Steins;Gate
An unofficial world-line journal. Akihabara, summer 2010.
Steins;Gate in four ideas
Akihabara, summer 2010. Rintaro Okabe, eighteen and a self-declared mad scientist, runs a two-room "laboratory" with his friends. Their latest gadget, a microwave wired to a phone, turns out to send text messages into the past.
A one-minute read. Nothing here goes past episode 5.
D-mail
A text message sent into the past through that microwave, the PhoneWave. It carries at most 36 bytes. Whoever receives it acts on it, and history quietly rearranges itself around the change.
World lines
History is a bundle of threads, and each thread is one complete version of events. A D-mail moves the whole world onto another thread, where the past was always different.
Point at a thread below.
The Divergence Meter
A number names the thread you are on, to six decimal places. The story opens on 1.130426. One text message later, the meter reads 0.571024.
Tap the meter to re-read it.
Reading Steiner
When the world line shifts, everyone's memories shift with it. Only Okabe keeps the old ones, through a grey moment of vertigo. He calls it Reading Steiner, and it makes him the only witness.
At Radio Kaikan, Kurisu Makise lies in a pool of blood.
Nobody else will remember the first version of that sentence. You will.
Who's who
- 001Rintaro Okabe18, self-declared mad scientist; founded the lab
- 002Mayuri Shiina16, his childhood friend; greets everyone with "Tutturu"
- 003Itaru "Daru" Hashida19, the lab's hacker and Okabe's classmate
- 004Kurisu Makise18, neuroscience researcher back from America
- 005Moeka Kiryu20, quiet, and would rather text than talk
- 006Luka Urushibara16, shrine priest's son; Okabe's sword pupil
- 007Faris NyanNyan17, the star of a maid café nearby
- 008Suzuha Amane18, part-timer at the CRT shop downstairs
Each name opens the lab page, and the lab page spoils the whole story.
The 2011 anime runs 24 episodes. This page spoils it from chapter 4.
Chapter 01
The girl in the blood
Okabe texts a friend that a girl lies stabbed, and the text lands a week before he sends it: the first D-mail.
Sent
by Okabe, to Daru
It arrives a week before he sends it. The line leaves the beta field.
World line 1.130426 to 0.571024
Read the full chapter
July 28, 2010. Rintaro Okabe, eighteen, a first-year student who introduces himself as the mad scientist Hououin Kyouma, takes his childhood friend Mayuri Shiina to Dr. Nakabachi's time-travel press conference at the Radio Kaikan building in Akihabara.
Inside, he finds a young researcher, Kurisu Makise, lying in a pool of blood, and texts his friend Daru what he saw.
Then the world blinks. The crowds are gone. A "satellite" has crashed into the building, and the conference has been cancelled. Daru says the text reached him a week before Okabe sent it. It is the first D-mail. The world line has changed, and its divergence reads 0.571024 instead of 1.130426.
Chapter 02
The PhoneWave (name subject to change)
Kurisu is alive after all, the PhoneWave turns bananas into gel, and SERN's secret files need an IBN 5100.
–
Holds
Nobody has sent anything on purpose yet.
World line 0.571024
Read the full chapter
The Future Gadget Laboratory rents the second floor of a tired building above Mr. Braun's CRT shop. Its eighth invention is a microwave you switch on by calling the phone wired into it. It only works while the 42-inch CRT downstairs is switched on, and what it actually does is turn bananas into green gel. The lab calls them gelbanas.
Kurisu Makise is alive after all. A heated debate with Okabe interests her enough to follow him to the lab. Online, a poster calling himself John Titor haunts @channel. The lab breaks into SERN's network, finds files on a "Z Program" and on "jellymen", and learns that SERN's old code can only be read on an IBN 5100. One of those is kept at Yanabayashi Shrine. It is still a comedy.
Chapter 03
Operation Urd
Five D-mails grant five wishes, each one quietly rewrites the world, and only Okabe remembers how it was before.
-
Sent
by The lab
Loto 6 numbers. Luka misremembers one of them, so nobody wins.
World line 0.571024 to 0.571015
-
Sent
by Moeka Kiryu
To her own past phone. On the new line she takes the IBN 5100 on July 31.
World line 0.571015 to 0.523299
-
Sent
by Luka Urushibara
To his mother's pager in January 1993, about eating vegetables. Luka is now born female.
World line 0.523299 to 0.456903
-
Sent
by Faris NyanNyan
To her father, for April 3, 2000. He skips the doomed flight and lives, and Akihabara never becomes an otaku town.
World line 0.456903 to 0.409420
-
Sent
by Rintaro Okabe
To himself: go after Suzuha.
World line 0.409420 to 0.337187
Two more tries change nothing anyone can see: Daru's tip for his card match with Faris, and Mayuri's lunch.
Read the full chapter
Once the lab accepts that the PhoneWave sends text into the past, Okabe names the experiments Operation Urd, after the Norn of what was. A D-mail holds at most 36 bytes, the PhoneWave's timer sets how many whole hours back it lands, and every one they send grants somebody a wish.
Nobody else notices a thing. Okabe alone remembers the world line before each change, and he names the ability Reading Steiner. The ledger above keeps the record: date, sender, and the world line before and after.
Spoilers: the second half, chapters 4 to 9
Watch it first if you can: these six chapters give the turn away.
04 Time leap 05 Convergence 06 Operation Verthandi 07 The choice 08 Operation Skuld 09 Steins Gate
Open the second halfClose the second half
Time leap
Kurisu turns the PhoneWave into a Time Leap Machine, and on August 13 armed Rounders storm the lab and kill Mayuri.
Read the full chapter
Kurisu rebuilds the PhoneWave into a Time Leap Machine, the first stage of what Okabe files as Operation Verthandi. It does not send text. It compresses a person's memories and plays them into that person's own brain, received through a phone at the ear, at most 48 hours back.
On August 13 the lab throws a party. Armed Rounders, SERN's strike force, storm the room to take the machine, and Moeka is leading them. Mayuri is shot dead. Okabe puts on the headset and leaps.
This is the hinge. Everything above this line was a comedy.
Chapter 05
Spoiler
Convergence
Okabe leaps back again and again, and Mayuri dies every time: on this side of the barrier, her death is fixed.
Sent
by Okabe, to himself
He takes back his own D-mail, the first step of the climb.
World line 0.337187 to 0.409431
Read the full chapter
The first leap lands at 4:56 pm on August 13. Mayuri dies anyway. Okabe leaps again, and again: a gunshot, a train, a car. Inside the Alpha attractor field the details can change but the outcome arrives, and on every Alpha line she dies in mid-to-late August 2010.
Suzuha Amane, the part-timer from the CRT shop, tells him she is John Titor, a fighter from a 2036 ruled by SERN. Her Divergence Meter reads 0.337187. The only way out is across the 1% barrier into the Beta field. She finds her father, who turns out to be Daru, and leaves for 1975.
To start the climb, Okabe cancels his own D-mail. On 0.409431 Suzuha died in 2000, and Mr. Braun has kept her meter. He hands it to Okabe on August 14.
Chapter 06
Spoiler
Operation Verthandi
To save Mayuri, Okabe undoes the D-mails one by one, taking back each friend's wish face to face.
-
Cancels the D-mail of
by Faris NyanNyan
Her father dies again. On this line Mayuri would still die on August 15, at ComiMa in Ariake.
World line 0.409431 to 0.456914
-
Cancels the D-mail of
by Luka Urushibara
The IBN 5100 has already been shipped to France. FB turns out to be Mr. Braun.
World line 0.456914 to 0.523307
-
Cancels the D-mail of
by Moeka Kiryu
Okabe has to confront her first. Afterwards the IBN 5100 is back in the lab.
World line 0.523307 to 0.571046
Only the first D-mail is left.
Read the full chapter
Every D-mail was somebody's wish, and Okabe needs the IBN 5100 back. So he takes the wishes back one at a time, in reverse order, face to face with the friend who made each one.
Faris loses her father a second time. Okabe agrees to be Luka's boyfriend for one day before Luka's D-mail is cancelled. Along the way Okabe learns that FB, the voice giving the Rounders their orders, is Mr. Braun. Then he has to confront Moeka. The ledger runs backwards.
Chapter 07
Spoiler
Keep it
Kurisu lives.
Mayuri dies, on every line of this field.
Erased
Okabe deletes it
Daru erases SERN's copy, and the line crosses the 1% barrier.
World line 0.571046 to 1.130205
Read the full chapter
One D-mail is left: the first, the July 28 text about Kurisu, which SERN logged through ECHELON. It is also the one that saved her. Deleting it saves Mayuri and sends Kurisu back to dying on July 28.
Okabe and Kurisu tell each other how they feel, knowing what the deletion will cost.
Daru uses the IBN 5100 to break into SERN and erase the record. The meter crosses the 1% barrier into the Beta field at 1.130205. Everyone except Okabe forgets Kurisu was ever there.
Chapter 08
Spoiler
Operation Skuld
From August 21, Okabe rides back to July 28 to save Kurisu without changing a thing his younger self saw.
Sent
by Okabe, from his own 2025
A video D-mail tells him how to deceive the world.
World line 1.130205 to 1.048596
Read the full chapter
August 21. A Beta-line Suzuha lands a working time machine on the Radio Kaikan roof. On this line, she says, Kurisu's death and her father's theft of her thesis lead to World War III. Okabe rides back to July 28 and, in the struggle with Nakabachi, stabs Kurisu himself by accident. Convergence again.
Then a garbled video D-mail arrives from Okabe's own future. The plan: do not change what the younger Okabe saw, change what happened. Deceive the world. He calls it Operation Skuld.
He swaps Mayuri's Metal Upa for a plastic one, so nothing sets off the metal detector and the thesis burns in the plane's hold. He goads Nakabachi into stabbing him instead, and leaves the unconscious Kurisu lying in his blood for his younger self to find. The meter reads 1.048596.
Chapter 09 Steins Gate
Nobody has to die.
On world line 1.048596 both Mayuri and Kurisu live, and weeks later Okabe meets her again, by chance, on an Akihabara street.
Read the full chapter
On 1.048596 nobody has to die. Not Mayuri, not Kurisu. There is no SERN dystopia and no world war. The thesis is ash, and Nakabachi is detained by the Russian authorities. The line belongs to neither attractor field, and Okabe gives it a name: Steins Gate.
He wakes in hospital with a stab wound. Weeks later, on an Akihabara street, he and Kurisu meet by chance, and she half remembers a summer that did not happen here. A world chosen, not granted: the choice of Steins Gate.
Send a D-mail
Up to 36 bytes, counted the way a Japanese phone of 2010 counts them: one byte for ASCII and half-width katakana, two for everything else. That is 36 letters or 18 full-width characters. Pick how many whole hours back, from 1 to 48, and watch the meter in the bar at the top.
Nothing leaves your browser. The message is hashed on this page into a world line and then forgotten.