=Organizing Missions= 
**Posted by:** Alisha Endowi, Gatecrasher <Info Msg Rep>
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Exploring the universe isn’t easy or cheap. Only a small segment of transhumanity even has access to the gates, and those that do tend to control them carefully, almost using them as choke-points to prevent their rivals from exerting an extrasolar presence. Some of these gate controllers sell access, but buying wormhole time isn’t cheap. The logistics of gatecrashing missions are also intimidating, even when just adhering to simple safety protocols.
==Sponsors== 
If you’re interested in taking a gatecrashing jaunt, your best option is to ﬁnd a sponsor. Sponsors generally break down into ﬁve categories: gate controllers, hypercorps, governments, researchers, and private ventures.
Everyone knows who the gate controllers are, in particular Gatekeeper, Pathﬁnder, TerraGenesis, and Go-nin. Each of these hypercorps controls a gate within the solar system and is actively exploiting its use for various types of missions. This means they hire personnel for through-gate operations, sometimes employing freelancers. As their operations are more extensive and well-established, however, getting in on the ground ﬂoor with these players can be difficult. The speciﬁc operations and procedures vary greatly depending on the entity in question. TerraGen focuses far more on exoplanet surveying and terraforming ops, for example, and so uses more geologists, xenobotanists, etc. Pathﬁnder is more focused on colonization, and so requires engineers, administrators, security, and social engineers.
Quite a few other hypercorps are engaged in extrasolar missions, however. Some of these are contracted by the gate corps for objectives that they lack the resources to pursue, consider too risky, or simply fall outside their main interests. Similarly, the gate corps also bring in contractors just to handle speciﬁc parts of a mission for which they lack the required staff. A thriving market has developed between numerous hypercorps that feed on these contracts, supplying everything from individual qualified personnel to supervising the logistics of an entire operation.
Many corps have their own extrasolar interests in mind, but lacking their own gates they must resort to buying gate time from a gate-controlling entity. These operations are often handled quite differently, with the logistics, planning, and sometimes even the objectives hidden from the gate corp. The gate corps provide some leeway in terms of exercising discretion for their client’s sake, but they do draw the line on certain points. Outside gate operators are rarely, if ever, allowed to control the gate itself, unless they have been thoroughly trained and vetted by the gate corp in question—they must protect their assets after all. Likewise there are restrictions on what types of materials may be transferred through the wormholes. Nukes, biological weapons, experimental nanotech, antimatter, and similar potential threats are verboten. There are rumors that some hypercorps have obtained exclusive rights for testing speciﬁc weapon systems and experimental technologies in secret extrasolar locations, but such arrangements are rare and very strict.
The same rules also apply to government entities that are interested in extrasolar affairs. Outside of the Planetary Consortium (Pathfinder) and Titanian Commonwealth (Gatekeeper)—and maybe Morningstar if you count their ties to TerraGenesis—the other states lack direct gate access. The Jovians have so far shown little interest in the gates, and in fact openly object to their use as a potential security vulnerability that could threaten the entire solar system. The Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, however, has sponsored several small missions, negotiating with various gate corps as appropriate.
A few non-corporate entities take advantage of the gates for research purposes, also leasing wormhole time from the gate corps. Most of these work through Gatekeeper, which provides better terms, having been specifically established to further gate and extrasolar research. The argonauts in particular are very involved, though other agencies like the reclaimers (researching terraforming) and some mercurial groups (studying xeno-environments and alien life) have pursued missions, among others.
Naturally, numerous private concerns have taken an interest in extrasolar affairs, notably various oligarchs and gerontocrats who are wise enough to take the long view towards extrasolar expansion. Rumor is that several major ﬁgures have used their vast wealth to buy permanent gate access, funding missions of various stripes in exchange for gaining exclusive access to their own private worlds.
==Self-Sponsorship and Buying Access== 
Let’s say you represent a resourceful person or group that wants to engage in their own extrasolar missions. Be prepared to pay through the nose and quite possibly other orifices because “gate time” is not even in the same mesh as “cheap.”
The going rate for a single minute of gate time benchmarks somewhere around 50,000 credits. This is the bare minimum, with no extra logistical support, which also requires you to sign a metric ton of waivers and liability contracts. The longer it takes you to shove people and gear through, the more you’ll get reamed in the bank account. This fee also doesn’t include the set 100,000 credit gate operation fee, which is what they charge you simply for allowing you anywhere near the gate and plugging in the address you want. Keep in mind that the shortest missions possible still lose at least 30 seconds to standard gate opening protocols. This includes
opening a micro-sized wormhole and poking the tip of a microsensor through, simply to ensure that you won’t be walking into a supernova and/or that an alien force is standing ready to invade as soon as the gate is opened a few millimeters wider. This is the bare minimum precaution that a gate corp is likely to take, and even then they’ll only do so for locations that have been previously visited and determined safe.
If you are intending to explore an entirely new gate address, you are immediately looking at even more significant expenses. “First-in” missions, as they are called, follow a careful set of procedures to ensure that the solar system-side gate will not be coming under any threat (direct or indirect) from the remote side. The fees for the personnel and equipment these procedures require start at 500,000 and go up. If your mission needs any speciﬁc logistics support, whether that be security bots, assisted transport through the wormhole, additional sensor scans, remote drone surveying, decontamination modules, and so on, then you can expect to pay significantly higher rates than you would ﬁnd elsewhere.
The prices listed here are just a mean of the costs publicly noted by various ventures. For your speciﬁc mission, they may be much higher, especially if you have any distinct needs. The gate corps themselves are not necessarily equal or consistent with their pricing. Go-nin is known to charge much higher rates than TerraGenesis, and use of the Discord Gate comes with the additional costs of reaching the solar system’s rim and avoiding any unpleasantness between Go-nin and the exhumans that have taken an interest in the gate.
In rare cases, gate-tending corps have been known to waive and reduce fees for causes they deemed particularly noteworthy (in terms of scientific achievement) or even humanitarian (for the positive publicity). They do of course lower the costs for missions that expect to have a monetary reward, as long as they are guaranteed a cut.
==The Lotteries== 
For those with little hope of being hired to work a gatecrashing op, much less funding their own missions, there are the lotteries. The main gatecrashing lottery is run by Gatekeeper, as they pursue the most exploration missions, though both Pathﬁnder and TerraGenesis have on occasion run their own limited lottery systems. The lotteries provide an opportunity for anyone who seeks to raise themselves out of poverty, strike it rich, or get the adrenaline-soaked adventure of a lifetime. Anyone can sign up, except indentures, simply by digitally signing a form on the mesh. Doing so guarantees you an equal shot in the next lottery drawing with the hundreds of thousands of other applicants.
If you are lucky enough to be drawn, your egocast expenses to Pandora will be covered, as will the cost of a synthmorph. Applicants can arrange their own sleeves on Pandora if they prefer something different and have the means, assuming Gatekeeper approves. On occasion, Gatekeeper will assign speciﬁc morphs more suited for certain tasks.
In reality, Gatekeeper does not leave the selection of candidates for missions entirely to chance. When lottery winners are picked, Gatekeeper assesses all of the data that can be pulled up on each. Specialized AIs sort through the proﬁles and assemble teams from individuals judged to work together the best. Teams are rated accorded to competency, and then three teams of varying skill level are set aside for each particular lottery mission. (Periodically, Gatekeeper also runs a lottery option for pre-existing teams rather than individuals. This gives groups that hope to work together a chance to do so.) When a wormhole has been opened to the location in question, Gatekeeper performs a quick assessment on how promising—and how threatening—the remote locale is. If it looks promising, they grab a highly rated team. If it looks like a hunk of barren rock with a heavy radiation count, they grab the collection of useless misfits and send them on their way.
Lottery gatecrashers are afforded fewer resources than sponsored missions. They are typically assigned the basic minimum in required equipment and training in order to minimize expenses. Gear quality is serviceable if not ideal, though there have been noticeably higher rates of equipment failure on lottery missions. Gatecrashers are not guaranteed backup or resleeving options; these must be taken care of on the individual’s own accord.
Assuming the gatecrashers survive the operation, they earn a minimum reward for returning with the required amount of sensor data and samples. This amount is enough for the individual to survive on for a short period or to seek medical care or repair as appropriate. Unless the gatecrasher behaved particularly inappropriately, they are then given the option of undertaking more exploration missions under the same terms. Many lottery winners have gone on to become professional explorers on Gatekeeper's behalf. Many others have died, gone insane, or been irretrievably lost. If the lottery mission succeeds in ﬁnding something of value, such as an exploitable resource, alien artifacts,
signs of life, or some significant scientific discovery, they are given a one-time reward commensurate with the discovery’s value, though only a small fraction of its overall worth. The rights to these discoveries belong to Gatekeeper, as per the lottery contract.
A few long-time gatecrashers have succeeded in negotiating higher rates and even royalty percentage claims on discoveries by leveraging their skills and experience.
===Sidebar: A Mobile Gate?=== 
**Gatekeeper Corporation**
**Rescue Mission Log**
**Order 1583-45**
**Classification:** Tier B
**Priority:** High
First-in team was sent to explore an unknown exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf. Initial scans indicated the planet had characteristics indicative of a super-earth. Pickup was scheduled for 24 hours. Upon re-establishing the connection, the ﬁrst-in team failed to check in. A search-and-rescue bot was deployed, which returned at the scheduled time 12 hours later.
The bot succeeded in ﬁnding the team 150 meters from the gate, but all were dead. Little remained of their bodies; all had been crushed by some sort of extreme force. Their bodies were literally pasted and pulped, and even the cortical stacks were damaged. They were identifiable only by DNA scans of the remains.
The bot did recover one intact recon drone the team has deployed shortly after reaching the exoplanet. This bot did not record anything unusual, but an analysis of its sensor readings did uncover one anomaly. According to its geospatial sensors, the gate was not in the same location it had been in when the drone was initially deployed. According to its readings, the gate was originally 150 meters away; exactly where the bodies were found.
===Solarchive Search: Gatehoppers=== 
Gatehoppers is an idiomatic term used for a particular subculture of gatecrashers. Gatehoppers take the act of exploration via the Pandora gates a step further. Instead of simply passing through one gate, exploring, and returning, gatehoppers go on an indefinite journey from one gate to the next without ever returning the way they came. Each time they reach a remote gate, they choose a new address before using that remote gate again.
Very few gatehopper groups exist, in part due to the extreme dangers of such activities. Most gatehoppers are never heard from again. Whether they fell victim to hostilities or some danger is unknown; they may have simply passed beyond the sphere of current transhuman extrasolar expansion. Some gatehoppers have eventually come across a transhuman-visited world again, however, and so have reconnected with transhumanity. One gatehopping group claims to have visited over 200 extrasolar gates in succession before returning to the solar system.
Some gatehoppers are careful to arrange for backup insurance before they leave, so that if they do not return by a predetermined period, they are resleeved from backup. Others consider it the ultimate risk to head out without such a safety net. Still others intentionally fork before they go, leaving an alpha copy of themselves behind.
Many gatehoppers have been drawn from the scum barges and habitats throughout the solar system, but members of other factions, particularly brinkers and singularity seekers, have participated in gatehopping trips as well.
==Autonomist Gates== 
In contrast to the closed nature and inaccessibility of the gate corps, the Fissure Gate is run in a decidedly autonomist manner. The gate is open to anyone to use, assuming they are vetted by the [[Fissure Gate#Love%20and%20Rage|Love and Rage Collective]] and adhere to certain restrictions. The [[anarchists]] who control the gate carefully screen those who seek access in order to keep out hypercorp spies and inner system saboteurs. @-List rep is very important here and can mean the difference between getting a 1-minute slot and a full hour. There is a waiting list for gate usage, which is generally handled on a ﬁrst-come, ﬁrst-served basis, though priority is sometimes granted for emergencies or speciﬁc missions deemed to hold more significance to transhumanity as a whole.Prospective gatecrashers must make their own way to Oberon, of course, and since the anarchist resources are limited, mission organizers are expected to handle most of their own logistics support. This sometimes means that missions are undertaken without the full support they need.
The caveat to all missions passing through the Fissure Gate is that the rewards must be openly shared with transhumanity, without restriction. Since this is how the autonomist society of the outer system is organized anyway, it makes little difference to them. This restriction effectively nullifies use of the Fissure Gate for entities seeking to privately exploit resources, claim extrasolar real estate, or otherwise proﬁt. On the other hand, the Fissure Gate is highly regarded in research circles, and so is a major base for the argonauts and various research groups that pursue unrestricted knowledge.
The Love and Rage anarchists have occasionally operated their own lottery, pooling resources in order to bring unlucky souls from the inner system out to where they can take a chance and make a new life for themselves among the autonomists. They run an additional lottery that is just for indentures, buying the contracts of indentures who win so that they can be free.
==Extrasolar Explorers== 
Organizing gatecrashing missions on the extrasolar side of the gate network is a far different affair. A few extrasolar colonies engage in gate exploration operations, much like within the solar system. A few of these are hypercorp research stations with no other purpose. Those colonies that don’t pursue exploration tend to maintain some measure of control over their local gates, often locking them on the address of the originating solar system gate, if nothing else out of a concern to protect themselves should some hostile entity come through the gate network.
There are many, many extrasolar gates, however, and the vast majority of them are unrestricted or only nominally monitored and controlled. This enables committed and well-equipped groups to pursue their own private gatecrashing endeavors. All one really needs to do is get out of the solar system with a portable gate control unit (a “blue box”) and a working knowledge of gate control operations. Once on the other side, such a team can use that remote gate to begin their own exploration. Several such remote base camps have been set up by enterprising explorers, many of them on cold, lifeless rocks with no interesting qualities other than the gate itself. A few intrepid autonomist groups have gone through the Fissure Gate to adopt an entirely nomadic lifestyle, moving through remote gates from one world to another, occasionally ﬁnding their way back to known space, sometimes not.
==Gatecrasher Teams== 
Though gatecrasher teams are almost always tailored for the speciﬁc mission at hand, it is beneficial to have members with a wide range of skill sets. Scientists, technical experts, equipment operators, mission leaders/coordinators, and security personnel are par for the course. Astrobiologists and xenoarcheologists are in high demand, as are anyone trained in mining operations or setting up colony operations.
When it comes to exploration gatecrashing, these missions tend to draw a speciﬁc set of psychological proﬁles. Adrenaline junkies on the look for adventure or new experiences are high on the list, though these types often do not work well with teams and are sometimes known for putting others in danger. The explorers, wanderers, and curiosity seekers are more staid and careful in their approaches to different scenarios, but they sometimes lack the drive and initiative for which mission sponsors are really looking. Researchers and learners are useful, though their focus on speciﬁc discoveries can sometimes slow down operations or be a hindrance. The ﬁnal common type, the desperate, are wild cards. These are the ones who pursue gatecrashing because they have personally fallen into a situation from which they have no better recourse. Many of these live up to their tasks and duties, even becoming great explorers and heroes. Just as many, however, are hindered by depression, self-loathing, or similar negative thoughts and end up being a burden or, worse, a threat to their own teams

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