The Pandora Gates

Posted by: Giselle Patel, former Pathfinder employee

In the time shortly after the Fall, transhumanity needed hope, and we found it in the pandora gates. Just as we lost our home, the galaxy suddenly opened up to us. The gates work as wormholes, allowing you to travel from one point in the galaxy to another in moments. Even more significant, the gates are programmable, allowing us to pick and choose our destinations (sorta, the process is not exactly refined). So, imagine getting thrown to the curb by your partner only to find an endless sea of people offering you a place to crash. Sure, you’ve only got a hastily packed suitcase and a shattered heart, but you’ve at least got options.

Each of the gates works more or less the same as the others, but that’s where the similarities end. Each gate has a different group managing it, and they range from hardcore profit-driven hypercapitalists to idealistic autonomist collectives. They all have their own rules and procedures. What is standard protocol at the Fissure Gate will get you escorted out of the spaceport in handcuffs at the Martian Gate. To understand each of the gates, you have to understand their contexts — political, social, economic, and historical.

The Vulcanoid Gate

The Vulcanoid Gate hides in the polar region of asteroid V-2011 — aka Caldwell — in the inner system. The gate complex consists of six surface domes and an extensive beehive warren.

The independent ecosystem and terraforming cooperative TerraGenesis owns and operates the gate outside of the Planetary Consortium’s control. TerraGen makes its name by terraforming exoplanets themselves, preferring the slow-and-steady approach to gambling on finding one of the precious few exoplanets that can support transhuman life without assistance.

In an effort to draw in more traffic, TerraGen also offers the best gatecrasher benefits in the inner system, including full medical care for injuries sustained during a sponsored mission. As long as a crasher signs up for at least three missions in a year, their finder’s fees are 10 percent higher than Pathfinder and Gatekeeper thanks to a bonus program to incentivize repeat business.

Rivalries

TerraGen has the distinction of providing the only gate access in the inner system free from Planetary Consortium control, and TerraGen leverages that fact well. TerraGen is also now working with the Morningstar Constellation on several research initiatives. Naturally, the Constorium chafes at TerraGen’s independence and the competition it provides to their own Martian Gate. The Consortium regularly attempts to corral TerraGen via threats of sanctions. Pathfinder has naturally followed their parent organization’s lead, albeit via methods less legal and more direct.

Security

In AF 9, a force of reapers managed to infiltrate the Caldwell facilities and nearly destroy the gate with a thermonuclear device. The parties behind the attack remain unknown, but TerraGen thoroughly upgraded their security in response. The hypercorp Novafire provides patrol drones, fighters, and space-defense systems around Caldwell. Another merc outfit, the Sol Brigades, handle security checkpoints and heavy ground defenses. TerraGen Security handles the gate itself and other sensitive areas of the complex.

The Martian Gate

The Martian Gate is the Planetary Consortium’s pride and joy and the symbol of their aspirations towards a galactic empire. The gate itself lies in a cave at the northern end of the Ma’adim Vallis, one of the largest canyons on Mars. The Planetary Consortium’s subsidiary, Pathfinder, operates the gate through the Ma’adim Research Park.

Pathfinder showcases the best and worst aspects of old-economy corporatism. Gatecrashing ops through Pathfinder pay a premium, but don’t expect benefits, medical care, free extra gear, or a healthy bonus for discoveries. They pride themselves on efficiency and organization to the point that the ironclad timetables are set down to the second. They organize missions into blocks so they can avoid having to change the staging too often. Once you set the time window for your wormhole, good luck changing it. Without an executive directive saying otherwise, the gate operators can and will cut the wormhole while they watch you crawling towards it. I’ve had to cut it myself.

Pathfinder City

Thankfully, the Hub of the creatively-named Pathfinder City nearby provides any vice a poor sap could want to drown themself in, as I can assure you. Gaming dens, dollhouses, casinos, petal pods, and more color the city, or you could go old-fashioned and just bet on low-g air racing or canyon parkour (the latter pays out better). The city can still provide even if you actually want to accomplish something, particularly if you are a gatecrasher. The Crasher’s Bazaar south of the Hub might just be the single most valuable resource you could want. You can find gear, people to upgrade or mod your morph, specialists for missions, and even ads for jobs.

The Pandora Gate

A Titanian-sponsored research/survey team found the first gate on Saturn’s moon, Pandora. The Titanian Commonwealth Plurality established a microcorp to oversee the gate,and even managed to hold onto sole control for a time. Outside pressure finally pushed the Titanians to transform their managerial microcorp into a fully independent hypercorp, Gatekeeper. Titan still holds a major non-controlling stake, but everyone from the Planetary Consortium itself to tiny research collectives owns shares at this point.

Gatekeeper dedicates itself to discovery and the accumulation of knowledge for all. This dedication means they focus on exploration ops, with research and xenoarcheology missions running a close second. Scientists have an endless appetite for data, and Gatekeeper works to provide them with the best. Studies that can inform scientific theory relating to star-system and planetary formation and the evolution of life entices them the most, as they can turn it around into practical applications for refining models about which planets will likely have life, support colonization, or provide resources for extraction.

Gatekeeper also highly values accessibility. They welcome tourists to the gate complex to see the gate (from a secure distance) and encourage media coverage and x-casts of of first-in missions. They even offer a lottery system to give people lacking the means and funds a chance at experiencing the universe. And they offer grants for research projects that might not otherwise get hypercorp backing. All that free advertisement certainly pays for itself, and Gatekeeper just loves playing up the spectacle and romance of discovery and milks it for all they can get. More than a few have gotten pulled into the gatecrashing life after seeing one too many x-casts, only to find themselves pushing buttons at a terminal at the Martian Gate wondering where the hell their life went wrong.

Pohl Research Labs

Named after the first gatecrasher to die on a mission (he’s still gatecrashing today!), the Pohl Research Labs are stationed at the far end of Pandora from the gate. These labs study anything and everything related to gatecrashing, from astrobiology to exotic physics.

Lab space is provided for hypercorps and autonomist research co-ops alike; the Argonauts of course have a major presence here.

Gatekeeper works to share the discoveries here with transhumanity at large, despite hypercorp efforts to keep the best for themselves.

Below the labs, a high-security vault contains the largest collection of xenoarcheological and alien relics accumulated so far.

The Fissure Gate

While all those gates may be in hypercorp hands, Fissure Gate has the distinction of being the only gate run by autonomists. Fissure is on Oberon, an icy moon of Uranus. An anarchist collective known as Love and Rage protects and operates the Fissure facility and the associated spaceport/outpost known as Chat Noir. Most of this complex is under Oberon’s ice, with a series of surface domes capping it off. One of those domes is composed of pieces of what is believed to be an alien spaceship hull, found in the orbit of an otherwise unremarkable exoplanet. Known as the Enemy Mine, that dome houses the best saloon in the Uranian system and a respectable stock of anarchist microbrews. The gate itself is 500 meters down, in a subsurface fissure complex reached by elevators.

Chat Noir is a main stopover for long-haul shipping in and out of the Uranian system, so it gets a lot of traffic. The consistent influx keeps the area diverse, but it also means the autonomists have developed a healthy suspicion of outsiders who don’t align with their ideals. I say healthy because I’ve seen how the Pathfinder execs lick their lips at that gate. They would spread stories about how Love and Rage will bump half the schedule to rescue any halfcocked gatecrasher who got in over their head, as if that was a bad thing. That characterization is partially correct, the anarchists will accommodate emergencies within reason, and they have built-in wiggle-room in their timetables.

Shared Access

Love and Rage does their best to keep the gate accessible. There’s a conductorless anarchist orchestra that does a yearly extrasolar concert, artists that plant pieces on random expolanets, and even silly stuff like capture-the-flag games and Easter egg hunts in alien landscapes. Non-commercial groups like the Argonauts or various mercurial outfits rely on such access, unable to afford the steep gate fees of the inner-system gate corps.

The Discord Gate

If you have a soft spot for Ultimate technofascists and exhuman cults, you’re gonna love the Discord Gate. Only use this gate as a last resort. People named it after both the dwarf planet Eris that it rests on and the chaotic and violent history of that little barren rock in the Kuiper Belt. Discovered by anarchists, it was seized by hypercapitalists who then lost it to exhumans before taking it back with the help of technofascist mercs.

Currently, the stoicly efficient Go-nin Group runs the Torii complex that houses the gate itself. Go-nin prides itself in its Japanese traditions, even going so far as to recover a Torii gate from a Shinto shrine on Earth to mark the entrance to the gate.

Go-nin somehow managed to destroy the Discord Gate shortly after they acquired it. Rumor is they messed around under the hood a bit too much and it blew up in their face. Amazingly, the gate simply rebuilt itself, just a kilometer deeper in the crater that was left. Good to know the warranty was still in effect.

The Torii complex is almost entirely subterranean, with kilometers of tunnels carved into the methane ice.

Monsters Everywhere

The self-important Ultimates stationed on Eris’s moon Dysnomia are there to bolster Go-nin’s defenses. A few exhuman cells occasionally make sabotage runs on Torii or raid a long-haul shipment.

A few times, they've even attacked through the gate, from exoplanets on the other side. The technofascists and exhumans are generally happy to fight each other, and most of us are just waiting for them to wipe each other out.

The anarchists of Ilmarinen, the original occupiers of the gate, also periodically probe the gate’s defenses with mesh subversions and drone sabotage. They lack the military power to retake the gate, but they remain a thorn in Go-nin’s side.

Other Gates

If you believe the mesh conspiracy forums, there are a dozen other gates hidden around the Solar System, either secretly held or yet to be found. Prospectors prowl every lone rock hoping to score big. Claims of one on Earth might be the most believable, given the TITANs were active there. Another top choice is one in the Oort Cloud, possibly under Factor control. Really, though, the thought of more gates is a bit unnerving — after all, we never know what might decide to come through it.