Pie is home.

Chapter 1

Oververse, a word I coined to describe a concept unknown to me, originally a drunken flight of fancy, but something which would become so much more. The Oververse is a field of potential energy that encapsulates all existence, every universe, dimension. Everything.

It’s not a great name, I know that but I’ve been using it so long now, I don’t care to change it. Deal with it, readers.

Speaking of names, I best introduce myself. Archer Thompson, at your service, experimental physicist, traveler of worlds, techno-wizard extraordinaire, uncoverer of secrets and witness to unspeakable horrors. For those familiar with comic book heroes. (in worlds which have them.) I suppose I would best resemble Doctor Strange. Or Doctor Who.

Anyhow, this is my… diary? Journal? Either way, this is my story, a record of my adventures and the sights and events I have witnessed in my decades of travel.

So, back to the Oververse thing.

Early in my journey, I created a simple way to map and navigate discrete sections of the spectrum of the Oververse field. This infinite field of potential energy is acted on by probability, creating a roiling storm of appearing and disappearing energy and matter. Inside this field are areas of chaos and stability, once again all governed by probability.

So, the funny thing about infinite anything. Measuring that shit is annoying, also combining probability with the infinite? Basically, that shit means anything that can happen, will happen, somewhere, oh, and it will do it infinite times.

And, I mapped that shit. It was real back of the napkin stuff. Look, I was drunk and you get a bunch of experimental physicists in a bar, some really weird existential stuff tends to crop up.

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Right, enough waffling on. The rules.

Draw a cross, in the middle, is you, north and south of you is a line of infinite parallel universes, each one is like, a tiny bit different, and by tiny I mean an electron going left instead of right. You could travel to a billion billion billion parallel worlds on either side of you and you would see no difference because each one is different by… just an out of place electron. (of course, it’s way more complicated, but yeah, anyway.)

So, your sitting on an infinite line of probabilities containing the movements of all atoms, particles, and energy in your universe.

To your east and west are the dimensions. Negative dimensions are west and positive dimensions are east of you.

There is a single number you need to navigate these two axis, Pi, 3.14159 if you are where I come from. See, the strange thing about Pi, each parallel universe is slightly different when calculating Pi.

So my home is in the third dimension and is number .14159 along the probability spectrum. I write it like this.

3:14159

So, that’s the rule, Pie is home.

Anyway, the number of decimal places just increases your accuracy for navigation. Now, I tend to simplify it down to 5 decimal places throughout this diary of mine, it’s usually actually out to around.. 500,000,000+ places. Anything, say a million or so more than that and you are quibbling with the color of your roof tiles.

So, how does a traveler fit into this? Would my actions change things in just one parallel? No, because there are infinite me, and we are all going to all those different parallels too.

Yeah, it’s complicated as fuck, just go with it ok? The math is… look, there are a lot of versions out there of a lot of physicists who have gone mad trying to figure it out, and probably just as many went mad trying to explain it.

So, how do I use this to travel between worlds? Well, originally It wasn’t at all what I intended. I’m an experimental physicist, not a test pilot, not a ship captain on a planned voyage to the new world. I just try to prove the maths right. You know, if I can, it’s not easy, physics is fucking weird.

Also, I’m not a maths genius or a science wiz kid. I’m a tinkerer, an engineer. I help build the experiments and help the other, way smarter guys get the answers they need. Sure, I can do the theoretical stuff… but it’s not great.

Anyway, so I travel between worlds thanks to a device I affectionately call the “Jigger” as in thingamajigger. It’s been my loyal if temperamental companion on my many adventures.

Now, it’s seen many iterations over the years and has been torn down, re-built, disintegrated, re-integrated, exploded, imploded… I think I’ve gone through at least 400 Jiggers over the years, I’ve gotten rather good at re-building the damn things from local parts.

Originally, however. It was a chair, and that is the whole reason I ended up on my world-hopping adventure.