Brant has travelled a bit, some contracting work in China, a stint in South America with a backpack and whining Danish girlfriend, even some Provencal pretensions as an abortive property developer (Brant couldn’t spot a bear market if it chewed his face off)—he flattered himself that he had evolved a keen eye for difference. Over the years he has developed what he privately calls an interpretation filter (his internal geek is inherently polysyllabic), the quality and successes of which he sees varying wildly from country to country. He considers the interpretation filter as the ability by which a nation adopts new cultural and technological paradigms into their own prevailing norms.
Some places are excellent adopters—the cell network in South Africa, a textbook example of technological leapfrogging: initially hampered by the lack of a hardwired infrastructure, the lekker boys from Telkom et al dispensed with the archaic copper mile altogether and jumped straight to a high bandwidth femtocell deployment. The result: a bootstrapped second world economy able to engage meaningfully in a global marketplace, unencumbered by cable maintenance and incumbent industry strangleholds. Other examples have impressed Brant: the shoehorning of incompatible fast food cuisine into the fiercely defended kitchen of France; the rigid strictures of Oak Brook’s franchise dictates remodelled and ameliorated by centuries of food love; the language itself softening and integrating, Royale Deluxe et frites s’il vous plait…
However, his home country has yet to impress him with its own articulation of the interpretation filter. In his opinion the UK got off to a bad start, he remembers his father’s stories of Wimpy visits (the ‘Bender’, WTF?), first gen pre-packed “Indian” meals, a horror of Sunset Yellow and bullet hard rice, no aircon, service with a sneer, fifty pence for tap water. Even the no brainer equation of Starbucks was warped and twisted by building regulations, native swingeing portion management, and a culture that turned the concept of a career in the service industry into a school yard diss.
As Daisy and he entered Victoria station (the unbalanced white glare of the Grade II listed paned roof instantly triggering polarisation in his lenses) Brant was stuck again by the stubborn English ability to warp the basic genetics of progress. Queues to the ticket office windows had been replaced by even longer queues to the too few autoticket pods; the toilet turnstiles only accepting coin cash—waddling, bladder-full travellers traipsing back to the concession queues to get change (sorry madam, you need to buy something); and he noted with a sigh that the huge notice board still did not yet offer real-time wireless updates. He had some small hope for the journey though, the new Brighton line maglev had opened to not inconsiderable fanfare three months ago (only 25 years after Shanghai, but what the hey…), and a schoolboy excitement was taking the edge off the crowd anxiety and Daisy’s endless bitching.
You’d think that after the ejection shock and Brant’s subsequent white knight ministrations, she might have expressed some small gratitude—don’t be stupid. Apparently her immediate discomforts were Brant’s fault—he balked at a fourth latte, and refused to re-garb her at the Paul & Joe outlet in the high street; he did concede that the LEAVER smock was not appropriate dress for a trip to the seaside, but his credit card could only stretch to a weary New Look.
From the look on Daisy’s face as she emerged from behind the grubby changing room curtain, he deduced that she wasn’t enjoying channelling neo-chav. He even offered to buy her some hoop earrings at the impulse rack at the checkout: Yes, Daisy, I could go and fuck myself, but then how are you going to get to Brighton?
They make a fine pair: Brant’s crappy work jeans, WorkSpace 2025 EuroCon freebie t-shirt, and high albedo scalp; Daisy in her third-time-round eighties/noughties clonewear leggings and cropped jacket—her Berkshire button nose visibly wrinkling whenever she caught a plate-glass glimpse of herself. Credit talks though, and Brant had had the foresight to pre-book them onto the maglev while they were negotiating the overland and then the tube to Victoria. As they crossed the concourse, the Brighton side maglev platform network automatically grebbed the second class ticket ackles from Brant’s public buffer and ponderously swung open its gates. Daisy still wasn’t talking to him, so he followed three paces behind her tryhard haughtiness.
The maglev was a thing of beauty though. Even Daisy stopped huffing for a few minutes as they emerged through the TerrorHurtz (TM) scanner. For a start it was still clean, the nanopaint layer had thus far repelled all tag attempts, and as Brant watched he saw an organic twitch on the roof skin of the first class carriage; like a horse autonomically flicking away a fly, the nano layer first agitated and then subsumed a splat of bird shit—according to the spec he had seen on Slashdot it was capable up to macro avian absorption—fuck you, pigeon. What mostly impressed them though was the lack of noise. The actual maglev action (the floaty bit) was hidden under the red livery of the plastic Virgin fairing, but the near inaudible bass hum of power and implied speed was to Brant’s inured English senses the very thrum of futurity; his pace quickened as he reached for the recessed carriage door handle.
Nice try: they still had to walk fucking miles down the platform to get to the second class carriages.
What a let down—the journey only took seventeen minutes. Just long enough to shuffle (seven carriages) to the distinctly twentieth century experience of the buffet car, shuffle back balancing two pre-Seattle era instant coffees, and then ten minutes of Daisy-bitching. The epic speed of the maglev was almost wholly masked by the heavily tinted windows (perhaps a small town echo of the industrial revolution anxiety about the perils of velocity), and there was little noise to be discerned of their four hundred kilometres an hour passage through the still mostly green fields of Surrey and Sussex.
So the eerily fast deceleration into Brighton station was a relief for Brant. He had grown up there, and a jaunty combination of nostalgia and an unanticipated day off put a spring in his step as he manoeuvred Daisy onto the platform like a piece of stubborn luggage.