Gethsemane Gateway

The Gethsemane Gateway (a.k.a. Heaven's Gate, a.k.a The Gateway, a.k.a. Hell's Gate) was a device based on Kariad Technology constructed by the people of the planet Gethsemane. Its purpose was to evacuate the population of Gethsemane before the planet was destroyed in a collision with a rogue planet. (Worlds Apart Book 09 - Gethsemane)
===Construction===
The Kariad designed the device to translocate the Gethsemanians to other colonies; specifically Fallon, Petra, and New Galapagos. However, none of the other worlds completed their complementary Gateways. Fallon's failure resulted in the complete collapse of its planetary civilization. The people of Petra began constructing a receiving gateway, but abandoned it halfway through construction that the place could be a lucrative tourist attraction, and never got around to finishing it. As a half-finished ruin, it draws in even more tourism. The people of New Galapagos, which was sort of a "party planet," discovered that the Kariad technology could be used in a variety of hedonistic ways; to generate euphoria, enhance human sexual response, and as a morning after contraceptive. In fact, use of the device soon drove their population to extinction.
There were supposed to have been three of the devices built on Gethsemane; one to connect to each off-world device. The Kariad apparently thought... or at least wanted to see if... each of the other colonies would welcome 100,000,000 refugees. Because there's nothing humans enjoy more than a massive influx of foreigners.
In any case, the Gethsemanians gave up on construction of the other two Gateways they were supposed to have built on their world and concentrated all effort on the one. They furthermore cut a lot of corners in building the primary Gateway; that it worked at all was something of a miracle.
===What Happened When They Turned It On===
The Gethsemanians first sent a small group of brave dupes through the Gateway to see if it would work. However, instead of arriving at other colonies, the Gethsemanian colonists arrived in a more idyllic version of their homeworld; where they met with loved ones who had died years previously. They concluded that the Gateway was a two-way passage between their world and the Afterlife (Heaven).
===Role in the Evacuation of Gethsemane===
For the thirteen years leading up to the collision with the rogue planet, all activity on the planet Gethsemane was structured to move the population through the Gateway. Fleets of aircraft were built to transport them. A city-size complex around the Gateway facility was constructed to process the refugees and accommodate the tens of thousands of bureaucrats and armed security goons who worked at the Gateway site.
The evacuation priorities were established so that key leadership was evacuated first and permitted to travel back and forth to report on the resettlement and provide direction in the "Afterlife." The second group of people to go were people who were not deemed vitally necessary to society. The farmers, engineers, and other critical persons were evacuated last so as to keep planetary society functioning up until the end.
Destination of the Gateway
Without receiving Gateways to connect to, the Gethsemane Gateway should not have functioned at all. However, it obviously connected somewhere, as people could travel back and forth between Gethsemane and the destination (presumed by most to be some sort of Afterlife). And the machine was not used to butcher people en masse like an episode of Scary Zone of Unpredictable Madness The Scary Zone of Unpredictable Madness.
Current theory is that the Gateway either connected to, or perhaps created, a Tangent Universe that represented a different probability set than the n-universe inhabited by the rest of us; and perhaps the connection to or creation of that universe was in some way bound to human consciousness. But that's just a guess.
===Design Flaws===
*For reasons that were never adequately explained, pre-pubescent children could not pass through the Gateway, but vanished between departure and destination.
*The device drew its energy from an extra-dimensional source. The energy built up in the planet's core, eventually, this led to massive core instability, massive seismic events, and disruptions to the planet's weather creating global scale electromagnetic storms.
*The device opened a portal to a Hell Dimension and allowed nightmarish creatures to escape and destroy everything in their path.
===Ultimate Fate===
The Gateway survived the destruction of Gethsemane only to be destroyed by a Big Dam Nemesis missile launched from the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus and piloted by Max Jordan.
Category:Technology