I don't look forward to the day physicists figure out what dark energy is. Right now it's this "We know it's there, but we don't know what it is" thing, so writers can make it whatever they want and only "You can't do that with science" assholes will get upset. This must be like how it was when they had measurements proving microwaves existed but had no way to detect microwaves. Work progressed and we became able to measure them, but there was that gray area in between. I like playing around with dark energy because it's like a connect-the-dots drawing without any instructions telling you which dots connect to which.
I also like Venn diagrams. I can't really explain that one so much. Who doesn't like Venn diagrams? It gets a capital V and two Ns and that's just fun. Plus you can shade the overlapping areas in different ways. Different colors, combined colors, hatching, cross-hatching, who knows! Go crazy!
Then yesterday, looking at the platypus/keytar Venn diagram that pops up on Faceboom every now and again, I started thinking about dark energy. Because those things clearly go together. It's not the first time I've imagined dark energy being the energy of the infinite multiverse, the layers upon layers that are so close together as to appear singular but so far apart as to accommodate all the influential choices that a person might make. This time, I started imagining it visually rather than mathematically. If the universe is flat (which it is) and we looked at it as a horizontal plane and then zoomed WAY in so that all these levels of dark energy multiverses could be visible as parallel lines to our universe rather than a singular line, you would be able to see the gray haze of energy that connects them all.
The space between universes is effectively a Venn diagram, a mingled space of energy that can be colored or shaded or cross-hatched or whatever you want. And now imagine if things occasionally passed through that Venn diagram, slipping from one universe where it belonged to one universe where it didn't. It's a common thread in sci-fi (SyFy?) TV shows where you have an agency or secret organization that deals with the fantastical that doesn't belong.
But imagine if science had successfully measured and quantified the different universes (or at least some of them) and you had specialists dedicated to the oddities of each one. The government/secret organization has a building and each floor of that building is dedicated to a different universe. The secret isn't just keeping the truth from the public (X-files style), but keeping the truth from yourselves. The 6th floor doesn't fraternize with the 7th floor because the one deals with ghosts and the other deals with aliens. What happens when you go on a blind date only to discover the person you're with works on a different floor? What happens when you discover an outbreak from two floors at once? What happens when you discover a new universe that warrants a new floor?
This is as far as I got in the ruminating department, but it feels like it could be fun. I will explore it more in the future.