Kingfisher

Rugby against the Lower Sixths

"This is Bridge 30. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. Change here for rail services through the North-South Column. The Ricardo line is part suspended, between Houses of Parliament and Social Housing District 5. This is an anticlockwise Circle line train via Bridge 35 and Mainline Railway Terminus 2."

Ida let the sound of the train in the tunnel wash over her as the Circle line rushed her towards her destination. She buzzed with positive anticipation, and rather than thinking, she focused on channeling that sensation into a projection of calm confidence. A fraction of her energy also went on ensuring that nothing of her internal feelings leaked out through her countenance—smiling on the Underground would constitute indecent exposure.

"The next station is Kingfisher Centre E. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. The doors will only open at the next station for passengers with a Level Three access card."

It irked Ida that she had to waste energy avoiding smiling. It felt inefficient. If her speech tonight got the response it deserved, the days of asking the public to repress their emotions would be over, and Britain would lead the emancipation of the so-called 'rational world'. She looked around at her fellow travelers. The cold silence that emanated from each was excellent, but it was plainly born of fear. What an inefficient way of running a society.

The problem with emotional repression was that it simply didn't work, and the next station was Kingfisher Centre E. (Where Ida would mind the gap between the train and the platform).

"This station is Kingfisher Centre E..."

She scanned her card on the reader and stepped off the train before its doors had finished sliding open, walking quickly down the empty platform towards the undercroft of the conference centre. As she crossed the threshold from Transport for South-East 1's domain into the Kingfisher Corporation's, the white plastic walls of the tube station yielded, curiously, to Portland stone, curving into gently pointed archways. Not what Ida would've expected for an important Kingfisher facility. She proceeded down the corridor. It finished in a shallow flight of stairs, identified as 'Access to the Main Floor' by a sign bolted to the stone.

No advance warning would have prepared her for what she saw upon completing her ascent. It was simply too wrong. Ida had been taught since her birth never to look at things the way that she looked then at Kingfisher Centre E—she was appreciating its beauty. Though, raised on aluminium and plastic, the feeling that rose in response to the majesty that towered before her resembled horror as much as it did pleasure.

The main speaking floor was a vast auditorium, with carved stone walls and a floor constituted by a matrix of black and white tiles. To her left and right, lines of archways granted admittance to side rooms, which seemed to be in use as makeshift offices and places to store stray electrical equipment. There was something deeply moving about the place - and thus something deeply wrong with it. Why was a Kingfisher Centre so irrational? There were windows.

She noticed a great dome above her head, with a golden fence running about its inside base, as though it had once been expected that people might stand up there. The harsh white lighting that had been bolted to the stonework made every irrational fleck of gold leaf glitter, and along the top of the ceiling, shining, angular letters proclaimed something in a language Ida could neither read nor recognise.

Ida thought briefly of her friend and former colleague Ives Blackwood, who had written the 2073 Design of Building Regulations. There was a non-zero chance that he would faint upon being confronted with the interior of K.C. E. What, exactly, was this place?