It begins when Warren, a young college instructor, encounters a spaceship on a levee. He and his ailing wife, Penny, soon learn that the aliens piloting the ship have been sent to monitor Earth's petroleum use, and their bosses are pretty upset. To make matters worse, their planet's government intends to eradicate the human race to stop the flow of oil. The New Orleans couple scrambles to prevent our extinction by any means they can, with a little help from their new alien friends. Couched as a terms-of-use agreement, those ever-present post-modern texts that no one reads, is a playful, experimental novel on heroism, absurdity, and life from other worlds.