Associated to every Azimuth point are two non-negative integers known as life and rift. This numbering system partition messages according to the quantity of networking key changes and quantity of breaches↗, respectively. This is explained in more detail below. These values are utilized by Ames and Jael to ensure that communication between ships is always done with the most recent set of networking keys, and that networking state is appropriately reset when a breach has occurred.
Every ship begins with a life and rift of 0. For galaxies, stars, and planets, these values are stored in the Azimuth PKI as keyRevisionNumber and continuityNumber, while for moons, these values are stored by their parent. Comets cannot change their networking keys, nor can they breach, and so their life and rift are always 0.
You can check your current life and rift number by running the +keys our generator in dojo. You can inspect another ship's life and rift by running +keys ~sampel-palnet.
Life
A ship's life, or key revision number, is a count of the number of times which a ship's networking keys have been altered. The initial value of each key is always zero, and the initial life is always 0.
Thus, setting the keys of a ship to a nonzero value for the first time will increment the life from 0 to 1. Rotating to a new set of keys will then increment the life to 2. Setting the keys back to zero would increment the life once more, to 3.
Rift
A ship's rift, or continuity number, is a count of the number of times that a ship has breached, also known as broken continuity.
In other words, a ship's rift will remain at 0 until the first time it is breached.
Network-wide breaches do not affect the rift of any ship. They are only used to count the number of personal breaches.
Edge cases
Configuring the keys to the same value they already were (i.e. a no-op) is possible, but has no effect on the life. Thus life is actually a measure of networking key revisions, and not the number of times they've been set.
Thus under ordinary circumstances, a breach will increment both life and rift since a breach typically also involves changing the networking keys. However, it is possible to breach without changing the networking keys. If the new keys specified as part of a breach are the same as the old, rift will increment while life will not.