After a humiliating layoff announced via a leaked Slack screenshot, forty-one-year-old Leena Kapoor says yes to an offer from Theo Morales, a former friend she stopped speaking to twelve years ago: help him turn Chicago's shuttered Harbor Science Center on the lakefront into a glossy "future lab" that can attract donors and attention. If Leena can coax brands and city hall into believing in the project, Theo can keep the building out of a storage developer's portfolio, and she can salvage the fragments of a career that once promised to change how cities work.
Missing from the "lab" is Aria Chen, a documentarian and neighborhood organizer who built a devoted following with intimate "future diary" videos recorded in the planetarium's stale dark, and then vanished after posting a stream of chopped clips that ended mid-sentence. With nineteen-year-old Davon Price, the newest intern and Aria's most ardent fan, Leena spins up a storytelling campaign around Aria's last footage — bus transfers, water taxi schedules, a key card that opens no door — rocketing the project into think-piece territory and catching the eye of foundations and a streaming platform. Too bad Theo forbids Leena from digging into what happened to Aria, citing a precarious agreement with the board, a mayoral photo op, and the risk of scaring off a billionaire whose name would look excellent on the south facade.
As Davon hunts for Aria's traces through service tunnels, mothballed exhibits, and a hand-wound orrery ticking behind a locked workshop door, and as Leena is drawn, against better judgment, toward both Theo and Jonas Leto, the resident preservation architect and last person to see Aria on the Green Line platform at Cermak-McCormick Place, the two start noticing patterns that feel like instructions: VHS cassettes labeled with dates that have not arrived, a donor ledger stapled to a stack of eviction notices, a cracked VR headset that only plays an apartment in Pilsen at golden hour, a box of pigeon bands stamped with years that do not exist. What they uncover collapses the clean borders between public good and private mythology, between content and care, between a city you think you are building and a city that is busy building you.
You may think you have a plan for tomorrow, but what if tomorrow has already written its plan for you?
