Alive matches a Lovecraftian deity. A process or mechanism seems more likely. Einsteinian Eternalism or a Block Universe also offers a possibility. And then there is the Eternal Return, a repeating universe.
Oh, that's the thing. I really don't want to spoil it and it's not long, just a novella.
Long story short, and it's something that, honestly you would have had to read more of my bullshit than anyone has time for to get otherwise:
I'm of the thought that stuff like that is indeterminate until it has to be determined, that it doesn't condense into a causality until it is caused such that it must.
As such, our universe is caused by everything and nothing of the set of things that create it simultaneously.
The example I like to use for this is to imagine the continuity of a game of Mario.
Ignoring the fact that Mario lacks self awareness, perhaps placing some randomized neural network of some kind in Plato's (Socrates's?) Cave, thus to see the game played.
"Mario" cannot know the difference between if it sees in a fixed sequence at fixed frames YOU holding the controller or ME. To "Mario", our AI watching the wall of this cave, it is the same universe, the same event.
Two different causes lead, here, to the same effect. It is the same game, it is the same "universe" being experienced.
If we were take the same AI process (assuming determinacy of process) and clone it, and subject one to your gameplay and one to mine, they would end up the same mind of the same observations, because it is the same gameplay.
We can extend this further.
If you care to download Dwarf Fortress, a stupid game where you are literally a god literally creating a universe full of thinking entities which are more or less about as smart as a worker ant, you can input a seed.
I can input the same settings and the same seed and end up with a universe with the same history, and assuming the inputs it receives from each of us are framewise identical, it will be the se universe, with all the same events. We could save our games on the same frame and they would contain all the same numbers.
Different mechanisms may yield the same outcome, and so all mechanisms which yield the outcome do so equally.
They share the same identity, until the probability wave is forced to collapse and the AI finds a way to exit it's cave, until the Dwarf (to be fair, I intend on replacing these with AIs once The Toady One releases his source) can effect an access violation that doesn't cause a fault.
At that point, the instances will differentiate.
The only question is whether or not something differentiates this universe.
Of course, I'm an infidel, so I don't really expect anything has and I'm not sure whether we have within us the power to effect such an access violation.
I guess we'll find out soon when LHC goes looking for gravitons, and if we can figure out anything useful with that knowledge.