The rolling stock pulls into the station. Sunday, seven in the AM: the platform is almost desert, but for me and two other blokes. Good thing. I hate crowded platforms, as much as I hate rush hours trains, chock-full with straphangers. The doors slide open on a empty car. That's the advantage of getting on at the terminus. Most people dislike empty cars. They feel unsafe. I, on the contrary, love them. I dig when my neighbour sits dozens of feet before or behind me.

I look around, take a couple of steps forward and choose to lounge on the nearest seat along the window, extending my legs under the empty facing one. I fish my earphones out of my pocket and stuff them into my ears. The mellow sound of the cello wraps around me, and I close my eyes. It's hardly if I hear the hum before the doors close and the train lurches forwards, making its iron way out of the concrete building.

The crude light of the sun falling smack on my face snatches me from my reverie. I scrabble for my shades, put them on and glance outside. The skyline of downtown London has unduly risen during the last decade. Three-hundred-storey skyscrapers are the norm now, some being even connected to one another by walkways perched thousand of feet over the ground. All around them, like bees buzzing around their hive, the flycars bustle, lifting fat cats of the finance or big fish of politics to unknown meetings in remote places.

There is no night or Sunday for the tycoons.

That vision is suddenly snatched away as the train bolts into the tunnel just before King’s Cross. With a screeching it brakes and stops. There's not much activity here either. Five people at most waiting in one of downtown London usually busiest stations.

Next door a Pook walks in. He (or she? I can't tell) briefly turns his big, sleep laden, face towards me before his eyes move to a further mark. I hate Pooks. The rare tufts of yellow stubble on the top of their heads they call hair. Their sallow skin that never tans and crimps as they grow of age. Their foul breath. Their scraggy shanks that hardly bear them, and that they hide under baggy slacks. Almost as repugnant as the Broogs, whose obese females swarm in the seamy smut movie industry, eager to flash their four breasts and their two vaginas in front of cameras for a pittance.

“Small change sir, please. To eat. Please.” I startle as a squeaky voice kicks me out of my thoughts. I turn my head and look straight into the smashed face of a young Karg tatterdemalion who returns my gaze. I didn't see him getting on. Probably another child abducted to serve as a slave in one of the various embassies, and who managed to break free. He looks like a broken crocodile plush with his teeth half-broken and his right eye swollen. Where does he comes from? All the way from the northern slums, I suppose.

I pull a coin out of my pocket and hand it to him. He bows. “Thank you so much sir,” he utters in his strange accent. I follow him with my eyes as he shuffles away, his tail trailing behind him. He approaches the Pook, who dismisses him with a menacing gesture. No wonder, I think, as I switch my smartphone to listen to the latest news.

As the device tunes in to the nearest station, my ears fill with the familiar voice of Mickey Clarion. I shudder at the torrent of blustering invectives. This time, he rants again about illegal immigration from the third quadrant: an invasion of blood-sucking monsters which stow away in the freighters, according to him. An outrageous lie debunked more than once by his adversary, Orso Anderson, to no avail.

I wonder who will win at the end of the day, so unclear are the odds.

Something flicks outside, at the extreme range of my vision. In the nick of time, I turn my head to glimpse the receding shape of a class V interstellar craft. We must close in on Heathrow now. I unplug my earphones and put them back into my pocket. Time to stand up.

Heathrow station, cosmos line.