He stood from his desk.  “How?”

“Blood or darkness.  Don’t know.”

Troublesome.

“The chance I die in the next thirty minutes?”

She thought, and felt the mosaic shift into a new configuration.  Coil’s face predominated each tiny scene, active, speaking and alive in some, unmoving or dead in the others. “Forty two point seven zero nine percent for the worlds where I don’t die.  Don’t know about the worlds where I’d die first.”

Hm, so whoever (probably today’s Slaughterhouse member) or whatever is the cause of this, they/it does not only target Dinah.

“And, say, Mr. Pitter?  The chance he dies?”

“Forty point-”  She stopped as Coil raised a hand.

Yeah, we don’t need all the decimals, we already got the point.

“So whatever it is, it happens here, and involves everyone here.  Chance of survival if we leave?”

“Ten point six six four-”

Oh jeez, leaving is way worse than staying.

“No.  Chance the average person in the city lives if we leave?”

That’s an odd question. Are you thinking Shatterbird or someone else with a large radius is the culprit?

“Ninety-nine point-”

“So we’re targets.  It’s not an attack on the city.  If we mobilize the squads?  To one decimal place?”

Oh, okay, it does makes sense to ask about when you put it like that.

“Forty-eight point one percent chance I survive, forty-nine point nine percent chance you survive.”

So oddly enough, they seem to have the best survival chances if they stay put and don’t mobilize anyone to defend them. It’s like the threat in question would get pissed at them for trying to fight back, or something.

Also, I suppose the fact that it’s so unpredictable whether they’ll live or die points to Bonesaw.

Heh, if that’s the case, I love the irony of picking someone with the power of prediction as the POV character for a chapter about someone whose main characterization so far is “unpredictable”.

He hung up.

“Coil?”

“What is it, pet?”

“Forty-four point two zero three eight three percent chance I die in the next half-hour.”

Straight to the point. Nice.

Also, at least she didn’t launch into the full sequence of 20 decimals, as hilarious as it would be to see that typed out in words here.

Actually, you know what, I want to see that, I’m gonna make it happen.

(Wait, shit, it’s increased, like she described, so I don’t have the updated 20-decimal version to go with. Oh well, let’s use the old one.)

Dinah: “Forty-four point zero three four eight five one nine two seven…”

Coil: “Pet–”

Dinah:

“…four six three zero seven…”

Coil:

“That’s enough decimals, p–”

Dinah:

“…nine five

five

six five nine percent chance I die in the next half-hour.”

Coil:

“Oh, fina– wait what?”

She concentrated, and the mosaic organized into two portions, one slightly larger than the other.  In one half, that death-terminus came very soon.  In the other, it was some distance off.

Hmm.

I suppose this kind of sorting is how she arrives at the numbers.

She judged the size of the individual parts, and the number snapped into her head.

Which was not to say her power didn’t help her out with that. The numbers are far too precise for there not to be a probability calculator in her head.

43.03485192746307955659 percent chance she would die in the next thirty minutes.  The chance was steadily ticking upward with each passing second, with possible realities becoming impossible and fading from her view, or being replaced with other possibilities, effectively shifting over to the other side.

That is not a good number.

…I’m curious as to how Wildbow decided the decimals, whether he used some form of randomizer, or just key-mashed a numpad. I’m inclined to think the latter, especially because there seems to be a bias towards the middle and higher digits, 4-9.

Anyway, how exactly do new realities become possible? Shouldn’t any reality that could be a result of a future moment along a branch be visible as another branch from that moment even before she gets to it physically?

Might that have something to do with influence from outside the universe, such as the dandelions empowering someone somewhere in the world?

Or maybe it boils down to quantum mechanics?

Wait, are those other universes in the mosaic also branches, spread out from past moments, where Dinah is alive?

Is there actually a difference between that and them being other universes like Earth-Aleph to the Wormverse? Did Earth-Aleph branch off from the Wormverse shortly before the dandelions began empowering people?

Dinah Alcott knew that those branches were ones where she had died.

Ohh. The end of the road for her.

So we are following Dinah, then! And apparently she has the power to see not only the branches of the future in the Wormverse, but to see other universes as well, and branches of their futures.

That’s pretty awesome.

Right now, there were a lot of them, more coming into view with every passing second.

That’s bad.

Is it related to the Slaughterhouse member of the day taking some form of interest in you?

Almost all of the images in the mosaic were either black or crimson.  Either the lights were on and everything was covered in blood, or they were off, and she was effectively blind.

Welp.

Hm. Does “terminus” refer to the ends of a line? That would make sense, given the apparent etymology of the word.

And in that case, does that mean the past does not exist?

But there was more to it.  There were faint sounds, for one thing, and they weren’t just two-dimensional.  Just the opposite – they were each a fully realized world, and each was continuous, like a slideshow or film reel that extended vast distances forward and backward from any of the scenes of focus.

I suppose this metaphor, if taken with any sort of literalness, requires at least five-dimensional vision.

Things got even more complicated when each of the slideshow reels forked out and branched as they moved further away.  The only thing stopping them were the terminus points.

“Further away”, in this case, appears to be along the temporal axis. Let’s upgrade that to six-dimensional vision, then.

What’s a terminus point? I feel like that’s a math/geometry term I’ve heard at some point, but I don’t know what it means.

The first terminus wasn’t complicated.  The now, the present.  It moved inexorably, steadily forward, consuming the individual realities as they ceased to be the future and became the now.

Again, “forward” appears to be temporally.

So if one terminus point is “now”, then I guess the terminus points are where the branches convene? In that case, is one of the more complicated terminus points the arrival of the apocalyptic threat 2-15 years from now? And is that local to the Wormverse only?

The other terminus was somewhat more ominous.  Every branch ended at some point, some sooner than others.

…you’re right, that’s ominous. A branch ending, in this context, would mean the end of a timeline, and if all branches of a universe end, the end of that universe.