Waygate Redirection

Waygate Redirection is a means of changing the system which a Wayhall connects to. It was the realization that each Index opens a connection to a set world, no matter which Wayhall Gate it is installed into.

This discovery precipitated the Lacunary Collapse, ending the golden ages of the ValuSelu Pact, the Andromeda Syndicate, and the Haimarchy.

Opening the Wayhall requires presenting an Index to a Gate. At first, these Indices were seen as keys to the neighboring rooms of the universe — neighbors on a map whose shape we had yet to understand. Each key only fit one lock, and each gate had a determinate link to another.

It wasn't until the Hub Systems — Via Lactea of the Syndicate, Tower Spoke of the Pact, and Anchaemo of the Haimarchy had each inhabited at least a dozen worlds that anyone thought to finally test otherwise.

An enterprising trader took an Index from its planet of origin, flew it through the Wayhall to a different world with a different gate, and used the Index there instead. It worked.

With this new variable, the economic calculus of the galactic powers changed; it became cheaper to steal a terraformed world from old enemies than to terraform new ones. One stolen Index became another, and soon the betrayals stacked up. Diplomacy gave way to bloodshed, and colonists began waking up to find foreign armadas in their skies and boots marching through their streets. By the millions they found themselves disconnected from their homelands and trade routes.

Worse yet, when an Index was taken from a gate, the path connecting it to its sibling collapsed from the center outwards, venting its energy and the debris of the enclosed ships lost out through adjacent paths and connected gates with cataclysmic force. A fever pitch followed by a silence that would take three centuries to fill.

Now, in the time after the silence of the Lacuna, the Banners have remembered the means and once again begun to consider the option. "We can do it," they say. "We just have to be more careful this time."

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Indices

An Index is a crystalline orb used to activate one side of a Waypoint Gate's surface and open an entrance to the Wayhall. Like the Wayhall itself, nobody knows where this tech came from.

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Each Gate deposits two Indices onto the nearest planet with Sensorimotoric life:

One is hidden in a dimensional rift which requires the peak of both science and metascience to open. For Earth it manifested in the radioactive Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl; for Jhoutai it manifested in the cursed heart of Tower Palace in the Marianyan Territories.

The other presents itself to the first Sophont whose soul undergoes both Naissance and Henosis without ever leaving its solar system. For Earth this was the Somnolent; for Jhoutai this was Kyzan.