(Note: I have previously explained this theory, just not particularly well. I hope that this one is a clearer explanation, even if it’s long af.)

This is my theory on a reality that no longer exists, one which collapsed due to Sigma and Phi’s success. I call this reality the Causal Reality. Before this collapse, this reality existed as a quantum wavefunction entangled with the Cyan Timeline, the timeline in which Sigma chooses to go through the cyan doors.

The reason I know the Causal Reality exists is because the reality that Sigma and Phi created in the Cyan Timeline doesn’t match the reality of the Magenta or Yellow Timelines. To explain this, we must determine why Akane is alive and why Akane is dead. We must compare the Magenta and Yellow Timelines to the Cyan Timeline to see what caused this divergence.

How is Akane dead? In the Magenta and Yellow Timelines, this is a simple question. Akane is dead because Dio killed her. Now, Dio killed her because he was ordered to by Brother, but let’s ignore that for this discussion. I want to focus only on what happened within the walls of Rhizome 9. As far as what happened within Rhizome 9, the ultimate cause of Akane’s death is that Dio murdered her.

Now, how is Akane alive in the Cyan Timeline? The direct cause is obvious. The point at which the manifested reality of the Cyan Timeline diverges from the Magenta and Yellow Timelines is the moment that Phi landed her badass dropkick, a seemingly superhuman feet that makes sense when you realize the gravity was only one sixth that of Earth’s.

But how did Sigma and Phi thwart Dio’s plan? They woke up earlier than expected, when the drugs in their system should have kept them unconscious, because they came from a future point in the Cyan Timeline. But how did they go back in time and change the past without creating a new timeline?

They were allowed to do this because the reality was uncertain. Schrodinger’s cat had not been released from the box; in other words, Akane’s life or death had not yet been determined. However, this was not ultimately because Akane was alive. Akane only lived because Sigma and Phi were able to go back in time, and that happened because Sigma and Phi had no way to know if Akane was alive or dead. But if that was because Akane was alive, then we come to the conclusion that Akane was only saved because Akane was saved.

That would mean the ultimate cause of Akane still being alive was because Akane was still alive. This is known as the Bootstrap Paradox. An object or event that only exists or occurs because it does is a paradox. Let me explain why this is ridiculous. If an old woman gives you a watch, and you later go back in time to give it to her younger self so she can give it back to you, then where did the watch come from? If it was only in the hands of you and her, then who made the watch? Or did it appear spontaneously?

Similarly, what event led to the endgame reality of the Cyan Timeline? When did this timeline originate? It cannot have created itself. If the reality was created by Schrodinger’s cat paradox, then that paradox cannot have been created by the reality we see at the end of the game. There must be another reality that looked exactly the same, which only collapsed into reality or fantasy when Sigma and Phi succeeded or failed in their task. This is the Causal Timeline.

The Causal Timeline occurred before the reality where Akane was saved. Therefore, in the Causal Timeline, Akane was still dead. The present was the same as the present of the Cyan Timeline that exists now, but the past was the same as the Magenta and Yellow Timelines. Yet something allowed this timeline to be more flexible than the other two: Schrodinger’s Cat Paradox. Where did this paradox originate?

The paradox originated when something went different from the Magenta and Yellow Timelines. So perhaps the better question to ask is this: When did the reality become fixed in the Magenta and Yellow Timelines? When did Akane’s death become a certainty? And the answer, of course, is when Sigma and Phi discovered Akane’s body in the first AB room.

So why did Sigma and Phi fail to discover Akane’s body in the first AB room in the Cyan Timeline? Starting from the moment that Sigma and Phi entered that room, the Causal Reality was the same as the Cyan Timeline we know today. There’s nothing to suggest that anything from that point onward could have kept Akane’s body from being discovered. And the past of the Causal Reality and the past of the Magenta and Yellow Timelines should have played out the same way: Dio kills Akane and disposes of the evidence, Luna takes the body and places it in the 6th AB room, and when Sigma chooses a door he decides to go with Alice through the cyan door.

So if it didn’t happen before choosing the door or after discovering the body, it must have happened in between. Was there any difference between the Cyan Timeline and the other timelines when the players were examining the rooms? The answer is simple. We already know something that happened in the Magenta and Yellow Timelines that did not happen in the Cyan Timeline: Zero III moved the AB room.

We assumed that Zero III moved the room because Akane was killed, but what if Lagomorph’s orders were actually to move the AB room unless Sigma and Phi chose to go through the cyan door? Akane, who could have seen the future through Tenmyouji’s eyes, would know which route would allow Sigma and Phi to unearth her message. So she created the paradox by ordering Lagomorph to leave the AB room once Sigma had decided to follow the Cyan Timeline by choosing the cyan door. Then, when Sigma and Phi came into the 1st AB room, they found it empty, because the body was in the room on the very end.

Now, why on Earth didn’t anyone say anything about the body? This should have been discovered by someone in the first AB round, and surely someone in the second AB round as well. But… when you read the descriptions of who went into which room in the second AB round of the Cyan Timeline, you find something interesting. In the timeline farthest to the right (the Phi timeline), Alice was drugged and her vote defaulted to “ally.” She was a solo, so one room was left empty, and it was the 6th AB room.

In the timeline just to the left of that (the Sigma timeline), Alice and Quark were drugged, and several of the other players (I believe Clover, Dio, and Tenmyouji) stayed behind. There were multiple AB rooms that went unused, and one of them was the sixth. But in the timeline to the left of that, Clover actually did go into the 6th AB room.

However, there’s a good reason why Clover wouldn’t have said anything about that. This was the Alice timeline. Alice had just run off with a scalpel, but had been detained by Sigma and Phi before she could attempt suicide. She had been drugged, but she awoke early and entered the AB room to vote Betray, an action which would (did) kill Sigma if he chose to pick Ally. Clover would realize that if she announced a body had been stabbed, they would blame the woman who had stolen a blade, especially since that woman almost killed Sigma. Clover’s devotion to Alice would make it impossible for her to say anything about discovering a body in the 6th AB room.

That takes care of the 2nd AB rounds. What about the 1st AB round? It doesn’t say who went in the door that time, but we can figure it out with two clues. 1: Dio said he would only plant the bombs if something went wrong. If Akane was still alive, something else must have threatened his plan. 2: Dio and Quark voted to ally in that round, and Dio acted very strangely about it. He didn’t even say anything about Quark being secretly evil.

The conclusion? Dio and Quark must have gone through the 6th AB room. When Dio entered and saw that Luna had placed the body into that AB room, he accidentally blurted out something incriminating—perhaps, “But I left that body outside! Who brought the old woman in here?” Quark deduced that Dio was the killer, and threatened to tell everyone if Dio didn’t promise to ally with whoever Quark said. Dio was worried that the kid couldn’t keep his mouth shut, so he planted the bombs. As it turned out, Quark subsequently succumbed to Radical 6 and was injected with Soporil Beta, so perhaps he was less of a threat than Dio had initially thought.

The Causal Reality is the reality that happened first, but Sigma and Phi erased it by determining a different past. This is why the Cyan Timeline has a different past from the others. Sigma and Phi took a timeline without a set reality and created the reality that they wanted it to be.