The one that ended up in his bowl was orange and had three eyes and four arms. And it was holding a ray gun in each hand.

His father hadn’t got up. His mother was watching the little television in the kitchen, where a very large man disguised as an entire desert was pointing to a lot of red and blue arrows on a map.

He went down to Neil Armstrong Mall.

He took the plastic alien with him. That’d be the way to invade a planet. One alien in every box! Wait until they were in every cupboard in the country, send out the signal and bazaam!

Cereal killers!

Maybe on some other planet somewhere you got a free human in every packet of ammonia-coated Snappicrystals. Hey, zorks! Collect the Whole Set! And there’d be all these little plastic people. Holding guns, of course. You just had to walk down the street to see that, of course, everyone had a gun.

He looked out of the bus window.

That was it, really. No one would bother to put plastic aliens inside the plastic cereal if they were just, you know, doing everyday things. Holding the Cosmiczippo Ray™ hedge clippers! Getting on the Megadeath™ bus! Hanging out at the Star Thruster Mall!

The trouble with all the aliens he’d seen was that they either wanted to eat you or play music at you until you became better people. You never got the sort that just wanted to do something ordinary like borrow the lawn mower.

Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac were trying to hang out by the ornamental fountain, but really they were just hanging around. Yo-less was wearing the same grey trousers he wore to school. You couldn’t hang out in grey trousers. And Wobbler still wore his sunglasses, except they weren’t real sunglasses because he had to wear ordinary glasses anyway; they were those clip-on sunglasses for tourists. Also, they weren’t the same size as the glasses underneath, and had rubbed red marks on his nose. And he wore an anorak. Wobbler was probably the only person in the universe who still wore an anorak. And Bigmac, in addition to his camouflage trousers and ‘Terminator’ T-shirt with ‘Blackbury Skins’ on the back in biro, had got hold of a belt made entirely of cartridge cases. He looked stupid.

‘Yo, duds,’ said Johnny.

‘We’ve been here ages,’ said Yo-less.

‘I went one stop past on the bus and had to walk back,’ said Johnny. ‘Thinking about other things. What’s happening?’

‘Do you mean what’s happening, or sort of hey, my man, what’s happening?’ said Wobbler.

‘What’s happening?’ said Johnny.

‘I want to go into J&J Software,’ said Wobbler. ‘They might have got Cosmic Coffee Mats in. It got a review in Bazzammm! and they said it’s got an unbreakable copy protection.’

‘Did they say it was any good?’ said Bigmac.

‘Who cares?’

‘You’ll get caught one day,’ said Yo-less.

‘Then you get given a job in Silicon Valley, designing antipiracy software,’ said Wobbler. Behind his two thicknesses of glasses, his eyes lit up. Wobbler thought that California was where good people went when they died.