitors only had to carry them; newcomers always displayed them anyway. "You are the Americans," she said. It was not a question. "From the bank building."
"News travels," said Rachel.
"Everything is on record." The woman smiled. A badge on her apron read: Ευγενία · Eugenia, 02386-19810904-F-04. "I'm Eugenia. I cook. Today I also carry plates, because the boy who carries plates is sick, so the system sent me. What do you want to eat?"
"What's good?"
"Everything. That's the point." She considered them. "Lamb with lemon potatoes. Greens. Fava. I'll bring what's right."
"And the prices?" said Marcus.
"For you, the same as for everyone. It comes in euros at the end. For us, it goes on our account." She tilted her head. "You pay with money. We pay with work. It is the same thing, but we can see it."
She went back inside. Marcus raised his eyebrows at Rachel. "Did a waitress just give us the thesis statement?"
"A cook," said Tom.
The food came, and it was very good — better than good; Daniela photographed every plate — and when the bill arrived it was printed on a small white slip with every item, its price, and at the bottom a line in Greek and English: Prepared by: Ευγενία · Eugenia, 02386-19810904-F-04 (cook, service); Κατερίνα · Katerina, 07731-19920517-F-02 (kitchen). Inspected by ERPO shift B, 26 October 2026.
"They sign the food," said Daniela.
"They sign everything," said Rachel. "Read the sheet. Every transaction, every person, every day. Anyone can look up anyone."
"That's terrifying," said Marcus, with satisfaction. That was a segment.
Tom was watching the next table, where a family of four had sat down — a big man with sawdust still in the hair of his forearms, a teenage girl arguing with him about something, a younger boy feeding bread to a cat under the table. Eugenia came out and kissed the big man on the top of the head, swatted the boy's hand away from the cat, and went back inside without breaking stride.
"She works here," Tom said. "And her family eats here. Where she works."
"Nobody has kitchens," said Rachel. "It's on the sheet."
"I know it's on the sheet." Tom was still watching. "I mean — look at them."
Eugenia came back out with four small coffees they had not ordered and set them down. "The welcome coffee," she said. "Every visitor's first meal in Neo Psychiko ends with one. It is on the record, like everything — the demos pays for it." Before he could stop himself, Tom asked her whether it was strange, eating every day where she worked.
She laughed. "Nobody has to eat where they work. We eat anywhere we please — here, in Ephialtes Square — it was Plateia Eleftherias before; we renamed it for Ephialtes of Sophonides — wherever we like. Today my family came here. And the price is the same for everyone — for you, for them, for me. Working here gives me no discount." She shrugged. "Before, I had a kitchen at home. I cooked for four, every day. Then I washed the pots. Then I washed the clothes. Then I ironed them. Every evening, every Sunday, for nineteen years." She wiped her hands on her apron. "Now I cook six hours here, for everyone, and then I take off the apron and I am finished. No pots. No washing. No ironing."
She nodded toward the next table. "That time is mine now. Theirs too. Pavlos makes the chairs he wants to make. Helen has her music. Pantropos has the cat." She shrugged. "That is not strange. Strange was before."
Rachel looked. The girl had stopped arguing and was laughing at something. The big man was pretending to be offended. It was an ordinary family having an ordinary lunch, and she could not, for the life of her, see what Tom saw.
*
The big man introduced himself on the way out, because Tom asked him what he did, and he answered by inviting them to come and see. Παύλος · Pavlos, 03119-19780222-M-04, carpenter. He walked them there himself, ten minutes through streets where the only traffic was bicycles and the little white buses, talking the whole way with his hands.
The carpenters' peripteron had been a car dealership once — Rachel could still see the ghost of a brand name above the great glass front. Now the showroom floor was a workshop the size of a football pitch, open on one side to a yard stacked with timber, and it smelled of resin and sawdust and coffee. There must have been eighty people working in it, and as many visitors watching. "Come at three in the morning," said Pavlos. "Same." Nobody seemed to be in charge of any of them.
"Who tells you what to make?" said Rachel.
Pavlos looked at her as if she had asked who told him what to dream. "Nobody. Some days the demos needs things — beds for the nursing home, benches for the speech stadium, a new floor for the school. Those go on the board, and whoever wants them takes them. The rest of the time" — he spread his arms — "we make what we want to make. And we create synergies — we watch each other, we learn from each other. That is the whole secret. You put fifty carpenters in one room, and in one year you have ideas that one carpenter alone does not have in his whole life."
He showed them what he was making: a rocking chair in olive wood, no screws, no glue, every joint cut so that it locked into the next. It had taken him four months. Beside it, a young woman was carving the arm of a chair she had designed herself, and an old man with one eye shut was showing her how to hold the chisel lower.
Along the edge of the workshop, behind a waist-high rope, visitors stood and watched — dozens of them, from everywhere, as if at a zoo or a cathedral. A school group from Lyon. Three Japanese architects with notebooks. A tall Nigerian man filming on his phone and murmuring a commentary in Yoruba. Nobody shooed them away. Some of the carpenters talked to them over the rope, explaining a joint, passing a piece of wood across to be felt.
"In the old days," said Pavlos, "I had a shop in Chalandri. Kitchens. Fitted kitchens, for rich people. Marble tops, Italian handles. Kitchens to feed fifty people, for families of three who ate out every night anyway." He laughed. "Twenty years I built kitchens for people who did not cook. Now there are no kitchens, and I make chairs. And today I finished at twelve."
"At twelve," said Marcus.
"Six hours. Like everybody. Tomorrow I start at twelve. A different shift every day. And two weeks' holiday every year, like everybody." He picked up a plane and turned it over in his huge hands. "After that, it is my time. Sometimes I stay here, because I want to. Sometimes I go to the sea with Helen and Pantropos. Sometimes I sit in Sophia Square and do nothing at all, and nobody calls me lazy, because everybody knows I made something good this morning." He looked at Rachel. "You can put that on American television. A man who works six hours and is not ashamed."
*
On the way back, in Sophia Square, Daniela turned her camera toward a young woman sitting alone at the foot of the Deism Point, and the young woman put up her hand, quickly, flat, the way people do when a ball is coming at their face.
"Please," she said in English. "Not my face."
Daniela lowered the camera at once. "I'm sorry. I didn't—"
"It's all right." The young woman was perhaps twenty-five, in a plain grey jacket, a visitor's ID tucked inside it so that only the cord showed. "You couldn't know. Where I come from, if my face is on your television next to this—" she nodded at the three bronze men — "then my family has a visit from people who are not polite. My brother, my mother. Maybe me, when I go home."
"Where do you come from?" said Rachel.
The young woman smiled. "From a country where it is a crime to say the name of this place. So I will not say the name of mine." She looked up at the stacked hands. "I booked my visit in March 2024, the first week the list opened. On a computer in a library, with a program my cousin gave me, so nobody could see. Two and a half years I waited. If I booked today, I would wait ten. I told my family I am going to a conference in Istanbul. I have forty-eight hours." She looked at her watch. "Thirty-one now. This morning I went to the seminar at the Prosopocracy School. There is one in my language. Twenty people in the room, from my country and the countries around it. Nobody said where they were from. Nobody had to."
"And is it what you expected?"
She thought about it for a long time. Around them the square went on — the tavli players, the children at the ice-cream bar, the Brazilian reporter still rehearsing his three sentences.
"I expected a revolution," she said. "Flags. Speeches. Soldiers." She shook her head. "It is people eating lunch. That is all. People eating lunch, in the middle of the day, and nobody is afraid of anybody." She stood up and pulled her jacket closed over the ID. "Do you know how far away that is, from where I live? You cannot measure it in kilometres."
She walked away across the square and was lost among the tables, and Daniela stood with her camera pointed at the ground for a long time.
*
That night, in the old bank building on Kifisias Avenue, Marcus put the world up on four screens.
Prosopocracy was everywhere. On one channel, a crowd in Santiago carrying a banner that said PROSOPOCRACIA YA. On another, a spokesman for a coalition of governments — two of them Islamic republics, the rest one-party states — reading a statement that called Neo Psychiko "a cancer in the body of civilization" and warned Greece that it would "answer for every day this experiment is allowed to continue". On the third, a Greek admiral assuring viewers that the country's air defences had been placed on alert "as a precaution". On the fourth, a café in Buenos Aires that had renamed itself Seis Homero and was serving, its owner insisted, nothing but lamb with lemon potatoes.
And at the bottom of the fourth screen, scrolling past in a thin red band, a line from a news agency in Seoul: Unconfirmed reports: two men executed in North Korean province after being overheard using the word "prosopocracy".
Nobody said anything for a while.
"Overheard," said Tom at last. "Not even written. Overheard."
Marcus's phone rang. It was New York. He listened, said "Uh-huh" four times, and hung up.
"They want the threat angle," he said. "Bombs, clerics, generals. 'Is it dangerous to be there.' That's the lead." He rubbed his eyes. "And the restaurant. They liked the bill with the names on it. They want more of that. 'Weird stuff.'"
"The chairs," said Tom. "The man who works six hours and isn't ashamed."
"That's not news," said Marcus. "That's lifestyle."
Daniela, who had said almost nothing since the square, spoke from the window without turning round. "A woman waited two and a half years to sit in that square for thirty-one hours. That's not lifestyle."
Rachel opened a new notebook and wrote three lines on the first page.
No cars. No prices. No priests.
She looked at them for a while. Half the world wanted this place dead; the other half was naming its cafés after it. Two men in North Korea had died for saying its name. And at its centre, as far as she could tell, there was nothing but a cook, a carpenter, and a rocking chair that had taken four months to make.
It made no sense. Something that ordinary did not frighten governments. Something that ordinary did not get people killed. Underneath, she wrote the question she had come to answer — the question every system on earth eventually answers, if you wait long enough and look hard enough:
Who is really in charge?
Outside, through the open window, someone was still practising the trumpet. Rather better now.