362: Ghost Planet

ENTRY 362: Ghost Planet

"It's eating my fucking suit."
- Fon Zongying, gatecrasher

The Iktomi are the only extraterrestrial civilization known to have used the Pandora Gates - remnants of their civilization or explorations have been found on several worlds. Of the Iktomi themselves there is little record or remains; no indication of what had happened to them. Yet just recently, in an arid semi-desert planet under two suns, a group of gatecrashers have reported finding what might be the actual physical remains of the Iktomi.

The planet is called Zongying, and the gate stands in the center of an open pavilion of heavily abraded aluminum girders, arranged into the outline of a pentagonal prism with a floor of aluminum plates. Along the edges are an interlocking pattern of pentagons, formerly painted bright blue and yellow, which are recognized as Iktomi warning/danger/forbidden symbology now mostly faded and covered by dirt. If there were ever walls or ceiling, there is no sign of them now, though certain markers on the aluminum frame suggest they might have been meant to be climbed. Beyond this barrier is the dry valley.

The Iktomi - if that is what they are - stand like a grove of gnarled, dead trees in every direction. Dark grey twisted carapaces, pale white strands like branches of antlers growing out from within, breaking out at joints and intersection points between the semi-petrified chitinous plates. Many reach for the sky as still white limbs, while the others tangle on the ground like roots, sometimes intersecting or burying themselves in the soil.

Research on the site is in its infancy, and after the loss of researcher Fon Zongying (after whom the planet is named), biohazard status on travel to Zongying has been upgraded to Synthmorphs-Only. It is believed that the creatures around the site succumbed to a fungal parasitoid that replaced their inner tissues before bursting through their shells - which, in the extremely arid environment, managed to survive longer than on other worlds, though some evidence suggests that they and the gate might have been buried for a period and recently uncovered. Whatever the case, it is clear that the fungal parasitoid is still active, and that is spores (or possibly a symbiotic bacteria) are capable of metabolizing plastic - which is how they got to Zongying, whose remains now form a permanent part of the xenoarchaeological site.

Using Ghost Planet

Ghost Planet does not necessarily contain the final truth to the end of the Iktomi - but it might hold clues to one possible end. As a civilization that survived for some thousands of years and made use of the Pandora Gates, the Iktomi were in their own way explorers not like transhumanity - and like transhumans, they found strange dangers, and sometimes brought them with them. For the Iktomi, the fungal plague may have been their version of the exsurgent virus, and the destruction it wrought on the population so terrible that they quarantined the entire world. Beyond the strangely grim and silent forest, beyond the bounds of the valley lies what was once a thriving planet - and now is only a ghost world.

359: Frontier

ENTRY 359: Frontier

"The truth has always been out there. We just have to go find it."
- William Scully

There is a rumor in the Firewall network, passed from ego to ego, the stories sometimes growing in the telling. The ultimate failsafe, if all else goes wrong - a colony on an exoplanet, a final refuge where transhumanity can retreat, should the inconceivable happen again. Not to make a final stand, but to walk through and bury the gates behind them, to close the door on the solar system for good - because transhumanity is bigger than Earth, more important than sentimental attachment to the sun that birthed it. Survival, at any cost.

There is a truth to the rumor, though it is stranger than any of the stories make it out to be. When gatecrashing began in earnest, Firewall stumbled upon a single set of coordinates that all of the known gates had in common. They found there a near-Earth compatible world with over two dozen active gate devices, a hub in the gate network. The first gatecrashers dubbed the exoplanet Frontier. If not for what else they found there, perhaps Firewall would have let it become the new home for transhumanity.

Frontier is an uninhabited world - but it was not always so. The gate complex stands in the midst of a vast prairie-type landscape, a broad sea of grass on a continent the size of Australia. Massive, far-separated pylons dominate the landscape surrounding the gate complex, geothermal-powered terraforming stations that spew out nanites to shape the land, water, and air to something else. Estimates suggest they have been running at least two hundred Earth years. Yet there are no signs of habitation, no structures at all besides the gates and the pylons - except overhead.

Hanging above the planet are the remains of a stellar empire built by an extraterrestrial race. Broken rings, cracked cylinders, and dying satellites circle the world in a belt of space trash, and every night is marked by the burning debris as decaying orbits bring the detritus falling back to the surface. Samples recovered are, relative to Earth technology, primitive - spacecraft and habitats built by a society with four arms and four-fingered hands that counted in hexidecimal and had barely mastered the transistor, but in such profusion that they represent hundreds of years of sustained exploration and colonization of space...using technology equivalent to the first Earth astronauts.

Cleary, these alien astronauts did not build the gates. Equally obvious, whatever race did build the gate complex and terraformers on Frontier, they never moved in. Some Firewall xenoarchaeologists suggest that there was a glitch in the terraform software, and that the nanoswarms removed or cannibalized any structures for raw materials. Others suggest that the terraforming was abandoned when it became clear that the planet was inhabitated...or they simply hadn't moved in yet. Until the mystery is resolved, Firewall has kept a low-impact presence on Frontier. There are still protocols in place for transhumanity to retreat here in the event of an extinction event, and storehouses of raw materials, information, and technology have been established in preparation of such an event, but until such time as the mystery of what happened is resolved, Frontier is not acceptable as a colony site...not yet.

Using Frontier

A mystery, wrapped in an engima, through an artificial wormhole. Frontier may represent the great hope of transhumanity - or the most direct threat to its existence. Even if answers to what happened to the two races whose technological remains have been found on the planet can be found, there is no guarantee that transhumanity will like the them. There's a strong possibility, though few even at Firewall will admit this, that the sudden intrusion of the gate complex led more or less directly to the downfall or disappearance of a race that had obviously been space-capable for longer than transhumanity. If this is the case, Firewall needs to know. The only question is - are the player characters game to explore this Frontier?

Seed

• Firewall has manufactured an emergency shutdown test at Extropia, which will leave the Pandora Gate "sealed" for several hours - long enough for them to run an evacuation drill and see if their current protocols are sufficient for moving a substantial population of transhumans and associated equipment through the gate to Frontier. The PCs are assigned roles to assist, and move through the gate with the others as part of the mock-evacuation. However, something goes wrong - the sudden appearance of so many transhumans on Frontier appears to have activated several of the pylons on the other side, and caused the gates to temporarily lock. Cut off from home and with no obvious chain of command and potential immenient threat, what will the PCs do?

348: Ymir

ENTRY 348: Ymir

On one end of the Fissure Gate, gatecrashers stepped through onto an icy, airless moon orbiting a great banded gas giant - and stared up at the shapes moving along edge of the storm fronts. They called the gas giant Ymir and the extraterrestrials frost giants, and the name stuck. The frost giants are huge non-sentient invertebrates, some hundreds of meters long, armored in methane ice against the winds and could, their bouyancy controlled by internal gas bladders, filtering the gases they "swim" through for water ice and other nutrients. The frost giants travel in throngs with the oldest, largest frost giants in the front, and sometimes make group "dives" into the lower atmosphere, only resurfacing hundreds of kilometers away. Most xenobiologists believe that the creatures are native to Ymir, and speculate that the upper atmosphere contains myriad smaller organisms that the great frost giants feed on, but studies have been extremely limited so far, and an opposing camp believes their biology is based on the metabolism of methane. For the most part, portable telescopes have captured video feeds of the frost giants "swimming" through the upper atmosphere at the forefront of the storms, which have proven very popular on the Mesh - even spawning the expected commercial clothing and toy lines from their images.

Seeds

• An expedition has been planned to travel through the Fissure Gate, travel to Ymir, capture one of the smaller frost giants (only 8-9 meters long), transport it back through the gate, and from there release it "into the wild" of Jupiter's upper atmosphere. It's a dangerous, technically difficult operation with quite limited scientific impulse behind it, but a Mesh crowdfunding initiative has raised over 200 million credits for the plan, based more or less solely on the idea that having frost giants swimming around Jupiter will be awesome. The player characters are hired on to help wrangle the frost giant - or maybe just as bait for one.
• There are other mysteries of Ymir than the frost giants - notably, whether the planet is suitable for gas mining and other commercial exploitation. An anarchist collective with hypercorp partnership is exploring the possibility of turning the moon the gate is on - really, just a largish asteroid - into the anchor point for a space elevator that could be used to pump gas up to station for processing and transport back to Chat Noir. Opposing groups of anarchists use the guise of environmentalism to try and get the PCs to disrupt the operation for free, claiming that the project will endanger the frost giants.
• A giant-watcher - one of those transhumans who has set up camp on the moon to monitor the strange extraterrestrials - has detected a solitary specimen that has drifted far away from the other throngs of frost giants and behaving very erratically. Enlisting the PC's help to investigate, they discover the errant creature is long dead - a floating corpse kept aloft by its intact gas bladders, tossed about by the winds. A tremendous prize for science if they can get it out of the atmosphere, certain to cement a rep among scientists and gatecrashers.

343: Space Lightning Strikes

ENTRY 343: Space Lightning Strikes

"Initial probe shows that the atmosphere has a high-oxygen content and no toxic gases, but we'll send you through with full breathing gear just in case. We also think that the other side of the gate opens into an artificial construct - there's no sign of life, but we want you to be careful anyway. This could be a first contact scenario."
- Mission Briefing

The latest gatecrashing expedition is to an exoplanet that doesn't even have a name yet; the scientists are still arguing whether it should be Perdurabo or Voltron. Atmosphere is breathable, gravity is a little heavier than Earth-normal but not grossly so, temperature is a very reasonable 78 C, radiation levels are well within acceptable limits, and the first probe shows that the gate is semi-enclosed by what appears to be an artificial structure. While it's not clear yet whether or not this is another Echo V, that's what everyone appears to be hoping for.

The most worrying thing so far is the complete lack of any signs of life - even microbial or plant life. The initial probe sent through came back as clean as when it had been sent. The current hypothesis among the scientists is that the world did once have carbon-based life, but some extinction event killed everything on the planet, leaving only an oxygen-rich atmosphere that would someday perhaps deplete itself.

As the gatecrashers make their last prep and step through, the gentle patter of rain strikes their helmets. There's a hole in the ceiling, and through it they can see streaming grey clouds and flashes of lighting. If they take off their helmets, the air tastes of ozone. Around them, all is dust - scattered bits of rust-encrusted machinery, faded images on the wall, bits of something that almost looks like paper. A little exploration outside the room shows them that they're in a building, part of a larger complex - clearly artificial, or at least artificially expanded from some natural feature like a hill or cliff.

They're also not alone. The noise of their coming attracts a graying, bedraggled member of the Factors. The surprising contact is set off against a bolt of lightning suddenly coming down and hitting their gate, knocking it out of operation.

Alone on a dead world, cut off from home, with no chance of rescue and only a single extraterrestrial to keep them company. Game on.

Using Space Lightning Strikes

A basic set-up for a rather high-concept scenario, no different in many ways from an episode of Stargate or Sliders - but hey, call it an homage. The PCs are hired for a bit of gatecrashing, are given plenty of time to prepare and get whatever equipment they need, step through into a dead world, meet a lonely shipwrecked Factor who has apparently been living off of freeze-dried local food for years, and then! Lightning strikes. The rules of the game change. What was supposed to be a bit of exploration has turned into a desperate struggle for survival, and their only chance of going home might be to get the gate fixed. A lot of the scenario depends on the player character's own ingenuity and approach - if they are hostile to the Factor (whom they might well not be able to talk to right away), getting out of here is going to be very difficult. Don't be afraid to let the player characters envisage (even plan out) staying on Perdurabo/Voltron for possibly months or years as the PCs and the Factor work out a means of communication and then apply their joint technical skills to repairing the gate. The gamemaster's saving throw is that even if the PCs and Factor fail - which they might well - the gate is still operable, and in a couple months the corporation that hired them will try to send another team through, and the PCs (and Factor) can escape then. But give them the chance to get out on their own merits first.

323: Uno

ENTRY 323: Uno

"Oh fuck, I think I stepped on something."
- Fuckup; 34:256:11:29 remaining on on their sentence

A step through the Pandora Gate brought the 'crashers to an alien paradise garden. The air smelled like cinammon, with patches of bitter almond that turned out to be clouds of cyanide gas. The whole place moved; the carpet-critter scoured the ground for feces left by the undulating gasbag plant, leaving bioluminescent slime trails eagerly slopped up by the five-tongued starfish-snail. Nothing attacked the transhuman tresspassers; nothing seemed carnivorous. It was a weird ecosystem, and deserved a lifetime of study.

Until one of the gatecrashers accidentally stepped on a finger-crawler. Damage done, the team scraped it into a sample bag and took it back home, initial survey complete. Analysis of the finger-crawler showed signs of an engineered organism - immortal cell-lines, no recognizable reproductive capabilities, ridiculously specific digestive system, something that looked like a serial number encoded in base 13 under one gill-flap. Reviewing the recordings of the survey further reinforced this hypothesis; none of the analysts could see two of anything. Each creature appeared to be unique, with its own niche.

The subsequent team came back to a devastated ecosystem. Things were starving, dropped dead in their tracks. A whole section of the garden's food chain had broken down, critters starved or suffering from micronutrient deprivation, others overburdened and poisoned by waste products that they couldn't rid themselves of naturally. Emergency rescue measures met up against an ecological prime directive, but a last-ditch 24-hour Mesh campaign raised enough funds to overcome the eco-conservatives and at least make an effort to save as much of Uno's ecosystem as could be done.

As for the gatecrasher who killed the finger-crawler, their punishment was set for bid during the fund-raising campaign, and the winning vote was that their name be officially changed to "Fuckup" for a period of 35 years, with all traces of their former name being erased retroactively. Fuckup wasn't exactly contrite or cooperative with the sentence, but eventually submitted to psychosurgery under duress, and henceforth until time is up will be known as Fuckup.

Using Uno

Transhumanity has a nasty habit of unbalancing ecosystems; it's just rarely as blatant as what happened with Uno. That said, even with its dying ecosystem, Uno needs to be explored - there is every indication that this group of alien lifeforms was built, not naturally evolved, and there may still be evidence of the extraterrestrial sentients that created them around there somewhere. Likewise, gatecrashers are needed to help in the recovery efforts, bringing sick and starving critters back for treatment and study, then re-introducing healthy specimens along with feeders that approximate the functions of some of the lost critters. It's a weird world, and the xenoecologists want to keep it that way.

Seed

• Fuckup approaches the PCs, trying to hire them to recover their original name. The PCs will have to do some serious digging if they accept the job, and face a number of reasonable-sounding transhumans that will non-violently hinder them, as they believe in the justice of Fuckup's sentence.

260: Amberwald

ENTRY 260: Amberwald

“Step through the Gate and enter the world-forest…five-mile high pylons, supporting an artificial canopy that holds in the air for a massive greenhouse effect…mega-architecture on a scale never even attempted in our Solar sytem…and riches yours for the taking! Volunteer your team to go gatecrashing today. Some restrictions may apply.”
- Amberwald Incorporated Commune advert

The first gatecrashers on Amberwald returned with a half-dozen unknown xenospecies covered in purple-blue chunks of amber, some the size of their heads. They spun a tale of a world grown under an artificial sky, where weird hydrocarbon-heavy saps leaked down from the pylons like slow-moving, inexorable rivers, capturing and asphyxiating all life in their path. With the proceeds of selling the material from their first mission, the gatecrashers incorporated as the Amberwald Incorporated Commune and began selling the right to gatecrash Amberwald to anyone that would sign up. Most gatecrashers who take them up on the idea aren’t heard from again. Smart gatecrashers might ask why AIC, which keeps the Amberwald coordinates as a carefully-kept secret, hasn’t been back itself.

The truth is, the founding members barely made it back last time, and far from the lush and exotic paradise that they make it out to be, Amberwald is a hellworld. The pylons exist, but the upper canopy is damaged and incomplete, so that the air quality can drop from Terra-optimal to “surface of Venus” in a matter of minutes when the wind changes. The hydrocarbon-heavy polymer saps that dribble down the pylons to form the multicolored “amber” are distillations from the toxic upper atmosphere, and most contain unusually high impurities of radioactive salts and grit. Most of the native wildlife—if it is native, and not introduced—has been completely trapped and covered in subsequent waves of this tarry glue, and it is believed that only the native sixteen-limbed insect species and a form of exploding tree still thrive. Even most of the liquid water remains trapped beneath the amber, hidden lakes where the life has long suffocated except perhaps for bacteria.

Still, every now and again a crew actually manages to straggle back—and having paid their 50,000 credit fee to AIC, they are free to sell whatever they can haul for top whatever they can get for it.

Mechanics

Most of the time, Amberwald is fairly hospitable, with near-Earth level mix of oxygen and nitrogen and temperate temperatures a little warmer than the surface of Mars. However, according to irregular tides a stream of toxic outside air will dip in from a rent in the canopy, temporarily rendering the atmosphere corrosive (10 points of damage per action turn) for up to 10 minutes. The liquid amber is another natural disaster, somewhere between an avalanche and a flood—the streams of heavy hydrocarbons are sticky, dense, can move amazingly quickly, and can seal a morph in seconds if they don’t move quickly enough. The local insects have an inherent radiation sense that they use to help predict and avoid the amberflows.

233: Eden Ventures

ENTRY 233: Eden Ventures

“Traditionalist.”

- Ultimates insult

Of all the organizations devoted to exoplanet colonization through gatecrashing, Eden Ventures is most notorious for its minimalist approach. Typically they find some (barely) habitable exoplanet, crowdsource a sizable amount of funding and materials with the aid of dedicated religious subscriber networks, and then send forth the “seed” colony—typically, between two and eight transhumans with minimal food and equipment and no plan for continued support. Eden Ventures considers this a “shotgun approach” to colonizing multiple worlds very quickly, but critics of the gatecrashing corporation deride it as “Adam & Leave,” which typically requires someone else to go behind them and rescue EV’s hapless “colonists.”

Seeds

• Eden Ventures is heavily involved with religious networks, buying advertisement space and programming drives to solicit donations and investments in its colonization activities. However, a group of these investors wishes to bring a multiple-habitat class-action suit against the company for its predatory practices—but they need evidence to do it. They wish to hire the PCs to visit six “colonies” EV has established, to find out how well the colonists were prepared, what supplies and training they were given, and how much follow-up support they received. If, that is, the colonists are still alive.
• A nasty property dispute has cropped up on the exoplanet Jezza III between a mining hypercorp and Eden Ventures regarding the ownership of a deposit of titanium ore. EV insists they have an established claim based on a previous colonization attempt—and hires the PCs to sneak into the titanium-rich caverns and quickly establish a makeshift “colony” so they can push their claim. How much can the PCs do with the limited resources available to them, and against the challenges faced by a hostile world?
• A critical impasse has come to the grass-covered exoplanet of Savannah: relations between the colony members have broken down because two of the female biomorphs have decided to engage in a monogamous relationship with each other, which poses a critical threat to the colony’s long-term genetic diversity. Eden Ventures hires the PCs to peacefully resolve the issue as neutral mediators, giving them the authority to promise the colonists anything from artificial insemination to the Lilith Sequence (see entry 126), but the PCs will also have to deal with the colonist’s religious beliefs.
• In preparation for every colonization attempt, Eden Ventures does considerably location scouting using gatecrashers like the player characters. The PCs are hired to scout out the terrain of Puddle, a world of sunken continents where all of the solid ground is covered by at least 1-10 centimeters of water. To fulfill their contract, the PCs will need to explore and map a circle at least thirty kilometers in radius around the gate—wading through tall grasses that might conceal deep water crevasses and quicksand, tiny carnivorous fish, and lumbering amphibious mugwumps. If the PCs consent to babysit a geological surveyor (a hapless neohominid called Earwig), Eden Ventures will even pay them a bonus.

148: Gravity Bridge

ENTRY 148: Gravity Bridge

Ruby is an exoplanet accessible through the Martian Gate, an irregularly shaped planetoid that shows signs of heavy industrialization orbiting a red giant somewhere on the far side of the Crab Nebula. The gate is located on the lip of an open-pit mine, one of fifteen such bores on the exoplanet’s surface, and the first explorer fell three hundred meters down the terraced slope before it could arrest its fall. Soil samples indicate the race who built it was probably mining for radioactive materials, especially a particularly blazing form of aluminum oxide contaminated and splendidly colored by native uranium ores to yield rainbow-shifted rubies, some up to ten centimeters long. The center of the pit is filled with waste materials from the mining and processing operations that must once have been a major concern: there are at least three hundred metric tons of radioactive slag, spent fuel rods, and assorted other junk piled into the middle of the hole. On any other exoplanet, the prospect of picking through the toxic and radioactive waste from the abandoned mining station of an apparently space-going alien civilization would be counted as a major win—but Ruby has something more: the Gravity Bridge.

Hanging above the horizon and about a hundred kilometers from Ruby in a parallel orbit around the red giant is an artificial satellite, a ring of metal with an inner diameter of 16.3 meters—more than big enough for a ship or ore container to pass through. If a viewer on the surface stares up and looks straight through the ring, they notice something weird: the stars and planets seem to shift toward the center. The first observers considered it an optical illusion; subsequent tests proved that gravity within the ring really was abnormal, producing approximately 30g of acceleration passing from the side facing Ruby to the other side. Ships (or anything, really) that approach within a kilometer or so will be sucked in and accelerated at a leisurely 300 meters/second squared, usually hitting a velocity of a couple thousand kilometers per second by the time they leave the trailing area of the effect. Fine for rocks, not so good for organics.

The Gravity Bridge is plainly a one-way device for speeding up transport from Ruby to whatever the bridge was pointed at—currently the ring appears to be oriented toward an asteroid belt 53 million kilometers distant that might have been a fair-sized planet at one point. It would have been a cost-efficient method for a long-term mining. Researchers speculate the patch of distorted space-time is caused by exotic matter from within the satellite itself, though they’ve been slow and careful in their examination so far, afraid to break the device, which they believe might be a primitive precursor to Pandora gate technology.

Mechanics

The surface of Ruby is a mildly radioactive near-vacuum with very low gravity (0.1g); anyone that jumps to hard will find themselves falling into space, drifting toward the Gravity Bridge, accelerated very quickly indeed and flung out in space in an arc that would eventually take them to an asteroid field that may or may not contain the debris of a former spacefaring civilization. Alternately, characters can not do that and take a ship, which is generally safer.

Seed

• A medium-sized automated explorer vessel with a resleeving station and a group of synthmorphs was pushed through the Gravity Bridge and with the gravity assist has reached the asteroid belt in record time. The call has gone out for gatecrashers willing to do an initial survey—a job slated to last at least twenty-four months (including two months training and prep), but with a massive payout at the end with plenty of bonuses if the characters find anything interesting. If the PCs want the job, they’ll probably have to call in every favor they ever owed and stretch their rep to the max…but at the end of the two-year mission, they’ll either be dead or rolling in fortune and glory.