The bright half-circle of the moon catches Naveed’s eye and he looks up to see it is illuminated from the wrong side, a smile when it should be a frown. A few years ago this would have drawn crowds of upturned faces, a full spectrum of expressions from mesmerized wonder to epinephrine-drenched horror. Now nobody seems to notice.
This is the global phenomenon in microcosm: when the end of the universe comes, people react not with panic and chaos but with boredom and indifference.
Of course, it isn’t really the end of the universe; only our universe, or what we thought was our universe. And it came gradually enough — gradual on the timescale modern humans are used to serious events unfolding, anyway.
Enough that scientists had an opportunity to go through their perplexities and arguments and coalesce around a few theories nobody could disprove, the least implausible of which, although still astonishing, no longer warranted special citations when mentioned in scholarly writing.
The journalism outlets had had their weeks-long frenzy over it. The blogs and social media gulped, then sipped, then took their time chewing and regurgitating and chewing again on what had become so obvious to most people that it faded into the background noise of other splendid, widely accepted, but not immediately practical Facts.
It isn’t yet seven, but the parking lot is already filling up as Naveed trudges approximately northwest across it toward SimTek HQ. He steps up onto the curb and considers with amusement the fact that the concrete slab isn’t really there, that he isn’t really stepping because he doesn’t really possess a foot, that he isn’t really having thoughts because there is no him, or thoughts, or having.
For the most part the illusion is still as impressive and finely detailed as it ever was. The strange, subtle inconsistencies he remembers from his youth have even disappeared. But huge gaping ones—-such as the illumination of the moon this morning-—have opened up in their place. The more SimTech and other companies like it do what they do, the more glaring the defects become.
Coworkers stride up to the doors before him, swipe their badges, hurry inside. Naveed does the same. Inside HQ it is mostly quiet, except for the occasional hushed early-morning chit-chat of friendly pairs of coworkers strolling about, coffee mugs and notebooks in hand. The lobby is clean and sparse, and he heads for the elevator. He doesn’t understand how his inner ear can possibly tell him he is moving away from sea level when he knows there’s no such thing, but the effect is convincing and he enjoys it, the way he remembers enjoying 3-D movies and VR headsets when they first came out.
Naveed likes his job, even though a few years ago he was ready to quit. The maddening qualities—-the few that remain-—have become endearing quirks. As he scans his email he observes that of the six people who have written to him (all of whom he has been working with on the same project for months), four have comically misspelled his name: two “Nevada”s, one “Nadeef”, and one “Nadir”. At the start of the project everyone had learned his name quickly; what’s going on with these emails is just more of the obvious deterioration happening everywhere.
He has also grown accustomed to the random instances of recursion: as he peels the orange he brought with him, he finds another whole orange inside that one, unpeeled. He tosses his partially-peeled orange in the small trash can near his desk, knowing that no matter how many times he peels it, only more unpeeled oranges await him like stacked Russian dolls. If this pattern works the same way as the last dozen or so times, he could break the cycle by slicing the orange open with a knife. But the kitchen is where the knives are kept, and it’s down on the first floor and Naveed is too lazy this morning to care.
Other instances of recursion are harder to shrug off. A pair of coworkers pass by his cubicle, and Naveed catches a snippet of their conversation: an older man with gray cropped hair and a beer belly is asking a middle-aged woman in a floral cardigan what she did over the weekend, and the woman responds with an account that is exactly the way Naveed would summarize his own weekend. The woman refers to finally getting started on painting the bathroom, that her spouse was so pleased.
For Naveed this is especially disorienting because it is a reminder that his experience is simultaneously shared with and closed off from others’. If the scientists are right then the woman who passed by, from her perspective, is talking about a weekend that was truly hers, not Naveed’s, and although the two of them have never talked and don’t know each other’s names, they had the exact same weekend.
It takes Naveed a second or two to recuperate. When he feels ready, he pulls the door handle and lumbers out of his car, beginning his trudge across the parking lot. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper,” he mutters to himself after he realizes the moon is lit from the wrong side.
A thick congregation of Naveeds huddles in front of the doors to HQ, churning slowly as they funnel in. Naveed suddenly grows impatient and charges into the crowd. They give way like air. He’s broken protocol by not swiping his badge, but he lands so suddenly in his email he forgets about it immediately and doesn’t worry.
He finds an email he sent himself from his personal address recounting the time Nadir was observing the moon, peeling fruit, overhearing accounts of his own weekend, and constantly experiencing glitches and recursion. Nadir hits “Reply” and makes some edits.
Naveed’s/Nadir’s car door slamming, feet on the asphalt of the parking lot, excerpts of Eliot, inner ears in elevators, the half-peeled orange striking the trash can, coworkers’ blabber, typing email —— it all forms a rhythm that accelerates until somewhere in the back of his mind Naveed/Nadir/Dane/Ned has a sense that he can’t keep up with it and it begins to slur until it vibrates rather than pulses. The vibration coalesces into a hum, then a whistle, then a zipping noise, then a pop.
Apparently even gods can’t break the limits of computation.
The Center for Experimental Telepathy 
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