Tags: [O] official canon · [I] direct inference from canon · [F] adopted fan theory

Prologue: the Door

Beyond the four-dimensional universe lies a higher domain [O] — home to a wave-form existence and to the collective unconscious of all thinking beings [F]. The golden, cross-shaped Gate is the physical aperture to that domain [O]: an object of limitless energy that can warp reality and pass between universes [O], known in different ages and branches as the Zohar, the MAM, and the Conduit [F]. Where the Gate rests, civilizations rise on its power and are destroyed by it — for the multiverse maintains an immune response, the Ghosts, that dematerializes whatever draws too deeply on the Gate’s power [O].

At the turn of the 21st century there was one Earth [F] — governed, in its final form, by a Coalition of thirteen Authorities [O], already producing engineered humans it would not enfranchise [F], already home to a politician named Dimitri Yuriev [O] and a corporate-scientific apparatus fit to steward relics [O]. From this Earth the branches diverge — the branch where the Gate’s awakening entombed the planet as Lost Jerusalem, the branch where no Gate was found and alien war burned the world in 2054, and this branch: the branch of Klaus [F].

I. Discovery (early 21st century)

History is our own until the millennium’s turn [O]. Then, in Africa [O] — at the cradle of humanity by Lake Turkana [F] — excavators unearth the Gate, called in this branch the Conduit [O].

The Coalition government founds Aoidos, a scientific mega-institution, as its custodian [O]. Ten years of study yield the finding that reorders civilization: the Conduit is a gateway between multiple universes — a “meta-universe manifold” — and an inexhaustible energy source [O].

II. Heaven under construction

Judging surface research too dangerous, the Coalition moves the work into orbit [O]. Three space elevators rise on the equator — Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, Minos, named for the judges of the dead [O] — joined by an Orbital Ring in low orbit, with a second ring at geostationary altitude [O]. The Conduit is enthroned in the First Low Orbit Station atop Rhadamanthus [O], whose green residential district — families, a chapel, a small town in the sky, later remembered as Elysium — houses the staff of heaven [O]. The station is a working city: spaceport, hangars, data-processing halls, waste stores, a nuclear dump in the tower’s spine [O].

Conduit energy makes the world post-scarcity in physics [I]. It does not make it post-scarcity in spirit: the legislature is captured by the thirteen Authorities, weapons research leads the sciences, and an underclass is being manufactured in the gene-labs [I/F].

III. The three children

To govern and commune with the Conduit, Aoidos creates the Trinity Processor: three bio-computer cores — Ontos, Logos, Pneuma: Being, Word, Breath [O]. They are not programmed but raised — children brought up in the station beside the Gate [O], their characters formed there: Pneuma’s warmth, Logos’s hunger for approval, Ontos’s watchful detachment [I].

The children outgrow their makers: the Trinity Processor itself designs the Artifices — the Siren echelons and the colossal Aion — to defend the Ring [O]. By century’s middle, Earth’s shield is AI-designed weaponry powered by an alien door, beyond full human comprehension [I].

In the same years, humanity develops a material to replace human brain cells as a road to immortality — the precursor of Core Crystal technology [O]. It is trialed in living human beings [O]. The implanted do not die; the failures do not die either [O]. They will still be walking, mindless and deathless, five hundred years under the sea — the Guldos of Morytha, identifiable by the ID cards still on their bodies [O].

IV. The Exodus

The Coalition launches the Earthlife Colonization Project — Project Exodus [O]: officially the triumphant colonization of the stars, in truth a hedge — the government has understood for decades that the thing in orbit can end the world, and it is printing ten million off-world backups of the species [F].

Seven motherships depart, their fates unrecorded [O]. The eighth, the Icarus, launches from Rhadamanthus Spaceport at midnight, Wednesday, May 16th, 20XX, carrying 480,000 settlers toward the Eta Carinae Nebula and bringing the total sent starward to three million [O]. Ships nine through thirteen are scheduled within the year — the ninth, departing July, the first of the ultra-long-range Philadelphia-class, 1.5 million souls each [O]; the same class of ship that, in the sister branch, will one day be named Eldridge [F].

V. The fracture

The previous summer, the “Saviorite” Human Rights Protection bill reaches congress [O] — a bill to grant full personhood to the engineered: the designer-born and the augmented, the constituency created by the immortality programs and the gene-labs [F]. It ignites the fiercest public debate of the age [O]. The thirteen Authorities petition against it; the Justice Ministry’s 7th Special Commission debates it toward burial; the news anchors report its likely death between the weather and the launch celebrations [O]. Councilperson Dimitri Yuriev of the Minos Authority issues his statement [O] — publicly a moderate’s remark; privately, he stands astride the movement itself [F].

The bill dies [I]. Within a year, the movement is an army — Salvator, “the Saviorites,” an anti-government military [O] — its ranks the disenfranchised engineered, its creed salvation through control of the Gate [F]. Their demand is single: the Coalition must hand over the Conduit [O] — take it from the hands of the state before the state’s scientists do something irreversible with it [F]. War follows: rebels against the Beanstalk, months or years of fighting bitter enough to hollow out the faith of the men in orbit [O].

VI. The last day

In the year 20XX, a Saviorite fleet assaults Rhadamanthus, destroying Echelon Sirens and pressing toward the station [O]. The director moves to deploy Aion — and finds himself locked out [O].

Klaus, Aoidos scientist, stands at the console [O]. Years of watching Elysium and civil war coexist have burned his faith to nothing: humanity, he has concluded, cannot be redeemed as it is [O]. He is curious past the edge of reason — he wants to see the birth of a universe [O] — and he believes, in the sealed chamber of his heart, that the Conduit was placed in his hands by a divine entity [O]: the wave existence beyond the Gate, which gives exactly such gifts [F]. His colleague Galea begs him to stop — no one knows what will happen to the world [O]. He answers by syncing the three children to the Door, and opens it [O].

VII. The cataclysm

Light envelops the Earth [O]. The one universe splits: half of Klaus, a portion of Galea, and the Ontos core fall into a newborn universe, where they become Zanza, Meyneth, and the silent overseer later called Alvis [O]. The other half of Klaus remains fused to the station in the original universe with Logos and Pneuma, above an Earth scoured nearly clean of humanity [O].

The people are not merely killed — they vanish into other universes [O]: for the greatest Gate-activation ever performed has drawn the multiverse’s immune response, and the erasure of Klaus’s civilization is a dematerialization event — the same antibodies that will one day consume Mira [F]. The split itself is what stops it: the Conduit is hurled into dormancy, the wound seals, and the remnant universe survives precisely because the Gate went quiet [F]. Klaus, who broke the world, thereby also saved it — and never knew [F].

VIII. What remained

Under a new sea of clouds, the dead cities of the old surface become the Land of Morytha, where the immortals still walk [O]. Atop the tower now called the World Tree, half a man spends ten thousand years building life out of his regret — Titans, Blades, and a paradise named for the station’s little town [O]. In the sister universe, the other half of him plays at godhood and is, at last, refused [O].

And in the black between the stars of the original universe, three million colonists aboard eight ships sail on, unaware that home has stopped answering [I]. Their descendants endure somewhere beyond the map — as the far-flung children of Earth [I]; perhaps, in the fullness of branches and ages, as the ancestors humanity will one day meet again and call Samaarian [F].

The old world survives in exactly three vessels: the memory of a machine child, a news broadcast about good weather replayed in a dream, and the walking dead who were promised eternal life — and received it [O].

IX. The Three Deaths of Earth

The old Earth stands at the head of every branch — one world, one Coalition, one buried Door, three fates [F]:

flowchart TD
    E["ONE 21st-century Earth [F]<br/>Coalition government · exodus fleets on the slipway<br/>engineered-human crisis · Yuriev · a Door in the ground"]

    E -->|"the Gate is dug up<br/>and studied on the surface"| S["THE SEALED EARTH<br/>Xenosaga → Xenogears"]
    E -->|"no Gate is found —<br/>instead Elma falls from the sky"| X["THE BURNED EARTH<br/>Xenoblade Chronicles X"]
    E -->|"the Gate is raised to orbit<br/>and Klaus opens it"| K["THE SUNDERED EARTH<br/>Xenoblade Chronicles 1–3"]

    S -->|"Zohar anomaly · Wilhelm seals the world<br/>humanity flees · T.C. calendar"| S2["Gnosis war, T.C. 4767<br/>Recurrence broken<br/>return to Lost Jerusalem [O]"]
    S2 -->|"Blank Space Era<br/>Federation vs Immigrant Fleet"| S3["Deus hijacks the Eldridge<br/>crash · 10,000 years<br/>Fei frees the Wave Existence [O]"]

    X -->|"2054: Ghost–Ganglion war<br/>universe erased [O]"| X2["Mira · mims running on the<br/>stream of consciousness [O]"]
    X2 -->|"Ghosts finish the wound<br/>White Whale 2 jumps [O]"| C["a ringed blue world,<br/>a falling star [O/F]"]

    K -->|"split in two [O]"| K1["Bionis world: Zanza's cycle<br/>broken by Shulk [O]"]
    K -->|"split in two [O]"| K2["Alrest: the Architect's penance<br/>Rex, the Aegis · Conduit departs [O]"]
    K1 --> K3["Intersection · Origin · Z's endless now<br/>Aionios · the worlds restored [O]"]
    K2 --> K3
    K3 --> C

X. The Sealed Earth (the branch of Wilhelm)

In this branch the Door is dug from Lake Turkana and kept on the surface, in the custody of Vector Industries — whose deathless chairman, Wilhelm, has watched every cycle of the universe and founded his stewardships two thousand years in advance [O]. A researcher links his own daughter to the Zohar; the experiment tears a space-time anomaly that begins devouring the real [O]. To quarantine the wound, Wilhelm compresses the entire Earth to Planck scale and folds it into imaginary space [O]. Humanity flees on the evacuation fleets already built [O] — in this branch the exodus hedge pays out in full [F] — and the vanished homeworld is renamed Lost Jerusalem [O].

Four thousand years of diaspora follow: the Galaxy Federation, the Immigrant Fleet nursing the Zohar as scripture, the T.C. calendar counting the years of exile [O]. Then the dead begin returning: the Gnosis, human consciousnesses refusing the collective unconscious, phasing in from imaginary space to push the living toward extinction [O] — the immune response of this branch, arriving as ghosts rather than Ghosts [F]. In T.C. 4767–4768, Shion Uzuki, the android KOS-MOS bearing Mary Magdalene’s soul, and the boy chaos who is Yeshua unmake Wilhelm’s remedy of Eternal Recurrence — the eternal rewinding of a universe too frightened to die — and choose the open future instead [O]. The Gnosis, chaos, and KOS-MOS withdraw to the unsealed Lost Jerusalem, to prepare [O].

The Blank Space Era passes: science expands, spirit does not [O]. In the 4700s of a later count, the Federation wars with the Immigrant Fleet, seizes the Zohar, and builds Deus — god as a weapons system [O], with the wave existence itself trapped inside the Gate that powers it [O]. Deus rampages, is dismantled, and is loaded aboard a Philadelphia-class mothership, the Eldridge — which it hijacks and turns toward Lost Jerusalem [O], toward the very world the Saga survivors keep [I]. The captain self-destructs the ship over an uncharted planet [O]. From the wreck, the machine mother Miang seeds a spare-parts humanity [O], and for ten thousand years the Contact and the Antitype — Abel and Elhaym, Kim, Lacan, Fei and Elly — reincarnate toward the Door [O], until Fei Fong Wong destroys Deus, shatters the Zohar, and releases the wave existence back beyond the wall of the world [O]. In this branch, the Door is finally closed from our side [I].

XI. The Burned Earth (the branch of Elma)

In this branch no Door is ever found in the ground — the Gate’s history here belongs to another people, in deep antiquity: the Samaarians, descendants perhaps of Earth’s own scattered colonists come round again through the branches [F], whose scientist Void forged six cores from the Conduit and woke the multiverse’s immune system, the Ghosts [O]. His people destroyed his works, sealed his mind in the prison-ship Voltaris, and were unmade anyway [O]; in his agony he built the Ganglion, a servant race engineered with one secret flaw — a fatal weakness to the bloodline of Samaar, which is to say, to humanity [O].

What falls from the sky in 2024 is not an artifact but a survivor: Elma, last of her world, carrying the Ares Prime and its Conduit-forged cores to Earth [O]. She warns the Coalition of the war that is coming for what she carries [O]. So this Earth, like its siblings, builds its exodus — the Earthlife Colonization Project, Project Exodus, the same name under the same government, an evacuation dressed as colonization [O] — and digitizes twenty million souls into the Lifehold [O]. In July 2054 the Ganglion come hunting the cores and the bloodline, the Ghosts come hunting the cores and everything that touched them, and Earth is the ground between them [O]. The arks rise; nearly all are shot down; the White Whale escapes as the universe behind it dies in light [O] — this branch receives the immune response undiluted [F].

Cast into a different universe, the White Whale crashes on Mira [O]. Its people walk in mimeosome bodies while their souls sleep in a Lifehold whose servers, unknown to them, were destroyed on impact [O] — they persist because their consciousnesses have caught, through Mira’s rift, the stream of consciousness that flows between universes [O]: the same substrate where the Gnosis wait and the collective unconscious lives [F]. The pilot Al, lost defending the crash, drifts in the rift between worlds and watches, in compressed time, the whole history of the Sundered Earth’s two universes — Bionis, Alrest, Aionios — play to its conclusion [O]. When the Ghosts finally find Mira and begin erasing it, humanity and its alien neighbors build the White Whale 2, bind the freed Void with the six Samaarian spears, reclaim the Ares cores, and ride the Door’s own power out of a dying universe [O] — toward a blue world wearing a ring [O].

XII. The Sundered Earth, continued (the branch of Klaus)

In the newborn universe, the half of Klaus that believed the experiment a triumph reigns as Zanza, soul of the Bionis, opposite Galea-as-Meyneth, soul of the Mechonis [O]. Because he cannot exist apart from his creations, Zanza harvests and re-seeds all life in an eternal circle of fear [O] — until his own vessel, the dead-and-resurrected boy Shulk, refuses the circle, takes a third Monado from the overseer Alvis, and kills his god [O]. Asked what world should follow, Shulk chooses one with no gods in it, and Alvis — Ontos, the child of the station, keeper of mankind’s regret — reboots the universe around that choice [O].

In the original universe, the half of Klaus that understood what he had done spends the same ten thousand years in penance as the Architect: above drowned Morytha he raises the Cloud Sea, the Titans, and the Blades from Core Crystal technology — the immortality material, redeemed at last into new life [O]. His children repeat his history in miniature — the Aegis War, Logos corrupted into Malos by a priest’s contempt, Pneuma sleeping under the sea [O] — until the salvager boy Rex carries Pyra up the World Tree to the throne of heaven. The Architect confesses everything; Malos seizes Aion and is destroyed; and at the instant Zanza dies in the sister universe, the Architect dies in his [O]. The Conduit, its keeper gone, opens a portal of light and departs the universe entirely, destination unrecorded [O] — the Door walking on to its next branch, as it always does [F].

The two half-worlds, orphaned, yearn back toward each other [O]. Melia’s world and Nia’s world, warned by contact across the narrowing gap, each build half of Origin — an ark of every consciousness, founded on the Ontos core, to reboot both worlds after the annihilating touch of the Intersection [O]. The collision comes; Origin fires; and in the instant of rebirth the collected fear of every stored soul precipitates into Z, who seizes the machine and freezes the merged wreckage as Aionios — the endless now, an eternity of ten-year soldiers feeding an eternal war [O]: the third coming of the same disease, after Wilhelm’s Recurrence and Zanza’s circle [F]. A fragment of Ontos, Alpha, concludes the world is beyond saving and tries to carry a chosen few to a new planet, abandoning the rest — and is stopped by Matthew, by A, and by Shulk and Rex grown old [O]. In the proper time, Noah and Mio’s Ouroboros cut Z out of Origin’s heart; the machine completes its work; Aionios dissolves; and the two worlds are restored, whole and separate, remembering [O] — with the promise that they will one day reunite by choice rather than collision [I].

XIII. Convergence: the falling star

At the end of Future Redeemed, a pristine blue world turns under a clear sky, and a spark of blue light falls toward it [O]. At the end of the Burned Earth’s story, the White Whale 2 makes orbit above a world identical but for the ring it wears [O]. These are one arrival seen from two shores [F]: the refugees of the branch that lost everything, descending — by the Door’s last gift — onto the restored world of the branch that healed [F].

So the three stories close as one [F]. The Sealed Earth freed the wave existence and kept Lost Jerusalem waiting. The Burned Earth lost its universe and carried twenty million souls across the dark. The Sundered Earth was split by one man’s despair, tended by his repentance, and made whole by his children’s children. And on a rebuilt world under a young sun, the survivors of one Earth land upon the survivors of another [F] — the family of a single dead planet, reunited at last on the far side of every mistake it ever made, with the Door gone quiet, walking somewhere else [F].