Another perspective on the story

[Count von Bunnyhopven]

I had a different interpretation of the story in SIGNALIS than what I have seen others write about. Very different! And I wanted to talk about it. It comes down to an old depiction of the King in Yellow that I read about a long time ago. I dont even remember the story, but the the description was very interesting.

In it the King in Yellow is a being that barters and offers deals to people that are unlucky enough to encounter him. The king will give you material things or help in your current endeavor and in return he will take "commensurate" payment in you potential future. And I dont mean that he will come back in the future and claim interest, I mean that he will claim you potential, you destiny, your luck. The things you could have become but never will. If you barter away too much of your destiny you might cease to exist! You might cease to ever have existed and all the impact you have had on the world will also disappear. Enough of it and your descendants and family and land that you own might also go away.

If enough people in a city barters away their destinies then the city itself will stop existing and will have no trace left of it. The rest of the populations are tied to the cities destiny and will disappear as well. They will go in to the realm of the king and become his subjects.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I think thats pretty much what happens in this story as well. The Replikas are not clones, they are alternative reality versions of the person they are based on. This is why they have to seal their memories and prevent things that can cause those memories from resurfacing. And why every Replica is said be a bit different despite being copied from the same template. This is also true for some Gestalts. Several different versions of the same person seem to exist in the same timeline, albeit born at different times in different places. They are not reincarnations because several can exist at the same time.

The King gives you alternative versions of yourself in exchange for your destiny. And this causes reality to wear thin to the point that several versions of the same person can exist at the same time.

Anyway. Finally on to what happens in the game. I suspect that the Empress of the Empire was a psyker (bioresonant) of some kind and managed to contact an otherworldly entity and made a bargain with it. That bargain allowed her to become Empress and because her destiny was so grand, the price she paid extended to her entire realm. She gained the ability to create Replicas and use those to quickly create a huge army and an enormous amount of extra workers. Possibly she made the deal to avoid some kind of calamity?

Later on another version of the Empress became the Great Revolutionary Leader of the Eusan Nation which rebelled against the Empire. She did again do a new deal with the entity in order to get the power to overthrow the empire. The Empress might have been dead at this point however.

The price they paid for this was again the new nations future. This is why it is so bleak and hopeless. No mater how long time pass it can not seem to develop past a DDR-like society. It can also not seem to develop new technology in many areas and are stuck in the 1980's outside of the development of better Replicas and space ships.

That might seem strange, but maybe the physical potential for better tech have been bargained away? The nation and its inhabitants no longer have much of a future or potential for improvement and it grow worse the more Replikas that are created.

[Count von Bunnyhopven]

Anyway! On to the actual story and happenings of the game! If you have gotten this far I assume you dont care about spoilers.

The story starts on Leng where the fabric of reality between different timelines and between the real world and the realm of the King wears thin. The story is confusing because it actually takes place over at least three different different timelines that are merged together. Or I assume there are at least 3 different timelines as you can find three different journals from ADLER which describes the same events in a different way. Might be other, minor timelines too. There are also three different main endings. But I dont think they relate to the three timelines.

These three timelines are:
1: Ariane grows up on Leng, but move to Rotfront where she attend a military academy. She fails to become anything special and she ends up back on Leng as a worker in the Sirpenski facility.
2: This timeline she succeeds in joining the Penrose program. The ship she is flying is badly maintained however and it crash lands on Leng.
3: Same as 2, but this time “someone” have fixed the ship so that it continues to work and they continue on their exploration mission out in to space.

The story starts with timeline 2 and the ship crashes outside Sirpenski facility on Leng. The main character Elster can not find Ariane and thus go out to look for her and stumbles inside the facility. Or some other facility and is teleported to Sirpenski. Its unclear. Here she has entered timeline 1 and is actually following the trail of Ariane from that timeline.

Eventually she reaches the bottom where she refuses her fate, enters instrumentality from Evangelion and go back in time to fix the ship so she wont crash.

Even later she ends up on Rotfront where she confronts Ariane's past and her connection to Falke, who I think is a Replica based on The Empress/Revolutionary Leader who have a connection to both Ariane and whoever Elster was supposed to be based on. The Empress seem to have died by her own hands the day after she married...

I assume that the endings either takes place in timeline 3 or in a separate place altogether. After all, they never had a future left anyhow.

[Koanos]

Originally posted by Count von Bunnyhopven:

Anyway! On to the actual story and happenings of the game! If you have gotten this far I assume you dont care about spoilers.

The story starts on Leng where the fabric of reality between different timelines and between the real world and the realm of the King wears thin. The story is confusing because it actually takes place over at least three different different timelines that are merged together. Or I assume there are at least 3 different timelines as you can find three different journals from ADLER which describes the same events in a different way. Might be other, minor timelines too. There are also three different main endings. But I dont think they relate to the three timelines.

These three timelines are:
1: Ariane grows up on Leng, but move to Rotfront where she attend a military academy. She fails to become anything special and she ends up back on Leng as a worker in the Sirpenski facility.
2: This timeline she succeeds in joining the Penrose program. The ship she is flying is badly maintained however and it crash lands on Leng.
3: Same as 2, but this time “someone” have fixed the ship so that it continues to work and they continue on their exploration mission out in to space.

The story starts with timeline 2 and the ship crashes outside Sirpenski facility on Leng. The main character Elster can not find Ariane and thus go out to look for her and stumbles inside the facility. Or some other facility and is teleported to Sirpenski. Its unclear. Here she has entered timeline 1 and is actually following the trail of Ariane from that timeline.

Eventually she reaches the bottom where she refuses her fate, enters instrumentality from Evangelion and go back in time to fix the ship so she wont crash.

Even later she ends up on Rotfront where she confronts Ariane's past and her connection to Falke, who I think is a Replica based on The Empress/Revolutionary Leader who have a connection to both Ariane and whoever Elster was supposed to be based on. The Empress seem to have died by her own hands the day after she married...

I assume that the endings either takes place in timeline 3 or in a separate place altogether. After all, they never had a future left anyhow.

So from what I understand, all roads lead to ruin? Is there a happy ending? Or a satisfying one after all they've been through?

[Wind_Falcon]

There are no multiple timelines. There's multiple sets of memories Elster can't differentiate between in her breaking down state (blue hair Gestalt, "iconic white armor" LSTR, and Elster's own, though they don't play as big a role in the narrative).
The beginning crash we see in the snow is actually a memory from the previous LSTR unit, confirmed in a readable where it says it was recovered from a Penrose decommissioned unit. Which is also why we can play through events on Rotfront, these are obviously neither Elster nor Ariane's memories, as we uncover info that neither of them knew or there was even a way for them to know. It's past memories that belonged to someone else (probably again the white armor LSTR, though potentially maybe even the Gestalt).
Due to persona degradation, Synchronicity and Pareidolia, Elster continuously confuses objects, people and events between these memories. Which is why the switcheroo with Alina and Ariane in the beginning with the photo happens. But is by no means the only confused character (Ariane-Falke-Empress-Great Revolutionary and her daughter is another set of distinct unrelated characters that have begun melding together in Elster's mind) or event chronology in the game.
The same thing is happening to ADLR as well, which is why almost everything he says is actually a red herring and an intentional misdirection (especially everything about loops).

[Count von Bunnyhopven]

Originally posted by Wind_Falcon:

There are no multiple timelines. There's multiple sets of memories Elster can't differentiate between in her breaking down state (blue hair Gestalt, "iconic white armor" LSTR, and Elster's own, though they don't play as big a role in the narrative).
The beginning crash we see in the snow is actually a memory from the previous LSTR unit, confirmed in a readable where it says it was recovered from a Penrose decommissioned unit. Which is also why we can play through events on Rotfront, these are obviously neither Elster nor Ariane's memories, as we uncover info that neither of them knew or there was even a way for them to know. It's past memories that belonged to someone else (probably again the white armor LSTR, though potentially maybe even the Gestalt).
Due to persona degradation, Synchronicity and Pareidolia, Elster continuously confuses objects, people and events between these memories. Which is why the switcheroo with Alina and Ariane in the beginning with the photo happens. But is by no means the only confused character (Ariane-Falke-Empress-Great Revolutionary and her daughter is another set of distinct unrelated characters that have begun melding together in Elster's mind) or event chronology in the game.
The same thing is happening to ADLR as well, which is why almost everything he says is actually a red herring and an intentional misdirection (especially everything about loops).

No, I'm pretty sure there are either alternative timelines or at least time travel. Take two of the endings for example which happens in timeline 3. You enter an old and decrepit version of the Penrose that never crashed. You could argue that it is a different ship and that you see it from the perspective of that different ships Elster. But that does not work because you can already find the corpse of that Elster on that ship. Which makes sense because you have read in a note already that the Elster of that time should already be dead. But not the player character because you are from timeline 2.

In fact, the previous episode when we went back in time to the Penrose you can explore the ship. But not the starting area where Elster sleeps and where we start the game. Because that area is locked off. But I would bet that the Elster from that time is sleeping in there and the Ariane here mistakes us for her.

During this trip back in time the player conducts a number of maintenance tasks to proceed and in doing so saves the ship. Something the other Elster should have done but probably slept through. By doing this you create Timeline 3 branching off from Timeline 2.

I'm not quite as sure about timeline 1 as that could theoretically have been another case of two versions of the same person existing several times in the same timeline. But later the player gets sent even further back in time to Rotfront to confront Arianes past. (And possibly change it from Timeline 1 to Timeline 2. But I have weaker evidence for this.)

From what we know she was born on Leng but moved to Rotfront as a child. Thus its possible that the event that shifted Timeline 1 to 2 could have occurred even earlier in the story. I would have to replay the game to be sure...

Oh yea, most of the events probably dont take place in reality. They take place in the kings realm. From the things that the king has already taken as payment. The pasts and the futures that will never happen. Thus they are often just disjointed and corrupted shards of the real thing. But they might also connect to reality in places.

[Count von Bunnyhopven]

Originally posted by Koanos:

So from what I understand, all roads lead to ruin? Is there a happy ending? Or a satisfying one after all they've been through?

There are four endings. They are satisfying I guess, in a bittersweet way. But none of of them are happy endings as such.

[Wind_Falcon]

The problem with all of that is that there is zero textual evidence that even suggest different timelines or time travel. On the contrary the game is very explicit with the limits of bioresonance ('Bioresonance Technology and its Limitations'), even in the last 1.2 update a new readable was added that further gives concrete limits to what bioresonance can and can't do ('Resonant Phenomena'). And time travel, dimension travel, creating different dimensions/timelines etc. are not mentioned in any way, direct or indirect.

What we have instead, black on white in the game, paints a very clear picture.

Put in the simplest and shortest way:
1. The playable narrative is experienced though Elster's subjective first person point of view. This is not a game that follows the omniscient third person narrative perspective that most media does. We see this with the boot up screen right at the very beginning of the game, we see it with the blue screen of death when we get killed by monsters, and we see it with the reboot in the fake out ending, among many other examples. And like many such first person stories, she is an unreliable narrator. Almost everything we see is happening inside Elster's mind, a mix between hallucination, delusion, reality and (false) memory.
2. Elster and Ariane are stuck on a Penrose ship that is breaking down and leaking radiation from it's reactor due to reaching it's end of operational life before they could find an inhabitable planet. This is why Ariane gets sick, has hair and teeth falling out etc. It's radiation poisoning. We also know the Replikas don't live as long as humans.
3. From the unopened letter on the Penrose ('Replika Known Issues: Penrose Program'), we know Ariane not only never took proper steps, but actively made all the wrong ones when it comes to Elster's persona stabilization. So Elster is in full persona degradation mode by the time they are at the end of their rope.
4. From all the readables describing each Replika unit and other events we have a very good idea of what persona degradation does. They become unable to differentiate between what is happening to them in the moment, their past memories, and the Gestalt memories their psyches are based on. This is Synchronicity. Which is why the first chapter is named that - it's pretty on the nose on the part of the devs. They are telling us exactly what and why it's happening, what that sudden and confusing jump at the beginning is. This is also happening to ADLR, which is why he keeps thinking he's in a loop with the same LSTR unit. He's not, these are all completely different units which he can't differentiate between as well. The game explains this with the whole Kolibri investigation, the LSTR unit that was to come to Sierpinsky but supposedly didn't, and the LSTR unit ADLR actually sees in the facility. This is the purpose of this whole sub-plot.
5. There are two extremely important readables among those related to Replikas. One explains that a Vinetan soldier was used for the Gestalt of the first LSTR units ('Replika Known Issues, Penrose Program'), and the other explains that that neural pattern was lost, and newer models of LSTR units are based on a Penrose decommissioned one ('Replika Overview: LSTR'). From this we can deduce what kind of memories and confusion between them we can expect. The original Gestalt is the person with blue hair next to Alina Seo in the photo (the evidence for this is vast, so I won't go over it here). This is important, because it now gives us context as to what an LSTR unit with a degrading persona might do. And of course, the moment we see "Penrose decommissioned unit" alarm bells should be ringing in our heads. At the start of the game, we see a Penrose ship on a snow planet, going out looking for a person, who looks like Alina Seo in the photo we take... I mean it can't get any more obvious that that. That's only the first layer though.
6. The final big key to understanding everything comes from the safe puzzle, a puzzle relatively late in the game, right before the crescendo in the narrative with the fake ending. You have a safe with a letter combination, it says I think 'ADLR' when you first approach it, and on the wall next to it, on a butterfly case (not the first time we've seen butterflies either, which is again not a coincidence) we get the phrase Pareidolia - seeing patterns between unrelated phenomena. This can almost alone explain most of the game, and especially what we are seeing, and ADLR's behavior. The switch with Alina and Ariane in the photo in the beginning. The confusion between Falke and Ariane, so on and so on. Elster in her mind is beginning to meld distinct characters and events, and draws parallels between them that actually don't exist. The game is intentionally creating this initial misdirection, and this is the clue that helps us break it. Which is again why it's important to be aware of when certain info is given to us relative to each other.
7. Now with all of the above knowledge, we can very easily explain what is happening. Ariane is in the cryopod, in a terrible state where she can neither die nor be at peace, she is slowly dying horribly from radiation poisoning, trapped in there (and Avalon, which is the island we keep seeing the painting of, and is also the first person section island we go to, is a symbolic representation of this). Elster is completely breaking down, her mind is experiencing shut downs, reboots, crashes etc. In that state she is in complete delirium between all the sets of memories she has in her mind, confusing them, melding them, etc. She can't understand what is happening to her, what is real, what is a memory of hers with Ariane, of someone else with Alina, and what is a fabrication between all of these. Which gets us to the driving force behind the narrative. "Wake up". "Keep the promise". What are those about? The promise Elster and Ariane made is that if things get bad, they will go out together, they wont abandon each other and suffer alone. This is the promise. All the regular endings revolve around this. Elster becomes lucid enough to at least open the cryopod and end it. Which is also why all the endings revolve around remembering. It's not simply whether Elster remembers her actual moments with Ariane, but whether the player can decipher the mystery as well.

With this you can explain the major gist of the plot and narrative of the game. Now I immediately confess that not everything is as easy to piece together. In a sense the game has two major narrative threads - one is Elster and really more so Ariane's story, and the other is the greater story of the world and background lore. The first one is relatively easier to understand, with minor exceptions like Isa which either which way you think about her don't really impact any of the above. The world building and background lore is a bit harder, especially when it comes to the eldritch connection. This is most likely the result of the game going through a massive narrative overhaul during development, from what we know it seems a lot of the background non-Ariane and Elster stuff comes from those previous iterations of the story (Huang siblings, Rebecca, the totalitarian elements etc.), so it makes sense how these are left in the background and don't impact the new story the devs settled on telling.

There is more stuff I can explain, like the Red Eye etc. but again, the rest are minor details once you wrap your head around the major mystery and its mechanics.

[Count von Bunnyhopven]

This is a good answer, but I'm still not convinced.

Originally posted by Wind_Falcon:

The problem with all of that is that there is zero textual evidence that even suggest different timelines or time travel. On the contrary the game is very explicit with the limits of bioresonance ('Bioresonance Technology and its Limitations'), even in the last 1.2 update a new readable was added that further gives concrete limits to what bioresonance can and can't do ('Resonant Phenomena'). And time travel, dimension travel, creating different dimensions/timelines etc. are not mentioned in any way, direct or indirect.

This relies entirely on whether the things that are written down are the "Words of God" or if they are information pamphlets designed and written by the people in the world. Its entirely possible that this communist nation has no idea of what Bioresonance is capable of, or if they do, might keep that information secret to a select few. Just like most other information in a communist society.

Originally posted by Wind_Falcon:

What we have instead, black on white in the game, paints a very clear picture.

Put in the simplest and shortest way:
1. The playable narrative is experienced though Elster's subjective first person point of view. This is not a game that follows the omniscient third person narrative perspective that most media does. We see this with the boot up screen right at the very beginning of the game, we see it with the blue screen of death when we get killed by monsters, and we see it with the reboot in the fake out ending, among many other examples. And like many such first person stories, she is an unreliable narrator. Almost everything we see is happening inside Elster's mind, a mix between hallucination, delusion, reality and (false) memory.

Yes, but if so, why do we see another dead Elster unit in the ship before the ending?
I'm not doubting that the world colored by her hallucinations, I'm just not sure that she is not also in a place where what you imagine becomes real to a degree.

Originally posted by Wind_Falcon:

2. Elster and Ariane are stuck on a Penrose ship that is breaking down and leaking radiation from it's reactor due to reaching it's end of operational life before they could find an inhabitable planet. This is why Ariane gets sick, has hair and teeth falling out etc. It's radiation poisoning. We also know the Replikas don't live as long as humans.

3. From the unopened letter on the Penrose ('Replika Known Issues: Penrose Program'), we know Ariane not only never took proper steps, but actively made all the wrong ones when it comes to Elster's persona stabilization. So Elster is in full persona degradation mode by the time they are at the end of their rope.

That being bad depends entirely on if Personality Degradation is something that actually cause insanity.

This is again a question of whether you trust the information from the pamphlets as being the word of god. I personally think its just a picture in to what the people of the world think and feel about things rather than absolute truth. And because they live in a communist dictatorship you will get communist propaganda.

And one type of propaganda that the Soviet union would spread was that anyone who questions the state was mentally ill. Soviet had more interned schizophrenics than the rest of the world combined. Because a lot of people who questioned authority in any way was labeled insane and locked up.

I think its the same here. Replikas are created through what they think is making a copy of a person. But I personally believe they are summoning another version of a person from another timeline. Then they scrub those memories and insert new ones in order to make them compliant.

When they break down and have Personality Degradation, what happens is that they recover their old memories and stop being compliant slaves. This is the Soviet/DDR definition of insanity.

Originally posted by Wind_Falcon:

4. From all the readables describing each Replika unit and other events we have a very good idea of what persona degradation does. They become unable to differentiate between what is happening to them in the moment, their past memories, and the Gestalt memories their psyches are based on. This is Synchronicity. Which is why the first chapter is named that - it's pretty on the nose on the part of the devs. They are telling us exactly what and why it's happening, what that sudden and confusing jump at the beginning is. This is also happening to ADLR, which is why he keeps thinking he's in a loop with the same LSTR unit. He's not, these are all completely different units which he can't differentiate between as well. The game explains this with the whole Kolibri investigation, the LSTR unit that was to come to Sierpinsky but supposedly didn't, and the LSTR unit ADLR actually sees in the facility. This is the purpose of this whole sub-plot.

I dont think we know much about it actually.

Anyway, there is an Easter egg at the end of the game that explains all of this. There is a long tunnel with messages on the floor on your way to the final boss. One from Adler tells you to "Turn back, there is nothing for you here." If you do as you are told and try to go back to the save room you will instead end up in in Adlers office back at Sierpinski. But instead of just one copy of Adlers journal you will find 3. You will also find a document with a list of excavation members and an Elster is on it.

These journals cover the same days and mostly the same events, but they have differences. They actually covers three different timelines. Not the same as my three above, but journal nr 3 overlaps with my timeline nr 1. In Journal nr 1 Falke orders a new Elster unit to the site to help with the excavation. She arrives and works with Adler. In the third Journal Falke is sick and can't order one. Because that is the same timeline that Kolibri read his mind, she became confused. She saw a memory of him working on Sierpinski with the Elster unit despite the fact that this unit never existed in the facility. Also keep in mind that Kolibri's notes were written before our Elster entered the facility. So he could not have confused the two.

The reasonable explanation is that Adlers mind get memories from other timelines as the station grows more and more funky. Whether this is because of "Synchronicity" or because of the creature below I will leave unsaid.

Just to make this more confusing I will label these two new timelines as "Timeline 0" and Timeline -1.

More to come.

[Wind_Falcon]

Well, first we have to lay down what our methodology is.

I come at this from the point of view of laying down all "facts" of the game. By this I don't meant that all facts are "truth" - some might be intentional misdirection or red herrings. I just mean in the sense that at point A in the game we see/read/experience etc. X, Y or Z.

Once I have all of this layed out, I start cross-referencing everything to see if I can single out where the misdirection is (the odd thing out), and where the more "truthy" parts are. What sort of pattern emerges. What are the mysteries the game presents, and what are the clues/hints they gives us as keys to those mysteries. Now, we must remember that the game doesn't operate on a purely overt, textual level however. It employs symbolism, visual metaphor, and subtext to carry its meaning as well. An example of this is, near the beginning of the game, we find a key inside a butterfly box. In the last third, we find a box with a butterfly in it, with the phrase "Pareidolia". The phrase is the key inside the box. This is the visual metaphor. it's a direct callback. And instead of opening a door, it opens up new avenues of looking at the narrative. Like I said before, the chronological place of these "facts" the game gives us has to be considered. On a first playthrough, where the mystery for the player is the most enigmatic, they probably wouldn't make much note of this. But on a second run, with the knowledge of the entire game with them, including the endings, this can completely redefine how you view the events. Which is why I think this is a big clue on the parts of the developers. There's too much intent, detail and attention put into this to be of little importance. This is just one example of how we can deduce with confidence which parts are more important than others. It's not a random hunch, it's something the devs have lampshaded for us, and it's also important to note how subtle they are about presenting clues and keys, while how obvious they are regarding the mysteries (the switcheroo with the photo being a good example of this).

Now, what you are saying is absolutely technically possible. But you run into an issue. You pick up a few events, and come up with a plausible way that they can be explained. The problem comes when you try to find unambiguous textual evidence for what you are suggesting + having to explain everything else that might not conform to this explanation, including the parts that make sense together and suggest a different reading.

In the end it boils down to possible vs probable explanations.

I'm the first to admit I can't explain absolutely everything regarding the game. And there are indeed some parts that seemingly go against what I lay down. Why I have a strong confidence regarding what I'm saying in relation to other people's theories however is - I always try to stay at least close to a direct textual link with anything I am suggesting. In a sense I'm trying to find the simplest method of making sense of the facts that the game presents us. And I think the above through-line I suggest is backed up by the game in a way that most other theories simply aren't, despite whatever is left that I can't explain or incorporate into it (yet).

And again, we have to pay attention to structure and view things from the perspective of the devs. There is a reason why the most overt things shown to us come from ADLR in cutscenes with direct dialogue. But are these scenes meant to establish the mysteries, the questions (What is he saying? Is what he is saying true?), or are they the answers to everything else in the game? From a structural pov, it just makes more sense for the devs to use the direct approach to establish the questions, and then bury the answers in these layered symbols, readables and images, rather than the other way around. In many instances, these sub-plots that seemingly don't have anything to do directly with Elster and Ariane's story on the Penrose (the Kolibris investigation, the spy on Rotfront, etc.), are exactly the clues and hints the devs establish so that we can make sense of the narrative. If they weren't important, just manufactured, red herrings - why would they spend so much time, effort and nuance on them? They do spend a lot of time telling us about stuff that in your timelines reading are at best filler and time-wasters - they don't add anything to the overall narrative of the game, especially if you take the stance that many of the readables are in some way fake or forged or made up.

Regarding the multiple dead LSTR units we see throughout the game, for me the explanation is very simple. Multiple units had gone through persona degradation, and when they do, they start searching for Alina Seo (due to the original Gestalt memories). Where is Alina Seo though? On Sierpinsky. Where do we see most of these dead LSTR units, and where does ADLR supposedly see the same Elster over and over? On Sierpisnky.

Again, this can't just be a coincidence, or unintentional on the devs part. They set the mystery first (in this case the mystery is related to whose memories does Elster have, what is the connection with Alina Seo, hence the photo in the beginning, which is also why we only see Alina on the photo and the Gesltalt's part of the image is destroyed), overtly - multiple dead LSTR units. They give this overt possible explanation - loops (from ADLR's dialogue). But then they pepper around all these other details. Regarding ADLR they reveal he is also going through persona degradation. I think in the elevator cuscenes (or maybe it's somewhere else) he even comments why Elster doesn't have her white armor. Again, this is not an insignificant detail. They (the devs) reveal info about the two distinct sets of memories used for the LSTR units. They reveal info about Synchronicity. They reveal the limits of Bioresonance. They reveal info regarding Pareidolia etc. etc.

When you put everything on the scale, on one hand you have ADLR's word, whom the game has established as just as unreliable and confused, and everything else. At one point one just has to come to the conclusion that the game, textually, in terms of evidence, gives you a lot more details in support of my reading, rather than the dream loops/timelines/dimensions which most people talk about.