I've got something for you, but I can't write it now becuase of that GDC live video thing on, but I think it might satisfy you. Think of Comstock and his rapid aging for now.

So here we go. The trans-dimensional travel is not depending on a specific time or location. We saw throughout the game that the tears that Elizabeth opens are not depending on the location they are currently in. She does not open a tear to 20 minutes ago or 1 hour in the future or even a perpendicular step into a new reality. The time and place that they go to is independent of those factors.

That gate she opens to Paris at the start of the game has no relation to her current position in space. It opened a tear into a particular reality of Paris that has nothing to do with her particular time.

When she's trying to escape from Booker at Fink Manufacturing she opens several tears to simply bring in new objects into their reality to impede his progress. She does the same to help you in the game. They are simply variations from different realities with no relation to the time that they exist within their own reality.

The situation with Chen Lin should clearly shows that they did not travel in time to fix that situation. They completely left their own universe to go into a Columbia where Chen Lin did not die because he was white and not Asian. What form of time travel creates that situation? They could have gone to the moment right before they started the torture, but they didn't because they couldn't.

Toward the end of the game she demonstrates the ability to open a tear into some midwest location with a tornado. Keep in mind they are still in the sky. The time and space that the tears reveal have no connection to her current time or location.

We saw the effect that the dimensional machine had on Comstock by making him sterile and speeding up the breakdown of his body. Lutece points out that not every version of Comstock suffers the same effects. His "time" was not changed. He did not percieve the world around him as being faster or slower. His body simply started to break down as a result of the exposure.

At the end of the game we see that Elizabeth has gained the sort of the control over the multiverse that the Twins seem to have. You see them seemingly move together to the rowing scene and the Lutece's even comment on the futility of their situation. They are not picking a particular moment in time to go back to. They are selecting a specific reality and a specific point in that reality. Booker tells Elizabeth that none of it matters because Comstock is dead. Elizabeth makes no reference to time when she tells him he still exists in millions and millions of worlds.

Your insistence on time travel rests upon the fact that they seemed to create a ripple that prevented the creation of Comstock through the multiverse. Why is that not resolved with the multiverse idea? How is it that every instance in the game tells you "They are jumping between realities" and yet the ending is somehow time travel?

I would like to see DLC that explores Infinite's stinger. Here's how I think it would work:

1. The game established that people brought back to life by a Tear recalled some of their alternate existence.

2. A lot of people died during the events in Columbia. When Elizabeth drowned Booker (assuming it acted like a giant Tear), they all came back to life.

3. What if they vaguely remember being in Columbia?

4. What if some of them start a cult around it?

I see them kidnapping Anna and dragging her to a ghostly Columbia, with Booker in hot pursuit.

You guys are thinking of time and space as two diffrent things. You need to think of them as one thing.

Time is space, and space is time.

So, there are infinite Elizabeths running around, right? I'd like a new tonic that lets me shoot Elizabeths out of my arm.

Time travel is similar to the multiverse idea, but it's not quite the same. Female Lutece refers to time as an ocean, rather than a river, meaning it isn't linear. Elizabeth has the power to open tears or portals to ANY universe at ANY time, because in the multiverse, they exist simultaneously. This is visualized literally at the end, in the sea of lighthouses. They are ALL doors to other universes at any given branch in time. She opens a door to the branch where the Booker/Comstock split happens. So yes, they are traveling through time in a sense, but also to another universe. This isn't exact science, but that's how the game presents it as I see it.

So, here goes. Does Booker have something to do with Rapture? Every place Elizabeth took him to via a door, was from Booker's life. I don't think Rapture would of been in the game just as a HEY REMEMBER THIS GAME?? moment. While it's largely impossible for be Andrew Ryan (age, ethnicity, etc), I wouldn't put it past Irrational to explain it.

Possibly, the Booker who wakes up prior to giving Anna to the Luteces, keeps his memories, and decides all types of religion and government is a sham and sets off to create his own world, inspired by what he saw in Rapture.

Here is the best I could to do to explain why your statements do not refute time travel at the end;

Goddammit people, you look at time like a two dimensional thing. Why can't time and space be connected? Why can't dimensional travel, and time travel have a lot in common? Why can't the Lutece's travel in time between dimensions? They say time is not a river, it's more like an ocean in game, so what's the problem? It's possibly beyond "normal" comprehension how quantum transdimensional time travel mechanics work, so stop thinking about it! It's fiction, not fact!

@0blivion said:

It's not just an easter egg. It's there to ilustrate the lines about "A lighthouse, a city, a man" and "variables and constants". The plot of BioShock Infinite is a direct combination of elements from BioShock 1 & 2: a man with false memories (Jack/Booker) who is also a father (Delta/Booker) arrives at a lighthouse (Jack/Booker) from which he is transported to a strange city (Rapture/Columbia). The city is ruled by a visionary persona (Ryan-Lamb/Comstock) to whom he has a connection (son/alternate self). The persona believes in a radical doctrine (Objectivism-absolute collectivism/Exceptionalism) and later betrays his principles. Plus, the persona kills his lover after she makes a move against him (Ryan's mistress selling his child to Fontaine/Lady Comstock threatening to make a stir about Elizabeth's true parentage). In the city, he has to save a girl, who is also his daughter (The Little Sisters-Eleanor/Elizabeth). She is held captive by her crazed parent (Lamb/Comstock) so he can transform her into a greater being (Old Elizabeth/The Utopian). Oh, and there is a guardian hindering the man on his way (Big Daddy/Songbird). He also meets a revolutionary figure (Atlas/Daisy) by whom he is betrayed. Those are all constants, with the only absolutes being that in a given universe there's a story beginning with a man arriving at a lighthouse, from which he goes to a city, where he saves a girl and meets a guardian figure.

I'd like to point out that the past is a two dimensional passage of time to the observer - it's only when you consider every universe's observers and superimpose their views of the past that it begins to look like an ocean. The future is almost by definition an ocean as it's an infinite probability space (if you are for some reason transposing the rules of quantum mechanics onto reality, which you shouldn't but the game does).

Plus, it's fun to talk about time and cross dimensional travel : ) - so long as the talks remain civil, of course.

@selfconfessedcynic said:

@golguin said:

@golguin said:

@selfconfessedcynic said:

@golguin said:

Your reasoning is sound, but the game is LITERALLY telling you what it is. The quote at the very start of the game states:

"The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist..."

Barriers to Trans-Dimensional Travel

That line does not rule out a theory of time travel, nor do any of the others that I can find from my recordings list in game. None of the quotes you have given me do, either.

From my stance, Elizabeth and Booker's pursuit of killing Comstock leading to the baptism scene coupled with strong inferences that their act there influenced all future events and probabilities is stronger evidence to me. This evidence suggests that both time travel and cross dimensional travel takes place in this game.

To convince me, you'd have to construct an argument with evidence which supports the idea they only ever move perpendicularly with respect to time from the universe they are in before going through a tear to the universe after such.

I've got something for you, but I can't write it now becuase of that GDC live video thing on, but I think it might satisfy you. Think of Comstock and his rapid aging for now.

So here we go. The trans-dimensional travel is not depending on a specific time or location. We saw throughout the game that the tears that Elizabeth opens are not depending on the location they are currently in. She does not open a tear to 20 minutes ago or 1 hour in the future or even a perpendicular step into a new reality. The time and place that they go to is independent of those factors.

That gate she opens to Paris at the start of the game has no relation to her current position in space. It opened a tear into a particular reality of Paris that has nothing to do with her particular time.

When she's trying to escape from Booker at Fink Manufacturing she opens several tears to simply bring in new objects into their reality to impede his progress. She does the same to help you in the game. They are simply variations from different realities with no relation to the time that they exist within their own reality.

The situation with Chen Lin should clearly shows that they did not travel in time to fix that situation. They completely left their own universe to go into a Columbia where Chen Lin did not die because he was white and not Asian. What form of time travel creates that situation? They could have gone to the moment right before they started the torture, but they didn't because they couldn't.

Toward the end of the game she demonstrates the ability to open a tear into some midwest location with a tornado. Keep in mind they are still in the sky. The time and space that the tears reveal have no connection to her current time or location.

We saw the effect that the dimensional machine had on Comstock by making him sterile and speeding up the breakdown of his body. Lutece points out that not every version of Comstock suffers the same effects. His "time" was not changed. He did not percieve the world around him as being faster or slower. His body simply started to break down as a result of the exposure.

At the end of the game we see that Elizabeth has gained the sort of the control over the multiverse that the Twins seem to have. You see them seemingly move together to the rowing scene and the Lutece's even comment on the futility of their situation. They are not picking a particular moment in time to go back to. They are selecting a specific reality and a specific point in that reality. Booker tells Elizabeth that none of it matters because Comstock is dead. Elizabeth makes no reference to time when she tells him he still exists in millions and millions of worlds.

Your insistence on time travel rests upon the fact that they seemed to create a ripple that prevented the creation of Comstock through the multiverse. Why is that not resolved with the multiverse idea? How is it that every instance in the game tells you "They are jumping between realities" and yet the ending is somehow time travel?

Here is the best I could to do to explain why your statements do not refute time travel at the end;

I feel that this is a dispute over the nature of time where I view time as merely a measurement on the state of the universe and what changes have taken place. I see Elizabeth as opening portals to a universe that has the required variables she needs and the amount of change needed to arrive at her solution. The babtism at the end doesn't happen in any "past" experience by a single Booker. Elizabeth creates a universe that deals with the Comstock variable throughout her multiverse. Really think about the end and how "Booker" was "killed" by different variations of Elizabeth in a space that exists outside of the traditional multiverse. She literally destroyed a variable in a space that should be infinite. It shouldn't be possible, but she has the power to create her own laws.

It's very striking how close her ability is to Madoka. Are you familiar with Puella Magi Madoka Magica? Elizabeth essentially did the same thing.

Give me a moment to collect my thoughts on Madoka, because it's actually the PERFECT example.

One character tries to stop a "thing" from happening by using time travel (traditional form of going backwards in time to a specific point), but fails every time. The solution is only achieved when Madoka takes a hands on approach by literally "killing the variable" for infinity in every possible iteration across the multiverse. She literally becomes a force of nature that exists outside of reality to stop a thing from happening forever...pending the final movie where things might not go according to plan.

I can get into more details of the actual mechanism used to do this, but I think that's enough. It can all be considered "anime bullshit", but it works in the context of that universe.

Yup, you're probably right that this is a dispute revolving around how we each view time.

I view time as a fundamental dimension of the universe, along with the 3 observable dimensions. In the case of quantum mechanics in relation to the many worlds interpretation, the idea is that to solve our issues with quantum superposition, we state that the result we observe upon collapse of the superposition state is but one of the results possible, with the others observed in other universes. Or, in essence, up until that point there is only one version of reality which houses a specific experiment, and only upon observation are other realities formed.

So the probability space looks like one large tree graph with infinite branches, each spawning infinitely more branches, but it is possible to return to a specific divergence if time travel is used. So by my views, this is what happened at the end - they used time travel to return to a branching / juncture point and prevent that set of universes from ever spawning a Comstock.

Elizabeth's ability to do as she wishes with her tears is explained by there likely being a reality which houses something she wants at some time - and her ability allows her to reach across both space and time to take that object. She uses her ability to travel across space and time to fall back on the one fixed point which, when changed, will eliminate Comstock - and many versions of Elizabeth / Booker do this, all having been spawned by the original divergence at that juncture. The reason many iterations of Elizabeth are there at the end is not because of the route they took to get there, but the fact that this is the one point in time where all of those Elizabeths would pick to change the future (in fact, there are many of them because they each took such different routes to get there). There is only one Booker because of reality and memory collapse.

As the juncture is destroyed by killing that specific Booker, the Elizabeths disappear because they have eliminated themselves from the universe.

@selfconfessedcynic: Yeah, people do like them time-travel theories and whatnot.

Ah, I forgot to bring up that particular point about Elizabeth's powers coming from wish fulfillment because Madoka actually MAKES A WISH that alters the state or reality and gives her god like powers over her multiverse by recreating the rules according to her wish...

Madoka: I...*takes a deep breath* I want to erase every witch. Every witch from every world, from the past and the future. With my own hands.

Kyubey: That wish..If your wish is fulfilled, it'll surpass even space-time interference! It violates the law of causality itself! Do you really want to become a god?

Madoka: I don't care what I become. I don't want to let all those girls cry. All those Magical Girls that believed in their hope and fought against witches. I want them to live on with smiles on their faces. I will destroy the rules that prevent that. I will change them. This is my prayer. This is my wish. Fulfill it, Incubator!

Now I like Madoka and Bioshock Infinite even more.

Just wanted to say that this was/is my initial interpretation of the ending as well.

The only question I have is of the coda at the end of the credits. If they went back to that fixed point and killed him before he became Comstock, then Booker would cease to exist too, and any universe with Booker and Anna would have also been erased. That's really the only thing I can't come up with an explanation for, and what makes me consider Golguin's theory.

It seems that "Bioshock" is a series of universes with constants and variables. That there aren't infinite universes for infinite variables, but that there are some key moments, situations, things that become transfixed in time. Junction points from which all universes become further diluted. There is always a lighthouse, a man, a city. The coin will always land heads. He DOESN'T row. I think it's a bit of a Dr. Who take on things.

One constant is that Booker goes to the baptism. The variables that spawn from that constant open up a million million universes. All of the ones that create Elizabeth spawn from one of the two variables. Those Elizabeths all head to that moment in time (shown when walking along the docks between lighthouses), and killed him, severing that branch. So maybe the constant remains, but that variable has been destroyed? I'm not sure. I'm looking at this more from a narrative standpoint than a scientific one, so this might all be gibberish.

The thing I have yet to figure out in my head is the true nature of Elizabeth as a multi dimensional being. Does she possess a hive mind across realities that allows her to communicate with other versions of herself? Are all the Elizabeths in the end completely independent and able to think on their own? If Elizabeth exists outside of the multiverse then how would any change cause her to not exist? If her reality altering powers is shared by an infinite number of Elizabeth individuals how could she trump their abilities and collapse them into a single constant?

There is still much to think about aside from the time travel/inter-dimensional travel interpretations and the extent of her powers.

The post-credits sequence is explained by both the non-time travel and time travel theories as simply taking place in a world where Booker never decided to go to a baptism ceremony in the first place. His surprise at Anna being in her bedroom is due to reality and memory collapse caused by the drowning of "our" Booker.

To elaborate, there are numerous Bookers who likely landed on their feet post Wounded Knee and lead a happy life with his daughter - perhaps in some of those realities, his wife survived the childbirth and they all lead wonderful lives. Levine chose to show us a Booker closer to the one who we were familiar with from the course of the game - one whose wife had died, leaving him a destitute single father.

As to how the above suppositions relate to the concept of there being constants in the universe, consider those constants as only coming to effect after a junction. We are only told about one junction point in Booker's life, but not the preceding ones. It is possible that his decision to enlist (assuming it wasn't conscription) prior to Wounded Knee was a junction point - in the universes that he never enlisted, not rowing couldn't have been a constant, as the situation never arose. In a similar fashion, it is possible that the decision to go to the baptism ceremony in the river was a junction point, so there are possibly Bookers who are very much like our own, but never even came close to spawning a Comstock (it is one of these that I believe we see at the end).

So, in short, I would argue that Booker going to a baptism is not necessarily a constant, as we are not informed about the junction points of his life prior to this event. Conversely, it is a constant in all of the realities involving the Columbia events as this is a common element of all of their pasts.

@golguin: The way I think of it is that all of these Elizabeth's are essentially the same person differentiated by having different experiences. There is no hive mind because by the end of the game they have all become aware of everything that has or will be as well as every variation therein. Each Elizabeth comes from a different reality, but each is for the most part the same person and now has a sense of omniscience because of knowing all this and so they all come to the same conclusions.

About the Lucetes: They knew that Comstock would resort to any extreme measure to keep secrets and The Prophet narrative going. So instead of ending up dead they went on a little trip. :) To get out of their jam they would need to find a version of Booker that could rescue Elizabeth and together destroy the Siphon.

What both Lucetes were up to could be an interesting focus for a DLC but I'm not sure how far they could go with it. After all they got their wish so any other versions of Booker and Elizabeth are superfluous.

That is a good way to look at it. Their omniscience would lead them to become the same person, but what if some Alt Elizabeths just want everything to burn upon knowing everything? Would omniscience always lead to a "good" Elizabeth? Is God "good" because everything God does must be "good"?

Just realized something weird that maybe someone can explain to me (also sorry if this is common knowledge): Two things about my game seem to be different from other playthroughs I've seen. One is that in videos I've seen, when Elizabeth wanders off and starts dancing on the pier, the other dancers are all wearing bathing suits, which makes since seeing as they're on a beach and all. When I played, though, all of the dancers were wearing full clothing, just like the NPCs inside the buildings.

A more glaring change is that I had no idea what this "post credits" scene everyone talked about was. Because my game didn't give it too me. I even replayed the end and it still didn't happen. That seems super weird because in the videos I've seen of it, it looks interactive. You control Booker and open the door to Anna's room. That entire segment didn't occur for me. The credits went directly to the main menu, meaning the last visual I had of my playthrough of Bioshock Infinite was Elizabeth blinking out to a black screen followed by credits, while everyone else had this cool Inception-esque moment. I don't know how I should feel about that.

I hope they do something with the girl Constance possibly having powers like Elizabeth because that would be a good play on the Constants and Variables idea.

Get it.

I don't know if this has been stated already but as soon as I read the part about Constance in the OP, I had a stroke of genius. See if the following statement makes you realize anything:

Constance and Variables

Eh? Eh? This somewhat supports the theory that Constance is a younger version of Elizabeth.

@pennyettle: The post LITERALLY right above yours made that joke, over 2 months ago.

@pennyettle: Wow, you basically just copied the guy over you... He made that pun over 2 months ago... Literally right above yours

It's a vicious cycle

It's a deadly circle.

Well damn. Now I just feel retarded.

@pennyettle:

OK im about to answer all your plot holes so bear with me none of these are actually plot holes and i will explain them now.

1. the loop was NOT created by the lucetes its created by booker himself at the time of his baptism after the battle of wounded knee. booker was going to be baptized but then decides not to be therefore in the multiverse there is a universe made where he does get baptized and in bioshock land that is where he renames himself Z comstock and becomes evil... also in that universe the lucetes make the space time ripping machine and by being near it comstock is made sterile and since he cant have kids goes to bookers universe ( the one with no baptism and booker is not evil) and essentially forces booker to give up anna aka elizabeth the child comstock could never have with his wife because of gambling debts or whatever. there is NO way to stop comstock from getting her because even if booker chooses not to give her up comstock will just steal her anyway, this also explains all the versions of her even tho there are only like 5 that drown booker this is symbolizing all the different ways elizabeth looks after being stolen or given up or however comstock has procured her in all the other realities... also reinforced by elizabeth in the crib cutscene where your only choice is to give up the baby cuz it will happen one way or another and has happened many times as denoted by all the tails marking on the lucetes chalk board ( over one hundred )... k so with that in mind the only way to stop the loop is to kill comstock and to do that we need to kill him when he was "born" aka when booker was baptised way back after the wounded knee battle...

WITH ME SO FAR ?

2.constance is a minor character and cannot alter time and space.. she write letters to elizabeth to try and become her pen friend her mother is contemptuous because of constance's studies stemming from being enamored with elizabeth. also on a side note constances name is constancy fields so litter easter egg

constance = constants and variables

fields = lucetes fields

kinda cool but still a minor character

3.elizabeth did not inherit her powers... this is explained in the voxophones...the lucetes made a machine to rip space time then experimented on elizabeth with it thats how she has the powers for the games purposes .... another way to think about it is since she was stolen and her pinky cut off she now "exits" in two universes so being the only person like that that could also be a source of her powers...

4. the lucetes want to rescue elizabeth because with her powers she is the only one who can really kill comstock aka bad booker for real no one else can not even booker himself as denoted by the many "tails" coin flips showing its inevitable that booker will get killed and fail every time..they are not really omniscient but since they have played with tears they are "aware" of themselves in diff universes including ones where comstock actually did kill them many times and has done who knows how many other horrible things by turning their experiments against them and against everyone...

5. yes songbird protected her kinda like booker did but no songbird was created at finks factory and yes it is a brainwashed human but its not booker it is however kyle fitzpatrick from the other games if u go on youtube u can find videos showing he sounds identical to him..

6. yes booker wants to save elizabeth because even tho he is supposed to bring her back and wash away some debt he grows to like her and wants to save her but this is driven by booker's want to get his anna back remember elizabeth is comstocks "creation" booker knows her as anna and by going thru this whole ordeal to save elizabeth its actually an attempt for booker to play the role of saving his anna little does he know that elizabeth somewhere along the line maybe old elizabeth or something has become aware that she is bookers daughter and wants booker to have her back .. booker thinks of saving elizabeth as killing comstock but elizabeth knows that killing comstock(really killing him not just drowning him on his airship, and instead drowning booker at his baptism the place where comstock was "born') will actually give booker anna his daughter back this is why she asks booker if he is really ready to do this in the lighthouses level she also knows that her existence wil be extinguished if this happens. this theory is confirmed by the scene after the credits where after all is said and done elizabeth never actually exists ( because comstock is "killed" and therfore can never come to collect or steal anna from booker experiment on her and turn her into his own daughter elzabeth. lucetes cannot bring booker out of the loop obviously since if they had that power they would just end comstock themselves instead they guide and help booker and elizabeth to do this instead remember they are not related or created by comstock so if comstock is defeated they will still exist, i'm sure they know this....but this also means that that our elizabeth we have been playing alongside for the past few games will never exist which is pretty sad;(

im sorry for the horrible grammar, punctuation and spelling errors but im on my phone and my lunch break so had to be quick lol

Now for some really freaky deeky stuff:

ok so cool we know whats up comstock dead booker has anna back great. but what about the one timeline that you just played?!!!! elizabeth could never have drowned that version of booker / comstock in the river because it would creat a paradox!

Paradox: if no version of comstock ever existed how could he ever come steal anna turn her into elizabeth and have her become a time and space traveler and intervene in the baptism scene?!it's impossible for anyone to do something that results in him/her to not have existed in that exact moment when doing that certain action - if he/she wasn't there, how could he/she do it?. So whatever Elizabeth tries to do in the drowning scene, she will not be able to erase herself. She indeed kills multiple versions of Comstock at that moment, but she cannot kill the one version that took her (and precisely her, not some other version of her) to Columbia.

So bearing this in mind when the screen goes black the last Elizabeth is still there and doesn't disappear!

Possibly, realizing that at least ONE Comstock must remain alive, she just exits from that place, leaving that one reality unaltered in any way.

Or MAYBE, she presents herself to that Booker as being the angel Columbia, telling him that he must accept the baptism and then stride to construct the flying city and its ideals, ensuring that the whole timeline in which she belongs remains intact.

This so-called angel of Columbia that appeared before Comstock is mentioned in the game at several times.

the multiverse be crayy sonnnnnn!