Apparently she’s my business banking adviser. She has hair that’s fashionably short, asymmetrically sculpted, with the latest style of luminescent dye that changes colour as UV light touches it. It’s a wave of shimmering green and yellow now, telling me that we’re in a room that lacks anti-viral lights, but she obviously knows that. Her latex gloves match her hair, and her face mask has its full filtration light on.
I’m not as much of a show off as her. I haven’t fancied a trip into the city centre, so I’m wearing a disposable suit over my business shorts and shirt, and my combination kepi and face mask that’s handy when I’m out on site. Out of politeness I’ve swapped my usually polarized lenses on my old school Oakley’s for clear polycarbonate; the eyes matter so much when you can’t see smiles and jaw movements. Her eyes are covered by the latest Google safety glasses; she’ll be getting a readout on her head up display of my body temperature, the moisture content coming out through my mask, and, probably, one of those shonky algorithms that claims to be able to read how honest you are via eye movements.
I don’t mind, really. In these post virus days, nothing is secure, and everything is open to question. I know I’ve got maybe seven minutes to win her over, and this isn’t going to be easy.
Sorry, did I mention what I do for a living? I’m a surveyor. Not the old school kind, the kind of property professional who knew everything about the local markets, about buildings and their uses, who gave professional credibility to any estate agents practice.
We call ourselves buccaneer surveyors. We stalk round city centres and diminished townscapes, looking for space we can convert into residential units that are insulated from each other, with no shared airflows, no communal spaces, no contact points. I’m good at it. Forgive me the boastfulness, but I am. Give me an old retail space, and I’ll gut it and put thirty studios into it, with no need for wifi to trigger the fearful, with the 7G masts on the roof to kill off that pernicious myth, and the core of the building full of the trunking and filters that persuade the wealthy they’re not breathing second hand air.
And I’m here, asking this woman, this bank, really a branch of the civil service since their property debts took them down with all the others, to give me the money to take a redundant space and turn it into somewhere those people, the wealthy, the mobile, the young and isolated to find a way of having sex with each other without having to go through all the social negotiations that are a minefield for the unwary. It’s either the best offer they’ve had all year, or it’s a nightmare. Which do they think?
I think I’ve got her, personally, but the bank? They may be a harder sell. Behind the google glass her eyes are moving side to side - she;s getting full screens of data about me, about past projects, about where I’ve been and where the BM programmes think I’m going. Before the virus we all had a credit history - now we have a credit future as well, and I know what the bots say about mine. I’m at the cusp; either I break out of doing safe projects for other people, and move up to another level, or they’ll start choking off my access to money as they realise I’m never going to be any better than this.
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