A bookmark outlives the door it describes. Everything in this circular follows from that one fact.
What a bookmark preserves, what it cannot, and how much a wormhole will admit before anyone crosses it.
A bookmark is not a record of a place. It is a set of coordinates, and coordinates are indifferent to whether anything is still standing at them.
The case is stated without decoration, above, and needs no gloss. A wormhole is an object that is certain to be destroyed, so a wormhole bookmark is a short-dated instrument, and a folder of them is a folder of assertions, some of which have quietly stopped being true.
It need not be. A bookmark may be given an expiry when it is made — never, two days, twenty-four hours, four hours — and the list of places carries an Expiry column recording the date and time of its own deletion. An expiry cannot afterwards be edited, though it can be cancelled, and the last setting used is remembered for that folder.
Four hours is the aperture's own second lifetime state. A wormhole bookmark set to expire in four hours is a label that removes itself at approximately the moment the door it names becomes unreliable, without a pilot remembering to do anything. The facility exists, costs nothing, and is set to never by everyone who has not thought about it, which is why the folder fills.
Two errors of transcription are on file, and both are older than any naming scheme. A bookmark taken from the scanner window rather than from the grid may sit as much as ten kilometres from the aperture itself, which is a warp and a decloak away from where it claims to be. And a bookmark placed in a shared folder is not immediately a bookmark anybody else has: propagation to the rest of the corporation may take up to five minutes, during which the scout is the only person who can reach the door being announced.
Both are recorded in the Wormhole Community's own scouting guide, which is archived and which the office cites as practice rather than as policy.
The first bookmark made in a new system is the aperture the pilot arrived through, and it is made before the system has been looked at. It has to be. A wormhole that has not been bookmarked cannot be returned to without scanning the system again, and a pilot who postpones that bookmark until the situation is clearer has arranged to be scanning for the way out at precisely the moment they want to take it. The most important label in the folder is therefore the one written with the least information available and the least attention to spare.
This is why the label matters more here than anywhere else in the cluster. A station does not move. A stargate has never once dissipated into the ether while a pilot was reading its name. In Anoikis the name is the only part of the arrangement that survives, and it survives longer than the thing it names.
Every connection is scanned twice, from two systems, by two pilots who may never meet, and it is entered in two registers under two different names.
A cosmic signature belongs to the system it was found in. The scanner lists what is present where the ship is standing and nothing else, so the three letters a scout records are a local reference, not an identifier of the connection. The far end of the same aperture carries its own three letters, unrelated, in the register of the system on the other side.
The aperture's type behaves differently again, and asymmetrically. One end carries a type that discloses a great deal: which class of space lies beyond, what mass it will pass, and what size of hull. The other end carries K162, which is the generic name for an exit and discloses nothing at all. The manufacturer's own advice on a K162 is to jump it and find out.
| Observed from | What the type tells you | What the signature tells you |
|---|---|---|
| The entrance side | Destination class, mass limit, hull size limit | Where to find it again, in this system only |
| The K162 side | That somebody, somewhere, opened this | Where to find it again, in this system only |
The consequence for naming is exact. A label carries a signature that has jurisdiction on one side of the door and none on the other. Carrying it through and expecting it to be honoured is the commonest error in the practice, and it is committed most often by the pilot who scanned the hole and is therefore certain.
What lies beyond a class, as distinct from beyond a particular door, is a question the office keeps a separate catalogue for: Periscope holds the statics, effects and residents of every system in Anoikis, and is consulted before surfacing rather than after.
An aperture will describe its own health at some length and its own destination not at all.
Two of its statements are freely given, and the office records with approval that the manufacturer has recently made both of them shorter. Until late in 2025 an aperture described its own condition in sentences, and a pilot was expected to know that reaching the end of its natural lifetime meant four hours. The messages were simplified in Version 23.01, which also added colour and a one-hour warning, on the stated ground that they should no longer need to be decoded. They now read as figures.
| Lifetime, as stated | Mass, as stated |
|---|---|
| Less than 1 day remaining | More than 50% remaining |
| Less than 4 hours remaining | Less than 50% remaining |
| Less than 1 hour remaining | Less than 10% remaining |
| Expired, closure imminent | — |
The field's EOL is the second of those lifetime states and everything below it, which is to say four hours or fewer. Its shrunk and crit are the second and third mass states. Three letters continue to do the work of a sentence the aperture has stopped writing, and the shorthand now loses less than it used to, because there is less to lose.
What the aperture will not say is where it goes. The type code implies a class of destination. It does not name a system. That gap between the implied and the confirmed is the whole subject of §6.
Three schools of naming, a fourth answer that declines to name anything, the question none of them asks first, the office's own hand, a desk, and the discipline of leaving things out.
Conventions differ by what their authors are afraid of losing. Sorted that way there are three, and each is coherent.
| School | Reads | Answers first |
|---|---|---|
| Rooted | Chain position first | Which way leads back? |
| Rootless | Destination first | What is through this door? |
| Signature-first | The three letters first | Which door is this? |
A resident organisation reads its chain as a tree with the residence at the root, and the first thing its labels record is position within that tree. The Wormhole Community's published guide gives the form directly:
.2 B9N [ABC] EOL SMALL
Chain position, aperture type, the local signature in brackets, then the conditions. A full stop opens a label that leads away from home and an asterisk opens one that leads back toward it, so the folder sorts the way out to the top and the way home above that. Every field before the brackets exists to answer a question about the way back. The scheme is unimprovable for a group with a home and unusable for a pilot without one, since its first field would have nothing to count from.
Hunters, couriers and day-trippers enter through one aperture and leave through another. Their route has a beginning and no centre, and their labels are ordered accordingly. The convention observed in WiNGSPAN Delivery Services practice puts the destination category first:
C3 HIJ 518
HS ABK Jita
NS TUV 1DQ1-A
Class, then the first three letters of the local signature, then the confirmed destination: the final three digits for Anoikis, the recognisable name for known space. There is no marker for home, and that is not an omission.
The distinction is sharper than roaming against residence. A resident organisation shares one chain, and its labels can carry a mark meaning toward the place we all keep our things because every reader of the folder means the same place by it. WiNGSPAN keeps no wormhole residence, and its agents work their own chains for their own content, so a shared asterisk in a shared folder would point at as many different systems as there are pilots reading it. The convention does not omit the root. It declines to pretend there is one.
The third school begins where the pilot's attention already is. The scanner window lists signatures; a label that opens with the same three letters can be matched against that list at a glance, and a label whose letters no longer appear in it is a label describing a door that has closed. Practice observed of chloroken:
MGD 5s
ASQ Ns
GHI 5x
KFY iii
Signature, then a compressed private classification: a class-five connection, a null-security connection, a static distinguished from something that is not one. The office notes that x and iii also appear in this hand, declines to say what they mean, and records the restraint here so that it may be found again by whoever eventually asks.
The schools are not in competition. They are three answers to three different first questions, and a pilot who changes posture is well advised to change hand. There is also a fourth answer, which is to decline the question, and it is the subject of the next section.
The largest public mapping service in the cluster uses none of the three. It does not label doors at all.
The largest public mapping service in the cluster does not use any of them. EvE-Scout, operated by Signal Cartel of EvE-Scout Enclave, publishes the connections of Thera and Turnur as records rather than as names, and the office consulted twenty of them on the day this circular was written.
A record has fields. That single fact dissolves most of what the schools above are fighting over. Where a label must choose a first word, a record has no first word; where a label must compress, a record can hold a wormhole type, a maximum hull size, a class, a region, an expiry, and the hours remaining, all named and all separate.
Two of its fields are worth the whole discussion. It records the signature at both ends of the connection, in separate fields, which disposes of the jurisdiction problem in §2 entirely and which not one of the hands above troubles to do. And it records, three times over, who did the work: who first entered the connection, who last amended it, and who completed it. The office had believed, when it drafted §7, that no convention recorded this. The office was mistaken, and the correction is in the section itself.
The service also demonstrates §1 better than the Ministry could, and in its own published words. A register that computes an expiry for every connection it holds still cannot reach into a pilot's own folder and take back what has been copied out of it.
The register is also a folder, for those who would rather have one. The Cartel place their vetted connections in a public bookmark folder named EvE-Scout \\ Hubs. The link that adds it is posted in the message of the day of the EvE-Scout channel, which is open, so the whole procedure is to join the channel, read the notice at the top of it, and accept the folder. The connections then sit among a pilot's own places, named by somebody else, where they are indistinguishable from a pilot's own except that somebody else wrote them.
Their own advice is that the site is always ahead of the folder: entries are vetted before they are placed, so the folder lags, and expired entries may still be sitting in it. Both halves of that sentence are §1.
Every scheme above records what a door is. The question the Ministry files under is how well it is known.
An aperture will support an inference before it supports a fact. Its type gives a class; its appearance gives a class; the mapper gives a class. None of these produces a system name, and a label that carries one is making a claim that can only have come from a crossing. Between a class-three connection and a connection to J111518 there is a jump, a decloak, and an interval in which the scout was in a place nobody had checked.
The office did not invent this concern and does not claim to have. The Wormhole Community's guide already carries the marker:
.2 B9N [ABC] EOL SMALL NJ
NJ, for not jumped, appended by a scout who could see the door and could not go through it. That is the same distinction, recorded at the end of the label rather than in front of the thing it qualifies, and it is prior art of the plainest kind.
The public register at §5 carries it too, as a field named completed, which is either true or is not. The distinction the office believed it was contributing turns out to be the one thing everybody had already thought of, in three different notations, none of them typographical.
What the Ministry observes is that the marker is optional in every scheme it has read, and appended in every scheme it has read. An optional marker of doubt appears when a scout is careful and vanishes when a scout is quick, and the failure is silent: a label that has dropped its doubt does not look uncertain. It looks confirmed. A marker that must be remembered under pressure is a marker with a known failure mode, and the office does not care for those.
The remedy the office adopted is to put the standing of the entry in front of the field it governs, where it cannot be omitted without leaving a space. That is set out in §7, together with the two remedies the office proposed after it and withdrew.
The conventions above were devised by pilots, for pilots, and each omits the same thing: a mark for how well the door is known. The Ministry's form supplies it.
The office files a door as follows. Conditions follow the destination in the order of the table, and any of them may stand alone.
[CLASS] [SIG] [SEAL] [DESTINATION] [CONDITIONS]
C3 HIJ ◇
C3 HIJ ⊕ 518
C5 MGD ⊕ 472 ☾ ♄ ⊘ †
C2 ABC ⊕ 118 ☍
An aperture classified and not entered. The same aperture crossed and witnessed. A crossing that is terminal, hull-restricted, down to its last tenth of mass and leading toward the declared root. And a crossing found to be the counterpart of an entry the file already holds.
| Mark | Reads | Standing of the entry |
|---|---|---|
| ◇ | Classified, not entered | An inference from the aperture's own type. Nobody has been through |
| ⊕ | Entered and witnessed | An observer has crossed and has seen the far side |
| ☾ | Terminal | Four hours or fewer remaining: the second lifetime state and everything below it |
| ♄ | Restricted | A hull-size limit applies. The office declines to say which; the aperture will |
| ⊖ | Reduced | Mass below half |
| ⊘ | Barred | Mass below a tenth, and will not take much more |
| ☍ | Opposition | The counterpart of an entry the file already holds: the same connection, from the far side |
| † | Toward the root | Declared on Form OBS-10/A, never inferred. A root may be a residence, a staging system or an insertion point, and is not necessarily a home |
The marks are not decorative. Saturn restricts, which is the whole of what a hull limit does; the opposition is two bodies at the ends of one line, which is what a connection is once both its signatures are known; the dagger is the register's own mark for an entry subordinate to another. The circled marks are one family: a cross for a crossing, a minus for a mass below half, a bar for one below a tenth.
The office gave the question its attention and prepared a case for leading with the mark, which would group every unentered door at the top of the folder as a body of outstanding work. The case was rejected. The list of places sorts alphabetically, and a folder ordered by class presents the doors a pilot is choosing between.
Two further fields were proposed and struck. A countersignature, on the reasoning that a claim whose author cannot be established is a rumour which has been formatted; and the hour, on the reasoning that the field's question is who put that there and when. The list of places already carries a creator and a date, in its own columns, on every bookmark, unprompted.
Minute. An objection has been received to the effect that the marks cannot be produced at speed by a pilot who is cloaked, moving, and being asked several incompatible questions at once. It is noted, entered in the file, and referred for consideration. The office observes that the marks may be prepared in advance and held ready, preparation being the only part of this work performed at leisure.
Use of the marks is approved subject to confirmation that the list of places will accept and sort them, which is pending.
Enter what is known about a single aperture. The register renders the same facts in each school, and states what the resulting label asserts.
The register renders, it does not adjudicate. Each school is complete on its own terms, and the differences between the four lines are differences of fear rather than of quality.
It also declines to grow a field for every mark the office has invented. The opposition is not offered here: a form that asked a pilot whether the far side of this door is already in the file would be a form serving a notation rather than a pilot, and §7 rejects a form of that kind on other grounds.
The office's own hand is filed last. It is the only one of the four that cannot state a destination without stating how the destination is known, and it is the only one that requires eight marks to be held in the head before it can be read.
The line worth reading is the first, which states what the label claims. One condition draws an objection: a destination asserted without a crossing. It cannot be repaired by the pilot who reads the label next, because nothing in the label tells them there is anything to repair.
A label is read at a glance by somebody who is busy. A map is read at leisure by somebody who is not. Confusing the two is the commonest way to ruin both.
The following belong in the mapper, in the notes, or nowhere:
The mapper is the correct home for all of it, and the field's mappers already do this work properly: signatures imported in bulk from the scanner window, stale ones pruned automatically, a connection marked as ending turning a colour and removing itself from the map when its timer expires. None of that belongs in a bookmark label, which cannot be sorted on its parts, filtered or coloured, and which will still be sitting in the folder long after the aperture has gone unless somebody set an expiry at §1.
A label requiring interpretation has become a document. A document acquires an owner. An owner requests a review. A review is scheduled. The aperture, meanwhile, has closed.
Every convention in this circular is a hedge against one specific loss, and each is exactly as good as the fear that produced it. The field's fears are operational: the way back, the missed opportunity, the folder that no longer matches the scanner. They were arrived at by pilots who were, at the time, in a ship.
The Ministry has never been in a ship. Its fear is that an unsupported claim will enter the permanent record and be read later as though somebody had checked it, and the office is constitutionally incapable of setting that fear aside. Hence eight marks, three subsidiary forms, and a retention period for a document describing a hole that will be gone by morning.
The office's form is longer than the others. The office has examined the difference and finds the additional length to be doing necessary work.
It concedes one thing to the register at §5: a record keeps what a label cannot, and the reason is not that its designers wrote a better notation. A record is composed afterwards, by a pilot who has arrived somewhere and stopped. A label is written on arrival, in the first seconds in an unknown system, by a pilot who does not yet know whether the system is empty. Every convention in this circular is shaped by that, and the register escaped it by putting the writing somewhere the danger is not.
The solitary scanner holds all of these fears at once, generally in the wrong order, and names the door anyway.
| Figure | Value | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Bookmark after its object is gone | Still points at the position | The manufacturer's own filing |
| Bookmark expiry, at creation | Never · 2 days · 24 h · 4 h | The New Location window; an Expiry column records the deletion |
| Bookmark taken from the scanner window | Up to 10 km off | Community practice, archived |
| Shared bookmark propagation | Up to 5 min | Community practice, archived |
| K162 | Discloses nothing | The manufacturer's own filing |
| Entrance-side aperture type | Class, mass, hull size | The manufacturer's own filing |
| Signature jurisdiction | One system only | Definitional |
| Lifetime statements | Four, in figures | Information panel, simplified in 23.01 |
| Mass statements | Three, in figures | Information panel, simplified in 23.01 |
| EOL, in the field's shorthand | 4 hours or fewer | The second lifetime state and below |
| Not-jumped marker | NJ | Wormhole Community guide, 2024 |
| Ministry marks | ◇ ⊕ ☾ ♄ ⊖ ⊘ ☍ † | This office; acceptance by the list of places pending |
| Register's own columns | Date and creator, per bookmark | The list of places, unprompted |
| First bookmark in a new system | The way out | Field practice; made before the system is read |
| Public register, signatures held | Both ends, named separately | EvE-Scout public interface, 31.07.2026 |
| Public register, signatories held | Three per connection | EvE-Scout public interface, 31.07.2026 |
| Schools of label in circulation | Three | This circular, which added a fourth hand to them |
The fields of the public register are read from EvE-Scout's own public interface, consulted 31.07.2026; the service is Signal Cartel's and is free to all. Conventions attributed to WiNGSPAN Delivery Services and to chloroken are recorded from direct observation supplied to the office, not from published doctrine, and are described rather than reproduced. The Wormhole Community's scheme is quoted from its own public guide of 21 September 2024. Two pages that guide refers to have since been withdrawn from publication, and nothing has been reconstructed from their absence.