At first those things look like faults.
Then coincidences.
Then impossible coincidences.
And eventually someone realizes they all have one thing in common:
Every anomaly prevented something.
A death.
A disaster.
A civilization being cut off.
A piece of information being lost.
That is chilling in a very Stargate way, because suddenly the old technology is no longer just scenery.
For decades everyone treated the network as plumbing.
Dial an address. Open a wormhole. Walk through.
But what if the plumbing has been quietly observing traffic for millions of years?
Not necessarily thinking like a person.
Perhaps learning.
Routing.
Prioritizing.
Recognizing relationships.
And that connects beautifully to your reinterpretation of The Planet Builders.
The original characters saw an impossible planet and naturally asked:
Who built it?
Your story asks a much more interesting question:
What if nobody did?
Maybe the network knew Destiny's crew needed that world.
Maybe something else created it.
Maybe the Stargate network merely knew it existed and moved Destiny toward it.
That is a radically different power.
Creation is almost too magical.
Selection is terrifyingly plausible.
Because a sufficiently old, sufficiently vast network might know things nobody within it knows individually.
It might know that World A has something World B needs.
That one person standing beside one gate can solve a problem occurring beside another.
That a ship should drop out of FTL now.
That Langara needs Nicholas Rush.
And so it connects them.
That makes “Mercy” an incredibly important episode because it becomes the first event where the intervention is difficult to dismiss.
Langara reaches toward Destiny and nearly kills itself.
The connection ends.
Nobody asks the network for help.
And then the network appears to answer anyway.
That is your first unmistakable act of intent.
Not necessarily consciousness.
Intent.
And I really like that Rush initially gets the explanation wrong.
He thinks:
Destiny did it.
Of course he does.
That is the most advanced autonomous Ancient system he knows intimately. He has spent years trying to understand whether Destiny is merely programmed or something more.
Eli probably leans that direction too.
McKay will insist there is a technical explanation.
Jonas may be the first one who becomes uncomfortable with the assumption.
Because Jonas has always been extraordinarily good at noticing when everyone around him has accepted the wrong premise.
Eventually he might ask something devastatingly simple:
“Why do we keep assuming it was the ship?”
And suddenly the room changes.
Because Destiny did not build the Milky Way Stargate network.
It is merely connected to it.
Then you start revisiting old incidents.
Not retconning them.
Recontextualizing them.
The Pegasus network.
Destiny.
The anomalous planet.
Strange dialing events.
Addresses that shouldn't work.
Connections made under impossible circumstances.
Maybe even certain “lucky” discoveries across SG-1 and Atlantis.
Not all of them.
You absolutely should not say, “the network secretly did everything.”
That destroys human agency.
Instead, there were perhaps a handful of moments where something nudged the board.
And nobody noticed because nobody knew to look.
That is the creepy elegance of your phrase:
Someone or something is moving in the dark behind the gateways.
I would preserve that exact feeling.
Because the Stargates themselves remain familiar.
Blue water.
Seven symbols.
Kawoosh.
People still walk through them.
Nothing visually announces that the rules have changed.
