money for the override code. It had better work. He taps it in quickly.
The tiny pulsing red light turns steady green. He feels himself swallowing.
The train rocks; the handle feels cold beneath his fingers.
And it begins with our young-sounding, young-looking, young-acting but in the end middle-aged friend Mr Adrian Cubbish waking up in his Mayfair home one London morning in – oh, let’s say late summer 2007; the routine is the same for the majority of days. He is in his bedroom suite, which takes up most of what used to be the attic of the town house. A light rain is falling onto the slabs of double-glazed glass which point at forty-five degrees to the light grey sky.
If Adrian were to have a symbol, it would be a mirror. This is what he says to the mirror each morning before he goes to work, and sometimes at the weekends when he doesn’t have to go to work, just for the sheer hell of it:
“The Market is God. There is no God but the Market.” He takes a breath here, smiling at his still-waking face. He looks young and fit, slim but muscled. He has tanned Caucasian skin, black hair, grey-green eyes and a wide mouth which is usually fixed in a knowing grin. Adrian has only ever slept with one woman who was significantly older than him; she chose to describe his mouth as “sensuous,” which he’d decided, after a little thought, was cool. Girls his own age and younger would call his mouth cute if they thought to describe it at all. He has a shadow-beard a night old. He lets his beard grow for a week or so sometimes before shaving it off; he looks good either way. He looks, if he is being honest with himself, like a male model. He looks just like he wants to look. Maybe he could be a little taller.
He clears his throat, spits into the glass bowl of one of the bathroom’s two sinks. Naked, he runs his hand through the dark curls of his pubic hair. “In the name of Capital, the compassionate, the wise,” he tells himself.
He grins, winks at his own reflection, amused.
And here, in a low-rise office suite in Glendale, Los Angeles, blinds slicing the slanting late afternoon sunlight into dark and shining strips draped across carpet tiles, chairs, suits and conference table, the noise of the freeway a grumbling susurrus in the background while Mike Esteros makes his pitch:
“Gentlemen, lady… this is more than just a pitch. Don’t get me wrong – this is a pitch but it’s also an important part of the movie I’m going to convince you that you want to help me make.
“What I’m going to tell you here is how to find aliens. Seriously. When I’m done, you’ll believe it might be possible. You’ll think we can capture an alien. What we’ll certainly be able do is create a movie that will capture the imagination of a generation; a Close Encounters, a Titanic. So, thank you for letting me have these few minutes of your time; I promise you they won’t be wasted.
“Now, anybody seen a full eclipse? Anyone been in the path of totality, when the sun is just wisps and tendrils of light peeking out from behind the moon? You, sir? Pretty impressive, sight, yeah? Yeah, mind-blowing indeed. Changes some people’s lives. They become shadow chasers – people who track down as many eclipses as they can, journeying to every corner of the world just to experience more examples of this uncanny and unique phenomenon.
“So let’s think about eclipses for a moment. Even if we haven’t seen an eclipse personally, we’ve seen the photographs in magazines and the footage on television or YouTube. We’re almost blasé about them; they’re just part of the stuff that happens to our planet, like weather or earthquakes, only not destructive, not life-threatening.
“But think about it. What an incredible coincidence it is that our moon fits exactly over our sun. Talk to astronomers and they’ll tell you that Earth’s moon is relatively much bigger than any other moon round any other planet. Most planets, like Jupiter and Saturn and so on, have moons that are tiny in comparison to themselves. Earth’s moon is enormous, and very close to us. If it was smaller or further away you’d only ever get partial eclipses; bigger or closer and it would hide the sun completely and there’d be no halo of light round the moon at