1560: Paradoxes and Worldlines

Time-travel fiction is notoriously difficult to get “right” (for want of a better term) because it brings all sorts of baggage with it, both from established (or at least popular) science as well as conventions of fiction. It can be interesting to see how different works of fiction tackle these aspects — if at all.

The visual novel Steins;Gate jumps in head-first and attempts to spin a plausible example of how time travel might actually work were we to invent it in our lifetime. But despite the heavy science component — Steins;Gate really doesn’t hold back on the science side of things, which will delight those who are particularly interested in the “sci” part of “sci-fi” — it is, at heart, a story about people and how they’re affected by the strange, unnatural phenomenon of moving through time in a non-linear fashion.

SPOILERS AHEAD for the Suzuha and Faris endings of Steins;Gate — if you’re on the front page, hit Continue Reading (or whatever it actually says) to, err, continue reading.

I’ve only seen Suzuha and Faris’ endings of Steins;Gate so far (as if the spoiler warning above hadn’t already tipped you off to that) but even in those, there’s some interesting exploration of what the ability to time travel and/or affect the past — in the world of Steins;Gate they are two distinct things — would mean for an individual.

Specifically, it explores what they would mean for Rintarou Okabe, a gentleman who is already straddling that fine line between “sane” and “insane” with his own chuunibyou delusions. Of course, it becomes increasingly clear over the course of the story that even Okabe doesn’t really believe his own delusions — for the most part, anyway. When he and his “lab mem” compatriots finally do manage to convert a microwave into a working time machine (of sorts) he starts to discover that, even knowing his fantasies were just that — fantasy — the world is a dark and scary place where things you took for granted can’t just be believed at face value. He also gets several first-hand examples of the “Butterfly Effect” at work as he and his companions manage to send email messages to the past and subtly — or, in a number of cases, not so subtly — impact the present day.

I won’t delve too deeply into all the mysteries of Steins;Gate today, but I did want to talk a little about both Suzuha and Faris’ endings because they offer two “nightmare scenario” views of how time travel — often portrayed in sci-fi as the ultimate in glamorous “impossible things” — can come to impact someone’s life.

In the run-up to Suzuha’s ending, which is the first one it’s possible to get, we discover that Suzuha is “John Titor”, a figure from the future who has returned to what Okabe and co know as the present in an attempt to prevent the world’s inexorable path towards dystopia. We learn that her goal was to procure an IBM… sorry, “IBN” 5100 computer, as this is essential to making a significant change to the timeline. Her original intention was to head straight back to the ’70s, pick one up and then find a means of ensuring it got where it was supposed to be by 2010 — because, as it transpires, her time machine can only go backwards in time, not forwards.

But something goes wrong. Botched repairs to her time machine mean that when she finally arrives in the 1970s, she loses her memories. It’s not until it’s much too late that she remembers what her mission was and that she has failed it; she ends up killing herself in utter despair and loneliness, knowing that all her work was for naught.

Okabe, understandably distressed by the discovery that the girl he had said goodbye to moments ago had gone on to live a full life and then kill herself in despair, takes it upon himself to try and save not only her, but his childhood friend Mayuri too — who, due to the matter of “convergence”, seems destined to die. The only way in which he is able to do this is to repeatedly use the “Time Leap” machine that he and his friends develop — a device which sends his memories and consciousness back to the past by up to 48 hours — and remain stuck in a time loop of the same two days over and over again.

Since Okabe keeps his memories each time, it quickly becomes an ordeal for him, and as the path to the ending continues, we see his mind finally start to unravel. And it’s for real this time, not the fantasy world he was inhabiting before. He starts wondering what would happen if he were to indulge his dark fantasies and then turn back the clock once more; he considers letting his best friend Daru die in an easily avoidable accident, and he considers raping Suzuha. No-one will ever know, his darkening mind tells him, so why not just do it and see what happens? You might like it.

It’s eventually Suzuha that manages to talk some sense back into Okabe as she manages to spot the warning signs of his mind coming undone, but just for a little while, we get a glimpse of a genuinely horrific scenario. It might sound enjoyable to be able to repeat two pleasant days over and over again, but consider the feeling of helplessness when you realise that nothing you do matters any more and that no-one around you knows the pain you’re feeling or why you’re putting yourself through it. Suzuha’s ending makes that ordeal painfully apparent.

Contrast with Faris’ ending, which takes a somewhat different approach. Earlier in the storyline, Faris sends an email to the past that has a profound effect on Akihabara, where the majority of Steins;Gate takes place. What we know in 2014 as a haven of moe and anime lovers goes back to being the “electric town” it was previously known as, with not a saucer-eyed anime girl in sight. Faris, previously a maid in a popular maid café in the worldline we come to regard as “home” from Okabe’s perspective, becomes a champion RaiNet AccessBattlers player, but in the process manages to cause the IBM 5100 that Okabe and co. managed to acquire to disappear. In order to save Mayuri’s life, Okabe needs the IBM 5100, and it seems like the only way to do that will be to undo whatever it was that Faris did.

It takes some time for that to come to light, but it’s eventually revealed: Faris prevented her father’s death, since on the “original” worldline, he died when attempting to “rescue” Faris from a fake kidnapping she staged as an elaborate attempt to confirm whether or not he really loved her. Her father surviving meant that she never sat on the city planning board for Akihabara and never had the opportunity to push the moe agenda forward; more to the point, though, it means that her father sold his IBM 5100 to pay the “ransom” for Faris, which meant that there was no way it could ever end up in Okabe’s hands.

Eventually, Okabe and Faris devise a plan to change the worldline in such a way that neither Faris’ father nor Mayumi have to die. But it transpires that in order to do that, things have to change significantly. In Faris’ ending, none of Okabe’s friends know who he is, except Faris. None of the rest of the game happened because they never met. None of his relationships are real; none of his memories are real; and because none of it happened, his time machine no longer exists, which means he’s now trapped in this worldline.

Okabe comes to the horrifying realisation that he’s more alone than anyone else in the world because he’s literally from a different world — one that he can never return to. Fortunately, he has Faris with him to help him start to build a new life, but he’ll still have those memories of the past — memories of things that never happened. Utterly chilling.

Between those two endings, Steins;Gate presents two ways in which time travel could really fuck you up. It’s thought-provoking, emotional and disturbingly plausible.

And they say video games have universally bad writing.