The Superhero Database Classification number, or SHDB Class, is a number that represents the overall 'power' of a character. All traits of a character are used for calculating the Classification.
What it DOESN'T mean
This doesn't mean that a higher class would always beat a lower class character. But the bigger the difference in Class is, the more obvious it is who'll win in a fight.
How is this calculated
( INT^1.3 + (STR*0.5 )^2 + (SPE*0.5)^2 + DUR^1.6 + (POW + (SPS*SPL))^2 + COM^1.8 ) ^ TIER
Super Power Score and Level
Every Super Power has a score (SPS) that is used to calculate the Class. Each Super Power also has 3 levels (SPL). The level is set when connecting that Super Power to a character. The level determines the final score, of the Super Power, being used in the calculation.
The main catastrophe that appear in the novel is just called the Event by self-reference engine, and many times it doesn't give much attention to it, the event in question is a situation where some entities beyond the physical universe (called giant corpora of knowledge) fragments the universe, so this universe become a completely different infinite multiverse
Sometimes I think about James, and what happened to him, having disappeared from my future, wrapped up in the events of the North American middle west.
It has been explained that the Event smashed and atomized time itself. As a consequence, I feel like any explanation that doesn’t make me feel like I get something shouldn’t really be called an explanation. Is that right?
James has disappeared from my present and future, but I’m sure he is alive somewhere in atomized time. He was the kind of guy who would never shed a tear even if a bison trampled his toes. I, of course, am mostly talk.
I still buy James’s hypothesis that Rita was shot from the future, or somewhere in that direction. The thought that Rita and James might meet again out there somewhere among the broken shards of time still makes me smile. I wouldn’t mind at all. Any way you slice it, time has been smashed to smithereens, and order and consistency have abandoned the field. James is on one fluttering crumb of time, and Rita is on another. Somewhere in space, those crumbs could collide, and James and Rita would meet again.
That would certainly be exciting.
I remember her saying meanly, “If that’s the case, you must be the one from the past.”
It is true of course. Everybody comes out of the past; it’s not that I’m some guy who comes from some particular past.
Even when that is pointed out, though, she shows no sign of backing down.
“It’s not as if I came out of some bizarro past,” she said. That’s how she and I met.
Writing it down this way, it doesn’t seem like anything at all is about to happen, right? Between her and me, I mean. As if something could ever really happen. As if something continues to happen that might ever make something else happen.
I am repeating myself, but I haven’t seen her since then. She promised me, with a sweet smile, that I would never see her again.
For the short time we were together, we tried to talk about things that really meant something to us. Around that time there were a lot of things that were all mixed up, and it was not easy to sort out what was really real. There might be a pebble over there, and when you took your eyes off it it turned into a frog, and when you took your eyes off it again it turned into a horsefly. The horsefly that used to be a frog remembered it used to be a frog and stuck out its tongue to try to eat a fly, and then remembered it used to be a pebble and stopped and crashed to the ground.
With all this going on, it’s really important to know what’s really real and what’s not.
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived a boy and a girl.”
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived boys and girls.”
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived no boy and no girl.”
“Once upon a time…lived.”
“Lived.”
“Once upon a time.”
From beginning to end, we carried on this back-and-forth process. For example, in this dialogue, we were somehow finally mutually able to come up with this kind of compromise statement:
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived a boy and a girl. There may have been lots of boys, and there may have been lots of girls. There may have been no boys at all, and there may have been no girls at all. There may even have been no one at all. At any rate there is little chance there were equal numbers of each. That is unless there had never been anybody at all anyway.”
That was our first meeting, she and I, and of course it meant we would never see each other again. I was making my way in the direction she had come from, and she was headed in the direction I had come from, and this is a somewhat important point; you must realize this walking had to be, for some reason, in just one direction.
I would like you to imagine countless threads, strung through space. I am walking along one of those threads from this end. She is walking along some other thread from some other end.
“So that’s how you are calculating his chances of winning?”
“Research is ongoing, but that is no more than part of the experiment. Just last week, the human side proposed the theory that space-time calculations can be executed locally, and the evidence is piling up.”
“Does it seem like a theory that will hold?”
“You mean for humans? Or for us?”
“For you.”
“This is child’s play, but sometimes a child’s scribbling can move a grown-up to tears.”
Shikishima stops, wondering if he is being toyed with. Then he continues walking, remembering that just as natural phenomena are unable to make fools of people, it is essentially unthinkable for giant corpora of knowledge to make fools of people. This is difficult to comprehend, even after prolonged, repeated thinking, and it is a peculiar concept. Would his own children grow up thinking this is obvious?
“I’d like to know your honest opinion about Uncle Sam in Santa Fe. What are his chances with the space-time reintegration plan he is pursuing?”
“Zero.”
“You mean probabilistically? Or combinatorially?”
“There are solutions, limited solutions that would return us to the space-time we had before space-time was fragmented. However, we cannot allow them to be chosen because of the infinite possibilities of other solutions. Divide a natural number by infinity, and you get zero, probability-wise. This may send him off on a wild spree. Perhaps taking all of middle-western North America with him.”
The speed of pruning the network increases asymptotically as well as exponentially. In other words, after a sufficiently large number of attempts, the process proceeds extremely quickly. That is the result that James and his cohorts have achieved. When blockages appear in the network, they point to events in the distant future, but this is of no use in reaching even a general valuation based on a small number of attempts. The situation will eventually reach a turning point if the battle goes on for an overwhelmingly long time.
Maybe, anyway. If the process can continue without getting bogged down, it may eventually lead to an avalanche situation that will wipe away everything.
The total annihilation of the entire network will take place within a finite time period.
That was the most positive result achieved by James and his cohorts. Whether this is cause for celebration or for smashing one’s head into a keyboard is not clear. Finite means nothing more than “not infinite.” No theory is available on when, specifically, the avalanche might occur.
Doing battle means executing the calculations once a day, assuming that actions on this scale can be performed daily, for a length of time that we might as well call forever. The staff surrounding the spot can be forgiven for bearing expressions that are not particularly cheerful.
Therefore, what Yggdrasil is saying, while not untrue, cannot be termed completely straightforward either.
James understands the paradox of the problem the staff members are asking about.
The plan is to destroy the nodes of space-time, to take an existing gelatin confection and turn it back into the gelatinous raw material it may once have been. If the plan succeeds, space-time will be restored. In other words, space-time will once again be a one-way street. The plan itself is not very concerned about past or future; its goal is simply to destroy the nodes of space-time distortion. By using various forms of feedback and feedforward, the plan’s ultimate aim is to restore space-time to a more suitable form with a more stable structure.
The plan is predicated on the notion that a singular space-time will exist at some time in the future. In other words, if the plan succeeds, its success will be made manifest in the future. The plan will succeed by basing its operations on what is already known from the future. Honestly, though, James himself does not get this.
This campaign will go on virtually forever. It will persist as long as Yggdrasil continues, into a future universe where James and the rest of the staff will no longer be around. Somewhere out there, on the far edge of some fragment of time, time will once again reunite along a single axis and spread from there. And then, there will no longer be an infinite number of different clocks in the universe, there will be just one clock, continuing to tick away the passage of time.
This will be the deterministic cosmos where the current multiple, competing universes will be reunited. While this is in accordance with the perverse order of the multiverse as a whole, it is difficult for humans to grasp just what those other universes are. What the giant corpora of knowledge are attempting to do is to reintegrate this crazed multiverse into a single universe.