Cake layer quantum mechanics
| 5 min read
So - our internal universe has "layers." I've heard other people talk about layers in their own headspaces before, and I don't think this is the same, but that's the word we've used for them forever.
Anyway, almost everyone has a sort of… eh, it’s like a biometric signature in here, and sometimes the body processes that result in that biometric signature can also be used to do weird other things. Jason’s in-verse body is weird and made of shit like elastic polymers and electroconductive filaments and semi-organic hard drives in the shape of bones. Guy can throw lightning and frequently charges people's in-verse phones and the various batteries we have around our house when he's feeling too pent-up. He can explain the mechanics of that himself if he wants. Eddie can split apart molecules and reconfigure them into different materials - less “alchemy” and more “manual chemical reactions” somehow, and he can and has accidentally made really unstable or highly radioactive elements/compounds because he didn’t balance an equation properly before doing the action. He has a specialty in crystalline structures, and if he ever fronts he can explain the mechanics of that, too. All of that is powered by the same ambient energy that results in people’s biometrics, being utilized in different ways, and I think it's more the specific utilization pattern that is the Unique Recognizable Signature aspect. (We actually used to term our in-universe as "energy side" for reasons related to this, versus "mass side" (outside) being more mass-dominated.)
This energy is also exclusive to living things. In-verse plants, animals, people, so on. Inanimate objects do not have this. The layers are "levels" of a sort where the energy can or will exist: think electron orbitals. The layers appear to have "built up" over time in populated areas, and in most spaces both in the in-verse and immediate house, there's... 52? I think? Hypothetically, if you could find an area that has had zero living-being traffic, there may not even be any layers, because they appear to have built up over time from residual energy left behind by living things.
Living things typically occupy the topmost few. Jumping between layers is also not something most people try or even can do; honestly, very few people have reason to do so anyway, though, so it really isn't an issue.
With inanimate objects, however, the "persistence" gets a little strange. If I were to bake a cake on layer 52, and I set it on the counter, it would be visible on hypothetically all 52 layers. If we all stayed on layer 52 and ate the cake while on that layer until it’s gone, the “versions” visible on layer 51, 50, 49, and all the way down would also be gone.
But if I bake the cake, set it on the counter, and jump to layer 51, then grab the cake from layer 51 and bring it with me back to layer 52, I would then have two cakes... sort of. Some of the attributes would be split between the two cakes. We could eat both cakes on layer 52 and have more volume of cake, which is a nifty trick when we've got several people and don't want to make multiple versions of the in-verse dish for every single person who wants some, but the "filling-ness" and such of that cake might be a little less. Flavors can also be affected, but generally the flavors are still alright until you start getting past 4 “copies” or so.
If I baked the cake, set it on the counter on layer 52, grabbed the cake on layer 51 and brought it back to layer 52 so we have "two cakes" again, but this time, I set the 51-cake down on the counter with it, and pop back to layer 50, there will be a cake-copy of the original layer-52 cake (the “copy” grabbed from layer 51 won’t “permeate” through layers, though, it’ll stay on 52), and I can grab that cake from layer 50 and bring it back to layer 52 as well. We now have "three cakes," and somehow the act of grabbing the third cake from layer 50 will have affected the other two cakes sitting on layer 52, so those same split attributes are now split equally between all three cakes.
So. As far as we can tell, there is some flavor of, like… almost like a quantum-entangley concept going on there. I don't even have to take the layer-51 cake back to layer 52 for the attributes to get automatically split between them; I just have to move it, and the threshold for how far I'd have to move it is actually extremely minuscule, if I remember correctly.
Object permanence in terms of what persists throughout layers is also strange - the "observing something can affect its state" phenomenon. If I bake the cake, set it on the counter, and go to layer 51, but don't touch the cake, and someone else moves the cake on layer 52, if I am still looking at the cake, I don't see it move, but if I go to a different layer and then back to 51, it will have moved to wherever the person on layer 52 moved the original cake to.