Like a string of beads, chained throughout reality, universe after universe, each exceeding the last in their vast wealth of knowledge. We were only the second in a chain that went on forever.
And when MUORG followed that chain, they found that it did more than continue indefinitely. One string of worlds reached its limit, somehow, impossibly, one of those many before it had figured out how to allow the process to go on forever, terminating in a single, infinitely far away, limiting world.
And then they'd continued.
That limiting world had spawned another more advanced still, and that one another. And they'd created another limit. Two infinite chains standing beginning to end. Then three, four, five….
The mathematicians working for us at the time said they were following a pattern called "transfinite recursion". A process by which a linear ordering could be extended beyond the simple infinity of "1, 2, 3…".
First an infinite chain of universes. Then 2, then 3…
Then an infinite chain of infinite chains. Then 2, then 3.
Then repeat. Each time there are as many of the last thing as there are numbers, repeat again.
In the end, each universe had a place in an order that was as deep as mathematically possible.
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