D-Mail
Text messages sent into the past through the lab's modified microwave.
D-Mails are the text messages that Rintaro Okabe and the Future Gadget Laboratory send into the past in Steins;Gate. The lab discovers that the cell-phone-operated microwave they have been building, the PhoneWave, is a time machine that can deliver text messages to an earlier date: a message Okabe sends to Daru about finding Kurisu Makise dead arrives a week before he sent it. Okabe starts experimenting with D-Mails, and each one causes major changes to the timeline.
Quick Facts
- Device
- PhoneWave (the lab's modified microwave)
- Function
- Sends text messages to the past
- Built by
- Future Gadget Laboratory
- Watched by
- SERN
Facts from the source article.
Background
SERN, an organization modelled on CERN that has been researching time travel and has already sent people into the past at the cost of their lives, learns of the machine and sends a group led by Moeka to seize it, killing Mayuri in the process. Kurisu meanwhile builds a device that sends a person's memories through the microwave, letting Okabe leap back in time. To reach a world line where Mayuri survives he has to undo every D-Mail that shifted the timeline, which lets the lab recover an IBN 5100 computer, break into SERN's database and delete the record of his original D-Mail, returning him to a world line in which Kurisu died as she did at the start of the story. Several alternate endings turn on Okabe choosing not to send a particular D-Mail, and in Steins;Gate 0 a video D-Mail from 2025 tells his 2010 self how to save Kurisu.
More in Technology & Artifacts
Elsewhere in Steins;Gate
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