settled-reach/wiki/star-systems/GJ-702B/gttr.md

THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — PROMETHEUS

PROMETHEUS has one gate. One way in. One way out. The company that controls the gate also controls who lives for centuries and who does not, which is either the most important fact about the Reach or the most important fact about the Reach that nobody is allowed to investigate, depending on how you feel about distinctions without differences.

The Gate

The dead-end topology is not an accident. Prometheus Labs chose a single-aperture system deliberately, because a single aperture is the most defensible gate configuration in the network. Control the one gate, control all access. The Gate Corporation cannot build additional apertures — span gate technology operates intra-system, not between stars, and the alien-built horizon station's configuration is fixed. The single gate is a permanent physical condition. Prometheus Labs has maintained uninterrupted security control of it for three hundred years without a recorded forced-transit event, which is either a testament to security effectiveness or to the fact that no one with the means to force transit has decided it is worth attempting.

The system connects to Ran. Food, industrial inputs, everything that sustains the facility arrives through that one aperture. Ran exports at scale. Prometheus accesses longevity services. Neither system describes this relationship as leverage. Neither needs to.

The Product

Prometheus Labs manufactures immortality. The term the company uses is "longevity protocols," which is more precise and less alarming, and the difference between the two descriptions is the difference between what the company does and how the company prefers to discuss what it does.

Every Perpetual-class individual in the Reach — the founding Assembly members still in their seats, the Institute researchers who have been studying the same horizon station for five centuries, the Syndic family heads who have been compounding wealth since before most systems were settled — is alive because Prometheus Labs decided they should be. The criteria by which those decisions were made are not in any public register. The company's position is that access is determined by medical suitability and financial qualification. Neither criterion is publicly defined. The financial threshold has never been published. The medical assessment is conducted entirely within the company's proprietary framework.

Institutional Solitude

There is one faction in Prometheus, and it is Prometheus Labs. This is not an oversimplification. The Commission's jurisdiction over longevity protocols was formally excluded by a regulatory carve-out dating to the Reach's founding period. The Assembly's oversight operates through a direct negotiating channel, not standing governance mechanisms. The workforce is company-employed under confidentiality terms enforced without publicized exception for three centuries.

The Veil Institute does not have a formal presence. Several Institute senior researchers are Prometheus clients whose maintenance schedules bring them to the system on cycles measured in years. Whether the relationship extends beyond the standard client arrangement is a question both institutions decline to address.

Practical Information

Prometheus is two hops from Gateway via Ran. The client experience is smooth, appointment-oriented, and unremarkable. The security is present in the spaces clients do not access. The question of who decided who gets to live for centuries, and why, is the founding question of the Reach's class structure. It does not have an accessible answer, and the only institution that could provide one is behind a gate it controls, in a system it chose specifically because it has no other way in.

Adams of the Guide rates Prometheus: By Appointment Only.