World tree — the many-worlds narrative temporal tree, and the shared multiverse the VNMMO is made of

Status: rough spec (direction). Nothing here ships until scheduled; no new engine object is proposed. The tree is a reading of objects that exist — Domains, branches, Flags, MWS visits — plus two things the record does not yet carry: a birth date on every narrative and a seed edge between Domains.

The idea in one line, from the founder (2026-09-18):

VNMMO is a many-worlds narrative tree of causally deep and explored fateful worlds.

Each word names a measured quantity, not a mood:

A world earns a place in the VNMMO by scoring on all four. A shallow, unvisited, settled world is kept in the history and is not the game.

Authority is unchanged:

Domain defines. Branch preserves. Scenario resolves. Episode embodies. World inherits and lives.

Read first: world (origin, branch, canon — the seed rule below is its "explicit governed action" made concrete), branch refinement §12 (the shared tree), visual-novel branching §7 (bottlenecks), strategy 01 (care rules).

1. Three levels, each already an engine object

Meridians is grounded in shared universes with alternate timelines, and separate universes in one multiverse. Nothing new is needed to name any level:

Continuity — what makes the multiverse immersive rather than a catalogue — has two depths that follow from the table. Within a universe everything settled carries: a character met in one release is the same character, with the same settled history, in the next. Across the multiverse only what the seed inherited carries. For any two narratives the tree answers "what do these share?" exactly: their lowest common ancestor and the Settled Layer at that point.

2. The initial conception — timeline-dated VNs with live-service releases

The first VNMMO is not concurrent play. It is:

• A family of VNs, each an Experience — generated once, served at book cost, never generating while read (world). Each carries a date: its position on the tree (universe, parent branch, tip it was cut from, born-at).
• Replayable. A dated VN is fixed: all its routes, re-readable forever; the reader's route private; the divergence meter after an ending ("your route against the world's", branching §12). Replay never changes anything shared.
• Live service = MWS between releases. The tree is grown and re-priced continuously (branch refinement §2). A new dated VN is cut when a tip has earned it — visits, value in nats, a turning point due on the trunk — and a Director confirms the release (§6). Releases are the seasons; the Settled Layer advances with each.
• Readers steer without playing together. Decisions in the latest release are visits on the tree (§5 of branch refinement: scouts and readers count alike). Aggregated — never individually visible — they weight which tips the search deepens. Stake (branch refinement §12) is the reader's way to commit a belief about the next release and be scored on it.
• What is shared at this stage: the tree, the Settled Layer, the release calendar, the divergence meter. What is private: every reading, every route, every latent reading (care rule 4).
• Concurrent multi-seat — the pocket dimension — comes later and inherits all of this. A seat's decision and a search rollout are the same kind of visit, differing only in attribution (Will vs search), so nothing built for dated releases is redone for seats.

3. The Settled Layer — what a universe agrees on

The Settled Layer of a universe is the set of Flags that have collapsed to the same value in every surviving timeline of that Domain. It is computed, never written: the intersection of the surviving branches' Flag sets, recomputed whenever the tree grows or a branch is starved.

• It thickens toward the root and thins toward the frontier — the reader sees at a glance what the universe has settled and where it is still open.
• It is not a canon designation. The world spec keeps "which branch is official canon" open and explicitly not an inference from order or popularity; the Settled Layer does not choose a branch, it reports what all live branches already share. A Director may still designate canon by governed action; the two are different objects.
• A convergence event is a scene the Settled Layer implies every surviving timeline passed through — the bottleneck of branching §7 read at universe scale: one world event, lived from many states, read differently in each. It is the cheapest shared moment the multiverse has (one generation, many readings) and the natural boundary of a release.

4. Seeding — how one narrative begets another

A seed founds a new Domain from a scene of an existing one. It is the world spec's "explicit governed action with preserved provenance" for canon crossing a Domain boundary.

• The seed inherits its origin's World and System, and the Settled Layer up to the seed scene. It opens fresh Fate — new questions on inherited ground. Nothing after the seed point carries.
• The seed edge is kept on both ends: the child knows its origin scene; the origin knows it was seeded. A narrative's lineage — the chain of seeds back to its first Domain — is readable, and a reader can walk up it.
• Consequence flows down lineage, never back up. A seeded universe can never write to its origin's record. This one rule is what keeps the multiverse consistent; the world spec's "may a World propose canon back?" stays open for Worlds and is answered no for seeds.
• Cross-universe causality follows for free: the child's Flags depend on the origin's Flags up to the seed scene, so causal weight and hubs run across universes. A scene many universes were seeded from is a universe-level hub — the same closure graph one level up.
• Seeds are proposed by a seat or by the search and confirmed by a Director (§6). The proposer is the seed's author-of-record.

5. The tree as a surface — expansion of narratives over time

One view, the universe expanding. Proposed as the first VNMMO surface because it makes the tree visible and therefore social, before any multi-seat play.

• Axes. x = time the node was born (the record's clock, not story time); depth = lineage. Scene, branch, dated VN, seeded universe are nodes of one shape, typed by badge.
• Edges. Parent edges within a Domain; seed edges between Domains.
• Thickness = the Settled Layer. A trunk thickens as more surviving descendants agree.
• Heat = the search. Visits and value shade each node; the frontier glows where MWS is spending. Starved branches fade and stay — pruning is a view filter, never a write (branch refinement §6).
• Seats = cursors. Each seat is a marker on its own timeline at its current scene. Others see that someone is there, never what they decided (care rules 3–4); a seat sees no node born after its own cursor on its own line — blindness to the future, made social.
• Time scrubber. Drag back and the tree un-grows: watch the multiverse expand from its first Domain.
• What it is for. Lobby (choose a scene to read from or seed from), history (what was tried, by whom), search monitor (where novelty is being injected), and Pulse at universe scale (hubs many universes depend on).

Substrate present: the branch tree and its layout, MWS visits and value per node, run history. New: a birth date as a layout dimension, seed edges, per-seat cursor markers.

6. Novelty — where the intelligent system lives

MCTS grows the tree; it is also the only novelty injector, and it has two distinct sources:

• Search novelty — the exploration term of the selection rule spends generation on under-visited forks of an existing universe rather than the modal continuation; the value's divergence component (branch refinement §3) is the measure of what came back. Novelty is a dial on c and the divergence weight, readable on the tree as heat — not a separate module.
• Seed novelty — a rollout that reaches a scene worth founding on proposes a seed (§4): a new universe on inherited ground. The first deepens a narrative; the second widens the multiverse.

Boundary, unchanged and load-bearing: the search proposes and prices; it never commits. Three acts write to the shared layer and each has an author-of-record — release a dated VN, seed a universe, designate canon. Each is a governed action a Director confirms; the loop only proposes them. Reader decisions steer the search in aggregate without any reader's Will being committed for them.

7. What is deliberately open

• Whether a release is cut at a convergence event by rule or by Director judgment, and how often.
• Whether reader visits decay so an old cohort does not pin the frontier (branch refinement §12).
• Whether a seed may inherit less than the full Settled Layer (a partial inheritance), and how that is shown on the tree.
• How two seeded universes that both descend from one origin relate to each other — siblings share the origin's Settled Layer and nothing after; whether they may ever be re-joined is open and defaults to no.
• Discovery and admission: whether "causally deep · explored · fateful" thresholds are per universe or global, and how they are shown without becoming a leaderboard of worlds.
• Everything the world spec leaves open for concurrent seats — clock, resolution, persistence, economy, hosting, sharding — is inherited here untouched; this spec does not decide any of it.

8. The honest ledger

9. Sources

• Founder, 2026-09-18 — world tree, dated VNs, shared multiverse 🔒 (ingested with this spec).
• Founder, 2026-09-14 — VNMMO and turning points 🔒.
• Founder, 2026-09-18 — keep the sci-fi frame 🔒: the many-worlds picture is the physics of this spec, shown as such.