[Apollonian]

The HyperGate Continuum

Agent Cullen stared in shock at the TV. Grey-2 had been a straightforward echo; monitor local traffic and keep White Star operations profitable and secret. Mostly, he'd had to deal with conspiracy theorists hunting for Men in Black, and Men in Black doing what they did. Thankfully their tech wasn't up to Infinity methods, and since this timeline was obsessed with UFOs, the company had been able to divert most investigations into other avenues, and make a tidy profit on SF movies that hadn't been made in Homeline's 1970s. But this... this was a real UFO, hovering over Manhattan. A huge white disc with strange protrusions and what looked at first glance to be the UN logo.

The excited prattle of the newscaster changed. "This just in, we're receiving a TV broadcast from the UFO..." The picture of the spacecraft over the UN building changed to a man, in a strange uniform. He looked a hell of a lot like Burt Reynolds. He spoke. "People of Earth! Greetings from the United Nations of Earths! We come from worlds much like your own, but in different realities..."

Not a single faction, but a collection of competing ones. Somewhen, in some far-distant timeline, a civilization discovered the secret of faster than light travel through deep space hyperspace gates. They built an empire, as these things go, and maybe they eventually ascended or went extinct. Before then, they left an awful lot of hypergates spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, as well as a number of primitive civilizations ready to arise and take their place in the galaxy. One such civilization was humanity, which discovered the Sol gate out past the orbit of Pluto in a more energetic Space Race in the 1970s.

However. The HyperGates have two settings, and primitives monkeying around with them often didn't notice that they'd turned on the transdimensional mode. This ignorance was exacerbated by the nature of the gates; regardless of whether they are set to FTL or TD, they always connect to the same star. (Changing the destination requires rebuilding the gate.) They're also one-way gates, though the Precursor network always had paired gates to allow two-way travel.

Now, the group of civilizations that has spread across several timelines and thousands of stars calls itself (in English) the HyperGate Continuum. They have learned to build new HyperGates, though they aren't as reliable as the Precursor versions. As a whole, they're around TL10; they also don't care at all about the Secret. So far, Infinity has only encountered them on Q6 realities, and there is a tentative hope that the HyperGate technology is restricted to that quantum.

There are dozens of powers in the Continuum, ranging from the predatory Barathians to the United Nations of Earths, a human-centric government that comprises three cross-time Sol systems and nearly a hundred other solar systems. Of particular interest to Infinity and Centrum are the Church of the Gate and the Temporal Academy, two rival organizations that compete for control over Gate technology. Both have the ability to construct new gates, though their knowledge is incomplete, and targeting a new or rebuilt gate is very nearly completely random. Very importantly for Infinity, the Continuum appears to have no knowledge of conveyor/projector parachronics. The Continuum has also not yet encountered other space-faring civilizations with non-Gate FTL.

In game terms, the HyperGate Continuum allows Infinity to deal with space opera powers and plotlines, whether that's the Federation of Planets or the Hutt crime syndicates. They tend to be high tech and psionic; magic doesn't really fit the mood off the bat (and Infinity has only encountered the Continuum on no-mana timelines). Naturally, Infinity has a strict ban on travel to known Continuum worldlines, but they might just appear as a first contact on a world where Infinity already operates...