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Grant’s education has not been going smoothly, but he has managed to learn a thing or two. Or so he thinks.

“I get it, okay!” he is saying, his voice loud but controlled. He isn’t yelling; he hasn’t lost his temper, and though an exasperation shines through in his tone, it is an exasperation with the edges filed off. The voice of a customer service professional, soldiering on into his second hour on the phone with a transcendently dense client.

“I get it. Everything is a special and unique snowflake and nothing is the same as anything else. Some sorta reverse-Kanye thing. I get it.”

He’s been through about two hours, at this point, of what the goopball calls “exercises.” If you were to ask him, Grant would probably call them “hallucinations.” At first, these sent Grant into paroxysms of terrible doubt as to his own sanity (which confused the goopball); then the curious stability of their internal logic set him at ease (which made the goopball quiver with something that might have been delight); and finally, for a good forty-five minutes, the mind-numbing simplicity of that same internal logic made him grow bored and flippant (which made the goopball confused again).

The first exercise began with a lecture, of a kind he is starting to get used to: the sort where an anomaling tells you what you believe, and somehow manages to get it wrong in such a weird way that you can’t quite pinpoint where the problems are.

“You believe that Grant is Grant,” the goopball asserted, after it had calmed down from its titillation over the whole earth/spear slideshow. Grant shrugged his half-assed assent. (What the hell was the alternative?)

“You form the sign ‘Grant,’” it continued breathlessly, “intending thereby to snatch in your grasp all things which are Grant, and in the same motion to let all things which are not Grant pass through your rapacious fingers.”

“Sure,” Grant said.

In response, he was instructed to stand up and look behind him. In the room with him, then, was another Grant, exactly like himself.

This was where Grant—both Grants—started to freak the fuck out, derailing the lesson for a few minutes while the goopball vibrated nervously and the two Grants got over the fact that yes, I’m me, you’re also me, no seeing yourself in the flesh is not something that happens in real life, no talking to levitating rainbow slime orbs is also not something that happens in real life, this is a dream or something, okay, fine, so, nice to meet you, Grant is it?, always did think you were a pretty cool guy, ha ha, very funny, you’ve got a great sense of humor, dude, anyone ever tell you that?

With that crisis averted, the exercise went swiftly on its way. Barking instructions with deadpan urgency, the goopball sent the Grants on a series of quests. Carry the couch from one end of the room to the other. Review with one another the facility’s key administrative protocols. Play tic-tac-toe. It was, the other Grant quipped, like one of those video games with a thousand stupid mini-games, trying to make up for a dearth of satisfying core gameplay.

The second exercise was the same as the first, except that the other Grant was replaced with an eerie simulacrum of Grant ca. age fifteen: sullen, acne-ridden, and unsurprisingly incapable of reviewing admin protocols. He didn’t even know where he was. He wouldn’t get a job here until over a decade later, after all.

Third exercise: other Grant was a toddler. Could Grant and his toddler self carry the couch across the room, as Grant and his exact double had done? No, they could not. The goopball made much of this. Grant, to stave off boredom, began to feign mock astonishment at the appropriate moments. You mean this toddler doesn’t know how to play tic-tac-toe? O brave new world, that has such toddlers in’t!

The goopball, taking all this at face value, was ecstatic. “Wonderful, Grant!” it panted and cooed. Its old man voice was ill fitted to such transports of emotion, the cadence and the timbre glued awkwardly together as by some novelty voice-synth program (“make the president say anything you type!”), and the result sounded more pervy than encouraging.

Fourth exercise: no other-Grant, but two couches. Asked point-blank what a couch was, Grant ventured the guess “a thing you sit on.” Ah, but would you sit on this couch? And behind him there was now a controlled inferno whose tongues of lapping flame conspired, in their furious dance, so as to form in every successive moment the precise shape of the couch he had just been sitting on. No, Grant conceded, he would not sit on that couch. “You got me there! Good one! One point to Team Anomaling!”

Fifth exercise, sixth exercise, seventh exercise. A particular ceiling tile, singled out for his attention by its absence of anointing goop, was within his reach if he stood on the couch. The same feat was attempted with another, stouter couch, and could not be done. When the stouter couch was placed on its side, however, it was now tall enough for even toddler-Grant—incarnated once more for the purpose of the demonstration—to reach the tile with its help.

It went on like this, the simple repetitions growing downright Seussian, endless permutations of the same meal proffered by an extraterrestrial Sam-I-Am. It went on like this until Grant couldn’t stand it anymore, and so here he is, now, proclaiming that he gets it, that everything is a special and unique snowflake, that nothing is the same as anything else. That it’s some sorta reverse-Kanye thing. He gets it.

A riot of shock waves breaks out on the surface of the goopball, like the criss-crossing wakes of numerous large boats.

“Grant! These signs you form, ‘special’ and ‘unique’ and ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ and ‘the same’—these signs may well be the beginning of wisdom, if not its end. Your thought aims against violence even as you form it into a sign-train of the utmost violence.”

Grant, who’s had a lot of time to get familiar with this couch and its ways, has found a posture so comfortable he wants to patent it.

“Wait, so that was the point? Like, seriously? You made me do all that shit so I could learn that everything is different from everything else? Which also makes me, like, Gandhi or something?”

Plunging fronts of goop converge from several directions toward a single apex, which proceeds to vibrate in place, slowly and solemnly.

“Still you lurch toward pretend omniscience. Every thing, different from every other. A vast rush beyond your habitat, beyond your earth, to all that is or that may be. All this is your dominion? All this, the manifest destiny of the bilateral?

“And yet, Grant, this is nonetheless the beginning of wisdom. Your lurching sign-train lurches toward the cessation of lurching sign-trains. And so it may become safe for you to walk uncrashed, for a time, as each violent impulse to lurch is met by a violent answer, and strangled into submission.”

Grant took acid once, in college. He didn’t much enjoy it. The drug was provided by—and partaken in the dorm room of—an acquaintance who called himself Mouse, although everyone knew his real name was Joel. Mouse was one of those stereotypes-made-flesh that haunt the undergrad experience, a scruffy impish blip of a kid who’d had a “transformative experience” backpacking in Tibet, and whose wide-eyed enthusiasm for Jung outstripped that of any adviser he could find in the “blinkered” psychology department. Grant never liked the guy much, but he’d try anything once, and so he had spent a radiant April afternoon listening to Mouse pontificate on Buddhism and nudism as the innumerable knick-knacks mounted on Mouse’s wall reconfigured themselves into an endless sequence of mandala patterns before his dilated pupils.

He feels now the same way he felt back then: that enlightenment is not for him. That these sagely verities about the ineffable oneness or non-oneness of all things or nothing leave him tired and exasperated, either ahead of the class or behind it, but either way yearning to be out kicking a ball across a field, or in his room chasing enemies of the state across drab virtual hallways. Grant likes video games, punching bags, and Azad: things that respond to his touch with a single sharp counter-touch. Perhaps the counter-touch is agreeable, perhaps disagreeable—but it is brief and interactive, it cries out for the next move in the game. It does not reverberate for hours across Mouse’s room, making the same point again and again, luxuriating in the comforts of profundity.

“Okay,” Grant says. “So let’s get to the bottom line here. If I’m going to ‘walk uncrashed,’ with you, I can’t assume that things are like other things that have the same name? Like, if I say ‘there’s a couch in that room,’ I can’t assume I can sit on the couch, because it might be made of fire? Stuff like that?”

“I cannot assent,” the old man voice says, bundling that unique anomaling condescension into its elder gravitas, “to the fullness of your sign-train, in the fullness of its violence. But I assent to the direction you move in, now.”

“Okay, so. Riddle me this, E.T. What if I have a decision to make? Like, I’m choosing between a room with a couch and a room that doesn’t have a couch. I like couches. This one, for example, is hella comfortable. But I can’t assume anything about couches. So how do I decide which room to go to? How do I decide anything?”

“What you call assumption, Grant, can be made truly, on the basis of true similitude. But true similitude may only be discerned path-wise, as the spear-bearers on the screen measured it, and not in grasping lurches. Bilateral that you are, you cannot now measure path-wise. Of your future capacities, I do not claim to speak. But as your guide, I may soon measure path-wise where you cannot, and tell you of the decisions I derive by my true reckoning. These, if you wish to move uncrashed, must be your decisions also.”

Grant picks his lolling head up off the armrest, and collects himself in what he hopes is a more formidable pose.

“So I have to do what you tell me, huh? Is that what everyone’s doing? All the humans just bowing down to alien wisdom?”

All of a sudden Grant realizes what he’s saying.

As the end had approached, the conversation inside the facility—and outside, in ill-informed sententious speeches by every head of state on the planet—had focused on two scenarios. An abject submission to the anomalings, or an all-out last stand.

Grant has been out for some time. How long? He realizes, in these tardy reflections, that he has no idea. But one of these scenarios or the other has probably run its course by now. If it was the last-stand scenario, it must not have gone so well for us, since here is a living anomaling, right before his eyes. (“An anomaling’s four-dimensional shadow,” says a pedantic Ph.D, rising out of justly suppressed memories to correct Grant’s wording one last time.)

“Grant,” says the goopball, and as if it knows just what he’s thinking, it continues:

“You must realize that much has changed on your earth since your Mooncrash began. It is no longer permitted for bilaterals to move freely in the abominable realm. The majority of your fellows, such as your Serena, and others you hold in tribal affinity, now live crashed, and can move happily without violence. These are billions in number, and among them are all those you came to touch, in your former free motions upon your earth.

“Those who live crashed are in harmony with what you have called alien wisdom, and their movements cannot but honor that harmony. Among those who do not live crashed, some are guided, as you are, and know that they must obey their guides in matters they cannot measure path-wise. Others, not guided, may still walk violent paths—but these have been taken into account, so that their paths bend in natural steps towards path-wise harmony, and they need not trouble you.”

That’s it, then.

His mother is in the Mooncrash, or something like it. His mother, and his buddies, and—Grant is pretty sure he knows what the anomaling means by “all those you came to touch, in your former free motions upon your earth.” Everyone in their own private dream, their spinor anomaly interactions safely neutered, watched over and “taken into account” by smug, goopy overlords.

Project Mooncrash, it was hoped, could lock away the best and brightest in the equivalent of a nuclear bunker while the war went on outside. One day they would emerge: humanity’s final trump card. A mythic crack team of scientists and commandoes. The demigod issue of the Manhattan Project and the Navy SEALs, born of their passionate trysts among the fecund weeds of some thriller-writer’s wet dream. One day, one strategically chosen day, they would emerge from their pods, stride forth under a ceremonial halo of cigarette smoke and testosterone, and save the world.

It was a nice dream. In reality, Project Mooncrash had locked away an undistinguished security guard, a foppish litterateur, and no one else at all. The earth is under alien dominion. Humanity is fucked.

It really is the end of the world, Grant thinks. The couch’s cushions are firm but welcoming beneath him, and his spine rests happily against its ergonomically molded back. It is the end of the world, he thinks, but at least I have this couch as a consolation prize. At least I will have adequate lumbar support, as I gaze upon the ruin of my species.

Wait, he thinks. Did I always sound like that? A phrase like “as I gaze upon the ruin of my species” would not have come naturally to him, back when he worked here, in the facility. But it did come naturally to him, just now. It isn’t just his imagination: his interior monologue has gotten fancier in the last minute or two, and grows fancier still. He remembers the feeling he had at the four-way stop, the feeling of a frozen engine thawing, as memories of the facility dumped raw heat into his cold Mooncrashed mind. This, he realizes, is the same process in the opposite direction. His Mooncrashed years with Azad had changed him, and all the myriad marks Azad had left upon his mind, upon his engagement with language, are now reaching their silk-clad fingers up from the moonlit house, warming his brain with their rosy touch.

He is not quite the Grant of five years ago, and not quite the Grant of five hours ago either. He is a new creature, an outgrowth of the two, the Grant of now. Like an organism that matures by splitting into separate selves, sending them afar in diverse directions, and then, in some homecoming celebration of unimaginable intimacy, summing together the lesson learned by each in its unique travels. (But then, Grant reflects, perhaps there is as much truth to that picture of personal growth as there is to the hoary serial model, even in lives not broken by Mooncrashes.)

This pleasant reverie has been a wonderful distraction from the end of the human race, but like all distractions, it cannot last forever. As it happens, it is broken by a more mundane sort of crash, the crash of a door being opened by someone in a hurry. Someone loquacious:

“. . . an intricately woven dilemma whose warp and weft, unfamiliar as they may be to you, are second nature to us. Welcome, my snowy-haired friend, to one of the oldest and most storied of bilateral sensations. You have my congratulations, and my condolences. Here you are, face to face with the scoundrel who taught you speech, and you find yourself half disgusted but half reverent. Even the least lettered of bilaterals knows that reverence—why, half of us live in swooning thrall to an old sign-train in which it is written, ‘in the beginning was the word.’ And, on the other hand (for my point, naturally, is two-handed), even the most lettered of bilaterals knows that disgust, for—”

Another door crashes open, and the familiar fluting voice draws close.

“—for it is our most celebrated word-mongers who have the least piety toward their dear mother language, calling her a ‘prison-house’ and worse, and lest you think that a mere passing fad, do note the ancient tale it imitates, of a Tempter who aided our Fall, and who spoke like ‘som orator renound in Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence Flourishd.’ The simple truth in its shabby clothes, alas, will never seem worthy of comparison with the dignity of Tully—as you are now learning!

“Oh, and look now, there is one of your more orthodox brethren. Is it going to deliver a rebuke against your various heresies? I do hope so. It would be ever so instructive! I must thank you all again for the chance to see you in the flesh, or the closest you come to flesh. No fusser over scansion will ever emerge from the reading room to find Peleid Achilleus waiting outside, rippling with menin and muscle, but I have chosen a luckier subject for my unworthy gifts.”

Few things would be able to rouse Grant from his luxurious perch at this late hour of the world. But one of those things is this voice, this tiresome, pretentious, rapid-fire voice. The voice of the best friend he has left, the friend he spent close to four years with in a domestic wasteland bereft of other company.

He rises from the couch and turns to see Azad reanimated, Azad as (unfortunately) animate as ever. And beside him, the poor recipient of his manic monologue, a tall silent man with an intense stare, with a mane of hair that pours straight down past his shoulders and down to his elbows. The man looks not a day over thirty, but his hair is spindly and grey, shading toward pure white near the crest.

“Azad! You’re alive!” Grant says.

“That I am,” says Azad, “and you too, my jerboa. You have redeemed yourself by your footwork, and wrested us both into so-called reality. Did my instructions serve you sufficiently well? I was so proud of myself there near the end, dull masculine me, finally in blessed harmony with the Mooncrash and its wiles, its monthly changes of key.”

Azad’s lordly tone, in combination with Azad’s ignorance of the situation, makes Grant indignant. Indignant, and ready to give Azad the time of day: by God, he is home. The world has ended, but he is home.

“That isn’t how it happened at all. I went to the house you told me about, yes, but there was no box there. Instead, I ran into this guy”—he gestures amicably to the goopball, and its surface purrs in acknowledgement—“and he’s helped me the rest of the way. No niceties of Mooncrash logic, no harmonics or key changes, were involved. And by the way, I’m not a jerboa. I’m not even Grant. I am the thing you see before you, right now, and I claim nothing else.”

Grant’s education has not, in the end, been as pointless as it seemed.

“Fascinating!” declares Azad, inevitably and exasperatingly undaunted. His skin is uniformly slick with sweat, Grant notices, and the circles under his eyes are so dark they might contain their own abyssal worlds, patient and heavy as the Mooncrash.

“You are a convert, I take it, to the anomaling faith? Analogies and generalizations forsworn, like graven images? Has it taken months of brainwashing to get you to this point, or were you born again in the blink of an eye?”

Christ, Grant thinks. You can always count on Azad to pivot the discussion so that your apparent strengths are weaknesses. The implicit assumption: either you agree to my framing of the situation, or you’re siding with the aliens. Deft, but Grant knows this territory. He’s had nothing to do, for years, but get to know it.

“Azad, I confess I have fused together the beliefs of my anomaling benefactor and my own experiences as mouse executor of your best-laid plans. Let’s shelve that all for later, if there is a later. First things first—who is this guy you’re talking to?”

“I am Michael,” says the man with the grey hair.

“He is an anomaling in shade clothing,” explains Azad. “He has roused me from my spinless sleep, he says, because I fascinate him. My shoddy Englishings of his sublime unlanguage have, apparently, become the uneasy foundation for all the attempts made by his unpeople to communicate with our fallen, two-sided kind. Remember ‘sign’ and ‘sign-train,’ Grant? Remember when I defended those word choices, in this very room, as very important persons of the United States government struggled—and who can blame them—to stay awake? Well. All the anomalings are using my code now. Ask one what it is, and it’ll say ‘anomaling’! My word! My word, my word, they are using my word.”

“I see,” Grant says.

He sees, and he is unmoved. Even in the most involuted days of the Mooncrash, with nothing else to sustain him, he could never manage to match Azad’s totemic wonder over mere words.

“Violence!” the old man shouts. “Violence! I can no longer be silent! Be still, bilaterals, while I ascend to arbitration. Of arbitration you will learn, perhaps, when you are sufficiently advanced.”

A novel set of corrugations pulses along the goopball’s surface, pregnant with intent. Its voice calls out in a correspondingly novel monotone, less human than the old man voice has ever sounded before.

“O(3) shade [nonverbal scratching noise] has been locked while its interface operator engages in handshake.”

The grey-haired man opens his mouth, preternaturally wide. He chants a monotone invocation of his own.

“Humanoid shade Michael has been locked while its interface operator engages in handshake.”

He is still, too still, for the span of a few anxious breaths. (Grant’s breaths. The grey-haired man, Michael, does not appear to breathe at all.)

“Humanoid shade Michael preparing for re-synchrony with non-shade environment, as downstream consequence of its interface operator rejecting arbitration.”

The goopball burbles with pique.

“I cannot! I cannot begin to . . . you mean this is your desire? To exchange sign-trains in the abominable realm, in lieu of arbitration? I was ready to settle our differences . . . our differences, sick, poison, is this how we must talk . . . I was ready, oh this abominable interface, I was ready, please stop, I was ready to settle our differences regarding your strange experiments in that crash of your own devising, settle them naturally and path-wise, by arbitration! And yet you insist on . . . oh, this sick and perverse interface, that insists on me insisting on saying that you insist on, insists on me insisting on saying . . .”

If a goopball can vomit, this one looks like it’s about to.

“My experiments with the bilateral Anne,” says Michael with a sanguine smile, “are in harmony with our progressive venturing, and this shall be recognized in arbitration, when my own path sends me to arbitration.”

This tense moment persists for a speechless second, and then is shattered by yet another crash, as all the doors open and a multitude of human-shaped things—Grant no longer jumps to generalize from human shape to human nature—pour into the room, brandishing sidearms. They are clad in black from head to toe, and they move with a patterned efficiency that makes him think of the old hopes they all once held, hopes for a final human reserve force, crouching in Mooncrashed shadow, waiting for their moment to strike.

“This is Wolf Squadron! All bilaterals against the wall with your hands up! All shades, detach interface to minimum! We can see your link chains all the way upstream, boys. Can’t hide anything from us. These bilaterals are ours.”

Grant proceeds apace to the wall. His hands are already above his head—a practiced motion, practiced once in some five- or ten-minute stretch of training in the distant and hazy past, but practiced much more often as mental accompaniment to a hundred police procedurals and crime dramas, and in the thousands of nasty dreams that drew on them for inspiration.

He looks expectantly to Azad. But Azad—of course—is not against a wall. On Azad’s face there is a palpable smirk, expressing Azad’s eternal quibble, the no, not quite that which he will ever give voice to, as long as there is still life in his body. There is life in Azad’s body, and so he smirks, and grasps Michael’s hand in his, Tempter’s hand in Eve’s, sure of safe passage along some other, deviant path.