Henry Perowne is a 48-year-old neurosurgeon living in London. Henry wakes up before dawn, unsure of what has awoken him. He looks out the window and finds the city outside beautiful, despite bird excrement and overfilled trash bins. Henry relishes the signs of life and interdependence. He feels unusually happy and wonders if it is a chemical accident, a side effect of his exhaustion from the week, or the anticipation of the weekend and his daughter’s impending visit from Paris. He muses on how his daughter gives him reading assignments to make up for his lack of non-medical education, most recently a biography of Darwin. There was a flu outbreak among the hospital staff, which meant Henry had twice as much work to complete as usual to make up for the shortages, and left him feeling exhausted and in need of rest by the week’s end.

Henry sees a burning light in the sky, mistaking it first for a meteor, then for a comet. However, when he hears a low rumbling noise, he realizes that he is witnessing a plane crash. The scene is strangely familiar to him because of the live reporting he witnessed of the September 11 terrorist attacks.