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

Prometheus

GJ 702B | K-type | core

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System Profile

Star	K5 Ve · 16.6 ly
Bodies	1 habitable · 3 inhabited
Gates	1 aperture · dead_end
Settlement	wave_1
Industries	fusion_fuel, metallic_ore, hospitality, financial_services, legal_services
Exports	financial_services
Imports	processed_food, electronics, consumer_goods, medical_goods, refined_metals, chemicals
Population	—

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Supply Dependency

Prometheus imports everything except what it manufactures. The system has no significant agricultural output — no habitable worlds worked for surplus, no belt operations that produce exportable raw material in useful quantity. The population is modest, the facilities are specialized, and the supply lines run through the single aperture that connects the system to Ran. Food, industrial inputs, replacement components for infrastructure the system cannot fabricate locally — all of it arrives through one gate. The vulnerability implied by this arrangement is understood by everyone with reason to think about it, which is a small set of people, because Prometheus Labs controls who enters the system and what they are told.

The export profile is Prometheus Labs itself. What the system produces — longevity protocols, neural augmentation hardware, the maintenance services that sustain Perpetual-class biological function across the Reach — is not enumerated in standard freight manifests. Clients travel to Prometheus for initial treatment sequences; maintenance field teams travel outward from Prometheus to clients who cannot or will not make the trip. The revenue generated by this business is not publicly reported in any form the Reach's financial regulatory apparatus can verify. Prometheus Labs operates under a disclosure framework negotiated directly with the Concord Assembly that predates the Commission's standard financial reporting requirements and has never been brought into conformance with them.

The adjacency to Ran defines the system's supply position completely. One gate, one neighbor. Ran exports food at scale. Prometheus accesses longevity services. The two systems do not describe this relationship as leverage. The structural visibility of it is sufficient.

Faction Notes

There is one faction in Prometheus, and it is Prometheus Labs.

This is not an oversimplification. Other single-institution-dominated systems — Bastion, ACB — have at least the residual infrastructure of civic governance, worker organization, or Commission oversight that creates some institutional plurality. At Prometheus, the Commission's jurisdiction over longevity protocols has been formally excluded by the regulatory carve-out that dates to the Reach's founding period. The Assembly's oversight relationship with Prometheus Labs is conducted through the same direct negotiating channel that produced the disclosure framework — not through standing governance mechanisms. The workforce in the system is Prometheus Labs-employed; there is no labor body that functions outside the company's administrative framework.

The security apparatus is the most visible institutional presence after the labs themselves. It is not aggressive toward arriving clients — the client experience at Prometheus is designed to be smooth, appointment-oriented, and unremarkable. The security is present in the space that clients do not access: around the research facilities, around the administrative core, around whatever operations Prometheus Labs conducts in the inner system that are not part of the client-facing service. Prometheus employees in these areas operate under confidentiality terms that the company has enforced, without publicized exception, for three centuries.

The Veil Institute does not have a formal presence at Prometheus. Several Institute senior researchers are Prometheus clients; their maintenance schedules bring them to the system on cycles measured in years. Whether the Institute's relationship with Prometheus Labs extends beyond the standard client arrangement — whether there are agreements between the two institutions that go unrecorded in either organization's accessible documents — is a question that both institutions decline to address. The founding-period connection between the two organizations is documented as historical. Both organizations are still run by people who were present at the founding. The history is ongoing.

Silence Topic

What Prometheus does not discuss: client selection criteria, and the three centuries of decisions those criteria have produced.

The Perpetual-class population of the Reach exists because Prometheus Labs extended longevity access to specific individuals and withheld it from everyone else. The criteria by which those decisions were made are not in any public register. The company's official position is that access is determined by medical suitability and financial qualification. Neither criterion is publicly defined in operational terms. The financial threshold for initial treatment has never been published. The medical suitability assessment is conducted entirely within Prometheus's proprietary evaluation framework.

The Reach's current social stratification — between those who live for centuries and those who live on biological time — is the accumulated output of three hundred years of Prometheus's undisclosed selection process. The Commission has no jurisdiction to examine it. The Assembly has no active mandate to review it. The scholars who have attempted to reconstruct the selection history from indirect evidence — from the demographics of Wave 1 settlement, from the documented backgrounds of confirmed Perpetual-class individuals across the founding generations — have produced analyses that Prometheus Labs has not publicly disputed and has not facilitated. The research is technically permitted. The data that would make it conclusive is inside Prometheus's systems, which are inside Prometheus's gate, which is controlled by Prometheus's security apparatus.

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.

Narrative Hook

Every Perpetual-class individual in the Reach is alive because Prometheus Labs decided they should be, under criteria that have never been published, enforced by a security apparatus surrounding the only gate in or out.

Calibration Note

dead_end topology with aperture_count: 1 at wave_1 settlement is the most unusual gate configuration in the inner orbit for a system of this institutional significance. The standard expectation for a Wave 1 core-sector system is hub or junction topology — multiple apertures, multiple routing options. Prometheus has one gate. The alien builders determined this configuration. Prometheus Labs chose a dead-end system deliberately: a single aperture is the most defensible gate topology in the network. Control the one gate, control all access. The operational requirement was total control, and the founders selected accordingly.

The distinction matters because it clarifies the type of advantage the topology provides. The Gate Corporation cannot build additional apertures at Prometheus — span gate technology operates intra-system, not between stars, and the number of inter-system apertures is determined by the alien horizon station, which humans cannot modify. The single aperture is not an engineering choice that could be reversed. It is the fixed physical condition of this system's gate infrastructure. Prometheus Labs has maintained uninterrupted security control of that infrastructure since Wave 1. The continuity of that control, across three centuries, without any recorded forced-transit event, is either a testament to security effectiveness or a testament to the fact that no party with the means to force transit has found it worth attempting. Both interpretations are consistent with the observed record.

The star profile table entry (K5 Ve) indicates a late K-type flare star with emission features. The flare activity creates periodic radiation environment variations managed by the system's infrastructure. It does not materially affect operations. Prometheus Labs has been managing it for three centuries.

Topology

• Hop Distance from Gateway: 2
• Adjacent Systems: GJ 144

Celestial Bodies

Orbit	ID	Name	Type	Inhabited	Pop	Mass	Gravity	Year (d)	Day (h)	Atmo	Biome	Hydro	Economy	Settlement	Industrial
1	GJ702Bb	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.22g	12	288.0	none	barren	none	—	—	—
2	GJ702Bc	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.60g	55	1320.0	toxic	barren	none	—	—	—
3	GJ702Bd	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.45g	140	28.0	thin	arid	none	—	—	—
4	GJ702Be	Galen	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.82g	250	22.0	breathable	arid	rivers	—	—	—
5	GJ702Bf	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.50g	500	18.0	thin	frozen	rivers	—	—	—
6	GJ702Bg	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.35g	900	15.0	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
7	GJ702B-belt	—	asteroid_belt	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
8	GJ702Bh	—	gas_giant	no	—	gas_giant	—	2400	11.0	dense	—	—	—	—	—
↳ 8.1	GJ702Bh-1	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.09g	4	84.0	none	barren	none	—	—	—
↳ 8.2	GJ702Bh-2	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.06g	8	192.0	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
↳ 8.3	GJ702Bh-3	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.04g	14	336.0	none	barren	none	—	—	—
9	GJ702B-oort	—	oort_cloud	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—

Stations & Facilities

ID	Name	Type	Orbits	Population	Economy	Governance	Docking	Gate	Districts
GJ702B-oort-S1	Horizon Station	horizon	GJ702B-oort	—	transit	—	restricted	yes	1
GJ702B-oort-S2	Chiron	research	GJ702B-oort	50K	research	—	restricted	no	1
GJ702Bc-S1	Site Anterior	research	GJ702Bc	5K	research	—	restricted	no	1