![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mc776(Intro post here)
For reference, here is a list of the photos used for the focuses, in the order taken:
Max's intuitions
When Max sits at the kitchen bar once restoring the world to one in which Bill died in that car accident, she explicitly reflects on how she exists in "two or maybe three different realities". I think she means the one in which Chloe is paralyzed, the one she is in at that moment, and possibly one that she had abandoned by focussing on the Pancakes photo in the very first instance. (As per the previous post, I note she is not counting anything done through rewind.)
We never know for sure just how much the main final change - Max's emotional outburst and final words to Chloe before the focus ends, which then replaces either of the photos that could have been taken at that point (before Max takes a lot more photos in Farewell) - ended up making a difference in Chloe's life. I can only imagine her recalling it once Max tells her what she had done, but that later exchange could go exactly as it did even if she had forgotten it.
She continues throughout the story to struggle (mostly in the journal before the nightmare) with the possibility of leaving behind these alternate realities. But I don't see any jump to a unlikely conclusion not supported by existing facts but still ultimately clearly correct in result like with Chloe on the clifftop, that goes beyond speculation based on her previous readings.
If I seem a bit stubborn in my refusal to take Max's perspective at face value, consider the rival narratives at play:
There really is nothing unequivocally calling for a branching-reality interpretation here, let alone conclusively so, and I think by design.
Cues in the game
Once you've finished Episode 3 the flickering red particle effect appears in the main menu screen, which appears to be lit with the golden hour lighting from the walk with Chloe. Of course this doesn't actually happen ingame and is no less poignant in this context taken metaphorically rather than pointing to an actual diegetic ontological difference at play.
The visual language of the photo sequences is:
The symbolism here is of a single print having its image altered, or at most a layer being burned away revealing the one beneath. What we do not see at any point is two images being visible - even partially - at the same time, or anything containing the old image being put away somewhere. One might conjecture that the old photo is being pulled away (and the new photo being pulled in) along some fourth dimension, but if that were the case we should be seeing all sorts of crinkles given how the effect looks - and we should be able to see an intermediate stage where both images are partially visible as they move past each other; in any event, the physical surface ostensibly bearing the image does not appear to move during the transformation.
As with rewinds, the technological metaphor here is analogue rather than digital: a single medium on which the history is written is rewritten with a new history with nothing to back up the old.
What is not portrayed in the game
Contra one theory I've seen a couple times online: there is no reason to suppose that the first tornado vision at the very beginning of the game is a sign that this was already an alternate timeline created through any known functioning of Max's powers. It happens before the selfie so it could not be the moment of future her entering through a focus; nor is the tornado vision at all shown to typically precede the taking of an image that is used for a focus.
At no point during that week of October 2013 do we see Max suddenly blacking out, then waking up apparently having done or said something unusual without any recollection of doing it or any idea why. We do have frequent references to her spacing out that are easily deniable as signs of ADHD if we are ignorant of the time travel effect; there's no hint that these episodes are in any way connected to her having her picture taken.
Trying to model what is happening
Here is how I see the observed stages:
1. Max focuses on a photo that has her image in it.
2. Her consciousness, with her memories intact (and capable of being updated in accordance with what happens at this point), reaches back in time to the past moment.
3. During this projection Max has a variable time to act within a variable radius of where she was at the time the picture was taken.
4. The projection withdraws back into the present, and Max experiences what appears to her to be ~snapping back into reality~.
This base-plus-projection model is compatible with both the regular focus and the "nested focus" in which Max must return from her second focus back into her first, like navigating the three storeys of the old farmhouse.
It is also no more likely to create a P-zombie than if Max were to park a TARDIS in the 2008 Price backyard, go straight for the ballcap while her past self, Chloe and William were all in the kitchen, and throwing the keys into the yard before hopping back into the TARDIS for 2013.
Now to put this together. Here are some crude diagrams of how the focus jumps would work under this model, for single and alternate timelines.
Normal timeline (x = where Max presumably is projecting from)
Single timeline, single focus
Single timeline, double focus
Multi timeline, single focus
Multi timeline, double focus
To explain this movement we would need to posit some mechanism for Max's consciousness to always follow the newest created timeline. This mechanism would necessitate that there's some kind of porosity between the divergent timelines. Nothing in the game or in the real world suggests such porosity anywhere; if anything, the opposite seems to be true and no timelines (if indeed they are created) ever interact once they diverge.
The nightmare contains no information that Max would not have had, and shows no sign of any actual interaction with any other timelines. If it did, she could easily have been haunted by:
Instead we have:
One possibility is that this is a real alternative Max, but the ghost of one who is dead, and bound by the same rules as William is in BtS (assuming he even is a real ghost) not to provide any new information. But surely ~I'm one of the many Maxes you left behind~ is itself new information? Why not mention then that she's dead (and, most likely, it was trying to save Chloe that killed her)? I believe the Chloe that appears to rebuke her is similarly problematic, though we don't get enough information to even properly speculate about her actual identity.
Meanwhile, all that funny business with the moons contains nothing involving the extra moon physically affecting anything. The ambient light doesn't even dim when one of them disappears. And of course none of Max's interventions could naturalistically have altered the course of the moon's orbit enough to make such a clearly visible difference if it really were a vision of the actual alternate reality being superimposed.
But before we go, let's explore one alternative model that does not rely on any porosity between the timelines after the initial branching-off. Instead of xyz, this will be in bitflags so we can keep using 1-character markers, e.g., 1, 2 and 4 are entities and 3 is the combination of the first two.
Multi timeline, double focus
This would remove the need for the divergent timelines to interact, or the potential destruction of newly created Max-consciousnesses. But this raises all sorts of questions about what exactly the focus "bubbles" are protecting, why they have to be timed to detonate at certain points to mess with Max's memory, whose if any consciousness is acting in these new timelines before those detonation points, etc. - a multiplicity of new entities for which we have no evidence, and which serve no apparent purpose, except that they're needed to justify this model.
The single-timeline model is by far the most elegant explanation of what we see in the double focus sequence.
Implications
Here is what we see of the focus:
This means that every duplicate Max left behind will continue to try to focus, not even realizing that they've just been left behind, until the last Max is forced to stop from exhaustion or by outside force. A dozen Maxes might depart to their new timelines before the last created left-behind Max might suspect it isn't working.
There's nothing conclusively assuring us that this is not in fact happening. However, this would mean that we're dealing with dozens if not hundreds of alternate universes where Max went back and un-saved Bill after taking a somewhat longer time to complete the focus than the original, another similar set who fell asleep on (dead or still not on speaking terms, thus not interrupting) Chloe's bed with the album open and woke up and tried again, etc. etc. etc. until hundreds to thousands of these slightly different alternate universes later the final Max gives up or is interrupted and (subject to any subsequent focus jumps) either survives the storm from inside jail or dies trying to evacuate Chloe with Bill and Joyce. (Or successfully escapes with Chloe, Bill and/or Joyce, depending on what you think the tornado is and how it may be able to behave - that's a topic for another post.)
This would also mean 4 Maxes either dead in the diner or living with the loss of both Arcadia Bay and Chloe (3 focus remnants plus 1 original are rescued by David and go to the diner to get Warren's photo, whereupon all 4 generate more alts until each gets a final left-behind), and 1 living with the loss of both Arcadia Bay and (probably... unless...? 😳) Chloe, but only after a most excellent week with her (albeit one she doesn't remember) and in a great position to kickstart her photography career. Any of the surviving ones may come up with other ideas on how to use a focus to get out of their respective unbearable situations, beginning all new cycles of their own. Thousands upon thousands of universes all created under duress, none of them reducing the number of universes in which the underlying duress will continue unabated.
This would also mean that, if you choose the Bay ending, thousands of Chloes die in thousands of Blackwell bathrooms. But then again, this may be the second exception to our fourth observation: given how equally unbearable both options are (or, let's be honest here, how much more unbearable the Bay option really is), we may get no more than a dozen dead Chloes in before either Max loses her resolve or Chloe loses hers and begs her to stop (distracting her from the focus in the process, if we suppose for argument's sake that Max doesn't immediately cease and desist).
In any event, however, the original Chloe that Max knew before her time travel would have long been left behind, having failed her final attempt to protect a distantly-removed copy of the Max that she knew, resting beside Rachel as they await a final burial by the storm.
That's hella bleak. There is one way to resolve this, and that is to suppose that, when Max does a focus her consciousness moves to the new timeline along with those of everyone else. The old timeline would then be purely inhabited either by duplicate consciousnesses or zombies: the latter possibility would be indistinguishable from a single-timeline model given the standard for "real" in my original post in this series, while both would imply a significant porosity between the realities as well as a mechanism for transporting everyone to the new reality on top of (in the former possibility) creating new duplicate consciousnesses for them all in the old reality. None of this even begins to be hinted at in any observations available within the games.
Conclusion
An interpretation of the focus jumps as creating independently existing parallel universes results in a great deal of fridge existential horror, a great deal of regular existential horror, immense and exponential cosmic fragmentation and fractal growth, and an ever expanding array of new systems that we would have to suppose to be there for no reason except to provide explanations for the ways in which the alternate timelines behave - or more to the point, are never observed to behave - despite the total lack of empirical support for any such systems existing.
All this, when a model of a single changing timeline can account for all observations with a tiny, elegant subset of the systems the parallel universe theory would have us conjecture.
For reference, here is a list of the photos used for the focuses, in the order taken:
- young Max and Chloe making pancakes
- Everyday Heroes contest entry
- in-class selfie
- butterfly on bathroom bucket
- Warren's party selfie with Max
- Max sober on chair in Dark Room
- Max drugged on floor of Dark Room
Max's intuitions
When Max sits at the kitchen bar once restoring the world to one in which Bill died in that car accident, she explicitly reflects on how she exists in "two or maybe three different realities". I think she means the one in which Chloe is paralyzed, the one she is in at that moment, and possibly one that she had abandoned by focussing on the Pancakes photo in the very first instance. (As per the previous post, I note she is not counting anything done through rewind.)
We never know for sure just how much the main final change - Max's emotional outburst and final words to Chloe before the focus ends, which then replaces either of the photos that could have been taken at that point (before Max takes a lot more photos in Farewell) - ended up making a difference in Chloe's life. I can only imagine her recalling it once Max tells her what she had done, but that later exchange could go exactly as it did even if she had forgotten it.
She continues throughout the story to struggle (mostly in the journal before the nightmare) with the possibility of leaving behind these alternate realities. But I don't see any jump to a unlikely conclusion not supported by existing facts but still ultimately clearly correct in result like with Chloe on the clifftop, that goes beyond speculation based on her previous readings.
If I seem a bit stubborn in my refusal to take Max's perspective at face value, consider the rival narratives at play:
- Max's journal: "Chloe had been busy with her detective work, while I was in my alternate timeline."
- Photo sequence, omniscient and independent of Max's memory: Instead of starting Blade Runner, Max is now helping Chloe carry up the drawing board.
- Texts: Numerous texts to various people including Chloe, all from what appears to be an alert and understanding Max, which Max (as the continuity of memories revealed to the player) recalls nothing about.
- Chloe, to Max right after she had "returned": "Since we were up all night playing 'CSI: Arcadia Bay,' I was still spaced out here, trying to put all this info together. ... Max, did you forget we've gone over this? I hope you weren't messing around with time while I was sleeping." (Note how the likely period of time Chloe spent sleeping would almost certainly not line up with the amount of time Max spent experiencing Bill-alive-world; meanwhile, until this moment of forgetfulness she has apparently not noticed anything unusual about Max's behaviour.)
There really is nothing unequivocally calling for a branching-reality interpretation here, let alone conclusively so, and I think by design.
Cues in the game
Once you've finished Episode 3 the flickering red particle effect appears in the main menu screen, which appears to be lit with the golden hour lighting from the walk with Chloe. Of course this doesn't actually happen ingame and is no less poignant in this context taken metaphorically rather than pointing to an actual diegetic ontological difference at play.
The visual language of the photo sequences is:
- Photo flies into view.
- Image on photo melts/burns/bubbles away, with an effect similar to the end of a focus (itself evocative of ruined instant film), revealing or coalescing into the new image.
- Photo flies out of view.
The symbolism here is of a single print having its image altered, or at most a layer being burned away revealing the one beneath. What we do not see at any point is two images being visible - even partially - at the same time, or anything containing the old image being put away somewhere. One might conjecture that the old photo is being pulled away (and the new photo being pulled in) along some fourth dimension, but if that were the case we should be seeing all sorts of crinkles given how the effect looks - and we should be able to see an intermediate stage where both images are partially visible as they move past each other; in any event, the physical surface ostensibly bearing the image does not appear to move during the transformation.
As with rewinds, the technological metaphor here is analogue rather than digital: a single medium on which the history is written is rewritten with a new history with nothing to back up the old.
What is not portrayed in the game
Contra one theory I've seen a couple times online: there is no reason to suppose that the first tornado vision at the very beginning of the game is a sign that this was already an alternate timeline created through any known functioning of Max's powers. It happens before the selfie so it could not be the moment of future her entering through a focus; nor is the tornado vision at all shown to typically precede the taking of an image that is used for a focus.
At no point during that week of October 2013 do we see Max suddenly blacking out, then waking up apparently having done or said something unusual without any recollection of doing it or any idea why. We do have frequent references to her spacing out that are easily deniable as signs of ADHD if we are ignorant of the time travel effect; there's no hint that these episodes are in any way connected to her having her picture taken.
Trying to model what is happening
Here is how I see the observed stages:
1. Max focuses on a photo that has her image in it.
- We never see her do this with a screen, though prints of digital images work just fine. Something about the fixed nature of the physical image, I guess.
2. Her consciousness, with her memories intact (and capable of being updated in accordance with what happens at this point), reaches back in time to the past moment.
- We know this is a true projection of her consciousness and not a recreation of the scene, since the airplane scene gives us at least an instance of a focus that could not possibly have been reconstructed from the photograph after the fact.
3. During this projection Max has a variable time to act within a variable radius of where she was at the time the picture was taken.
- There is no reason to doubt that this is actually Max performing these actions during this previous period in time, even though she is temporarily operating on memories that she should not have until later.
- Max always appears to have enough time to decide what to do, do it, then reflect briefly on it in the immediate aftermath before the projection ends.
- The physical bounds seem to be a spherical cage about the size of a small house, based on the Warren selfie (which is the only one that happens outdoors). The gallery focus indicates this sphere may shrink depending on circumstances as yet unknown, but I would guess it has something to do with actual mental focus (e.g., being interrupted by a reporter in a stressful moment of urgency with numerous people milling about).
4. The projection withdraws back into the present, and Max experiences what appears to her to be ~snapping back into reality~.
- A lot of players (and possibly even Chloe, if we take her passing "the real Max" comment very literally) seem to assume that Max continues to act on autopilot as a P-zombie from the end of the projection to the present, while Max's entire consciousness and soul remain "truly" frozen in the present waiting to re-enter once the time is reached.
- Max never comments on or alludes to this possibility, despite being the one person who should be the most worried about her self being fractured, or turning into a zombie without anyone noticing. Instead, her only comment on this is to warn Chloe about gaps in her memory. If she has any sort of additional unspoken insight, it seems to be providing reassurance that there is no question of the continuity of her being.
- I think a better interpretation, one that does not posit some perfect P-zombies spontaneously being created, is that we're simply seeing Max's consciousness and memories project backwards and temporarily override her body at that previous time, then when she returns the memories that were attached to her backwards-reaching consciousness abruptly and permanently overwrite whatever she had learned up to that point.
- This rapid neural rewrite may contribute to the headaches and nosebleeds, but that doesn't explain them for rewinds.
- The overwrite seems to completely do away with recollections of events and propositional facts, but the fact that Max never suddenly chokes (e.g., breathing out as she completes a focus into a time in which she is breathing in) or ragdolls upon beginning or ending a focus suggests that kinesthetics, etc. remain.
- One possible exception to the overwrite may be found in Max's comment about the feel of writing letters on parchment paper - for letters to Chloe she would have no memory of writing. But she was probably doing this even independently of writing anything to Chloe, so it would be fairly straightforward to append that comment to this observation just to keep the conversation going.
This base-plus-projection model is compatible with both the regular focus and the "nested focus" in which Max must return from her second focus back into her first, like navigating the three storeys of the old farmhouse.
It is also no more likely to create a P-zombie than if Max were to park a TARDIS in the 2008 Price backyard, go straight for the ballcap while her past self, Chloe and William were all in the kitchen, and throwing the keys into the yard before hopping back into the TARDIS for 2013.
Now to put this together. Here are some crude diagrams of how the focus jumps would work under this model, for single and alternate timelines.
Normal timeline (x = where Max presumably is projecting from)
---------x
Single timeline, single focus
----y----x jump back to previous
----y x make a change
----y__ x time progresses based on change
-----____x final, altered timeline
Single timeline, double focus
------y--x jump back to previous
------y x make a change
-z----y x jump back to previous
-z y x make a change
-z~~~~y x time progresses based on change
--~~~~y x z is spent, consciousness now contained in y
--~~~~y__x time progresses based on change
--~~~~~__x final, altered timeline
Multi timeline, single focus
---------x original timeline
----y jump back and start a fork
---------x original timeline with original Max
----y_____ modified timeline with new or zombie Max
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
-----____x modified timeline with original Max (a new Max may be destroyed here)
Multi timeline, double focus
---------x original timeline
------y jump back and start a fork
---------x original timeline
------y_ time progresses with changes
-z jump back and start a fork
---------x original timeline
------y__ time progresses with changes
-z~~ time progresses with changes
---------x original timeline with original Max origin point
-------___ modified timeline with new or zombie Max
--~~~~y second modified timeline with original Max (a new Max may be destroyed here)
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
-------___ modified timeline with new or zombie Max
--~~~~~##x second modified timeline with original Max
To explain this movement we would need to posit some mechanism for Max's consciousness to always follow the newest created timeline. This mechanism would necessitate that there's some kind of porosity between the divergent timelines. Nothing in the game or in the real world suggests such porosity anywhere; if anything, the opposite seems to be true and no timelines (if indeed they are created) ever interact once they diverge.
The nightmare contains no information that Max would not have had, and shows no sign of any actual interaction with any other timelines. If it did, she could easily have been haunted by:
- 1 Max in jail awaiting trial for Chloe's murder, or killed trying to rescue Chloe from the storm
- any number of people left to die who Max had saved before using Warren's selfie
- at least 2 dead Chloes in the junkyard
- possibly 4 dead Maxes in the diner (all wearing black jacket and bullet necklace - I'll get to the reasoning behind this later)
Instead we have:
- a text from Joyce worded (surveillance, overdose) specifically to riff off of Max's anxieties in this timeline and not the alternate - Chloe's text if you had refused reflects things Max could be made to feel guilty about in either scenario
- a doppelganger Max (in zip-up hoodie and doe shirt) who shows no sign of actually having experienced being storm-smashed or imprisoned - at least not in any physical human form - and has no stories whatsoever to tell about what happened to him that didn't happen with our Max; he simply assumes he would be believed as he tries to gaslight her into agreeing to abandon Chloe again
- a crude facsimile of Chloe, not dissimilar to numerous crude facsimiles of other people, that just insults Max and tries to make her jealous
- a much less crude facsimile of Chloe that rebukes and banishes the doppelganger Max
- no bona fide revelation about any actual event Max would not already have experienced before getting out of those situations using her focus
One possibility is that this is a real alternative Max, but the ghost of one who is dead, and bound by the same rules as William is in BtS (assuming he even is a real ghost) not to provide any new information. But surely ~I'm one of the many Maxes you left behind~ is itself new information? Why not mention then that she's dead (and, most likely, it was trying to save Chloe that killed her)? I believe the Chloe that appears to rebuke her is similarly problematic, though we don't get enough information to even properly speculate about her actual identity.
Meanwhile, all that funny business with the moons contains nothing involving the extra moon physically affecting anything. The ambient light doesn't even dim when one of them disappears. And of course none of Max's interventions could naturalistically have altered the course of the moon's orbit enough to make such a clearly visible difference if it really were a vision of the actual alternate reality being superimposed.
But before we go, let's explore one alternative model that does not rely on any porosity between the timelines after the initial branching-off. Instead of xyz, this will be in bitflags so we can keep using 1-character markers, e.g., 1, 2 and 4 are entities and 3 is the combination of the first two.
Multi timeline, double focus
---------1 original timeline
------2 jump back and start a fork
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
------3 new timeline receives original Max
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
------3___ new timeline with original Max
-4 jump back and start a fork
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
-------___ new timeline with new or zombie Max
-7 newer timeline receives original Max and first focus bubble
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
-------___ new timeline with new or zombie Max
--~~~~3 newer timeline with original Max and first focus bubble, second bubble spent
---------- original timeline with new or zombie Max
-------___ new timeline with new or zombie Max
--~~~~~##1 newer timeline with original Max, all focus bubbles spent
This would remove the need for the divergent timelines to interact, or the potential destruction of newly created Max-consciousnesses. But this raises all sorts of questions about what exactly the focus "bubbles" are protecting, why they have to be timed to detonate at certain points to mess with Max's memory, whose if any consciousness is acting in these new timelines before those detonation points, etc. - a multiplicity of new entities for which we have no evidence, and which serve no apparent purpose, except that they're needed to justify this model.
The single-timeline model is by far the most elegant explanation of what we see in the double focus sequence.
Implications
Here is what we see of the focus:
- The focus is portrayed to always work, limited only by Max's willingness to do it and (as in Zeitgeist) her ability to literally focus on the photo.
- The focus takes time to work, but not always the same amount of time.
- Everyone's choices are deterministic, based on what they know at the moment they make their choice. (This is why Max had to destroy the Pancakes photo in the second focus - otherwise, without guidance from her preserved time-travel memory, she would be stuck in a time loop.)
- Max only ever voluntarily uses the focus to escape a situation she has conclusively deemed to be intolerable.
This means that every duplicate Max left behind will continue to try to focus, not even realizing that they've just been left behind, until the last Max is forced to stop from exhaustion or by outside force. A dozen Maxes might depart to their new timelines before the last created left-behind Max might suspect it isn't working.
There's nothing conclusively assuring us that this is not in fact happening. However, this would mean that we're dealing with dozens if not hundreds of alternate universes where Max went back and un-saved Bill after taking a somewhat longer time to complete the focus than the original, another similar set who fell asleep on (dead or still not on speaking terms, thus not interrupting) Chloe's bed with the album open and woke up and tried again, etc. etc. etc. until hundreds to thousands of these slightly different alternate universes later the final Max gives up or is interrupted and (subject to any subsequent focus jumps) either survives the storm from inside jail or dies trying to evacuate Chloe with Bill and Joyce. (Or successfully escapes with Chloe, Bill and/or Joyce, depending on what you think the tornado is and how it may be able to behave - that's a topic for another post.)
This would also mean 4 Maxes either dead in the diner or living with the loss of both Arcadia Bay and Chloe (3 focus remnants plus 1 original are rescued by David and go to the diner to get Warren's photo, whereupon all 4 generate more alts until each gets a final left-behind), and 1 living with the loss of both Arcadia Bay and (probably... unless...? 😳) Chloe, but only after a most excellent week with her (albeit one she doesn't remember) and in a great position to kickstart her photography career. Any of the surviving ones may come up with other ideas on how to use a focus to get out of their respective unbearable situations, beginning all new cycles of their own. Thousands upon thousands of universes all created under duress, none of them reducing the number of universes in which the underlying duress will continue unabated.
This would also mean that, if you choose the Bay ending, thousands of Chloes die in thousands of Blackwell bathrooms. But then again, this may be the second exception to our fourth observation: given how equally unbearable both options are (or, let's be honest here, how much more unbearable the Bay option really is), we may get no more than a dozen dead Chloes in before either Max loses her resolve or Chloe loses hers and begs her to stop (distracting her from the focus in the process, if we suppose for argument's sake that Max doesn't immediately cease and desist).
In any event, however, the original Chloe that Max knew before her time travel would have long been left behind, having failed her final attempt to protect a distantly-removed copy of the Max that she knew, resting beside Rachel as they await a final burial by the storm.
That's hella bleak. There is one way to resolve this, and that is to suppose that, when Max does a focus her consciousness moves to the new timeline along with those of everyone else. The old timeline would then be purely inhabited either by duplicate consciousnesses or zombies: the latter possibility would be indistinguishable from a single-timeline model given the standard for "real" in my original post in this series, while both would imply a significant porosity between the realities as well as a mechanism for transporting everyone to the new reality on top of (in the former possibility) creating new duplicate consciousnesses for them all in the old reality. None of this even begins to be hinted at in any observations available within the games.
Conclusion
An interpretation of the focus jumps as creating independently existing parallel universes results in a great deal of fridge existential horror, a great deal of regular existential horror, immense and exponential cosmic fragmentation and fractal growth, and an ever expanding array of new systems that we would have to suppose to be there for no reason except to provide explanations for the ways in which the alternate timelines behave - or more to the point, are never observed to behave - despite the total lack of empirical support for any such systems existing.
All this, when a model of a single changing timeline can account for all observations with a tiny, elegant subset of the systems the parallel universe theory would have us conjecture.