World: Many-Faced Multiverse

Spoilers ahead.

This is inspired by 'Crisis on Two Earths', a Justice League cartoon, in which the villain pointed out that each decision made was made differently in an alternate earth, thus creating alternate earths, and thus making free will of no effect because for every world where you chose good, in another world, you chose evil.

So, he searched for the original Earth to blow it up and destroy all reality.

Now somewhat accepting that postulate, and somewhat twisting, and somewhat advancing it, we come to the Little Multiverse, the Many-Faced Multiverse.

The MFM is seemingly one of the larger Little Multiverses. It has millions of alternate realities in it, or so theory goes. All scientists that are aware of alternate realities believe it to be The Multiverse.

Whenever a decision point of some significance is reached by a sentient being, it results in the splitting of the realities into A and B. No more. No less.

One would think this leads to the Doom described in 'Crisis', but not so.

For one, the decision is frequently not between good and evil, but between evil and evil.

"Shall I, a mugger, rob and beat this man, or shall I rob and murder this man, my victim?"

Two realities go forth from this moment.

There are various entities, some who hate each other, of great power. Some call them gods, others personified natural forces, others enlightened ones, but little is known of them as they are very hard to understand, and at best they speak in riddles. Also meeting them is hazardous as they seem to in the words of one materialist scientist 'carry a personality destabilizing field which is intrinsic to their nature', or as a priest of the True Knight declares 'the glory of their presence is too great for mortal mind to bear'.

They seem to travel freely from alternate reality to alternate reality. They seem to be able to die, but with difficulty. They also seem to be able to be wounded and recover, although this may take centuries. They are effectively immortal unless killed, and killing them takes some serious doing, or a very, very effective ambush with a nuclear missile (this is the equivalent of shooting Billy the Kid in the head with a .22 while he sleeps.) Actually killing a fully aware Traveller might take a supernova.

The True Knight, the Market Lady, Knife, Gravedigger (out and out evil), and Warlord are but a few of the approximately 2-3 dozen Travellers that seem to be currently operating. Another 2 dozen or so are severely injured or retired. An unknown number are dead or otherwise transformed.

In this MFM, dreaming is enhanced for indigs, although visitors, such as versers receive no such enhancement. Very vivid dreams are common for indigs, often enough dreams that continue on night by night with the same story advancing forward for some time, even months. Cases exist of people who have had the same story dream go on for decades.

This creates a strong culture of art and scientific invention with the dreams serving as inspiration.

Government forms vary widely from royalist monarchies with purple and gold, to totalitarian dictatorships in blood and concrete, to democracies with MacBurger drive-ins to treehouse villages and everything else.

Typical world-jumping devices, (which does not happen in every world, at best, one in ten), will arrive at a distinctly different world in some degree as the fine gradations to jump to a world very close to one's own are not possible in the beginner level dimension jumpers.

Now theory suggests that billions or at least millions of worlds exist. What current theory does not take into account is that worlds that are deeply parrallel, sometimes in ways that don't seem immediately apparent to the eye (but are parallel on a moral level) tend to merge back together. You can have a world of skyscrapers and a world of treehouses merge, while a world which is nearly totally alike, but in one the robber beat and in the other the robber murdered will not merge.

It is possible to have more good or more evilly inclined worlds than other. It is the number of decisions made that matters. And worlds that go wholly or even very strongly evil tend to extinguish themselves, thus removing them from the total number of decisions made.

It is possible to find the Prime world, and once there, the visitor, if an indig, realizes a shocking truth. He becomes a Traveller. He finds that each 'him', each doppleganger of himself in another reality is but another face for him. He exists across possibly thousands (usually a few hundred) timelines. And all this mentality crashes in on the indig who visits the Prime world. All of his faces compete to rule in the new mindspace.

For many, this kills them. For others, it leaves them catatonic (indeed most pass through a stage like this for at least a few days).

The balance of good and evil choices made, the strength each mind has, the number of minds involved in this internal struggle makes this a vast conflict inside the newborn Traveller. Typically a Traveller has to partially de-phase from reality in order to 'get enough room' in his head. This contributes to making them seem inhuman.

This is why dreams seem so vivid. Its because the dreamer is acccessing the life of another part of himself.

And it does happen that moral choices matter, the MFM as a whole can be tilted toward good or evil by the choices each person makes.

Its also true that if you kill your dop, you gain him as an annoying voice in the back of your head. So, yes, you can become a Traveller by killing all your other dops.

Some people have relatively few dops, and these make for weaker and saner or more human Travellers.

So perhaps this is not really a multiverse at all.

I have (and have always had) trouble with the concept of two worlds merging. My problem is, what is the history of the merged world? Does it actually have two conflicting histories?

There is also a problem with the concept of the prime world. Let's suppose we are at the historic moment where there is only one world, but the first significant choice arises. Let us further assume that it is a choice between two goods each of which benefits the world differently. It could be, fancifully, "Shall I, the Queen of Fertility, marry the King of Flowers and have children who will fill the world with the beauty of blossoms, or shall I marry the King of Beasts and so fill the world with a growing diversity of living creatures?" By the logic of the design, the Queen of Fertility chooses both, and each becomes its own world. Which, though, is the prime world? In the world where she marries the King of Flowers, her memory is that she had to choose between the King of Flowers and the King of Beasts, and she chose the King of Flowers, which filled the world with beautiful and fragrant blossoms; in the other world, the same Queen of Fertility remembers that she chose to marry the King of Beasts, and so the world is teeming with living creatures. Neither Queen perceives herself as not being in the prime world.

Thus we have the problem. The possibilities are:

1. The identity of the prime world is arbitrary and indeterminable; one of these worlds is prime, but there is no way to identify it.
2. The prime world ceased to exist at the instant the decision was made, and both of these worlds are derivative secondary world consequent of that choice.
3. The universe actually split into three, the third being the prime world in which the choice was never made either way. The prime world exists as the prime world because nothing ever happens in it; any choice that might be made automatically creates two other worlds and leaves a prime world in which the choice itself was only a dream.

If there's another option, I don't see it.

Otherwise, I like a lot of this.

--M. J. Young

I think 2 is the one generally assumed to be true - that the Prime universe only exists until the choice that makes it not Prime is made.

The merge world has a compromise form of history. For a world to merge with another, in many important ways, they have to be practically identical. Does it really matter that much if Jason lives in a penthouse in a skyscraper and J'ason lives in the highest treeroom in his treevillage?

You could make an arguement that one has a post-modern pov and the other a pre-modern, but for this, fudge it. Focus on the similarities of moral character and compromise the rest.

And I'd go with '3' for this.

I would have the creation of a Traveller be the only event that happens on Prime.

Question: What happens when a verser makes a significant decision on one of these alternate worlds?

I think 2 is the one generally assumed to be true - that the Prime universe only exists until the choice that makes it not Prime is made.

Ah, but it was inherent in Eric's description that it was possible to locate the prime universe, and that excludes (2) as a possibility, the prime universe de facto existing.

What happens when a verser makes a significant decision on one of these alternate worlds?

This might be my personal bias, but he's not an indig and so not subject at least to some of the rules of the related universes. I would say that his significant decision splits the universe into three, one in which he vanished from the universe and there was no decision, one in which the opposite of what he chose happened but he vanished, and one in which his actions impact the universe and he is there.

The alternative becomes too complicated for practical play, as every time the verser makes a "significant" decision you have to tell him that he is now playing three characters in three universes, one of whom did not make that choice, one of whom chose the opposite, and one of whom did what he wanted.

You also have the problem of defining what a "significant" choice is. If I chose to shop at the Acme instead of Eatmore because the Acme is closer and I wasn't going to buy enough things to justify the longer drive to save a few dollars at the register, and I break up a robbery at the Acme, does that make it a significant decision when I chose to go to the Acme? What if the robbery is at Eatmore and because I am not there I do not stop it--does that make my choice to go to the Acme significant? The problem with identifying significant decisions is not just that we do not know the consequences of our actions when we make them, it is also that we never know the consequences that would have flowed from what we choose not to do. Thus the key problem (I have) with any multiverse theory based on the choice alternatives approach is that instant by instant every individual in the universe is choosing one of thousands of possible alternative actions which might be significant. Just at the top of the list right now, I could finish this post, I could leave it and get more coffee, I could start the trip to pick up my son at school, I could check to make sure the papers he needs are here, I could check the TV guide channel to determine whether I should be recording anything while I'm gone tonight, I could go talk to my children in the living room, I could run through a few songs on my guitar, I could eat another of those chocolate covered pretzels, I could heat up some soup so I won't be munching on junk--and this does not include all the things I do not envision myself doing, such as robbing a store, raping or murdering someone, burning down my house or someone else's, or committing suicide.  There are several other people in the house, and any one of them also has a long list of possible actions, at least some of which will interact directly with me and all of which will interact with the universe, and none of us knows whether any one of those might be significant.

There was an episode of Quantum Leap in which Sam was the groom of the daughter of a U.S. Senator who was studying for her bar exam on their honeymoon, while Al was appearing before a Senate committee trying to justify continued funding for the project. Al thought that the answer to everything lay in having Sam tell his wife to tell her father about the problem that was about to become the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that wasn't happening that way despite his efforts. Then in one of her study sessions she answered a question incorrectly, and he corrected her, and she was thrown, and looked everything over and realized that her misunderstanding on that one point probably would have (as in the original history it did) caused her to fail the bar exam. She corrected it, he leaped out, and Al was suddenly presenting his case to her as the person who replaced her father in the Senate some years before.

The show frequently highlighted these little things, like when Sam told the kid who was trying to make a song out of the hog call "Piggy! Sooey!" that he should change it to "Peggy Sue", or as a Rabbi he casually wandered over and used the Heimlich Maneuver to dislodge a bit of food from the airway of a choking Dr. Heimlich.

So while on paper it sounds easy to distinguish those "significant decisions", how do you do it in play? How do you know whether sending Ratface to the Crow's Nest gets him killed or saves his life, or is just a routine duty assignment? How do you know which flap of which Amazonian butterfly's wings causes Hurricane Agnes to demolish Miami?

So the problem really is pretty complicated. Any simple solutions?

--M. J. Young

1. I was taking the JL cartoon's rules as they stated them to mess with them. They chose only two decisions. Otherwise, yeah, I agree. We humans have far more freedom than most people ever realize.

2. Perhaps its only decisions that are quickly obviously significant within a few minutes. Otherwise, the universes split at each decision, but when a change does not quickly occur, they remerge.

Edit: I suspect #2 is the one generally used in stories, but it doesn't work here.

Ah, but it was inherent in Eric's description that it was possible to locate the prime universe, and that excludes (2) as a possibility, the prime universe de facto existing.

I disagree. Eric's description implies that the Prime universe existed while it was Prime, and that going far enough back in time would take you back beyond the point of the first divergence and thereby allow you to introduce a change that would propagate forward. The nonexistence of the Prime world after the point of first divergence does not dispute that possibility at all - the fact that it's not here now doesn't mean it wasn't here then, and if then is all that matters, you're golden.

Actually the cartoon has the villain taking his world destroying bomb to Prime to blow it up by finding Prime with a cross dimension jumper. But wouldn't that action create alternates by their own description?

I think O7 may have pointed out a flaw or two in their logic.

MJ and I were not considering time travel to find Prime.