=Solar System Gates= 
There are ﬁve known Pandora gates within Earth’s solar system, each controlled by a separate entity: the Vulcanoid Gate ([[TerraGenesis]]), the Martian Gate ([[Pathfinder]]), the (original) Pandora Gate ([[Gatekeeper Corporation|Gatekeeper]]), the Fissure Gate ([[Fissure Gate#Love%20and%20Rage|Love and Rage Anarchist Collective]]), and the Discord Gate ([[Go-Nin Group|Go-nin Group]]). Each gate installation is set up differently and though operations are often similar, there are some fundamental differences.
* [[Vulcanoid Gate]]
* [[Martian Gate]]
* [[Pandora Gate]]
* [[Fissure Gate]]
* [[Discord Gate]]

=Rumoured Gates= 
**Posted by:** Webley, scavenger <Info Msg Rep>
Okay, people and post-people, we’ve been dancing around this subject for a while, so I think the time is ﬁnally right for us to dive in and look at what other gates might be out there in the solar system and where we think we can ﬁnd them. And especially for you ultra-conspiracy nuts out there (Hi Shadrach!), a little discussion on what gates may already be in full use without most of us knowing about it.
First, there’s no logical reason for us to believe that there are and always will be only ﬁve Pandora gates. Sure, when we found the ﬁrst one it seemed kind of unique, but then the others kept turning up, and by now we’ve all got the sense that we’re just in a gap between gate discoveries. There’s more out there, and once we ﬁnd them, some corp or other group will be very happy.
So if there are more gates out there, where are they?
==Option 1: Earth== 
Let’s stick with logic for a few more minutes. We may not know everything about how the TITANs came to be, but we know where they started, and that was back on good-ol’ [[Earth]]. Since one theory is that the gates are relics of the TITANs, it only makes sense for them to start their whole gate project on Earth.
But if that’s the case, how come we don’t know where it is? The TITANs were very thoroughly monitored in the last days of the Fall, so you’d think something like a large nexus point that they were using for interstellar travel would be noticed. It wasn’t, however, so that leaves three alternatives. First, there was a gate down there somewhere, but it was destroyed in the conﬂict (possibly even by the TITANs themselves). The gates seem nigh indestructible, however, so that seems unlikely. Second, the TITANs concealed the gate extremely well. Perhaps even somewhere like down in the Mariana Trench, some place they could get to a whole lot easier than those of us who like oxygen. Hell, for all we know, they may still be using it. Third, the gate exists and isn’t entirely hidden—someone knows about it and may even be using it, but they’re not sharing what they know. In that case, who has it? Is some hypercorp hiding it as an ace in the hole? Is the Consortium aware of it, but hiding it because they want everyone to forget Earth still exists? Or maybe even that whole Earth quarantine is a way of keeping it for themselves? Maybe some survivors used it as an exit strategy, but they’re pissed at the rest of transhumanity for leaving them behind, so they hid it good?
==Option 2: Luna== 
A lot of gate-hunters have paid close attention to [[Luna]], which has the advantage of being near the birthplace of the TITANs without being a radiation-soaked hellish deathtrap, like certain formerly blue planets I could mention. We know the TITANs were here—*cough*New Mumbai*cough*—so it deserves serious consideration. The biggest problem with this theory is that we’ve packed a fair number of people onto that dusty little rock, and none of them have stumbled across the gate yet. But the TITANs have revealed that they are some of the best hide-and-seek players the solar system has ever seen, so there could be one sitting there somewhere, right under the Lunars’ noses.
==Option 3: Earth Orbit== 
One theory I like combines the virtues of the Mariana Trench theory with the Luna theory—proximity to Earth and an environment only a TITAN could love. This theory says the TITANs tossed a gate into [[Earth orbit|orbit around Earth]], and it’s ﬂoating there still, along with the copious junk our ancestors left behind and did not manage to disintegrate while they were busy toasting the stuff on the surface that actually mattered.
If there’s a gate in Earth’s orbit, my money says it’s the one that will be found next. Unfortunately, this area is traversed as much as Luna, so it seems increasingly unlikely that one is here that we haven’t discovered yet.
==[[#Option 4]]Option 4: Venus== 
As I said before, the TITANs were great hide-and-seek players, and one of the best hide-and-seek techniques of all time is hiding very close to the seeker while remaining completely out of reach. The TITANs might have taken some perverse delight in dropping a gate on the second-brightest object in Earth’s night sky, so that the inhabitants of Earth could watch it sail in the sky above them without ever being able to reach it.
There are good reasons to plant a gate on Venus. It would be easily hidden and there are material resources lying in wait beneath all that poisonous atmosphere. The logistics of dealing with the hellish heat and pressure is something the TITANs could have easily handled. Fact is, this is one of the more persistent rumors out there.
In fact, some rumors say that this gate is already in operation, a major boon to someone like Cognite, with the capability to operate in secret for years. Some evidence has even surfaced that Cognite is up to something sketchy, down there in the clouds. I’m not on board with this story—I mean yeah, Cognite has the ability and the attitude to pull something like that off, but I think they’d ﬁnd more advantage in holding it publicly.
==Option 5: The Fringes== 
The solar system is a big, big, big place, and there are plenty of small chunks of rock and ice zipping about that would be quite easy to hide a gate on. There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets orbiting the sun, most of which have never been visited by transhumans or even thought about more than being found in a telescope and listed in a catalog. Many of these are way out in the Kuiper Belt, Scattered Disk, and Oort Cloud. And that’s not counting all of the other small dwarf planets and moons that are mostly boring, uninteresting, and uninhabited. The main question here is, why would the TITANs bother? Sure, a lot of these rocks are useful for raw materials, but those are also plentiful elsewhere. Isolation and obscurity are themselves bonuses, particularly if the TITANs left behind any ongoing long-term projects that they don’t want us to stumble across just yet. Certain comets and asteroids act as nice slow shuttles across the solar system, potentially useful if the TITANs want to drop something in the orbital path of a planet or something. Most of these reasons seem unlikely, however.
==The Search for New Gates== 
Though five gates have been found in the solar system so far, many are convinced there are more yet undiscovered. Even the possibility of such a ﬁnd is enough to make many major powers scramble. Control over a gate provides tremendous opportunities and, if Consortium propaganda is to be believed, may well determine who will be the dominant forces in transhuman affairs in future times to come. For this reason, most political powers keep a watchful eye open for any sign of a new gate within the conﬁnes of the solar system. Many search more actively, commissioning ongoing projects to scour the system. Hundreds of individual prospectors also scramble about the system, checking into various nooks and crannies, hoping to make a ﬁnd they can become rich selling to an interested power—or with more personal interests in mind. Though such searches are considered by many to be a waste of time, there are others who view immortality as a means to take the
long and thorough road to their goals.
The quest to ﬁnd new gates is confounded by the fact that gates are notoriously difficult to ﬁnd. They are invisible to many types of electromagnetic scans, so thermal sensors and standard visual recognition are primarily used. An active wormhole can be detected by the Hawking radiation it emits, though this only applies to gates that are in use, and so is no use in ﬁnding dormant gate structures.
Earth is generally regarded as the most likely place to ﬁnd a gate, making the interdiction particularly irksome to hopeful gate discoverers. The logic goes that if the TITANs did indeed have the capability to construct the gates, then the Earth is the most likely place to ﬁnd one. The fact that such a gate might still be active and/or protected by TITAN defenses is lost on no one. Nevertheless, some gate searchers have teamed up with scavengers or even reclaimers in order to pursue their investigations on transhumanity’s despoiled homeworld, though so far all have returned empty-handed, when they returned at all.
Others are convinced that the only way a gate within the solar system can still remain undiscovered is if it was in a particular obscure and out-of-the-way place. To this end, they have taken to scouring the asteroid belt, taken to inspecting lone asteroids and comets, or launched themselves towards the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. There is some speculation that some hypercorp interests have deployed small ﬂotillas of self-replicating probes towards these solar system nether regions in the hopes of making such a discovery.
=Extrasolar Gates= 
**Posted by:** Sagan Harris, argonaut <Info Msg Rep>
Every wormhole established through one of the ﬁve Pandora gates in the solar system leads to another gate somewhere else. There have been hundreds if not thousands of extrasolar gates discovered so far. Though they sometimes vary in size and features, they are all quite similar in form and function. The gate control units adapted to work with the solar system’s Pandora gates work with these gates as well. Most extrasolar systems seem to have only one gate. Several have been found, however, that possess multiple gates, much like the solar system. These are gate nexus systems. Naturally these gate nexi are highly-valued by gatecrashers.
==Gate Travelogue== 
**Posted by:** Kastan Gruber, gatehopper <Info Msg Rep>
===Entry 1=== 
Our respects are paid, our gear assembled, and our spirits are high. Tomorrow we leave through the Fissure Gate. We have a gate control unit, and our goal is to wander the universe.
There are ﬁve of us. Amna Mazam is in pursuit of scientific knowledge. She hopes to increase her knowledge of the galaxy and the way things work. Jaume Ferrús and Mwai Odinga, both experienced gatecrashers, and celebrating 20 years together as lovers, view this as the next stage of commitment towards each other. Siouxzi Chu wants to meet an alien. Myself, I merely hope to reach the edge of the galaxy, and maybe beyond.
===Entry 2=== 
Our ﬁrst gatecrash went perfectly. We traveled to the autonomist colony of Kropotkin, an outpost on an icy moon not unlike Oberon. We chose this location for two reasons. First, it is a nexus point, with two other gates existing on the moon. Second, it is one of the locations known to be most distant from Sol itself, some two thousand light years away. From this far point, we hope to move beyond the bubble of transhuman expansion quickly, and head out into true frontier.
The locals here are very courteous and entertaining, and have thrown a large party in our honor. We think they are in part simply quite glad to have visitors. They were eager for news of the solar system. I would write more, but one of the women here has caught my eye.
===Entry 3=== 
Our plan is to move fast and not linger. Ideally, we will spend one day in each place before moving on. That is the minimum that Amna requires to run her tests. She would like to have more, but does not want to hold us back. We have agreed to loiter in places that are of exceptional interest, but even then no more than 3 or so days.
It was sad to leave the anarchists at Kroptokin behind. They may be the last transhumans we see for some time to come. Half of the settlement came out to send us off.
We were careful to run through our ﬁrst-in protocols. We don’t want to be wandering straight through to an environment that is immediately deadly. The process is time-consuming, but necessary.
Our new destination is cold and quiet. We seem to be on a large asteroid orbiting somewhere around a massive blue-white star. Our scout missile may have located a series of cave openings, but they are too distant for us to explore. Amna thinks she has found several local planets in her survey of the skies, but none of them seem too interesting. Tomorrow we move on.
===Entry 7=== 
After 4 days of barren, lifeless rocks and alien suns, we have wandered into the realm of transhumanity again. Naturally, the ﬁrst thing they did was shoot at us. Our ﬁrst-in sensor check immediately detected signs of transhuman habitation at the remote gate. Strangely, there was no registration or claim marker.
We went through anyway, and were immediately ﬁred on by a set of sentry bots. Siouxzi’s leg was injured, but our own bots engaged the guardians. Jaume and Mwai also showed off their combat skills, protecting the rest of us and making short work of the bots.
As it turns out, we have stumbled on some sort of hypercorp mining operation. We were lucky enough to run into some of the indentured workers ﬁrst, and they have gone to some lengths to conceal our presence and the ﬁreﬁght at the gate from their overseers. They are reluctant to tell us who they are enslaved to or what resource they are extracting, but they seem honestly concerned about our well-being.
Amna suspects they may have had unexpected visitors before, and the bosses may have had them killed. Siouxzi’s leg is healing nicely, and we plan to leave soon. One of the indentures has asked to join us. We are reluctant to bring along someone we don’t know too well, and who may not be prepared for the hardships ahead, but we cannot simply leave them to rot as a corporate slave either. The decision is difficult.
===Entry 11=== 
Today we have found a place as mysterious as it is beautiful. The gate here exists on what seems to be a lonely mountain top or plateau. The atmosphere here is clean and peaceful, if not breathable. Down the steep cliff faces of this massive height, the land below is obscured by heavy, noxious clouds. It reminds me a bit of Venus, watching the swirling currents from such a height. The probes we have sent into the cloudy depths have failed and not returned.
Adding to the intrigue, we have discovered clear signs of alien ruins. Amna is convinced these traces are unlike any other xenocivilizations discovered to date. We may stay the full three days, to give her time to study and take samples. I even found what seems to have been some sort of small manufactured item. None of us can discern its purpose. For all that I know, I have discovered an exciting set of alien nose hair trimmers.
Mohammad, the indenture, has been holding up well. His case morph is unfortunately in poor repair, most likely due to planned obsolescence, but we may be able to upkeep his maintenance with our fabber.
===Entry 17=== 
Today was disastrous. A clear lesson in the hazards of gatecrashing, and gatehopping in particular. At ﬁrst, the world seemed of moderate interest. The landscape was orange, dusty, and rocky, all craters and sand dunes. The atmosphere was cold and thin, heavy with nitrogen. Amna detected traces of ice and water vapor, and was looking for signs of life. We ranged quite a distance from the gate, enjoying the trip, when suddenly the storm hit.
The storm front was like nothing I’d ever seen. A wall of sand and dust raged towards us at frightening speeds. Leading the charge were massive tornadoes—easily half a dozen of them.
We nearly made it back to the gate when the storm overtook us. We lost our vehicles and bots to the tornadoes. Worst of all, Jaume was struck in the head by a large rock, debris ﬂung from the storm. He was dead before we hit the gate. It was only worse from there. With no time to make a good selection, Amna chose a random gate address. Eager to escape the searing sand, we dove through recklessly—only to discover that the remote gate was underwater.
Lucky for us, it was only a few meters deep, and just off the shore of an island. We almost all made it, just barely. Mwai even dragged his lover’s corpse the whole way. But Mohammad, in that lightweight shell and unable to swim, was caught in a current. We haven’t seen him since.
Two worlds. Two lives. Now we mourn.
===Entry 19=== 
This morning we buried Jaume. Mwai kept his cortical stack. He plans to carry it with him, so they will still be together on this journey. He is holding up well, despite his loss. Having seen no sign of Mohammad, and without the means to truly search for him, with so much of our gear lost or destroyed, we opted to move on. We swam back to the underwater depths of the gate and found ourselves a new world.
This new exoplanet would be a paradise if we hadn’t so recently suffered such a tragedy. Now it’s vibrancy and life seems to mock us. If our lost comrades could but see this.
This planet is teeming with life. So much so that we fear for our safety—we have seen signs of large predators at work here. The local wildlife seems non-sapient, but there is much variety to it. Siouxzi seems to have befriended a small local creature. It is somewhat like a crab, albeit with three legs. It is playful and inquisitive. Amna is practically frantic, trying to study as much as she can before we must leave again.
===Entry 27=== 
Today, we stepped through from one frozen mudball to another. The locations were in fact so similar that it was almost haunting. But what was truly spooky was the way that Amna simply disappeared.
I was right behind her when we stepped through the gate, with Mwai in front of her. When I came through, however, it was only Mwai. Siouxzi came through after, and conﬁrmed that Amna has stepped through before me. Mwai went back through to look for her, but returned shortly after. She was simply gone.
We made the unusual decision to leave the gate open for the duration of our stay.
Twenty-two hours later, as we made preparations to leave and move on, Amna stepped through the gate. She seems as confused as us, wondering at ﬁrst how we had established camp so quickly. She remembers no time lag, but she cannot account for where she was.
I see the way Mwai eyes her now. He keeps his weapons near at all times. He no longer trusts her.
===Entry 35=== 
I fear the cohesion of our group. Siouxzi is growing increasingly agitated. She feels the strain of being so far, of potentially never seeing another transhuman outside our group again. Amna also grows increasingly distant. She hasn’t been the same since her unexplained disappearance. Mwai is quiet and resourceful as always, but I can see the paranoia in his eyes. The place we are at now, however, has made us forget all of that. We seem to be on a dead world, most likely scorched in the supernova that killed its sun. Surrounding this lifeless chunk is a glorious nebula of swirling gas and plasma. It is by far the most beautiful thing any of us have ever experienced. And so we sit here in our shelter, quiet and distant, in awe of the universe.
===Entry 42=== 
Today, unexpectedly, we encountered life: transhuman life. We seem to have wandered back to the colony of Bluewood. On one hand, this is a disappointment, a feeling that we did not get as far as we hoped. On the other it is a major relief. Mwai is already making arrangements to have Jaume resleeved. Amna is hard at work, sharing her research and discoveries with the colony’s scientists. Siouxzi is off looking for her pet tricrab, it seems to have run off shortly after we reached the colony. Hopefully it won’t destabilize the local ecosystem.
Me? I am relaxing with a stiff drink and a nice sauna bath, and contemplating the incredible extremes of our universe.
Life is good.

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