2. The Mechanics of Universes

A Universe could be created by exactly and specifically postulating every individual element in it. However, this is quite a bit of work. There are some common shortcuts that are easy to use. These show up frequently in the construction of simple universes.

It is almost as easy to postulate an infinity as it is to postulate an individual item. This is because an infinity of something is a single intention rather than many detailed different things. Lets say that you wanted to mock up a beach that someone could walk down. The way to spend eons at this is to mock up each individual grain of sand as itself and different from its neighbors. Instead, you mock up one grain of sand in detail and then copy it. You say this goes on and on. If you want and if there's nothing else in the space yet, you could just say that the beach goes on forever. This is an infinity. No matter how far along the beach someone walked, there would always be more beach. Note that the beach would always be the same unless you went along and changed some parts of it.

You could also postulate a progressive infinity. Lets say that you mock up a stretch of beach in an intermediate color. Now you say it goes on forever in one direction getting lighter and lighter and goes on in the other direction getting darker and darker. Again this is just a simple postulate without a great deal of detail work.

For a human level example, consider the number line in mathematics. The postulate here is just that there is a number and then you add one to it and get a bigger number. When numbers and counting were mocked up, just the basic premises of quantity and counting had to be conceived of. Nobody had to sit there and mock up every possible whole number from one to infinity. If you think of a bigger number than anybody else has ever thought of before, it doesn't make any difference. The next number is there just the same as always.

In the same way, no matter how far you go down that beach that was mocked up as an infinity, there is more beach. And if a progression such as the sand gets hotter the further you go was included in the postulate, then it just keeps getting hotter. This works the same way as the numbers getting bigger and bigger as you go along the number line.

Another trick with this is to postulate a repetitive pattern out to infinity. Here you say there will be a mile of green sand and then a mile of red sand and then another mile of green sand on and on forever. Its still pretty simple to set up. Any kind of mathematical series can be used in this kind of infinite postulate, it doesn't have to be a simple alternating sequence.

The practical application of this is that you will find that there are universes where there really is mud from here on down and it just gets thicker and blacker no matter how deep you dig. And when you say, well what's on the other side of this mud, the answer is that there isn't any other side. It was not defined for the universe in question. It just goes out to infinity. That's what the postulate happened to be and that's what you have to duplicate to as-is it.

In this universe, the postulate is infinite space. The space just goes on and on no matter how far you go.

Another popular trick is to curve one of these infinities back on itself. For this, you take the infinite beach and select a point on it and then take a different point far away and make them be the same point. This is not very feasible if the beach already has junk on it and differences etc. But if you do it when the beach is pure and simple, you're only alter-ising the simple original postulate and it goes fairly easily. So this is a common second postulate before you get carried away with making alterations. Once you've done this, the beach will have a finite length and loop back upon itself as you walk it. But the beach is not curved, it is still flat and straight. It is the space itself that is curved.

In an ordinary playing field type universe like this one, the thing just sits around getting alter-ised and fooled around with by whoever is in it. If you pick up the agreements of that universe or of someone in it, you get it in its current state.

However, a story telling universe, or its viscous cousin the implant universe, also has a canned time track. In this case, not only the space but also the time is postulated. For example, day one is sunny, day two is cloudy, and its blackness from day three onward. The infinite postulates can be used with time just as well as with space.

Imagine "Gone With the Wind" being set up as a story telling universe. First, a production crew would mock it up in detail, step by step and day by day. You would get into it by picking up the agreements at start of track. In other words you would agree with the Civil War and Tara and Scarlet etc. and suddenly there you'd be. It might be that the story was only mocked up from Scarlet's viewpoint, or maybe there'd be a choice of characters you could be with each one mocked up in full. At the end might be the credits, a theta signature that was postulated to go on forever in the time track of that universe.

Because universes are entered by agreement, it becomes possible to cause someone to shift universes by enforcing the appropriate set of agreements. One being can blanket another and enforce the agreements of start of track of a canned universe and so get the other individual to run through it willy nilly. The canned universe in turn can inflict yet a further set of agreements which take him into yet another universe. And so we have Universe shifting incidents.

Now we can explain Incident I. This is an implant universe that is a universe shifting incident. The incident is at start of track in its own weird universe. That's why you can have an earlier incident I and yet its always at the beginning of time. Its not just that it says it is at the beginning of time, it really is at the beginning of time in its own universe. It lays in the basic agreements that take you into this universe. The games in this universe are based on force and so you have things like the charioteer. The blackness at the end of incident 1 is an infinite postulate that just goes on forever in space and time. Since there is no real change except for repetitive waves in the blackness, eventually you shift over to the agreements that it was installing and wind up here. It is used to take undesirables and banish them to this universe. Sometimes someone manages to get back out of this one and they throw him in again and so you have the multiple occurrences of the incident. The overt side of this (blanketing someone and pushing them into it) is quite beneficial to run out.