Quoted By:
>Garvin's time loop mechanics when integrated to the rest of the setting confuse me to this day
The simple OOC explanation is that there is no "time" loop. Time flows forward at the same rate for everybody in normal reality (i.e. all of humanity, but not the WYRM, and sort of not the agents-- they have their own flow of time isolated inside of Satellite, separate from the rest). The thing going backward is Garvin's <span class="mu-i">consciousness,</span> manipulated by some bored agent, who is using advanced metaphysical technology to pluck the "looping" Garvin's mind out of his body upon death and implant it into the body of an alternate Garvin in a similar timeline... a few weeks, months, or years before he died in the last timeline, creating the perception of him being stuck in a time loop.
This explains why the "time" loop doesn't always reset to the same exact day (the reset point has drifted forward a couple years), and why Garvin sometimes dies of mysterious natural causes-- in both cases, the agent is manually controlling it; in the latter case, the agent pressed the "stop his heart" button for fun. Garvin's AUX-space remains intact despite this because it's in a tiny bubble outside of normal reality, like Satellite on a vastly smaller scale. The differences between timelines were minimal enough for Garvin to write it off, which is why he never worked it out. And so on. Let me know if this still isn't making sense. I'm not quite sure how the WYRM factors in-- the WYRM is God and can see all timelines simultaneously, so It could track this happening if It cared about it, but It really really could not care less. This was 100% an agent project.
(6/7 jk lol)
