Imp intended to channel the spirit of the original author’s intent, not the twee rubbish pandered by the Disney Corporation. Peter Pan was an inspiration to Imp in every way imaginable: a chillingly grandiloquent and narcissistic serial killer, detached even from his own shadow. Even in adulthood Imp found himself unaccountably irritated by his inability to fly.2
However there were obstacles on Imp’s path to greatness. For starters, the bank of Mum and Dad wasn’t around any more. He had a not-terribly-large trust fund, but most of the checks went to keeping the Student Loans Company off his back for his time at art school. Then there was the vexatious issue of copyright law. Peter and Wendy was in perpetual copyright—a copyright granted by Act of Parliament to Great Ormond Street Hospital. All recordings and derivative works were liable to pay royalties, and a pirate production would be perceived by the public as a sin as dastardly as any of Hook’s escapades. Stealing money from sick kids never played well with the tabloids unless you were a billionaire. (Billionaires, in Imp’s world view, could do anything. They could—and many did—play the villain in their very own live-action Bond movies.)
So Imp’s goal involved egregious and lamentable copyright violation as a precondition, followed by folding, spindling, and rendering nightmarish a children’s fantasy beloved by the millions who had been brainwashed by the evil Wizard of Walt. (Never forgive, never forget—Imp had committed to memory an impassioned half-hour peroration on the evils of the Rodent Corporation, just in case he was ever called upon to monologue, or even soliloquize, in the dock at the Old Bailey.)
And finally there was the matter of the ever-evolving script, which in Imp’s view required alterations to render it palatable to a modern audience.
Imp’s version of Peter and Wendy featured dead kids being downloaded from cyberspace and resurrected by the hacker Peter, a maniac with a detachable shadow who led the Lost Boys. Peter was a ruthless gang leader locked in eternal struggle with a lawless cyborg ravager, the Dread Space Pirate Hook, with whom he shared a mutual homoerotic love-death relationship. (Imp totally shipped Peter and Hook. In fact, Imp was bent on starring in his own movie as Peter, with Doc playing opposite him as Hook.)
A psychopathic murderer and child kidnapper, Peter slew without remorse or affection, and demanded absolute unquestioning obedience of his followers on pain of being thinned out. (This bit was totally faithful to the original.) He had a malign ghostly AI servant that ran through the tunnels and structures of the abandoned asteroid colony where they lived. She had a crush on Peter—Peter was nothing if not pansexual—and tinkled maliciously as she vented the air from the sleeping capsules of any Lost Boys who dared grow up. But that didn’t happen often because Peter kept them trapped in an eternally delayed pre-pubertal state using a cocktail of hormone suppressors (Game Boy had given him a list), for to grow up was the ultimate betrayal of the principles of the Neotenous Underground.
Other aspects of Imp’s script were distinctly heterodox. (That is: they took liberties with the source material’s intent.) His Wendy was in no respect a maternal figure—Rebecca would have kicked Imp’s ass all the way around Camden Market if he tried to write her into any kind of mothering role. She was a lethal bounty hunter, modelled on Grace Jones’s character in Luc Besson’s The Sixth Element. Imp’s Wendy had been sent to the asteroid to infiltrate Peter’s cell of nihilistic terror-children and assassinate their leader, but she was destined to fall in love with him and, after his heart was cut out by Hook, she was to graft his head onto the side of her own neck while his body regenerated. Finally there was the alien, the ticking lizard-monster in the ventilation ducts, that lived only to lay its eggs inside their bodies. And there was also going to be a blue, six-legged, brain-upgraded, psychopomp cyberdog called Nana that would win the boss fight with the crocodalien, just because it was awesome.
(“Steal from the best” was Imp’s watchword, as was “steal from more than one source and remix them so nobody spots what you’re doing.” (This last assertion was, Doc insisted, highly questionable.) And so was “try to make sure your sources are dead: if they’re still worth stealing, they’ve stood the test of time.” Alien wasn’t dead yet, but since the Disney takeover the Alien Queen was technically a Disney Princess. So it was all a moot point in Imp’s opinion; and anyway, revenge was sweet.)
In the two years he’d been working full-time on Peter and Wendy: A Cyberpunk Dystopia in Space, Imp had completed eleven drafts of the script. He had also figured out how to get unemployed actors to work for him “for the exposure” (it helped that Imp could convince rain that it was dry and night it was day); how to walk into an Apple Store and blag his way into being given a sweet Mac Pro loaded with video editing software; how to talk his way into endless free training courses in film editing, and even a one-on-one workshop session with Robert McKee; how to cozen his dealer into giving him a 70 percent discount on blow; and how to carry out foolproof bank robberies.
He hadn’t actually filmed anything yet, although that was going to change real soon now.
“We start shooting at the beginning of next month, and that’s final,” he announced, staring up at the smoke dragons circling lazily under the ceiling lights. “Before we can do that, we need another job, to pay for the film and the lab time. But don’t worry, I’m sure something will come up…”
The day after she rescued Professor Skullface, Wendy returned to work. Her first destination was the staff canteen for a coffee that hadn’t been festering in its jug for hours, and her second call was Gibson’s
