Open quantum systems play an essential role in many phenomena appearing in the universe, most notably the emergence of classicality. But a complete understanding of relevant non-unitary systems remains elusive. For example, gravitational open systems provide difficulties not faced in standard open systems, among these is the time-dependent nature of the boundary defining the open system. In this talk, we consider analytic computations in open qubit systems to understand complications that arise in open gravitational systems. We show that in a qubit network with activating environmental degrees of freedom, the master equation approach that is typical in open systems, becomes undesirable as it requires non-time-local components. From these considerations we propose a method for using ensembles of quantum channels, the non-unitary generalization of unitary operators, to provide an effective description of open quantum systems. Finally, we investigate a model for the spontaneous emergence of qubit subsystems from featureless quantum systems, which serves as a prequel to the appearance of an open qubit system.