This was written December 17th, 2025
Excerpt from The Guide to the Compendium (Formerly known as the Multiverse)
Introduction by S.M. Hamilton:
As is common knowledge nowadays, it is rather ironic how, prior to the reform, they were still so close to having adequate nomenclature to what they used to label as the Multiverse, yet it ultimately fell short. Their vision of the Multiverse was, in truth, both idealistic and limited. The parallels and association with poetry should already have been clear. Now, let us dive a bit further into our glossary.
First, we note how we’ve kept the term “Universe”, which felt rather adequate. That is a single and distinct entity, which some also simply call a ‘Verse. Now, what about a collection of Universes? Well, we used to think there was a single collection of universes, that it was simply all universes together. The term was labelled as the “Multiverse”. But this is a bit too narrow of a terminology. Ultimately, from any Universe, we can expect one of two potential options. Either this universe is materially isolated, or it is, in some way, capable of transferring matter to at least one other Universe. (Yes, we accept that ultimately, this is indistinguishable from both Universes not intersecting and identical matter spontaneously disappearing in one and appearing in the other, as first proposed by N.L. Gauss).
For the complete chain of universes that can exchange matter, we label this collection as a Stanza, a collection of ‘Verses directly connected to one-another. Accordingly, from any Universe, it would be impossible to ever a Universe outside of its own Stanza. Reminder that testing whether two Universes belong to the same Stanza is an equivalence relation: It must, by definition, respect reflexivity, symmetry and transition.
However, we do not enforce any of those properties in the actual travel between universes (except for, vacuously, for reflexivity). Thus, it could be completely possible for universes S1, S2 in Stanza S to be such that you can go from S1 to S2, but not from S2 to S1. Similarly, since we only require existence of this property, it doesn’t need to hold for all time, thus potentially breaking transition. Accordingly, from a single Universe’s point of view, a Stanza represents a super-set of all the Universes that could ever be reached (including through n-Universe-jumps, with n>1).
By definition, no Universe in a Stanza can exchange matter with any universe in another Stanza (No two Stanzas exchange matter). However, Universes in one Stanza could still exchange information with a Universe from another Stanza. (The mechanics of which are not necessarily intuitive, considering the Matter-Energy Equivalency). The closure of such Stanzas is what we call a Poem, a collection of related Stanzas that share a similar theme, the same set of information.
Ultimately, from the point of view of a single Universe U, the Poem it belongs to, P(U), represents a superset of all Universes it could ever get news from, or that could ever get news about U. The same properties hold for a Poem as for a Stanza and we shall therefore defer such considerations to the reader.
In the end, any Universe existing outside of one’s Poem is one that could never be interacted with or detected. Accordingly, those are rather uninteresting, and their existence is irrelevant. We could not distinguish whether such Universes exist or not. But ultimately, we still have a term for the collection of all Universes (all Stanzas, all Poems), we call it the Compendium, or sometimes the Poem Compendium. It is what once was simply referred to as the Multiverse.
Now, these serve as a base for our Nomenclature, but are by no means the only terms we’ll consider. In the first few chapters, we’ll discuss some of more useful considerations than impractical supersets. Still, these terms will be necessary for the upcoming discussions, and should serve as a good base for any discussion about the Compendium.
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