“At dusk Starsky was still sitting in the cockpit of the Grand Torino like the pilot of an alien spacecraft.”

Holding the data-CD that it had removed from the high-pressure liquid chromatograph, the dismembered robot Ash lay before the three medical display monitors like the sacrificial victim of some digital Cargo Cult. Framing the AI like a triptych of its credo, the three video frames displaying dorsal, ventral and sagittal section of the arachnid-phase Alien called up an impossible geometry, a forbidden angle in which some non-Euclidian Angel could dance only in isolation on the head of a pin. Its injured hands proffered the data, the compositional analysis of the buccal mucus, like a wafer. “The organism, like a moss, has an alternation of generations,” Ash said. “Unlike a moss, both the gametozoon and the sporozoon stages require a living host. The last acts of humanity may be as surrogate mothers for this free-living phallus existing only to impregnate the weak. Darwin and Freud in one jewelled lizard. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, they say. Where does that leave me?”

“History,” said Parker, raising the muzzle of the flamethrower.

In 1993 Lyle Hopwood imagined how the fabled JG Ballard novelisation of Alien might have looked. He has recently been the judge of a Ballardian competition: “Picture an alternate universe where Jim Ballard achieved his early goal of becoming a screenwriter, becoming so successful that he relocated from Shepperton to Hollywood. The task: write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch.”