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.

If each of the tens of trillions of universes were like pictures, then they were organized into a mosaic, constantly rearranging itself and shuffling.

Ooh, are we getting multiverse cosmology lore?

Also, who would know stuff about this, besides a new character? Dinah?

…I guess Professor Haywire wouldn’t technically be a new character, but I highly doubt that’s whom we’re following. Even besides them being a super minor character who’s been mentioned exactly once so far, in passing, I don’t think they’re in Brockton Bay.

Then again, that didn’t stop up from following Rainbow Dash. ;p

Anyway, let’s take a moment to think about flexibility, love and trust what’s actually being said here. So the universes’ relative positions and borders are constantly shuffling? Except we also know that a hole between two realities can be sustained over an extended period without suddenly being a hole into a different reality, or tearing open from the universes moving in different directions. So I don’t think this is quite that physical, at least not in a conventional, euclidean sense.

Taken in as a whole, it was a muddle.  Depending on how it shuffled, sometimes patterns emerged.  A predominant color, perhaps, or lots of scenes that were blurs of motion and activity.

Parallels between the universes.

I really like this metaphor so far.

Hm. Could we be seeing the perspective of a dandelion? That sounds a bit intense. Also, if that’s the case, I highly doubt the POV character is about to be invited to the Slaughterhouse Nine. :p