The tutorial on this occasion went on for much longer than it had done during Glynne’s indoctrination, with there having been so many new experiences, and therefore new bubble-words coined, in the intervening time. Another reason that the lesson overran would be The Panperule’s decision to include additional material after the language course was over, almost in the way of bonus extras. First, the captive audience were treated to a recitation that reprised ‘The Ballad of The Panperule and Glynne’ in all its many, many stanzas. Next there came what might be termed a blooper reel, wherein the sparkling speech-ellipsoids captured moments when Glynne had done something wrong, or had come close to injury in an amusing way. The final and most controversial feature was a perhaps over-vivid explanation of the term ‘clattersmashtinkling’, illustrated by a crystal-ball recording of that special first time for The Panperule and its considerably younger brainfriend, single quotes or commas in attempted soixante-neuf. This test run for a sex tape was, by virtue of The Panperule’s prescient grasp of media, viewed by everybody in the universe. The trapped spectators, to be fair, had no idea what they were looking at. A stag film broadcast to a crèche, a pink/blue movie, it elicited only confusion (twenty-seven), nausea (twelve), and fear (nineteen).

  The following question-and-answer session was a lively one, especially with Glynne’s outstanding stint as moderator. The major conundrums of existence – how did it come into being; does it have a purpose; why is there sentient life; what’s that thing over there, somewhere between a dead snake and a Teddy boy? – were all cleared up quite early on in the exchange, their single answer being several further repetitions of ‘The Panperule’. This wasn’t even monotheism, as that term would imply some manner of imaginable alternative. The fleet of student brains seemed to accept their subordinate roles as readily as Glynne had done, reasoning that this set-up must just be the way existence was and having nothing at hand to compare it to. The Panperule’s supremacy established, the discussion moved on to a clamorous demand for tails, and also a surprising number of requests for supplementary information on clattersmashtinkling.

  With this out of the way, when work conditions and some basic standards of behaviour had been established, Glynne commenced the allocation of the spinal flails. Even with five of these materialised at once, a column at a time, this was a lengthy process that was highly reminiscent of a Ford assembly line, and thus of fascism. Once outfitted with tailbones, each successive quintet of new converts was encouraged to assemble a short distance off, still in their vertical formation, and in this way reconstruct the group’s original cubic assemblage as Glynne’s ministrations deconstructed it. This was because The Panperule had taken quite a shine to the impressive discipline of the arrangement, which had something of the marching band about it – albeit realised in three dimensions and with Boltzmann brains that did not march but only wriggled. It may have been this military aspect, or at least some premonition of that bearing, which inspired The Panperule’s management style once Glynne had done the necessary work and the entire platoon was mobilised.

  Chattering and excited, the freshly augmented pups were understandably keen to try out their new flagella, though The Panperule insisted that this be enacted in an orderly and even stately manner. To this end, the one hundred and twenty-seven extra-cranial grotesques embarked upon a long theatrical tour of the endlessly expanding provinces. While maintaining their relative positions in the cube, the congregation of sapient hamburgers squirmed forth across mutating pastures with The Panperule up at the front of the procession, followed by the royal consort: Glynne had been pressed into service as a combination of drum majorette and orchestral conductor, bone tail swishing metronomically, leading the box-shaped brain armada through ‘The Ballad of The Panperule and Glynne’ in an ambitious polyphonic remix.

  The resultant sound – an oceanic swell of anguish – was forerunner to the later choral compositions of Gyorgy Ligeti, although more apocalyptic. As with a receding tide before a great tsunami of despair (sixty-four), it rang out through the cascading ironing boards and cuckoo clocks of space-time as the terrifying choir continued with its outing. Naturally, the expelled speech-lozenges from such a vocalising multitude were quickly in the hundred thousands and soon after that the millions, a polluting backwash of spent karaoke ornaments, yet still the hideous fleet sailed on. The Panperule was, as expected, having the most perfectly amazing time, and if left to its own devices would have seen this bedlam pageant carried on for the remainder of eternity. Glynne, being more attuned to rumblings of dissatisfaction in the ranks, eventually suggested that they’d best soon call a halt, preferably at some meaningful destination that might justify the whole dispiriting ordeal.

  Creasing its frontal lobe into a frown, The Panperule belatedly accepted that a destination would have been a good idea, but also understood that now was not the best time to admit this. A confession of that kind would surely undermine the aura of omniscience, the air of deity on which its pantomimed imperium depended. Improvising furiously, it confided in its deputy that, by a marvellous coincidence, the nondescript terrain that they were then approaching was indeed their journey’s end. Here Glynne responded, in a furtive whisper of miniature language-globules, that the area ahead seemed to be no more than a levitating wilderness of cyclopean doughnuts. Making it up on the spot, The Panperule declared that the apparently dull neighbourhood was actually the precise centre of existence, well aware that this pronouncement would be near impossible to verify. Since Glynne did not immediately ridicule this claim, The Panperule went further and explained that the unprepossessing but historically important site would make an excellent location for a novel institute of learning, the concept for which had lately crossed the older creature’s naked mind. In literally floating the idea to Glynne, The Panperule strongly implied that their continuum could not be thought of as a proper universe without a reputable university.

  At once intrigued and taken in by this, Glynne brought the marching minds to a dead stop, though tactfully allowing them to finish the verse of the ballad they were halfway through. Surprisingly, the rumbles Glynne had taken for dissatisfaction did not end with the parade, suggesting that they were instead a product of the background ambience. When this was brought to the attention of The Panperule, it was declared that these reverberations were most likely aftershocks resulting from The Panperule’s original act of creation. This caused Glynne to point out that the rumblings were not gradually fading as might be expected but, if anything, were growing subtly stronger. Issuing a sharply pointed speech-ellipsoid which implied a tone of mounting irritation with the younger brain, The Panperule retorted that according to the well-established principles of Thermo-never-die-namics, everything just went on getting even better, even bigger, all the time, and that included aftershocks. It added, rather waspishly, that Glynne’s apparent ignorance of basic science only demonstrated the necessity for educational establishments, such as the hub of academic excellence lately put forward by The Panperule. The implication, clearly evident, was that the sooner Glynne and the new workforce built their required campus, then the sooner they’d be liberated from the need for idiotic questions.

  Glynne, it’s fair to say, was not best pleased by this high-handed attitude, but wasn’t going to risk a confrontation with the thing that had allegedly created space-time. Thus was born passive aggression: taking on instinctively the role of union representative, Glynne stipulated that their new brain-army should be given individual names before they set to work constructing this legacy project of The Panperule’s. When these demands were met with an ellipsoid splutter of affronted indignation from the universe’s unelected management, Glynne countered with additional conditions, such as clauses guaranteeing rest and recreation periods for the newly formulated proletariat, insinuating that there would be no clattersmashtinkling of any kind until these issues were resolved.

  Following this robust exchange of views, The Panperule grandly announced to the still-hovering cube of press-ganged cerebellums that they were to be rewarded with both names and holidays for their forthcoming labours on a fabulous academy, to be known as The Panperuleum.

  The naming ceremony was brisk and efficient, bordering, in Glynne’s opinion, on perfunctory. All one hundred and twenty-five names were a monosyllable, fractional samplings of much longer sounds, and all of them commenced with the same phoneme, which was ‘gl’. So there were Glack, and Glod, and Glimp, and Glert, and also many whose names were coincidental homophones for later English words, like Glue, Glow, Glove, Glide, Gloat, Glum and at least three Glares, though all with different spellings. Glynn suspected that The Panperule associated short names that began with ‘gl’ – names like Glynne’s own – with pitiful inferiority. That said, the newly christened lower ranks seemed more than happy to be given even rudimentary identities. With names, they at last had a self to inflate, be infatuated with, deceive, or justify. A name, being almost a quality, was something to be proud of; something one could think superior to other names and which thus made all sorts of satisfying prejudices possible. For instance, later, once the brains had been released from their cubic formation, Glynne would note their tendency to congregate only with brains whose names had the same vowel sound as their own. Glynne also observed, while in conversation with Glytte, Glig and Glimp, that brains whose names contained an ‘oo’, like Gloot and company, were generally indolent, untrustworthy and avaricious. This was a purely aesthetic judgement, but also the only form of racism that was then readily available. Although, in Glynne’s defence, it was a very different time.

  After the glut of appellations had been handed out, including one for Glut itself, The Panperule once more ran through its vacuous charade of granting the amassed Boltzmann militia an ability to manifest through observation, which they already unwittingly possessed. The brains were then permitted to relax their hexahedron, which allowed an opportunity to fraternise and chatter while The Panperule and Glynne designed the proposed universal university, though frankly it was mostly Glynne. The rookies revelled in their shore leave while the higher ranks were in discussion, with the entry-level entities jiggling everywhere and eagerly attempting glassy, bulbous conversation when there really wasn’t much as yet to talk about. The limited number of topics dominating these first stabs at dialogue were, in descending order, a debate on what that rumbling was and how come it was getting louder; some deliberation as to Glynne’s degree of perceived hotness; and a general agreement that all brains who had a different vowel sound in their names were fat and ugly. These initial discourses were typically concluded when the subject of clattersmashtinkling came up, it being soon discovered that to talk about the practice led, almost inevitably, to the practice of the practice. Space-time, all too quickly, rang from end to end with a prolonged concerto of dropped crockery.

  No matter how quaint or appealing such a seething orgy of aroused flagellant brains might sound upon first hearing, for The Panperule and Glynne it was a gruesome inconvenience. While they were trying to concentrate upon their architectural intentions (or at least while Glynne was), everywhere about them was the thrust and squelch of copulating comb-overs. Mathematically, the horde of virginal participants had signally increased the number of erotic permutations possible, with more scope for perversion. Polyamorous arrangements seemed particularly popular, with many of the rockabilly seats-of-consciousness convening threesomes, whirling in a horrid Manx triskelion of untrammelled lust. There were also some foursomes, although these configurations bore unfortunate resemblance to self-molesting swastikas. The all-encompassing debauch looked dreadful, countless plugs of hair circling unseen bathtub plugholes, and it sounded like a raunchy landslide. Nothing in this was conducive to municipal design.

  The Panperule’s initial blue-sky visualisation for the mooted place of learning had been hugely disappointing, even to The Panperule: a number of that region’s monstrous floating doughnuts piled up like a stack of tyres or lumpy oil drum, it would have lent an already barren zone the aura of a city-limits junkyard. When Glynne tactfully suggested making some minor improvements to the elder thing’s original design, The Panperule was more than happy to sit back and watch the unrestrained brain-on-brain action that continued all around. Arcing ejaculations of speech-droplets went off here and there amongst the heaving proto-bodies, like timed fountains. Though most congress tended to be homophonic, between those whose names shared vowel sounds, there quickly emerged a heterophonic subculture that found a frisson in what oos and ees and aas could do for one another. This became immediately fashionable, although there remained a general consensus that clattersmashtinkling with anyone called Glup, Glum, Glug, Gluph, Glut, Glud or the like was tantamount to bestiality – which doesn’t mean it wasn’t going on.

  Observing this erogenous phantasmagoria transacted in the flickering pink and blue, The Panperule found that it was becoming unendurably aroused. Sensing that Glynne was currently immersed in planning and would not appreciate advances of that sort, The Panperule experimented with alternatives. It soon discovered that if the indented tip of its fun-fur proboscis were turned outside-in, so that the sensory cone was curled up into its own cavity, The Panperule was quite good at clattersmashtinkling itself. Admittedly, the act seemed somewhat dull and repetitious without the sensory input of a partner, but was an improvement over not clattersmashtinkling at all. At least, this was The Panperule’s opinion. Glynne, attempting to design space-time’s first school despite the continuing brain-debauch and The Panperule having invented masturbation, saw things differently. For one thing, what The Panperule was doing was supremely unattractive to an onlooker, much like a woolly mastodon somehow inhaling its own hairy trunk. Rotating its perceptual cilia in a despairing eye-roll, Glynne returned to work amidst the hovering ellipsoid diagrams.

  The rumbling continued, but by this point everyone was used to it.

  Eventually, in the faintly sordid and wholly exhausted aftermath, when everybody in the start-up universe apart from Glynne was drifting limp and spent amongst a trillion rose-and-cornflower bubbles and used speech balloons, the urban planning was completed. Waiting for the six-score disembodied libertines and their auto-erotic generalissimo to rouse from their disreputable torpors, Glynne expelled a polite cat’s-eye marble cough to attract the post-coital crowd’s attention, then explained the technical specifications of their new academy.

  The outer structure would be made from three of the tremendous floating doughnuts. Two of these, vertically oriented, would be fused together, intersecting at right angles to each other, with the third hoop, horizontal in orientation, looped around them like a waistband. Skeletally spherical, this basic outline would then be adorned by the mass-observed materialisations of the wriggling freshers. Crucially, the sphere’s hollow interior was to be fitted with a cube of six amphitheatres, turned inward and facing one another to create a global lecture space without an up or down. There would be tunnel entrances at top and bottom, with four more at the cardinal points of the horizontal ring, where it intersected with the pair of upright circles. All in all, in both its beauty and utility, it was a bold and very modern statement that possessed great dignity.

  The Panperule described this triumph of design as ‘doughnuts stuck together’, thus implying that the idea was entirely of its own devising. It went on to suggest minor tweaks, including a slight flattening of the proposed sphere, plus the addition of an observation-sculpted tail and sensory kiss-curl so that the academy would, in effect, be a gigantic statue of The Panperule. Nobody liked this concept save The Panperule but, as is frequently the way, this was the version that was pink-and-blue-lit and immediately implemented.

  Twenty six-brain work gangs laboured on the edifice, relentlessly observing it into existence, supervised by Glynne and five appointed foremen, one from each of the main vowel sounds. This took quite a long while. Much like any building site, the undertaking also turned out to be loud and messy. In their swooping, staring squadrons, each one half-a-dozen strong, the muscular young Boltzmann beefcake strived and sweated sound effects through rolling clouds of quantum dust that crusted mauve on sticky lobes. From the remove of an unused free-floating toroid, an unsightly pharaoh checking progress on a deformed sphinx, The Panperule surveyed this vista of cerebrospinal toil that was pre-reminiscent of the great Russian constructivists, clattersmashtinkling itself to near unconsciousness while doing so.

  The uproar of construction, for a time, drowned out The Panperule’s glass gasps of self-inflicted ecstasy and even masked the gradually increasing background rumble. Meanwhile, space-time elsewhere carried on as normal: getting bigger; ticking through its femto-lifespan; vomiting its careless, ceaseless prodigies and permutations. Brobdingnagian harps, trilobites, cooling towers and anchor-bouquets were amongst the only nameable components of this ongoing eruption into form, at least from a modern perspective. It need not be said that all of these spontaneously generated shapes were much more interesting and magnificent than the distressing effigy that the brain workforce was then in the process of erecting – a sideshow exhibit in a jar, displayed in company with masterpieces.