Talk:Reading Steiner/@comment-27183706-20190611150327/@comment-27183706-20190614050926

" So basically, she disappears because in the beta world line she's already dead. "

Yes, I understand but that's not the established physics in the world. They aren't sending anything through time. They delete data. That causes a major branching point and divergence - in the present. Basically, the new branch of worldline will be now affected by the beta attractor field instead of the alpha. But attractor fields don't change the past, they only force a shared future. So the world will head towards whatever the convergence of beta is now, assuming the beta attractor field's convergence is indeed in the future. If yes, that means we'll now head towards whatever that convergence point is, WWIII or otherwise, likely including Kurisu's death, if it happening before the present wasn't a necessary prerequisite.

However, if the attractor fields's convergence point is Kurisu's death itself or it had to happen earlier for the convergence to be possible, we're already past that point in time and never converged. If that convergence is necessary (considering the significance of her time travel papers, I'd say yes it is) to stay in the beta attractor field, then we should end up in a new worldline that's not beta, but also not alpha.

What I'm saying is, changing the PRESENT cannot change the PAST, and attractor fields attract from the present towards the future, but here both of these are reversed. It's the same mistake as with the first D-Mail, they skipped a step, except here it's the reverse situation. The first D-Mail they skipped the worldline(s) where SERN uses the mail information to change the past and take control. So they "double jumped" with Reading Steiner. That is wrong but at least follows the correct "direction" of events happening. Can't really use the word time here but imagine we talk about the the viewer's time, the order the worldlines existed before replacing each other. But on the way "back" deleting the data causes SERN to not invent time travel and not change the past. As changing the past doesn't happen, ever (no one has invented a time machine and Okabe won't use his anymore), even if we assume Reading Steiner can sometimes "double jump" and skip some worldlines in between, that doesn't explain this one. There was no worldline shift in the first place, we merely caused a fork in the present, not different from deciding if we eat potatoes or corn for breakfast except large enough that it puts the two worldlines into different attractor fields from that point onwards. But that still isn't a worldline shift, it's the "normal" operation of the flow of time.

What I'm trying to say is this "Causing SERN to change the past will change the present but causing CERN to not change the past will not change the present"  but the story makes the mistake of assuming if doing a time travel changes the past then preventing that time travel will too. The mistake in that is, said time travel is in the future so it hasn't happened yet so it couldn't have had an influence on the same worldline, so making it not happen does nothing at all until we reach that time in the future in 2034 when the worldlines would have shifted in SERN's favor.