=Exploration Missions= 
**Posted by:** Alisha Endowi, Gatecrasher <Info Msg Rep>
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That nagging itch we call curiosity has spurred the momentum towards exploring the gate network. Exploration missions are both the most dangerous and the most important kind of gatecrashing mission. These initial surveys often determine if transhumanity will return to a given place and are crucial for ﬁnding exploitable resources or identifying scientific curiosities. They are the most likely to make a significant ﬁnd and may be the point of ﬁrst contact between transhumanity and new life forms. They could also conceivably put transhumanity at risk by bringing us to the attention of unknown entities and threats. For these reasons, exploration missions are the most critical type of gatecrashing op.
==First-Link Procedures== 
“First link” is the term used for the ﬁrst time a wormhole is opened to a new gate address. Because no one knows what lies beyond, these events can be as exciting as they are dangerous. Given the possibility of encountering hostile life or some other threat, gate operations adhere to strict safety protocols for connecting to new remote gates.
The ﬁrst thing to understand is that no one ever goes through a gate without at least some reconnaissance. No one wants to send gatecrashers out to be instantly ﬂash-fried, fed to a pack of TITANs waiting eagerly on the other side of the gate, or come back crawling with some sort of hungry self-replicating nanotech, least of all any gatecrashers with even the smallest amount of sense or survival instinct. The incident where crashers died going from Pandora to the Fissure Gate for the ﬁrst time convinced people to be slightly more careful.
The initial procedure is to create a micro-sized wormhole just large enough to stick a small sensor probe through. It takes readings on the atmospheric composition, radiation levels, and temperature. It also feeds back a live audiovisual recording of the surroundings. The typical gate probe is rated for pressures from 0 to 250 atmospheres and temperatures from –250 C to 600 C. Its actual mechanism is in a shielded Faraday cage, so it’s pretty much unhackable. Only the tip is stuck through the mouth, making it unlikely to be detected. Typical deployment only lasts for about 1 minute.
If the probe is damaged, they try again. If two probes don’t come back, the policy is usually to close the gate, stick a warning label on that gate code and wait for someone to try to come up with a better plan to see what’s on the other side. Very few of these addresses are revisited.
If the probe survives and the site looks promising (which usually means not immediately threatening in any way), the wormhole is widened a slight bit and an explorenaut or similar drone is sent through, tethered to the start side. This bot conducts radar and lidar scans, analyzes the soil/rock/ground, and monitors radio wavelengths for any signs of activity. It also sends more detailed audiovisual data back. If the immediate area is designated as clear, these second-stage probes will scout around the remote gate itself and, if possible, use thrust-vector jets to get a small bit of altitude (just a few meters) for a more thorough look around, while remaining tethered. Any signs of biological growth are sampled and brought back through for analysis. If stars can be seen, the bot will also attempt to get a ﬁx on the remote gate’s location in the galaxy. These probes are typically pulled back after 10 minutes of reconnoitering.
If the extrasolar site still looks promising, the third step is to send another tethered robot through with a scout missile. This will be programmed to get an aerial map of the remote gate’s area, out to 5 kilometers in each direction. As long as no potential dangers are logged, any sites of interest are noted and a ﬁrst-in gatecrasher team scrambled.
==First-In Missions== 
A “ﬁrst-in” mission is when a group of live transhumans are sent through to a new address for the ﬁrst time. Usually this is done right after a successful run of ﬁrst-link protocols. In some cases, ﬁrst-link procedures are skipped due to lack of resources (common with ops stemming from extrasolar gates) or because the sponsor is seeking to save on time and costs. First-in missions are notorious for being the best route to striking it rich or making a name for one's self, even though the odds of ﬁnding anything interesting are low, and also because of the signiﬁcant chance the gatecrashers will end up dead and have to be restored from backup. Most experienced gatecrashers have stories of ﬁrst-in missions that their current ego never actually experienced.
For optimal gate time use, the wormhole link is usually severed right after the ﬁrst-in mission steps through. It will be re-opened at a designated time, usually between 4 and 12 hours later, following protocols similar to ﬁrst link. If the ﬁrst-in team fails to check in at this time, a search-and-rescue bot will be pushed through and the gate closed once again, to be re-opened at an arranged backup time. If the team remains missing, the address is ﬂagged with a warning and the known details are ﬁled for review. Usually, it is deemed too dangerous and not economical to attempt to ﬁnd or rescue missing gatecrashers unless the extrasolar location seems especially worthy of further research and exploitation. This means that gatecrashers that run into trouble better hope they do so in a place littered with uranium or similar precious resources that would inspire a gate corp to take a second look, despite the evident dangers. Otherwise they are likely to be cut off.
First-in teams have a rough start. They wait for long periods on standby, holed up in a ready room while Gate Control runs through ﬁrst-link protocols with addresses from the library. As little as ten minutes before they go in, the gatecrashers may have no idea whether they’ll be sent to an airless rock, the frozen oceans of a radiation-battered gas giant moon, or the lush jungles of an alien paradise. They’ll have access to the live feeds from the sensor probes and incoming data, but precious little time to absorb it and switch out their gear before they are ordered through the gate. Gear must be run through sterilization protocols (so as to avoid infecting any alien ecosystems with transhuman microbes), meaning that if something wasn’t pre-approved, they might be barred from adding it to their gear list last minute. Adaptability is key. Once on the other side, they’ll have to quickly acclimate to local conditions, get their bearings, and go about fulfilling objectives—all while hoping they aren’t about to get killed by some previously unnoticed menace. It’s tough, stressful, and dizzying work.
The excitement of exploring alien landscapes is often overridden by confusion and the sheer terror of trying to stay alive.
Most ﬁrst-in teams have a standard list of objectives. This is a common run-down:
# **Record Everything.** If something happens to your team, your recordings may still get recovered and they will let others know what happened. In the rush to explore a new setting, details are often overlooked that may be useful later. It is common practice to review mission recordings to gather additional data on the extrasolar environment.
# **Secure the Remote Gate and Establish a Perimeter.** The gate is your way back out. Protect it, and your path to it, at all costs. You will also likely spend much of your excursion time in the gate’s proximity. Some teams immediately assign members to keep the gate area guarded. Others don’t like splitting the group or wasting manpower and will leave that task to bots and sensors instead.
# **Map the Immediate Area.** You may already have data from a scout missile run. If not, hopefully you brought your own. For environments that aren’t conducive to such measures, recon drones and old-fashioned scouting around on foot are just as important. It helps to identify key landmarks, which may help you ﬁnd your way later. If you’re in a landscape that is changing, or difficult to see/map due to extreme weather conditions, you may want to set up your own radio beacons or mark trails with a breadcrumb positioning system.
# **Identify Potential Dangers and Threats.** You don’t want to overlook the fact that some local predatory creature is about to lunge at you while you set up camp or that an avalanche or mudslide could bury the gate at any minute. If anything else looks really likely to keep you from getting home and you have a QE communicator on hand, use it to ask for immediate pick-up. Sure, you may have lost your chance and will need to wait a few days or even a few months for another try, but you’ll also be around for another try. Being stuck on some volcanic rockball waiting for the lava ﬂow that surrounds your gate to cool sufficiently is a wretched way to die.
# **Establish a Basecamp.** Pick a defendable position, just in case you are attacked. Some prefer to stick right on top of the gate, others prefer to be hidden nearby but still in visual range of it, just in case the gate ends up being a spot of activity for something else.
# **Run Scans and Take Samples.** This is what you’re here for. The more you can collect, the more chance you have of stumbling upon something interesting. It’s also the best way of detecting some unforeseen menace, like perhaps noticing the cold planet you’re on is like Mercury and gets blasted due to close proximity to its sun when day rolls around, which could kill you if you were unprepared.
# **Investigate Anomalies and Items of Interest.** Strange radar echoes. Unusual energy readings. Unlikely trace elements. All of these can lead to the sort of Big Find that could break you out of poverty.
# **Explore.** Once the basic securing, grunt work, and investigation is done, it’s time to explore. At least at ﬁrst, stay in sight of each other. Just because things look normal doesn’t mean that there can’t be all manner of unexpected surprises or sudden radio interference. Grid out the most promising sectors and go take a look, while sending bots to search other areas.
# **Look Before You Touch.** Unless something starts moving on its own, by far the best policy is look before you touch. Even if something really tempting is waiting right in front of you, check out your surroundings.
# **Get Back to the Gate on Time.** If you miss your rendezvous, you could be in for a long, long stay.
The ofﬁcial goal for ﬁrst-in missions is to gather enough information to determine if further investigation is warranted. Specifically, this means determining if the remote gate locale is of special interest for colonization, resource exploitation, or research. This can be a challenge, simply because the evidence for this might be nowhere near the gate site. The gate might open onto a mundane, uninteresting moon, like millions of others in the galaxy, but another planet in that extrasolar system could harbor an Earth-like environment, a motherlode of rare materials, or the buried remains of an extinct species. The clues may simply be outside of the ﬁrst-in team’s reach; in fact, for all we know, many previously visited systems that were bypassed as not notable might hold fantastic undiscovered secrets, as there simply aren’t enough resources to thoroughly explore them all. In some cases, though, the ﬁrst-link scans may have already indicated the site is of interest, like if the gate happens to be situated near an open vein of precious heavy metals or amidst some obvious alien ruins. Any extrasolar spot with even traces of biological life, alien artifacts, or a previous TITAN presence automatically ﬁts the bill. In this case, the secondary goal is to ascertain how dangerous and/or difficult it would be to establish a transhuman presence there.
For many gatecrashers, particularly lottery winners, the real goal of the mission is to make a Big Find. This means that such teams often waste time and resources tracking down leads, investigating anomalies, or just exploring rather than conducting tests and making scans. This is a regular tension between gatecrashers and gate corps that sometimes jeopardizes follow-up missions.
==What to Bring== 
There’s very little that will get a bunch of experienced gatecrashers arguing like discussing what you need to bring. The basics are obvious; anyone who isn’t bringing a survival belt, a robomule, a shelter dome, a sidearm, a standard vacsuit, and a life support pack is either stupid or suicidal. Anyone who can afford to go gatecrashing can afford this sort of gear and there’s no excuse to not bring it along. Even lottery winners will
be kitted up with basic exploration gear.
Part of the difficulty in preparing for first-in gatecrashing missions is the inherent mystery in knowing where you’ll end up. For this reason, most gatecrashers rely on standard gear that is useful and necessary in most environments. You’ll never know if the air on the other side is breathable, for example— assuming there’s an atmosphere at all—so a vacsuit is mandatory. At best you’ll have a few precious minutes to evaluate the remote gate location while the ﬁrst-link protocols are run, giving you just enough time to switch some gear out. Your life may rest on the decisions you make.
Beyond the basic gear that you’ll find in the standard explorer’s kit, things get complex. Versatility is critical, however, so in that vein a desktop cornucopia machine and a good library of blueprints are your friends. If you can afford one, bring it. Otherwise, make do with a fabber or maker instead.
Though the remote location you’ll be visiting has hopefully been mapped by the ﬁrst-link team, there’s always a chance this can go wrong, so you’ll want to bring your own scout and mapping missiles. The gate may have opened underground, for example, so you’ll be glad you brought one with when you ﬁnally break your way through to the surface. If you're stuck underground, recon hoppers or snakes will do the job just as well.
Other than that, there are two other major considerations: vehicles and communications.
===Vehicles=== 
The main reason for bringing along a vehicle on a ﬁrst-in mission is to investigate anything interesting that shows up on the reconnaissance that is too far to walk. Problem is, gate corps and other sponsors often consider vehicles an extraneous risk expense and may veto them. According to their mission specs, ﬁrst-in teams should be focusing on the gate region and letting drones investigate farther aﬁeld. More detailed exploration involving vehicles is for followup missions. If you don’t mind putting your own assets at risk, however, they’ll rarely complain if you bring your own along.
Not all missions are suited for vehicles. The extrasolar environment can severely impact the utility of any vehicles you bring. There’s no use bringing anything to an exoplanet that’s similar to the surface of Venus or dayside Mercury, for example, unless it can withstand the heat and/or pressure. Likewise, a ﬂyer of some type won’t do you much good if the remote gate ends up being underground or airless. On the other hand, if the ﬁrst-link scans show the gate’s on a small island, bringing along a boat is a smart plan just so you can get somewhere else in the vicinity.
Unless you need to ﬂy halfway across the planet you’re visiting, stick to bringing a couple of portable planes through. I personally think backwings are a gimmick and bringing through jets is a waste of money. Portable planes, however, are exceptionally reliable, easy to use, and they let you get anywhere you need to go. The only time you want to look at anything else is if the world is a seriously unfriendly environment. Vacuum planets require rocket buggies or, if you only need short range mobility, a GEV. Both are expensive, but they’re worth it on worlds where you’ll otherwise be living in your vacsuit.
====**Sidebar: What about Go Cycles?**==== 
**From:** Mbanefo37Aa
Not bad advice, except you missed something important. Unless the terrain is too steep for anything else, walking is slow and tiring and you’re not going to carry much back with you. Out on Willowane, my team had to leave behind most of the artifacts we found, meaning later gatecrashers picked them off. Also, planes are expensive and a single vehicle like a crasher truck can break down, leaving you back to walking. One go-cycle a person is an ideal choice to add to the basic kit. They’re cheap enough that there’s no reason not to take one. You’ve got far more mobility, you can haul away lots, and if one breaks, you just have two people in your team double up.
===Communications=== 
Communications gear—specifically, QE comms—are another contentious issue among gatecrashers. One thing that every ﬁrst-in team has to consider is that once that wormholes closes, you are on your own until the scheduled pick-up time. There is no one remotely close enough to come to your aid in an emergency. Even if you brought a vehicle big enough to carry a neutrino transceiver, you are light years away. It could be decades before anyone else even hears your message.
The obvious solution to this is to bring a QE communicator for emergencies. Because they circumvent light speed limits, you can be on the other side of the galaxy and still call back home for help. The drawbacks to this are two-fold. One, QE comms are expensive and beyond the reach of many gatecrashers, especially lottery winners. Second, there is no guarantee that anyone will come to rescue you—or at least reach you in time. Many mission sponsors have no-rescue clauses in their contracts, simply because they don’t want to pay the exorbitant fees the gate corp will charge them to break from the schedule to run a rescue op. Lottery winners are also typically laden with no-rescue clauses; another reason to backup before you crash. Even if your sponsor is willing to stage a rescue, simple logistics may get in the way. If your call for help comes in right after they spun up a wormhole link to a major colony for their monthly supply drop and they only just started shoving things through, Gate Control may very well just tell your rescuers that they’re going to have to wait 20 minutes for the gate to be clear.
Despite the drawbacks, many teams consider QE comms a requirement, even if only to use for emergencies. Some will use them for other purposes, like requesting assistance or asking for exceptionally urgent data. Perhaps you end up in a situation where you need to nanofab something but lack the proper blueprints. Spending qubits to ask someone for the right tool or medicine design specs or whatever you might need to save your lives and get you home might be really expensive, but is probably well worth the price. Similarly, if you suddenly hit a ﬁrst-contact situation or something equally big, then you might want to turn it over to professionals. You’ll get a big reward and lots of acclaim that way. If you go all lone wolf and accidentally start an interspecies war, people might not even bother to resleeve you from your backup.
One additional argument in favor of QE comms is the problems inherent to radio and other communications methods your team may use. If your radio can’t punch through rock or interference, you’re out of contact with the rest of your team. If something happens to you, a QE communicator may be the only way to ﬁnd and help you, especially if you end up underground or someplace equally inaccessible. Way too many disasters can block radio, and the ability to request back-up from your own team on this side of a gate is a vital one to many gatecrashers.
Emergency farcasters deserve mention here. Like neutrino transceivers, they are of limited usefulness to gatecrashers given the vast distances involved. Still, they provide a security of mind to some gatecrashers who feel safer knowing that their backup could still be retrieved, even if takes years for it to cross interstellar space.
====**Sidebar: A Ghost from Afar**==== 
**To:** <Encrypted>
**From:** <Encrypted>
Comrade, I want to point your attention towards something interesting. The People’s Body Bank on the extrasolar colony of Etched picked up an interesting package on their neutrino transceiver, on a channel normally used for emergency farcasts. After analyzing the burst, the transmission did indeed seem to be the backup of a gatecrasher, sent from another exoplanet when their emergency farcaster was triggered. The retrieved infomorph is only partially intact, having suffered some signal degradation and loss. Initial research seems to indicate that the backup was sent over 5 years ago from an extrasolar system approximately 5 light years from Etched. Our solar system is approximately 74 light years away from where the gatecrasher seems to have died, so it was pure luck and chance that the Etched colony picked up the signal ﬁrst.
A copy of the retrieved infomorph was run in simulspace for standard debriefing. The deceased’s story was confused and garbled at best, which may in part be due to corrupt neural structures from the damaged signal. Two things immediately stood out. First, this crasher seems to have some sort of special ops/commando training and was employed by a hypercorp (most likely Direct Action, but this remains unconfirmed). Second, during the interview the infomorph repeatedly stated that their mission was to “establish contact with the TITAN base.”
We’ve attempted to access the gatecrasher’s personal records and figure out what particular mission they were on, but our efforts have been stymied by uncooperative Consortium officials. In the meantime, I’m passing this along to you, in the hope that your, ah, watchful friends might be interested.
==What Not to Bring== 
One major concern for all gatecrashing ops, and ﬁrst-in missions in particular, is that you never know what you’re going to run into. One possibility is that you may run into an alien entity—and it might be hostile. According to this line of thought, bringing anything along that might help such a life form is an unnecessary risk. To some, this includes any technologies that could help an alien species understand transhumanity or perhaps increase their own technological development. Opposing this view is the fact that some of these technologies are considered necessary for a gatecrashing team’s ability to survive.
Each gate-controlling body handles this matter differently. A ban on information that might be useful in pinpointing the solar system’s location in the galaxy is common, sometimes enforced with mandatory searches of all information storage systems. Many restrict, or at least limit, the equipping of nanofabbers and nanoswarms, at least for ﬁrst-in missions. Similar restrictions are often placed on technologies like large weapon systems, weapon designs, antimatter, biowar information, and other x-risks. Go-nin goes so far as to ban the use of AGIs through the Discord Gate, a policy sometimes echoed by Pathﬁnder at the [[Martian Gate]].
Though often inaccessible to gatecrashers anyway, gate control units fall in this category and are banned from ﬁrst-in missions. No one wants to risk accidentally giving the technology to use the gates to another life form that we haven’t thoroughly examined and vetted. This is unfortunate for many gatecrashing teams as having one can be the difference between staring into the face of imminent death while you count down the clock for the scheduled wormhole connection to be made or just opening a new link to anyplace else so you can get the hell out.
===Sidebar: Voice From the Past=== 
**To:** <Encrypted>
**From:** <Encrypted>
This is notification that I’m taking my leave. Remember that time I told you about the voices, on that one crash? You told me it was nothing, and I was ready to write it off myself. One time is just a hallucination, right?
But that wasn’t the ﬁrst time. That was the ﬁfth gatecrash where I experienced voices while passing through. Five trips, ﬁve different voices, all talking about the same thing. I couldn’t just write it off.
This last time through, I made sure to get a morph with mnemonic augmentation. Maybe that was a mistake.
My mesh inserts said it was just over a second to walk through. In my memories, there’s a whole minute more.
It was a female voice this time. Before the words had been confusing, unclear, easily forgotten. This time I can play them back, over and over again.
They’re telling me to go somewhere. To do something. Back on Earth. Back to Dubai. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m foolish. But I knew that voice.
I’m going home
==Mission Protocols== 
First-in missions, as well as follow-up exploration ops, tend to follow set guidelines for different discovery scenarios. Sponsors don’t want their gatecrashers contaminating alien ecosystems, despoiling archeological sites, or failing to adequately mark a resource claim. To this end, gatecrashers are expected to know and follow established protocols. Those that diverge ﬁnd themselves blacklisted from further gatecrashing ops.
===Finding Life=== 
Given any sign of non-intelligent xenolife, even the lowliest extremophile micro-organism, ﬁrst-in gatecrashers are expected to maintain separated environments. This means staying sealed up in vacsuits or other compartments and not spreading germs among the locals—or picking up any. If there is a breach, gatecrashers are expected to keep it contained. Any exposure to alien life is expected to be reported immediately upon return so that proper quarantine procedures can be followed. Meanwhile, gatecrashers are expected to catalog whatever life they encounter as thoroughly as possible and to bring back relevant samples.
This particular protocol is a stickler among preservationists who argue that transhumanity must be careful not to contaminate alien ecosystems. This opinion is a minority one, however, particularly among gate corps, who see alien life as a potential revenue stream. In practice, maintaining sterile contact is exceptionally difficult, even when advised. Many micro-organisms are hardy, long-lived, and difficult to eradicate completely, even with cleaner swarms. Nano-ecologists argue for a sensible approach, utilizing nanoswarms to limit contamination on either side until research can determine the relative safety of interaction. Preservationists, however, protest even the use of nanotech in alien environments.
===Finding Relics=== 
Unless a gatecrashing team has a xenoarcheologist in their midst, the standard for ﬁnding alien artifacts or ruins is to document but don’t touch. This is partly to protect potentially fragile relics from being mishandled or to prevent a future archeological site from being trampled, thus destroying potential evidence. It is also to protect the gatecrashers, as these artifacts are sometimes dangerous and/or protected by lingering defense systems. To maintain a relic site’s integrity until professionals arrive, gatecrashers are instructed to map it thoroughly, take sensor scans to determine the site’s size and potential locations for buried goods, and otherwise record it all as normal.
In practice, gatecrashers often break this protocol, whether out of greed at scoring a Big Find with some intact alien mechanism or simply because they want to bring back a souvenir. Looting of valuable archeological ﬁnds remains a major problem in the gatecrashing community, fueled as it is by the high price paid for alien artifacts on the gray and black markets, especially in hyperelite circles.
===Finding Resources=== 
One of the main interests of gate hypercorps is to ﬁnd and exploit certain naturally-occurring materials that remain rare and in high demand or are monopolized by rivals. Specifically, these include metals, helium-3, and complex organic materials. Of metals, heavy metals are the most valuable, especially uranium, gold, tungsten, and titanium.
Locating signs and traces of these exploitable resources is a key function of many gatecrashing teams. If located, crashers are expected to take scans and samples in an effort to determine the availability, quality, and ease of exploitation. While advanced surveying is usually left for follow-up missions, gatecrashers are expected to at least mark the claims on their sponsor’s behalf, to protect them from late-coming rivals.
===First Contact=== 
Contact with any sort of intelligent aliens is a big deal. Transhumanity has not yet met a living technologically advanced sentient species via gatecrashing. There are dozens of archeological sites, with the oldest dating back to well before the ﬁrst vertebrate life evolved on Earth. However, with the exception of the Factors, there’s a distinct shortage of recently active intelligent life. The problem seems to be that once a species develops advanced technology, it doesn’t stick around for more than a few hundred thousand years, and most last far less long. Of course, given the Factors’ reluctance to use Pandora gates, some researchers believe that the problem isn’t that technologically advanced intelligent species don’t last long, but that species who use the gates either don’t last very long or stop using them after short periods. There isn’t a lot of evidence to back up this theory, but it’s worth considering. I would stay out of the mesh debates on this topic, though; the crazy-to-sane ratio is far from good.
Making contact with an intelligent species, even if they have low or no technology, will be an impressive and noteworthy affair and will guarantee the gatecrashers who do so with wealth and/or fame. The key is of course making a successful contact. Playing conquistador and committing atrocities is an excellent way to end up facing either formal charges or frontier justice.
No one has any ﬁrm rules for alien contact because there’s been so little of it. If you don’t happen to have an astrobiologist or ﬁrst contact specialist on your team, the standard protocols say to keep contact minimal, give away as little information on transhumanity and our technological capabilities as possible, don’t do anything that could be remotely construed as offensive or aggressive, pull back, and call in some experts. Based on what little experience we have, and the projections of scientists, communication with an alien species will be exceptionally difficult and mistakes are practically guaranteed. Our mental architecture and evolutionary histories are likely to be very different from any sentient xenolife we encounter. There’s likely to be a serious lack of shared points of reference.
===Sidebar: Issues and Ethics of First-Contact Scenarios=== 
Among the various factions of transhumanity, there is some concern about who is best situated to represent our species and serve as ambassador and negotiator to an intelligent alien life form. Demagogues in the Consortium argue that the Pandora and Fissure Gates should be seized away from autonomist inﬂuence and that the technosocialists, [[anarchists]], and other radicals in the outer system should be barred from extrasolar expansion, as they could corrupt any meetings with intelligent life and portray the wrong image of what transhumanity is and what it stands for. On their end, many autonomists fear that the hypercorps will make ﬁrst contact and exploit it to their own selfish advantage, perhaps acquiring new technologies that they could use to grow in power. The argonauts have presented themselves as the best candidates for handling inter-species dealings, given their political neutrality, commitment to supporting transhumanity as a whole, and cadre of trained xenosociologists. It seems unlikely that the various factions will agree on this point, however, so any ﬁrst contact scenario is likely to be tainted by maneuvering and political inﬁghting.
Perhaps more relevant to this situation is the question of whether seeking out other forms of life is even a smart idea. Many caution that transhumanity’s unchecked exploration and expansion into the cosmos is far too reckless and could draw the attention of an alien species that is hostile or otherwise at cross-purposes. These voices argue that our extrasolar activity and use of the gates should be far more cautious and kept in check, to ensure that we do not put ourselves at further risk. In both the inner and outer system, however, these please for caution are drowned out by those entranced by the adventures and opportunities of expansion, or those who see it as a phenomenon that cannot be stopped, as well as those who argue that spreading transhumanity out is also a form of security.
Along with issues of representing transhumanity in a ﬁrst contact scenario are the ethical considerations in how our dealings with alien life should be handled. Do we attempt to limit our contact and involvement, so as not to interfere with their culture and their own development as a species? Do we directly engage with them, sharing ideas and memes that might create rifts in their own society, and in reverse, expose our own cultural identity to their outlooks? Or do we even intentionally interfere with their affairs if by doing so we can greatly increase their quality of life? Do we, as some argue, have a duty to do so?
These are just some of the initial questions that xenosociologists debate and discuss. What if we encounter a species with strict, fanatical religious beliefs? Do we challenge or respect those beliefs? What if they are remarkably primitive by our technological standards? Do we share technologies that could rupture the fabric of their society? What if their evolutionary biological development has resulted in a hierarchical caste system, where some members of their species or a client species are ruthlessly enslaved or subjugated? Do we interfere and emancipate their servants? What if they are sufficiently more advanced than we are? Do we prostitute ourselves for a taste of their technologies and developments, or do we keep to our own path?
The answers to these questions are unlikely to be resolved before contact is achieved. This means that our dealings with any alien life we encounter are likely to be organic, dynamic, and littered with potentially dangerous pitfalls. No matter what occurs, it will be a growing experience that could forever change the face of transhumanity.
===Hostile Contact=== 
Sometimes the things waiting on the other side of a gate aren’t friendly. Carnivorous critters, automated defenses left by extinct aliens, traps laid by rival gatecrashers—these are all good reasons to carry weapons and defenses. There’s always the possibility of running into hostile technological sentients, though so far we’ve been lucky in this regard. There is also the possibility that a nervous or reckless gatecrasher might initiate hostilities with something they encounter, though shooting ﬁrst is rarely considered acceptable behavior.
The rule of thumb for encountering any acts of aggression is to defend yourself appropriately but disengage at the ﬁrst opportunity and then evaluate the situation. There’s likely a way to defuse the situation, work around the threat, or otherwise keep from getting killed. If the threat is ongoing, bug out and ﬁgure out a way to approach it from safety. If the gate itself comes under threat, gatecrashers are expected to protect it as capably as they can. Not only is it their way out, but they should be keeping hostiles from accessing and using the gates for their own purposes.
As a rule, any contact with the TITANs or anything they have left behind is considered hostile contact. Some gatecrashers, eager to protect their own skin, will torch any sign of TITAN technology as soon as they come across it—a stance often supported by their sponsors. There are others who see value in studying TITAN remnants either for scientific purposes or self-advantage, however, though even these advocate a cautious approach. Most gate corps have strict policies against bringing TITAN relics back through the gate; anything recovered must be examined by experts on the remote side and deemed safe before being allowed through. Many also invoke gag orders on any missions that come into contact with TITAN artifacts. They don’t want anyone freaking out about the potential dangers just as much as they want to protect their valuable ﬁnds.
One point of caution: there are a fair number of singularity seekers in the gatecrasher community that actively look for TITAN signs out of misguided desires to pursue or maybe even join their ranks. These types can be exceptionally dangerous, leading your team into potentially hostile environments in pursuit of their fantasies.
==Returning Home== 
Your mission doesn’t end once you walk back through the gate—far from it. Every ﬁrst-in team comes back through not to an open reception, but to a portable quarantine zone. Various equipment will be on hand to deal with any issues the extrasolar environment may create when you return. For example, if you were on the blazing surface of a near-sun asteroid, and you come back through with a suit radiating enough heat to melt metal, you’ll be cooled down before you step on anything vital. If a transition of atmospheric pressure might create problems, a pressure chamber will be rolled into place. Dr. bots will be on hand to deal with any medical emergencies, with skilled doctors and surgeons overseeing via telepresence. You will be scanned in just about every measure conceivable to ensure you haven’t returned with any hidden passengers, like a TITAN nanoswarm or mind-controlling parasites. You and your material will be hosed down with cleaner nanoswarms to ensure you don’t accidentally bring back anything too small to be seen. Your team will be placed under supervised isolation for a set period, depending on where you were. If you visited a cold, lifeless rock, this period will be a short 24–48 hours. If you found evidence of biological life, the quarantine will last considerably longer to ensure you don’t bring back some microbe that could cause an interstellar plague. Teams lacking biomorphs get through this process easier. Some gatecrashers or sponsors prefer to destroy exposed biomorphs as a safety precaution.
While you sit through decontamination procedures, you will be subject to a thorough debrieﬁng—otherwise known as an interrogation. Your sponsors will want to know every little detail about the mission and all recordings will be thoroughly reviewed. This is partly to catch anything interesting that the gatecrashers may have overlooked. It is also part to analyze each subject’s response, to ensure that they’re not hiding anything or otherwise acting suspiciously. Sponsors are wary of crashers who think they can hide a Big Find so that they may capitalize on it on their own at some later point.
If there were any unusual incidents, deaths, or encounters with alien life, alien relics, or TITAN artifacts, this review is likelier to be much lengthier. Part of the process of laying a claim on an exoplanet is enforcing the claiming body’s legal authority there. This means that gatecrashers are liable for their actions according to the laws of whomever sponsored their mission and claims the remote gate location as their property. The Planetary Consortium, for example, has not been hesitant to prosecute gatecrashers for crimes committed on ﬁrst-in missions, if just to lay the groundwork for their extrasolar legal authority. In certain cases, gatecrashers have even been subject to psychosurgery and virtual interrogation, among other investigative methods.
===Sidebar: Mission Bonuses/Rewards=== 
Many hypercorp-sponsored gatecrashing ops, particularly lottery missions, offer bonuses to the gatecrashers
for particular discoveries. Here are a few common rewards:
||~ Discovery ||~ Average Reward (In Credits) ||
|| Alien Artifacts || 10,000 ||
|| Alien life (Non-sapient) || 5,000 ||
|| Alien Life (Sapient) || 50,000 ||
|| Another extrasolar gate || 10,000 ||
|| Exoplanet ripe for colonization/terraforming || 5,000 ||
|| Exoplanet with Earth-like conditions || 20,000 ||
|| Exploitable resource || 5,000-20,000 ||
===Sidebar: Property Claims=== 
The issue of claiming and owning extrasolar property is a thorny one. Among the inner system gate corps and hypercorp mission sponsors, the same doctrine of “property rights without sovereignty” that applies to much of the solar system is also accepted for extrasolar space. What this means is that discovery alone is not enough to claim ownership, but that instead //continued usage// of the territory is the basis of property rights. In practice, whomever ﬁrst takes a spot and puts it to use can claim ownership of a chunk of real estate, and they will continue to hold those property rights for as long as they exploit them. If they let the territory go vacant and unused, however, others may freely move in. Claimed areas also extend to relevant airspace and orbital paths.
According to the terms of their contracts, most explorer gatecrashers are legally bound to claim whatever discovery they make on behalf of their sponsor. Such claimed stakes are temporary, however, and if their sponsor does not move to exploit that claim quickly, they become forfeit.
The gate-controlling corps hold a huge advantage here as they literally control the portals to the new frontier. Pathﬁnder, for example, automatically marks a claim on any location they open a wormhole link to via the Martian Gate. This claim is waived, in whole or in part, when a particular mission is sponsored by a client, presuming the client pays the substantial claim fee (hypercorps that are members of the Consortium receive a deep discount). Even when they waive the claim rights to other mission sponsors, they almost always reserve the claim for the remote gate itself and the area around it to a radius of 5 kilometers. This way, they ensure control over the gate network itself. This means that a prospecting hypercorp might end up owning an extrasolar world that the mission they ﬁnd claims, with the exception of the gate on that world. If they want to use that extrasolar gate, they must pay royalties and/or do so according to the conditions of whomever claims that gate.
Naturally, there have been many property and claim disputes. Some exoplanets have been independently “discovered” through different gates and claimed by rival parties at different times. Among Consortium hypercorps, these matters are technically supposed to be resolved legally, with competing claims considered by the Ministry and rewarded to one claimant or the other, usually on the basis of who settled and/or exploited the territory first. Additionally, some precedence has been set that physical occupation by robot (whether controlled by AI or telepresent jammers) is substantial enough to count as usage. Outside of the Consortium, disputes are handled by old-fashioned negotiation. In practice, TerraGenesis, Gatekeeper, Pathﬁnder, and their individual partners honor each other's claims based on usage rights. Go-nin has taken a more aggressive stance, however, sometimes refusing to yield claims without some sort of compensation for themselves or their mission-sponsor partners. In response to these issues, Gatekeeper has established a directory of claims, subject to independent review, that everyone is encouraged to contribute to, in order to better resolve disputes.
On remote worlds, far from prying eyes, however, it is not uncommon for disputes to be resolved with deceit or even force. Some claims are simply ignored, with fly-by-night mining operations moving in to extract a resource and leave before the violation is discovered. More than one hypercorp has protested that their robotic installations were subverted or destroyed and their Gatekeeper claim registry hacked by rivals. Others have simply slugged it out with mercenary troops on distant planets. With no over-abiding authority, frontier justice applies. A few hypercorps, disliking the monopoly the gate corps wield over the gates themselves, have seized remote gates to use as they wish. Complicating matters is the fact that some claims are intentionally not registered so as not to alert rivals to potential sites of interest and wealth.
In contrast to this system, most autonomists reject the idea of property altogether. They make no claim on the exoplanets they ﬁnd, instead saying such things belong to everyone. When conﬂicts arise with hypercorp claims, they are sometimes resolved amicably and just as often not. Some autonomists simply refuse to respect hypercorp claims, though they do not actively interfere with their operations. Others take a more aggressive stance that hypercorp claims are a crime of theft against transhumanity and actively sabotage and oppose any attempts to exercise such claims.
==Follow-Up Missions== 
The success of the ﬁrst-in mission is often key to determining if an extrasolar gate will ever be visited again. Though one would suspect that whomever built the gates chose each location for a reason, this is not always apparent. It is possible that the reasons are long gone, buried, or simply unapparent to an nonadvanced species like transhumanity. The majority of gatecrashing trips have found nothing of interest, or been to locations too hostile and dangerous to fully explore. Those that hold something of value to transhumanity are not always immediately recognizable, and so even the sites that show no promise at ﬁrst are evaluated for potential follow-up missions.
Before any follow-ups are launched, the data from the ﬁrst-link and ﬁrst-in missions is carefully analyzed. Each gate is then ranked according to its potential value, with higher-rated sites given priority. Sometimes the analysis of scans and samples turns up something the ﬁrst-in operation missed, bolstering its chances for a second look.
Follow-up missions have the advantage of being more directly geared towards the environment and likely use of the extrasolar world. These missions often involve setting up a semi-permanent base camp from which further exploration can be undertaken. They are more likely to bring vehicles along, specifically to search further aﬁeld. Some follow-up missions even involve exploring other worlds beyond the one the remote gate lies on, and so require bringing through spacecraft. Secondary priorities typically include acquiring a more detailed map of the exoplanet and setting up a satellite network in orbit. The satnet facilitates communication and mapping and reduces risks. Though expensive, they are often considered vital to further exploration.
Many gate corps farm out follow-up mission logistics to contracted hypercorps, particularly if the world’s usefulness is beyond their primary agenda. In some cases, the rights to a world or ﬁnd are sold outright.
==Mission Dangers== 
Exploration missions are notorious for their high casualty rates. There could literally be anything waiting for a gatecrasher on the other side of a gate, from a horde of TITAN death machines just over the horizon to an active volcano about to dump hundreds of tons of ash on the expedition. The various dangers roughly break down to categories: natural threats, stellar phenomena, accidents, and unnatural dangers.
Risks from nature include everything from predatory local wildlife to dangerous environmental conditions. Weather systems on exoplanets are notoriously difficult to predict; more than one expedition has found themselves suddenly endangered by hurricane-strength storms, ﬂash ﬂoods, or extreme temperature changes. On an even larger scale is the threat from regional astrophysics, whether that be lethal doses of radiation emitting from a neighboring gas giant, periodic asteroid bombardments, or communication-killing solar ﬂares at a critical moment.
Far too many gatecrashers succumb to lethal accidents. The skills required for gatecrashing operations are numerous and complex, and despite AI help and built-in safety features, issues with vacsuits, temporary shelters, or heavy equipment can bring a quick end to a mission.
Though much rarer, there are other risks not originating from carelessness or the environment. Traps left by dead civilizations, hypercorp mercenaries protecting a secret claim, or mutating TITAN nanoswarms —gatecrashers never know what to expect.
===Recovery Bonds=== 
One big topic among folks who are both fortunate enough and crazy enough to gatecrash regularly are recovery bonds. They aren’t much talked about with outsiders, but the basic idea is simple. You take out an insurance policy on yourself, you pay the insurance company a hefty premium, and if you don’t come back within a stated time period, anyone who comes after you and retrieves you, or at least your intact cortical stack, gets the reward. Of course, if you come back on your own, the company keeps the money you paid them.
The higher the pay-off, the more recovery teams are likely to come after you, but the more you’re going to be paying. I’ve never seen much need for an expensive bond. If a world turns out to be a complete death-trap, no amount of money is likely to get you back, and if it’s not then you’re not going to be the last gatecrashers going there. That said, a moderate bond is a wonderful incentive for someone to take time away from survey work or treasure hunting to look for you or your remains and to do so in a fairly speedy fashion. If you can afford to go gatecrashing, you can afford to pay for a bond that makes getting you back worth someone’s while. Anyone who thinks they’ll never need one is a fool. There can be something bigger, badder, and hungrier than you’ll ever be on the other side of any gate you walk through, and everyone’s luck runs out sometime or other
====**Sidebar: Fools But Not Ghouls**==== 
**Subject:** Recovery Missions
**From:** Rayna Akiloye
Everyone knows the recovery bonds are a great idea, but I also hear lots of talk about the advantages of going and collecting them. I even know a few gatecrashing teams who make a good bit of their living going after them. The only problem is most of them have had to be restored from backup at least once.
Some will call people doing this sort of work ghouls and worse, but you don’t hear anyone who’s been rescued by one of these teams talking that way. I don’t see anything wrong with looking for bonds, except that it’s an awesome way to lose both your morph and your stack. The downside to recovery bond missions should be obvious: they’ve already left someone dead or helpless. Sure, they might have been stupid, but if they could afford a decent recovery bond, they could also likely afford equipment as good as yours, and maybe they weren’t all that stupid. A recovery mission to a destination where at least one team of gatecrashers have visited and returned safely can occasionally be a good deal, if you’re really careful. However, a mission to recover a ﬁrst-in team is bait for greedy idiots. Some insurance companies won’t issue bonds to recovery teams going to destinations that no one has come back from, and the few that do require at least double the normal payment. If you make it back, you may end up a hero, and you’ll have both the bond reward and a claim to any rights the exoplanet has to offer. You’re also likely to get the previous teams’ data and artifacts as salvage, so it’s a great way to visit a new destination, if you don’t mind the fact that it has already proven itself to be deadly.

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