Plateau

A **plateau** in Soupcount is a cosmological feature that encompasses a small finite number of levels of archverses near a lodeverse (limit of the archverse). Rather than necessarily being a fixed physical phenomenon, the term is often used to refer to "extraordinary" regions of these scales which are more identifiable to observers than similarly unusual regions that are not near lodeverses.

A plateau is often identified by one or more features that are not common to the archverses sufficiently far below or above it; typically, sufficient entity or civilizational activity can give a region such a name. Examples include the local plateau at

ω

{\displaystyle \omega}

 (whose anomalies include the Tree, a monocosm with only one omniverse, a series of entities of potentially high activity, and various alternate realms and dimensions), and to some extent the local

ω
⋅
2

{\displaystyle \omega \cdot 2}

 plateau, where

ω
⋅
2

{\displaystyle \omega \cdot 2}

-verses like the Secode have been tampered with by an arguably anomalous civilization.

## Typology and Theories

Numerous competing theories naturally crop up for the existence of every observed plateau. Generally speaking, there are two types of mechanisms that could give rise to anomalies or unusual features in archverses near lodeverses: naturally, they are split into "bottom-up" and "top-down".

Plateaus forming top-down presumably occur when an archverse of index

α
β

{\displaystyle \alpha + \beta}

, where

α

{\displaystyle \alpha}

 is a limit ordinal and

β

{\displaystyle \beta}

 is a finite ordinal, undergoes some event or process that in turn affects the -verses below. For example, an alteration to a high-level physical law could change the means by which lower archverses interact; such a plateau would have to stop at the lodeverse below since it has no predecessor -verses to influence.

Plateaus forming bottom-up arise, some claim, because of various technologies and abilities with transfinite repetition that stop at lodeverses. An example would be the  **1
k

{\displaystyle 1+k}

 drive**, a transportation device that adds one to the archverse level of its user and inevitably halts at the local

ω

{\displaystyle \omega}

-verse. Civilizations and entities arriving at these lodeverse "anchoring points" then have to proceed with alternate and often slower methods of further progression, thus crowding the handful of archverse layers above. This method is thought to be the mechanism by which Type I Seeds of the External Hazard choose targets; archverse

ω

{\displaystyle \omega}

 being easily recognizable from afar, the Seeds simply step up archverses from there one level at a time until the -verses in question are only just small enough to be within their coordination scale.

One alternative explanation is an informational one: the simplest entities, civilizations, and anomalies cluster around the -verses which can similarly be described as concisely as possible. Since, for example,

ω
3

{\displaystyle \omega+3}

 is in one sense simpler and easier to understand than a finite number with millions of digits, an archverse of the former level might be more likely to attract more informationally compact minds. These theories would suggest the existence of **negative plateaus** below lodeverses in cosmologies where archverses are ordered with surintegers rather than ordinals, as well as plateaus at some infinitesimals and rationals in surreal cosmologies.

Further theories still suggest that plateaus do not exist at all and are solely an artifact of measurement bias, since -verses whose indices have low Kolmogorov complexity are the most studied and thus most likely to yield "unusual" results. Proponents of these explanations are content to say that the entirety of Soupcount and its archverses are crawling with "unusual" things, and that, comparatively speaking, nothing about lodeverses is unusual at all.