There’s just ONE part of the lore that I can’t figure out..

Okay - so because Falke and Adler and the rest of the Sierpinski crew never had anything to do with Ariane or Lilith, they MUST be real and not just part of Ariane’s projected reality, meaning at least some parts of what we see had to actually happen.

However - the date given for the start of the time loop is 84-21-D, which is Ariane’s 25th birthday. This would be WAY before Ariane goes to sleep for the last time. Even if we ignore the decoded note and that says Ariane survived to cycle 262144, she at least made it to 5555 cycles. That should be somewhere around 15 years, but if Ariane was 16 at the earliest when she first boarded the Penrose, there would only be 9 years before the time loop begins.

Interestingly - 9 years is almost exactly 3,000 cycles, which would put 84-21-D very close to the date of the memory of Ariane and Elster dancing before getting their final orders.

This COMPLETELY throws out the timeline of the game for me. The date given for the game is improbable, and it’s coincidentally also a date that is very important to Ariane (both her birthday and possibly the last day she spent carefree with Elster before all hope was lost). This tells me it’s much more likely the date of the timeloop is yet another projection of Ariane’s mind - maybe an attempt to relive the last time she was happy.

This opens up a lot of possibilities for what year Falk and Adler and the rest of the miners are really from. Maybe they discovered the crashed Penrose decades in the future and the “Red Eye” is just Ariane’s psychic corruption which has been growing as she degrades. There could also be a time travel/manipulation explanation, but either way, the timeline as it’s presented to us doesn’t make much sense.

Has anyone been able to square the timeline? Maybe there’s something I’m missing…