White Noise Multiverse Theory

Preface: Multiverse theory in White Noise is veeeery loosely based off a real theory (read: I read about it in a magazine as a teenager, thought it was cool, and then largely forgot the specifics of it and added/mutated a bunch of stuff later on.)

So Shinobu goes into the structure of the multiverse a little bit in-comic, in that worlds are infinite, intersect, and are arranged into tight fractals. Her diagram is really simplistic, because an actual fractal looks like this:

[source; view full size, it’s neat]

And in the case of the multiverse, imagine the above, but in three dimensions--the picture shows fractals traveling along an x and y axis, but in reality everything would also be built along a z axis. To infinity. As far as anyone knows. It is a fractal, after all.

I also explained in an earlier Tape Hiss post about how each universe differs along the length of a fractal, in that there are infinite universes with infinite tiny differences that build up over infinite amounts of space and time until you end up with universes with different laws of physics etc. Here’s an extremely simple illustration:

• -1) Everything is the same as in Universe 1, but your point X is several miles under the surface of the Earth.
•      1a) Everything is the same as above, but there’s a bit of coal that’s formed at point X that isn’t there in universe -1.
•      -1b) Everything is the same as -1a, but somewhere, a bird is singing. In all other universes, this bird is dead.
• 1) You are at a given point X, at a given time, on the Earth, in this Universe. All of our regular laws of physics/current zeitgeists/truths of geography and history apply.
•       1a) Everything is the same, except that you can’t get wifi at point X anymore.
•       1b) You can’t get wifi, AND also wolves were never domesticated.
• 2) Everything is the same in this universe as in 1, but through a strange quirk in the laws of physics, the Earth is on the opposite side of its orbit and your point X is in the cold vacuum of space.
•      2a) Everything is as in 2, but the sun is also undergoing a solar flare.
•      2b) Everything is as in 2a, but a particular child at a particular county fair (planet tbd) has dropped his ice cream, whereas in every other universe it’s intact.
• 3) Everything is the same as in universe 2, except the Milky Way has been bearing about .2 of a degree to your left and is now billions of lightyears away from your point X.
•      3a) Everything is the same as in 3, but the Milky Way has been also bearing about .00001 degrees up relative to you as well, and so is now in quite a different place.
•      3b) Everything is the same as in 3a, but on Earth, patent law reform has passed in the United States.
• 4) Everything is the same as in universe 3, but your point X has ceased to have meaning due to it now being over the event horizon of a black hole that would not be there in your native universe.
•       4a) You get the drift. I truly like to think about cuil theory when I consider this.

SO ANYWAY I’m going to talk a little bit about traveling through universes and how the multiverse got fucked up by the Aetherians as Vlad mentions.

You can see from that junk above how just tearing holes into other universes could get very hazardous! Probably you will just end up in the Cold Vacuum of Space. Also, everything moves. You’re moving right now on a planet traveling thousands of miles an hour in a galaxy traveling several thousand more miles an hour; every planet everywhere in every universe is also doing this in every direction as well. Early Aetherians made portals to other worlds merely by opening and closing the holes over and over until they opened onto a point on a planet they could use (not underground/a mile in the air, not in space, probably also with air and not in a volcano.)

There are a couple of ways to make portals as well: permanent gates, and impermanent (or flash) gates.

Permanent gates (we’ve seen at least one, though they can look very different depending on who makes them) work a lot like two neurons in the brain making a connection: it’s not that the two ends of the gate are connected all the time, but that they remember the connection each time, even if the end points have moved relative to each other. (And they do. The multiverse also moves around, in a seemingly set pattern.)

The advantage is that if you fall out in the middle of going from point A to point B, there’s only a set number of points in a set number of universes you can fall out to, because the pathway only ever takes the same route. (This doesn’t happen a lot, but it can.)

Impermanent gates are quicker to set up, don’t require big honking sigils at either end, and are great for emergencies. They’re also faster, because since they don’t remember the connection every time they’re used, they find the most efficient path from A to B each time. However, if you fall out, you can fall out literally anywhere, and also if you make a mistake in your entry sigil at point A and don’t hook up to point B properly, you could also end up LITERALLY ANYWHERE (though you will probably end up locked onto an endpoint sigil in some other universe that someone’s drawn but not hooked up to anything.)

All of this means that jumping universes is difficult, exceedingly dangerous, and not to be fucked with.

If you’re curious, by the way, Aetheri had several permanent gates set up to other worlds that disappeared in the fold that Vlad talks (v casually) about. The reason most people assume that those worlds were somehow destroyed and aren’t just somewhere else unseeable is because by this logic, those permanent gate should work no matter how big the distance between points A and B. But nope. Those gates are dead, which can really only mean the endpoint for those gates is gone.

Those Aetherian-side gates are still standing, by-the-by. Maybe we’ll see them. Aetherians keep them up, in case they start working again one day. (This is not likely.)

Addition 2025: The field of interworld travel by magic is very, very complicated, and also wraps back around into looking a lot like math rather than magic. One thing the Aetherians have gotten over on astrophysics is they have come to understand that what we call dark matter and energy is actually mass in other universes influencing matter in our universe, which is why dark matter cannot be detected by any method we have available--because it's not really THERE there, it's just that the mass in other universes is great enough in particular areas that it gravitationally affects mass in our universe (and vice versa). This realization is the catalyst that allowed Aetherians to make the breakthrough into interworld travel in the first place, and also what gave them the idea to try 'moving' worlds (if it's got mass, can you just move it closer.)

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