settled-reach/wiki/star-systems/GJ-770/index.md

Rekohu

GJ 770 | G-type | north_reach

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System Profile

Star	K3/K4V · 45.8 ly
Bodies	1 habitable · 3 inhabited
Gates	1 aperture · dead_end
Settlement	wave_3
Industries	fusion_fuel, metallic_ore
Exports	—
Imports	processed_food, electronics, consumer_goods, medical_goods, refined_metals, heavy_equipment
Population	—

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Supply Dependency

There is one gate, and it went offline. For somewhere between sixty and eighty years — the local calendar's preservation of pre-silence dates is imperfect, which is itself a consequence of the silence — Rekohu had no gate. No transit. No imports. No communication with the Reach beyond what the system's own survey vessels could carry to Moyale and back, a journey that in pre-gate conditions required years. The people here survived on what they had, grew what they needed, and built what broke. Three generations came to adulthood knowing the gate as an architectural artifact rather than a functioning transit node.

When the gate came back — the cause remains officially undetermined; Gate Corporation's post-restoration assessment concluded "spontaneous aperture reactivation consistent with undocumented maintenance cycle" — Rekohu did not immediately reconnect to the economic networks that had existed before the silence. The systems those networks had served had found other routes. Rekohu's pre-silence export relationships were gone. What the system rebuilt was a subsistence-plus economy: enough surplus in specialist marine products and a specific class of hand-fabricated navigational instruments to maintain gate access fees and essential imports, not enough to become economically integrated with the outer corridor in the way it had been before.

Faction Notes

No external faction has meaningful presence at Rekohu. Gate Corporation maintains the single aperture under a minimal rotating contract that the settlement pays for through a special levy. The Assembly's jurisdictional status for Rekohu is genuinely uncertain — the pre-silence filing relationship was interrupted, the post-restoration Assembly engagement was limited to a single registry update confirming active settlement status, and no compliance audit has occurred since. The local governance does not regard this as a problem. The local governance does not regard Assembly jurisdiction as a live question.

What exists at Rekohu is a governance form that developed during the silence and was not dismantled afterward: a deliberative council structured around the voyager genealogy tradition, in which council standing is determined partly by descent from the original founding families and partly by demonstrated contribution to the settlement's collective welfare. It is neither purely democratic nor purely hereditary. It works for the population it governs. It is unlike anything else in the north_reach corridor, because nothing else in the north_reach corridor spent sixty to eighty years inventing its own institutions without external reference.

Silence Topic

What Rekohu does not discuss with outsiders — not from deception but from a deep ambivalence about how outsiders would understand it — is the Gate Silence period's full cultural history. The Reach's official narrative of that period describes Rekohu as an isolated settlement that maintained stability through the gate outage and successfully reintegrated after restoration. This is accurate in its facts and almost entirely wrong in its character. The silence period was not experienced as an interruption of normal Reach life. It was experienced as the emergence of something new: a community that no longer defined itself in relation to the Reach because the Reach was not present to define against. The people who came of age during the silence do not feel that they "reintegrated" with the Reach. They feel that the Reach reappeared around a community that had become something the Reach does not have a category for.

The founding Pacific heritage of the Rekohu community — Maori-tradition voyager culture, brought by the founding party as a deliberate idealist choice rather than following the corridor's Commonwealth mainstream — frames the silence period in its own terms: as a deep voyage, undertaken without return being certain, that changed the voyagers into something that cannot be unchanged. Outsiders who hear this framing tend to find it moving and somewhat baffling. Rekohu residents tend to find outsiders' incomprehension unsurprising.

Narrative Hook

The gate came back after sixty to eighty years of silence, and the people here had stopped waiting for it — what reactivated the aperture is officially unexplained, and Rekohu's elders' council has a different account than Gate Corporation's restoration report.

Calibration Note

wave_3 dead_end at hop_distance: 12 with Gate Silence Survivor and Idealist Exception archetypes combined produces the most culturally singular system in this corridor batch. The wave_3 founding is important: the community was old enough and established enough before the silence that it had real institutional infrastructure to adapt, rather than simply collapse. A wave_5 system experiencing gate silence of this duration would likely not survive; a wave_3 system with 150-200 years of settlement prior to the silence has the food production, technical capacity, and social cohesion to endure. The K3/K4V stellar class is a warm orange — not as dim as typical M-dwarf settlement, close enough to familiar that the founding party's agricultural traditions translated without major adaptation. The Pacific-heritage founding community's choice of this specific system name — Rekohu is the traditional Maori name for the Chatham Islands, the easternmost inhabited islands of pre-settlement Aotearoa, associated with voyage, distance, and cultural distinctiveness — is the most transparent piece of naming intent anywhere on the north_reach corridor.

Celestial Bodies

Orbit	ID	Name	Type	Inhabited	Pop	Mass	Gravity	Year (d)	Day (h)	Atmo	Biome	Hydro	Economy	Settlement	Industrial
1	GJ770b	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.35g	20	480.0	none	barren	none	—	—	—
2	GJ770c	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.48g	55	20.0	thin	arid	none	—	—	—
3	GJ770d	Te Whanga	planet	yes	15K	terrestrial	0.86g	130	22.0	breathable	temperate	extensive	agriculture	dispersed	—
↳ 3.1	GJ770d-1	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.05g	8	192.0	none	barren	none	—	—	—
4	GJ770e	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.40g	280	18.0	thin	frozen	ice	—	—	—
5	GJ770f	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.32g	650	16.0	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
6	GJ770g	—	gas_giant	no	—	gas_giant	—	1800	11.0	dense	—	—	—	—	—
↳ 6.1	GJ770g-1	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.06g	5	120.0	none	barren	none	—	—	—
↳ 6.2	GJ770g-2	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.04g	14	336.0	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
7	GJ770h	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.22g	4500	20.0	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
8	GJ770i	—	planet	no	—	dwarf	0.10g	9000	22.0	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
9	GJ770-belt	—	asteroid_belt	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
10	GJ770-oort	—	oort_cloud	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—

Stations & Facilities

ID	Name	Type	Orbits	Population	Economy	Governance	Docking	Gate	Districts
GJ770-oort-S1	Rangiauria	horizon	GJ770-oort	—	transit	—	restricted	yes	1
GJ770d-S1	Kaingaroa	commercial	GJ770d	1K	transit	—	restricted	no	1

Topology

• Hop Distance from Gateway: 12
• Adjacent Systems: GJ 1292