The realtor said the neighborhood had character. She meant the lawns were uniform and the fences matched.
No one remembered choosing. The Parkers hadn't chosen — they'd seen the listing, noticed it was close to the Nguyens and the Chens, felt a small warmth of recognition, and signed. The Andersons hadn't chosen either. They'd driven through, counted something they couldn't name, felt a small coldness they also couldn't name, and kept driving.
Each household had its threshold. Not a rule — nothing written, nothing spoken. Just a question the body answered before the mouth could: do I see enough of myself here? The question required very little. A third. Less than half. The answer required even less: a signature, a moving truck, a forwarded address.
The map, if you pulled back far enough, looked geological. Amber territories and blue territories, coastlines between them, dark channels where the vacancies lived. It looked as if something had decided. But nothing had decided. Eighty-three percent of the cells were satisfied. Then ninety-five. Then ninety-nine point six. The number was its own gravity.
At the boundaries — the thin dark lines where amber touched blue — the houses were brighter somehow. Better maintained. Newer paint. As though proximity to the other made you work harder at being yourself. The deep interiors were darker, settled, sure of what they were without needing to show it.
The vacancies were the strangest part. Empty lots, unrented apartments, gaps in the grid through which all the movement had flowed. They were corridors now — passages no one used because everyone had already arrived. The churn was finished. The corridors remained, like riverbeds after the river.
Someone at city hall could have mapped it. Could have shown the initial random scatter, the thirty-six steps of shuffling, the convergence. They could have shown that each household's threshold was mild — nobody demanded a majority, nobody refused a minority. They could have shown that the result was not mild at all.
No one at city hall mapped it. The result looked natural. It looked like preference. It looked, if you squinted, like choice.