jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
e05444f708
Hop-2 systems authored: Tessera/Corvel (legal archive, 1.3B), Proxima/Ancora (first colony, Zheng He lore, 400M), Meridian/Provenance (boomtown, 150M), Barnard's Star/Verada (commuter town, 2B, wiki prose adjusted for surface-majority pop), Prometheus/Galen+Chiron+Site Anterior (longevity monopoly, 55K), Cygni B/Ferrath+Kihl Works (shipyards, 1.8B, 7 combines named), Cairn (the anomaly — 7 apertures, 2 garden planets, zero population). New: corporations table in systems.db schema. 20 records populated from wiki/corporations/ + DSMC + 7 Cygni B combines (Vethara, Kossler-Drun, Amberan Works, Talavec & Sons, Orren-Skel, Marhoud Fabrication, Drevast Extraction). Atlas CLI: fixed planet count defaults (6-8 minimum per star type, was 2-4). Miri added Zheng He lore to Proxima wiki. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — PROXIMA CENTAURI
PROXIMA is where humanity first arrived, which makes it a place of profound historical significance and a very effective mechanism for making visitors feel guilty about asking questions.
The Pilgrimage
People come to Proxima because it is Proxima. Because their ancestors came through here. Because standing on the surface of the first world humans ever colonized beyond Sol carries a weight that no comparable experience offers anywhere in the Reach. The pilgrimage is real, the demand is consistent, and the infrastructure that serves it has become a significant fraction of the system's civilian economy. Heritage tourism is the more honest economic descriptor, though the system's official registers avoid the term.
The research institutes — the Historical Foundation of Proxima, the Firstelder Archive, the Colonial Period Research Consortium — are not politically organized in any formal sense, but they share interests, share funding channels, and share an institutional orientation toward the past that shapes the system's civic culture. The Foundation's senior researchers tend to have strong opinions about heritage designation scope, development restrictions, and the Assembly's willingness to fund archival operations on the timetable the archives require.
The Pre-Gate Period
Proxima was settled by the Zheng He before gate discovery — slow ship, long crossing, no way back. The first human colony in the Reach existed for decades in isolation, managing a flare star on a generational lag from resupply, before the horizon station activated and gate transit began. The early settlement infrastructure is, by accessible accounts, more robust than comparable Wave 1 installations elsewhere — overbuilt for a colony that expected to be isolated for a long time and planned accordingly.
The Firstelder Archive holds the primary sources from this period. The Archive's index of holdings is public. The access protocols for specific document classes are not simple, and they have become less simple over the past century. The digitization backlog that makes certain record classes "currently inaccessible pending archival processing" has persisted, for certain documents, longer than the stated processing timeline can explain.
What the slow-ship colonists found when they arrived — what condition the system was in, what they encountered, what they reported back to Earth in the tight-beam transmissions that preceded gate contact — is partially reconstructable from accessible sources and partially not. The accessible sources describe a standard early colonial period. The inaccessible sources are the ones whose access classification changed.
The Veil Institute's researchers visit Proxima. They access the pre-gate records. The frequency and purpose of those visits is not reported in any Institute publication.
The Guardians
The Guardian chapter focuses on a specific question: who can afford to make the pilgrimage. Proxima's heritage designation and cultural weight have historically meant that residence and commercial access are managed with selectivity. The Guardians characterize this as inconsistent with the Assembly's stated democratic principles. Their publications on the subject are technically sound and politically inconvenient. They are acknowledged and not acted upon, which is the standard outcome for technically sound and politically inconvenient Guardian analysis.
Practical Information
Proxima is two hops from Gateway with four gate apertures — a junction connecting to Tessera, Keid, Ross 128, and Bastion. The M5Ve primary is a flare star, which the pre-gate colonists managed without external support for decades, which is either a testament to human resilience or evidence that they had help, depending on which records you can access. The residents describe the founding generation with the reverence appropriate to ancestors who survived impossible conditions. They do not describe them as having found anything unusual. The reverence and the absence are both genuine.
Adams of the Guide rates Proxima: Sacred. Filing Pending.