Lyra stood before them, her energy infectious. The ghostly memory of an expanding Tree of Timelines still hung in the air like after-rain ozone.
"Before we watch a Megaverse be born," she began, "we need a foundational law. Not a law of physics, but a law of ontological dependency. Listen closely: The container must be qualitatively superior to the thing it contains."
She conjured a simple wooden box and placed a rock inside it.
"The box contains the rock.The box is not just 'bigger.' It has a property the rock lacks: enclosure. It has the property of 'having an inside.' That's a superior, more complex state than simply 'being.'"
She dissolved the box and rock."Now, scale this up. Way up."
A 4D universe—the familiar spacetime worm—appeared.
"This is contained within the 5D Tree of Timelines.How? The Tree doesn't just surround the universe. It adds a new fundamental category: Probability. The universe is a single, determined thread. The Tree is the totality of all possible threads. The container (Tree) operates with a concept (probability-as-axis) that the contained (universe) cannot even fully comprehend. That's qualitative superiority."
She zoomed out to the 5D Multiverse Bulk, with its many floating Trees.
"Now,the Bulk contains the Trees. How is it superior? It adds the concept of isolation and meta-law. Within a single Tree, all branches share the same fundamental physics. The Bulk is the environment that allows for different physics to exist in separate, non-communicating Trees. The container (Bulk) introduces the concept of 'other kinds of law,' which is a meta-concept to any single Tree's internal logic."
She pointed her stylus for emphasis. "This is why higher dimensions contain lower ones. It's not about size. It's about conceptual richness. Each higher dimensional framework introduces a new, fundamental category of existence that the frameworks below lack. A 5D being thinks in terms of probability landscapes. A 4D being only thinks in terms of a single path through that landscape. The 5D mind has a tool the 4D mind doesn't even have a word for."
"Now," she said, her eyes sparkling, "let's correct a simplification. The Tree of Timelines."
She brought back the shimmering,branching structure. "You think of it as 3D space + time + probability. Wrong." She slashed through the air with her stylus. "Probability infuses everything. The expansion isn't just 3D space stretching. At the most fundamental level, spacetime itself is a probabilistic structure."
She zoomed in to the Planck scale. The smooth fabric of spacetime dissolved into a seething, frothing quantum foam. Each "bubble" in the foam was a probability.
"The Tree expands in 3D spacebecause probability is generating new possible configurations of geometry. It expands in time because probability is generating new possible causal chains. The P-axis isn't a separate dimension tacked on. It is the substrate. The '3D space' and 'time' you see are emergent, classical approximations of this deeper, probabilistic reality. So when I say the Tree expands at the 'speed of ℵ₁,' I mean the probabilistic substrate is generating new, uncountably infinite, self-consistent configurations of what we call space and time, every moment."
She let the seething, generative chaos of it hang in the air. The universe was no longer a thing that expanded. It was a statistical pattern crystallizing in real-time from an infinite probability field.
"And as for the Megaverse," Lyra said, her tone shifting to one of precision, "forget the range. It is 6D. Period. Those extra dimensions beyond the 5D Bulk are not 'more space.' They are the axes of the parameter space of physics. One axis might be the strength of the electromagnetic force. Another, the number of spacetime dimensions that compactify. A 6D being in the Megaverse doesn't move through a big room. It navigates the settings menu for reality. To create a new Multiverse (a 5D Bulk with its own set of Trees), it doesn't build it. It selects a point in this 6D parameter space. That selection is the creation."
She looked at them, her gaze challenging. "So, the hierarchy is not a stack of bigger jars. It's a ladder of increasing conceptual responsibility. A 4D universe is responsible for its own causal chain. A 5D Tree is responsible for all possible chains of a single physics. A 6D Megaverse is responsible for the menu of possible physics. Each container is responsible for a broader, more fundamental category of 'what can be' than the thing it holds."
She clapped her hands once, a sharp, clean sound.
"Now you're ready.Next time, we don't just look at a menu. We press a button. We watch a 6D Megaversal architect make a choice, and see a whole new forest of realities—with brand new laws—spring into being. Dismissed!"
Lyra vanished, leaving the classroom buzzing with a new kind of understanding. The walls between worlds weren't just barriers; they were differences in cognitive responsibility. And Kael realized with a start that their own Button-Tier Classroom operated on the same principle. It contained their lessons because it was responsible for a concept even the Megaverse wasn't: the concept of explanation itself.
The hierarchy, it seemed, went all the way up to pedagogy.