I think TVtropes calls this Fridge Horror: The realization that, though Jonah gets to respawn, Nera doesn’t, combined with Sergio’s explanation that this is not conventional time travel, but skipping sideways across alternate universes. So when they die, Jonah’s consciousness survives and moves on to sitting in the auditorium in another universe, and he ends up being a sort of gestalt of all the Jonahs from all the universes he passed through to get to the end.
But that doesn’t help Nera. Her consciousness doesn’t get shuffled into the next universe over when they die. There’s another Nera in the next universe Jonah visits, but this Nera, and every other one of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of Neras in all of the universes along the way, until the very last one, is a dead girl walking.
I thought he wasn’t moving through alternate universes, just observing a ton of them in preparation for the eventual perfect run which actually happens.
You’re right, though. Yours is way darker.
Not really. Thine is exactly as dark; those universes still exist and all those Neras are still dead or soon-to-be-so, whether or not *our* Jonah’s actually been in them.
Well, on the bright side Nera hasn’t died EVERY time, maybe she somehow makes it out of the building in a few of those where Jonah dies horribly on his own.
The real Fridge Horror is that every possible configuration of moves in the game known as reality is played out assuming the existence of this sort of parallel dimension.
Loads of stuff is worse than what they’re going through.
Umpteen billion universes of almost impossible suffering. These guys get off lightly.
On the upside, the “universes of almost impossible suffering” … by which you mean Universes that are identical but for a few negligible differences on one irrelevant blue planet third from the native star somewhere on the outer edge of just another spiral galaxy… are a miniscule minority next to the Universes where life never existed to suffer in the first place.
Don’t try to think about it though. The human brain hasn’t sufficient RAM to process numbers anywhere near that scale. Even numbers orders of magnitude SMALLER can only be processed by reducing the units of data to featureless quanta.
On the flip-downside, if virtually every bit of sci-fi ever has taught us everything, it’s that the universal constant across all alternate universes is Earth and the hairless apes upon it.
That’s what happens when you live in sector ZZ9-plural Z alpha. And not every universe has an Earth; some were blown up by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Except that’s not actually the case either, as Mostly Harmless deals with another of the surviving Earths and the supposed final destruction of the probability of Earth’s existence (but that isn’t quite as accurate as it seems either, as there is still one more book after that).
That’s not really relevant because Jonah is only going through the universes created by changes in his own actions, not ones with different start conditions or anything like that.
Ah, the time travel device is going to destroy the universe; I see Sergio’s time machine works on the same principals as Helen and Dave’s. Time travel in this universe kind of sucks.
I think TVtropes calls this Fridge Horror: The realization that, though Jonah gets to respawn, Nera doesn’t, combined with Sergio’s explanation that this is not conventional time travel, but skipping sideways across alternate universes. So when they die, Jonah’s consciousness survives and moves on to sitting in the auditorium in another universe, and he ends up being a sort of gestalt of all the Jonahs from all the universes he passed through to get to the end.
But that doesn’t help Nera. Her consciousness doesn’t get shuffled into the next universe over when they die. There’s another Nera in the next universe Jonah visits, but this Nera, and every other one of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of Neras in all of the universes along the way, until the very last one, is a dead girl walking.
I thought he wasn’t moving through alternate universes, just observing a ton of them in preparation for the eventual perfect run which actually happens.
You’re right, though. Yours is way darker.
Not really. Thine is exactly as dark; those universes still exist and all those Neras are still dead or soon-to-be-so, whether or not *our* Jonah’s actually been in them.
He can’t just be observing alternate universes, because he’s altering what happens with his outside knowledge.
Well, on the bright side Nera hasn’t died EVERY time, maybe she somehow makes it out of the building in a few of those where Jonah dies horribly on his own.
Yeah, she’s pretty competent on her own- remember who got them in here? Once she doesn’t have to worry about Jonah she should be fine.
Yes, but she also just saw her freind die and she’s in A-Sig. I don’t think any alternate Nera gets a happy ending.
She probably gets forcibly recruited in a few of those.
Though you have to admit that’s still not a happy ending. Then again, she might finally find out what “extirpation” really involves.
The real Fridge Horror is that every possible configuration of moves in the game known as reality is played out assuming the existence of this sort of parallel dimension.
Loads of stuff is worse than what they’re going through.
Umpteen billion universes of almost impossible suffering. These guys get off lightly.
On the upside, the “universes of almost impossible suffering” … by which you mean Universes that are identical but for a few negligible differences on one irrelevant blue planet third from the native star somewhere on the outer edge of just another spiral galaxy… are a miniscule minority next to the Universes where life never existed to suffer in the first place.
Don’t try to think about it though. The human brain hasn’t sufficient RAM to process numbers anywhere near that scale. Even numbers orders of magnitude SMALLER can only be processed by reducing the units of data to featureless quanta.
And somehow, for you, the complete absence of life is an *upside*.
On the flip-downside, if virtually every bit of sci-fi ever has taught us everything, it’s that the universal constant across all alternate universes is Earth and the hairless apes upon it.
That’s what happens when you live in sector ZZ9-plural Z alpha. And not every universe has an Earth; some were blown up by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
All but one of them, actually. Kind of a big SLaTfatF plot point, that: the one that we see there is explicitly the only one.
Except that’s not actually the case either, as Mostly Harmless deals with another of the surviving Earths and the supposed final destruction of the probability of Earth’s existence (but that isn’t quite as accurate as it seems either, as there is still one more book after that).
That’s not really relevant because Jonah is only going through the universes created by changes in his own actions, not ones with different start conditions or anything like that.
Ah, the time travel device is going to destroy the universe; I see Sergio’s time machine works on the same principals as Helen and Dave’s. Time travel in this universe kind of sucks.
Well, multiverse.