Okay, really, really quick and dirty hijack of The One Who Knocks' timeline altered with a shift in perspective. And lacking a bunch of data because I'll make a better one when I have more time. And with a bad choice of yellow because I'm a fool, and not at my own home with Photoshop. Paint 4 lyf.
I've left out the specific history details (eg: Comstock founding Columbia, etc), and excluded the part with the gunsmith (I don't feel it's overly essential to understand perspective, but more exposition of the tear concept), focusing more on the timelines themselves.
The main reason I re-arranged it is to focus on
perspective. Considering we're dealing with quantum multiverse philosophy, understanding Booker's perspective
in the game, the only one that matters to the player, is quite important. It stems from theories of quantum immortality. No matter how many timelines or universes there are. No matter how many variables. You will only ever be able to see from your own: a sequence of events and patterns interconnected. And I mean that literally.
We as human beings in this world will only ever perceive the flow of time and the universe itself within the time we are alive. We cannot perceive before. And we will not perceive other. The universe only exists as long as we exist, after which we and time itself become nothing, and cease to have ever existed before. Literal nothingness, no time nor space, was before the Big Bang. And should our universe collapse, or bounce, so too will all time and space of this existence become nothingness. No trace left behind. No memory, no history. Time itself having never existed at all. Yet here we are, in the now, real and perceiving it.
As was said earlier by others and more eloquently, what it means to "be" and perceive time and the universe is one of the greatest of all philosophical quandaries. And the philosophy quandary of "meaning" is older than time itself.
The equatorial line is the perspective of Booker in BioShock Infinite, and the only one we can ever know and experience. Colours represent new universes/timelines/dimensions. Lines outside the equatorial represent universes/timelines/dimensions with known events happening parallel to Booker's perspective elsewhere.
Imagine printing it out and connecting it in a circle. It's missing the key point of what happens at the very end, what happens
after the drowning. But as I said earlier, I view this as an inherently paradoxal universe collapsing the moment it came into existence, if it comes into existence at all. It is inherently paradoxal as the total sum of all constants and variables conflict and result in a situation where the universe is erased (Elizabeth's end-game doings). We still perceive events happening in a linear sequence because time and consciousness are funny things. Again, like our own universe: with nothing before and nothingness after, does what happen in the middle, reduced to zero, really "matter"? What "is"?
And if you want, you could almost look at the entire chain of events like a mini Big Bang. Take a new line and draw it
down from the equator. Call that the timeline where Booker has Anna and lives on without interference. A universe born from paradox, because a paradox by nature cannot exist.