All of Us

Victoria Renn had been told three times that the eastern frontage was 'almost resolved', which in her experience meant someone had moved the unresolved bit into a different slide. She sat at the end of the conference table while Callum Reeve brought the latest massing model onto the wall. The glass behind him looked north across the wet roofs of Southwark, where cranes stood above the railway arches and a pale strip of October sky had begun to clear over the river. The room itself had no visible controls. Callum lifted two fingers from the table and thought the model through another quarter-turn; the building rotated obediently, dropping shadows across the proposed square. 'There,' he said. 'If we pull the servicing route back to the red line, we recover the pedestrian width.' Roisin Barrett made a small sound through her nose. Callum paused. 'Which is not the noise I was hoping for.' 'That's because your delivery vans are now driving through a nursery.' Roisin touched the edge of her notebook, and a planning layer unfolded beside the model. The nursery appeared in yellow, exactly where Callum had put a neat grey arrow. 'Unless we've changed policy on children since Tuesday.' Callum brought the model closer, enlarged the corner and checked the layer key before he spoke. 'That wasn't there in my layer.' 'It was there in mine.' 'Good,' Victoria said. 'We've identified the problem before we put it in front of the borough. That's what the meeting is for.' Callum looked ready to apologise, so Victoria moved the discussion on. He was twenty-nine, very good, and still young enough to think a mistake became more serious if everyone saw him make it. At her left, Greer Lawson leaned towards her without taking her eyes off the wall. 'I give it six minutes before Bronwen asks why we didn't resolve this last week. Ten pounds.' 'Four,' Victoria said. 'And you still owe me from Croydon.' Greer considered this an irrelevant technicality. 'Croydon was force majeure.' Victoria's Commons ribbon pulsed once at the edge of her awareness. She ignored it. The room had been set to project mode before the meeting, so anything not tagged urgent waited outside the shared layer unless she chose to bring it in. She could have checked the sender without moving, a thought no more effortful than remembering what was in the fridge. She didn't. Forty-five minutes into a design review, a person either needed her enough to call or could survive another fifteen minutes. Roisin was still looking at Callum's route. 'You can keep the width if the service entrance comes off the south side.' 'Which puts it against residential.' 'It puts it against future residential. At the moment it puts it against a hoarding and three foxes.' 'Four,' Greer said. Greer pointed to the corner of the site plan where the foxes had been discussed. 'I've seen them. One's huge.' Victoria smiled despite herself. 'South side. Test it properly. Noise, sweep path, emergency access. Don't make the borough find the obvious objection for us.' Callum nodded and marked the task into his private layer. His expression cleared as soon as there was something to do. The door opened behind him and Damian Colebrook came in carrying an actual paper cup of coffee. It was one of his affectations, though perhaps affectation was unfair. Damian was an engineer and had a prejudice in favour of objects that remained objects when the network failed. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Lift stopped at nine and informed me it was considering its options.' 'That's comforting in a building we're using as a site office,' Roisin said. 'I thought so.' Damian took the empty chair opposite Victoria. He was a broad-shouldered man with silver beginning at his temples and a habit of folding his glasses before making a point, even though the lenses were adaptive and he almost never needed to remove them. Victoria had known him through six programmes and two firms. He had once spent four months telling her that a transfer deck she wanted was a terrible idea, then another two designing it after she won the argument. Callum brought up the structural grid. Damian put down his coffee. 'Why have you moved column D-six?' Callum checked the grid, plainly calculating how much of the drawing would have to change. Greer murmured, 'And now we begin.' For the next twenty minutes they argued about the building, bringing up a new section whenever somebody disputed a figure. The Commons made the practical parts easier: drawings appeared wherever a person needed them, and older versions could be retrieved without asking anybody to send a file. Roisin wanted public realm. Damian wanted loads to go somewhere sensible. Callum wanted the scheme to remain recognisably the one he'd spent most of his week drawing. Victoria wanted all of those things without lying to the client about what they cost. Bronwen Arkwright joined remotely at eleven seventeen. Her image appeared at the far end of the wall at the size of a real person, seated in an office somewhere Victoria suspected was Edinburgh but could just as easily have been a hired room at King's Cross. Bronwen had long ago stopped providing geographical context unless it affected a decision. 'Where are we on the eastern frontage?' Bronwen asked. Greer slid a ten-pound transfer request into Victoria's private ribbon. Victoria rejected it immediately. 'You said six minutes,' she murmured. 'She wasn't even here.' CHEAP appeared in the corner of Victoria's vision. She suppressed a smile and turned back to Bronwen. 'We're testing a south-side service access. The current option compromises the nursery route.' Bronwen's eyebrows went up. 'I thought we'd resolved servicing last week.' Greer sent another request, this one for five pounds. Victoria ignored that one too. By twelve, the group had a list of decisions long enough to justify the meeting and short enough to suggest the programme was still under control. Roisin left first, already speaking to someone in her own project channel. Callum stayed behind to pull the revised model together. Greer went in search of food and claimed she was taking Victoria's unpaid gambling debt with her. Damian remained at the table, looking at the structural overlay after everyone else had begun to leave. 'You don't actually want that canopy. You want the idea of it.' Victoria gathered her notes. 'I do want it. And you say 'idea' as though ideas aren't occasionally useful in architecture.' 'They're very useful. They give engineers something to remove.' She finally opened the waiting Commons ribbon. Three work messages, one reminder from her dentist, a photograph Cora had shared of twenty-eight primary-school children apparently attempting to build a Roman fort out of cereal boxes, and a message from Ally: DINNER. SIX-THIRTY. DON'T LET BRONWEN TURN YOU INTO A HOSTAGE AGAIN. A second message followed underneath: WE HAVE NO BASIL. Victoria smiled despite herself. Damian glanced up. 'Good news?' 'Apparently we're in a basil crisis. Potentially terminal.' 'Serious, then. I have people.' Damian shifted his notes to give Victoria space to see the canopy connection without leaning across his arm. 'I'm sure you do.' She sent Alistair a reply by thought while Damian reopened the load paths: I'LL GET SOME. CORA COMING? His answer arrived almost immediately. SHE SAYS YES, WHICH AT HER AGE MEANS MAYBE. Victoria put the ribbon away. 'Right. Convince me about the canopy.' 'You see, this is why we work well together.' 'Because I let you be wrong in full sentences?' 'Because eventually you ask the correct question.' He stood and brought a section through the building onto the table between them. Victoria leaned in. The canopy, irritatingly, was worse than she'd thought. By half past one she had conceded enough to make Damian insufferable and escaped to her office with a sandwich Greer had bought on the assumption that Victoria would otherwise forget lunch. Her room was hardly a room, more a glass corner with a door, but it gave her a place to close herself off when the open project floor became too generous with other people's thoughts. The Commons privacy field tightened when she sat down. Shared project layers dropped away. Notifications reappeared in a neat stack, waiting to be acknowledged. She dealt with them in order, except for Cora's photograph, which she opened again. The children had made the fort taller than at least three of them. One boy stood in the middle wearing what looked like a paper plate as a breastplate. Cora's caption read: WE HAVE REACHED THE COLLAPSE OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE. Victoria sent back: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER AVAILABLE IF REQUIRED. Cora replied almost immediately with a picture of a cereal box falling on the boy's head and the words NO LONGER REQUIRED. Victoria laughed aloud. Greer, passing the glass wall, pointed at her as though she'd caught her committing something. 'Family,' Victoria said through the open door. 'I wasn't asking.' 'Your face was.' Greer came in anyway and perched on the edge of the small meeting table. 'My face has boundaries, unlike Bronwen, who wants the board pack tomorrow morning.' 'Of course she does. She said Friday yesterday.' 'Tomorrow is Friday.' Victoria checked the date and discovered, with some irritation, that Greer was right. 'That's upsetting. Fine. We'll finish it today.' 'We? I came in to warn you.' 'You came in here. That made you involved.' Greer sighed and asked the room for another chair. The unused one slid forward from the wall on its track. Victoria pointed at it. 'See? Even the furniture agrees.' They worked for another two hours. The board pack was the sort of document that became less honest each time another person improved its wording, so Victoria stripped out three phrases that meant nothing and replaced a green status indicator with amber where the cost plan had plainly earned it. Greer objected once, then conceded when Victoria asked whether she fancied explaining the variance to Bronwen next month. At four, Alistair called rather than sending a message. Victoria accepted audio only. His voice entered through her private channel, close and familiar without being audible to anyone outside it. Alistair opened with, 'Do you know what basil looks like?' Victoria kept her eyes on the board pack. 'I'm hanging up.' 'Long green leaves. Quite aromatic. Often near the tomatoes.' 'I have purchased basil before.' 'I remember the parsley incident.' 'There was no incident. There was a lot of parsley. Those are different things.' Across the table Greer had stopped pretending not to listen. Victoria turned slightly away from her. 'I'm at work, Ally.' 'So am I. I'm just better at it. Also, Cora says seven now and wants to bring washing.' Victoria pushed the marked-up cost table out of her immediate view. 'She's thirty.' 'Apparently the washing machine doesn't recognise her emotional needs.' 'Tell her ours has no interest either.' 'Too late. I already said yes.' There was a short pause. 'Love you.' It came without ceremony, as it usually did, and Victoria answered the same way before ending the call. When she looked up, Greer was still watching her. 'What?' 'Nothing. I'm just pleased somebody still rings you to discuss herbs.' 'You ring me to discuss drainage.' 'Exactly.' Greer returned to her screen. 'Cherish the herbs.' Victoria went back to the board pack. She left the office at six twelve with the document finished, the eastern frontage still unresolved in three different ways, and basil added to the route home. The building recognised her departure and handed her personal environment back as she passed through reception: work layers receded, private messages came forward, the podcast she'd abandoned that morning offered to resume in her ears. She declined it and asked instead for the shopping list. Alistair had added basil, parmesan, washing powder and, beneath those, WINE THAT DOESN'T TASTE LIKE A SHED. Victoria stood on the pavement outside, looking at the list while commuters moved around her. She added: YOUR TASTE BUDS. By the time she reached the corner, Ally had marked it purchased.