And talk about loud. The furry cone that drooped from the front upper surface of the Boltzmann brain like a damp hat had simultaneously allowed the advent of the earliest spectator and the earliest listener, which meant that the vibrations flooding the emergent femto-cosmos could be meaningfully described as sound. Though in the main, this could be typified as oceanic and inchoate white noise, there, in that initial flicker of untrammelled probability, the hiss and crackle would occasionally resolve itself into brief snatches of contingent symphony or accidental aria. The whole incessant and hallucinatory eruption into being was accompanied by possibilities of music; by the jingles, hymns and heavy metal of a billion yet-to-happen worlds. Randomly permutated voices likewise trilled and soared between the budding marvels of that flickering blue/pink Creation, outcries of innumerable speculated physiologies or vocal apparatuses, with somewhere in amongst the happenstantial glossolalia and trickling cadence a precursory idea of language.

  Awestruck by the billowing extravagance and struggling to assimilate its first experience of an experience, the floating brain came, not unreasonably, to associate these random sonic outbursts with whatever visual aspect of the spectacle its bristling and indented fore-sprout happened to be pointed at. By these means, purely as a way to inwardly both classify and categorise the incoming information, a cacophonous vocabulary was achieved. To offer an example, a brief trumpet fanfare in C major was associated with what looked like a pincushion of conjoined chess pieces, although only pawns and bishops. Meanwhile, a colossal fountain that produced a spray of stylised duo-decapods was represented by the sharp-edged tinkle of a shattering bottle. Mostly nouns to start with, then, though soon acquiring noisy verbs and even a few adjectival screams, bleats or explosions.

  Utilising its own improvised syntax and grammar, it determined that the type of sonic cluster representing discrete entities could be referred to as a noun – something like the word ‘minimal’ pronounced through a harmonica – while each distinct activity engaged in by these entities, all of the manifesting, toppling and whizzing, could be called a verb – a sound effect resembling a large quadrupedal mammal falling down a flight of stairs. Accompanying this latter coinage was the brain’s dismaying realisation that it was itself a noun that had no verb attached: in all the seething metamorphic panorama spread before its new-found scrutiny, it was the only thing not visibly involved in an activity; the only object not engaged in manifesting, toppling or whizzing.

  Observing that, with its manifestation already accomplished, most other verb activities apparently involved some form of movement, it attempted to imagine an appendage useful to that end. Once more exploiting Heisenbergian indeterminacy, as with its flaccid sensory apparatus, it was able to produce from the surrounding soup of proto-particles a vaporous posterior plume that rapidly congealed to a whip-like flagellum with articulated vertebrae, some twenty-five times longer than the brain itself and coloured a pale gentian.

  Instinctively attempting an experimental shimmy of its splendid new extension, the brain found itself propelled some distance forward from its prior position, which, as the only place that it had ever previously known, had been its birthing point. The Boltzmann speculation gloomily concluded that the probability of again occupying this precise spatial location must be vanishingly small, and in this way provided the initial rough sketch for nostalgia before once more flexing its new tail and rocketing away into the overboiling foam of form, a sapient spermatozoon. With a rapid rotary action swiftly proving to be most efficient, the trial spinal streamer functioned rather like an egg whisk, stirring up an effervescent contrail of minuscule bubbles from the fluid medium through which it travelled, the clear albumen of space-time.

  Over melting terraces and recombinant palisades, through glassy tunnels like the bore of some tremendous wave, between the scything ocean-liner blades of an immense electric fan, the brain torpedoed, with its wake of froth, into the strobing pink and blue of everywhere. It soared exhilarant above metallic ornamental gardens that had threatening bladed topiary and, oh, the cryptic miracles it witnessed, the orchestral havoc that it heard. Many were its adventures during this, its headstrong youth: the laughing chandelier affair; the incident of the self-referential obstacle; that sobering episode with the winged maisonettes; a rhombus avalanche; and the quickly obsessional advent of numbering, to name but five. It planed alone down avenues gone exponential, and reflected, for the first and last time that this would be possible without self-consciousness or irony, that in all of its explorations it had made significant discoveries about itself.

  The brain had learned, for instance, that it had a tendency to waver between recklessness and trepid overcaution. It had haltingly deduced a periodic table of its own responses, with preliminary elements like paranoia and bewilderment already set in place, leaving suggestive gaps for as-yet-undiscovered substances, such as ennui or lechery. Having met the absurd futility of what appeared to be a massive self-dismantling roundabout with an obscure forerunner of amusement, it had postulated the conceivable existence of a sense of humour somewhere in the swelling cosmos, but at length accepted, with some disappointment, that it didn’t have one.

  On a more pragmatic and less self-absorbed front, Boltzmann’s thought experiment had learned that it could skilfully vibrate the follicles coating the surface of the sensor-cone, worn on its prow like a ship’s figurehead, and, in the way that modern microphones can also serve as speakers, could rebroadcast audial and visual impressions by precisely reproducing the vibrations which accompanied said content’s first reception. Acoustically this sounded like an early synthesiser, while the visual transmissions were delivered as a hologram-style bubble that contained the expressed scene in miniature, much like a pictographic cartoon speech balloon, albeit realised in three dimensions.

  Following this innovation, the preliminary creature’s passage through the burgeoning geometries that flared and flickered all about it was accompanied by glittering snow-globe utterances, suspended in its frothy wake at irregular intervals; jewel-like vignettes, each wrapped in its accompanying soundtrack; eerie trailers advertising a forthcoming animated feature. With its bridal train of purpling surf bedizened by these drifting image-opals, the augmented Boltzmann brain continued its exploratory cruise into the stupefying formal overgrowth, the ghastly premonition of a tourist lost in that unfathomable Eden.

  Wriggling down algebraic arcades for shelter during a brief but intense monsoon of flutes, the brain used this involuntary period of inactivity to invent indoor play. Experimenting with the willed vibration of its sensory filaments, it realised that it was not solely forced to reproduce the sights and sounds it had experienced, but that it could create new visions and disaster-symphonies from its own rapidly developing imagination, non-existent noises made by things that hadn’t happened. Thus, with the cessation of the woodwind downpour, it once more set forth across the pastures of amok manifestation, but now with a necklace string of lies and artworks at its back amidst the nearly violet spume. Eternity’s first monster splashed and frolicked, glorying in its singularity and its unique abilities.

  Finding the second brain, then, was a dreadful shock.

  It happened during the initial entity’s traverse of several huge typewriter-like constructions that were fused, ingeniously, to comprise a marvellous emporium of pecking, plunging characters and punctuation. Hanging roughly at the central point of this arrangement was what the by-now-experienced voyager at first took for a fault with its own sensory equipment: a blurred area of its visual field shaped like an egg and made, apparently, from fog. Suspecting that its optical protrusion was becoming cataracted in some way, the Boltzmann daydream stopped dead in its fizzy tracks in order to examine this ghostly anomaly at closer quarters.

  On inspection, the new thing proved to be a phenomenon in its own right, rather than the anticipated optic flaw. It was a vaporous ellipse, a tendrilled smoulder gathering shape and slippery texture as it curdled towards substance. Noting a resemblance between the object’s misty composition and the similar particle fog that it had witnessed while materialising its own bone-chain of a tail, the brain haltingly comprehended that this must be how it had appeared, when it first coalesced into awareness from the riotous quantum broth. Rapidly adding free-floating unease and existential dread to its evolving periodic table of responses, the brain realised with a start that it was looking at the birthing process of another individual like itself. Confirming this unsettling apprehension, the inchoate cloud shook off the last vestiges of its former fuzziness and twinkled into pin-sharp focus with a sticky glister on its lobes, its crenellated folds. It was, beyond all doubt, another brain. Lacking for audiovisual organs or a method of propulsion, the perplexing new arrival hovered there in the ongoing rush of architectural generation, insensate and motionless. It didn’t even know it was a noun.

  The universe’s former sole inhabitant here twitched its trailing length of spine in a display of agitation or, to use the brain’s own terminology, element eighty-three. This worrying turn of events, it knew, necessitated some wrenching adjustments to its formative vocabulary and worldview. Foremost amongst the great many philosophical anxieties that this occurrence represented was the hitherto unknown and therefore unexamined question of identity, a thing which, until that point, as the former lone inhabitant of anything, it hadn’t really felt a need to contemplate.

  This upset would require additions to the brain’s internal language system, some sort of pronoun to describe itself as separate from any other brain that happened to drop by, and possibly a different pronoun to refer to this unwelcome upstart that, to its unpractised sensor-hump, seemed smaller, less attractive and less charismatic than itself. Admittedly, its concept of ‘attractive’ was not very much advanced from ‘non-repulsive’, while charisma was seen only as a lack of dismal unimportance, but nevertheless, the Boltzmann horror was increasingly persuaded to its own scornful appraisal of this relatively dull and ugly interloper. It seemed possible that more than pronouns would be needed to distinguish between the original brain and this dreary dwarf successor.

  Perhaps some kind of identifying label process could be implemented, something that went beyond simply ‘Boltzmann brain’ and managed to convey a sentient being’s status and significance, its unique personality? This process, it conceived, should be named naming. Warming to the idea, it contrived to fashion from its memory of sounds and syllables an appellation wonderful enough to represent itself, and while it felt that the sound sequence ‘Panperule’ held all of the requisite awe and grave magnificence, there was still something missing. In a flash of inspiration, it inaugurated the definite article – a soft implosion – as the indicator of a given thing’s uniqueness and pre-eminence. The Panperule. It had a ring to it. There could be any number of intruding brains, but none of them could ever be The Panperule.

  Feeling much better for its acquisition of an impromptu identity, The Panperule turned its attentions once more to the other brain that bobbed before it, blissfully oblivious. So, what was to be done about it, this anonymous blob that was nowhere near as large or interesting as The Panperule? Unnoticed, great brick chimney stacks assembled themselves into an immense industrial sea urchin somewhere overhead while the first Boltzmann brain assessed its various options, racked with indecisiveness (element nine). The course requiring the least effort on The Panperule’s part would be simply to ignore the new arrival and continue on its foaming violet way, though it conceded this might lead to greater difficulties later on. What if the new brain in its turn evolved a way of sensing its environment, of moving through it, acting on it? What if it should come to the absurd conclusion that this self-inventing funfair of existence was in some way the new brain’s domain, not realising that it was instead for the convenience of The Panperule? Might that not lay the ground for future conflict?

  After some deliberation, a more elegant alternative became apparent. Since the new brain was not presently observing anything, the Heisenbergian loophole could still be exploited. Theoretically, this would allow The Panperule to alter the latecomer’s proto-substance as it had its own, with sensory awareness and mobility within its gift. Much better that the gate-crasher be taught this bursting universe according to The Panperule than formulate a rival worldview of its own, and better yet to have the new brain feel indebtedness (element thirty) from the outset, rather than element eighty-seven, animosity, or forty-two, resentment. As an afterthought, the senior brain decided that it would at first bestow only the wilting quiff of sensory equipment, leaving the bone tail, and thus the chance to swim away, until after The Panperule felt that its introductory lessons had been properly absorbed.

  With that resolved, it concentrated on the smeared potential smouldering about the junior entity, quantum scintilla hesitating over what to be. This focussed observation by The Panperule began instantly to collapse the wave of probability into a thin spray of the actual, and the more developed brain looked on with interest as an indistinct smog of hypothesis reduced to one specific form. Seen from the modern point of view, this process most resembled slowed-down footage of an aspirin dissolving in a glass of water, but played in reverse. Superpositioned particles in powdery suspension gathered frothing substance as they streamed towards a point immediately above the younger brain, where a faint stippled outline of the slumping and indented forehead bonnet was teased into view, then gradually coloured in with semblance and solidity. It was perhaps a little smaller than The Panperule’s own hunch-brain mound of sound and vision, as this seemed most natural and appropriate. Unfinished, naked, functionally useless without its follicular embellishments, the newly fashioned sensory tumour came with rolling blue/pink highlights in its snakeskin sheen before these were obscured by spreading blotches of quivering filament, sensitive suede upholstery that swathed the neurologic polyp’s inner and external surfaces in carnival sensation. Once again, this coat of individually vibrating hairs could possibly be seen as less luxuriant than the glossy coiffure that The Panperule had lavished on itself but, in that sparsely populated femto-moment, seen by whom?

  As riptides of perception, luminous and howling, crashed into the black and solitary silence of the second brain’s awareness, all its fibres stood on end, much like those on the backbone of a threatened cat. Some several thousand of the delicate erectile quills shrilled and vibrated, one upon another, and The Panperule was startled by the high-pitched and protracted signal, plainly of distress (element forty-three), with which the foundling greeted its first glimpse of glorious existence: it was screaming, and this was by definition primal. Puzzled by the vehemence of this reaction when its own attainment of sensation had elicited only mute awe (element one) and stunned bewilderment (element two), The Panperule did not consider that the newcomer’s initial vision of reality contained The Panperule itself – a disembodied brain crowned with a shivering beehive hairstyle, skeleton propeller dangling beneath it like the downstroke of a horrifying question mark – as a predominating foreground feature. It could only conclude that this second Boltzmann fluke was rather highly strung, and inwardly congratulated itself on its earlier decision not to furnish the new brain with means of locomotion or escape.

  Waiting until the fledgling had exhausted its paroxysm of terror, with the frightened ululations at last dwindled to an apprehensive hush, The Panperule commenced its tutelage. This was accomplished by the generation of ellipsoid information beads, speech bubbles, glass-egg utterances that contained both image and identifying sound, so that the captive/pupil could be taught the rudiments of language, although as the only such existing then, that language would of course be Panperule. As if to illustrate the egocentric nature of this process, the first glinting word-globule emitted was a heavily idealised portrait of the senior brain, a huge Halloween tadpole, with attached to it the sampled thighbone-trumpet fanfare that was, onomatopoeically, the sound-group ‘Panperule’. After the hundred or so repetitions of this image-bauble thought sufficient to embed it in the understudy’s memory, the lesson moved on to the many other monumental nouns, the restless verbs, the decorative face-powder adjectives, the somehow accusatory pronouns and inflection-shifting punctuation. This took quite a while. From the perspective of the non-consenting student, born from nothingness into a secondary-education language class, it took eternity.

  Once the indoctrination was complete and the now educated secondary brain was relatively fluent in Panperule, there followed a short session for questions and answers. While translation from a mode of speech composed of moving pictures and accompanying random noises can be only inexact, the femto-verse’s opening conversation is approximately reproduced hereunder:

  ‘What is all this highly structured stuff that’s going on? I’m terrified (element ninety-five)!’

  ‘Why, my young disciple, this is simply what existence looks like when it all comes pouring out of nowhere. When you’ve lived as long as I, it will seem commonplace and even disappointing.’

  ‘I’m still terrified, but now I’m also intellectually intimidated (forty-four) and envious (thirteen). Although I’ll almost certainly recall your oft-reiterated name forever, I must ask, who are you, and how did you come to be?’

  ‘The Panperule, The Panperule, I am The Panperule! I am a marvellous collision of unlikely pseudo-molecules that happened into being with the advent of this thundering and tumbling cosmos, and before me, nothing was. The Panperule!’

  ‘I remain ninety-five-stricken, but this is now tinged with (one) awe, and (three) paranoia. Am I to deduce from your previous speech-trinket that you are, by implication, the self-made creator of this existential torrent; this suspiciously well-organised exploding whirligig?’

  ‘It would be false if I did not deny that that was not the case. The Panperule!’

  ‘Are you then my creator also? Please forgive my incredulity – it is but that your semblance is, to a trifling degree, somewhat unsettling (seventy-one).’