reimagining
human civilization across time

In the first decades on Proxima b, every watt carried a shadow. The early fission units kept air moving through domes and kept the Dome Gardens warm when the star flared and solar went uncertain, but they left behind spent fuel no one wanted to name. You could not bury it. There was no “away” on a newborn world.

Deep in basalt caverns, behind glass and remote hands, they learned to unmake the old problem: separating what could burn again, vitrifying what could not, and harvesting long-lived heat into sealed nuclear batteries. The first Ω Cells were simple-looking cylinders stamped in gold, warm as a hand-held ember, built to run for years without complaint. They powered Torch sentinels beyond the tree line, SpaceComputer vaults where time had to stay honest, and the farthest Pipedream junctions where a single outage could strand a city.

When Rainmaker’s forests thickened and the Belt of Rivers ran clear, Omega stepped into daylight. In a green valley beside slow water they raised the White Hearth, reprocessing halls and compact reactors shaped to coexist with life, exhaling clean steam into blue sky while the river below stayed cold and bright.

The first GRAM units looked almost playful when they stepped off their landers — low, rounded hulls on many jointed legs, eyes like lanterns, shells polished to a champagne sheen. The forerunners called them “Tidewalkers” the day they saw one wade straight from sand into surf, anchor itself to a boulder, and begin quietly eating the rock. Inside that smooth carapace was not a vehicle but a factory: drills, smelters, printers, and a tiny cradle where new chassis could grow from harvested ore and ice. Each Tidewalker carried a shard of the Worldmind that enforced GRAM’s First Law: they could only copy themselves from approved blueprints and only to fill quotas set from Proxima.

SpaceComputer lifted trust off the ground. They lofted a ring of tamper-resistant nodes into hard, quiet orbits—sealed compute vaults beyond local jurisdiction, beyond intrusion, beyond the weather of politics. In orbit, verification was not a committee vote; it was physics. Computation became a neutral courtroom above every flag and faction, with settlement anchored where no one could reach it.

In the public halls, the system was taught with a single object: an engraved star‑disc, constellations cut into dark metal, a fine line of light sweeping its center like a patient hand. “Money,” the instructors would say, “is a coordinate.”

By Sol 2275, Space‑Time Settlement had become ordinary magic: you didn’t send funds to a person—you summoned them to a moment and a place. A Dome Garden could sell tomorrow’s harvest to an orbital refinery, and both sides could sleep, certain the universe itself would keep the receipts.

By Sol 2275, Proximans say the planet learned stability the day Lavoit arrived: not by fighting the rhythms of light and storm, but by turning them into stored dawn. Lavoit’s first answer was almost monastic: a small white pavilion on the river’s edge, and beside it a tall glass column where blue water rose and fell in measured silence.

Inside, electrolysis stacks hummed like a distant choir. In the bright hours, the House drank surplus photons and split the river cleanly—hydrogen captured into pressure cells for Longshot rails, Lumina machines, and the cold-start nights of the Dome Gardens; oxygen bled back into the valley, gram by gram, until the air stopped feeling borrowed. Over time, Lavoit Houses multiplied along the Belt of Rivers—quiet stations with mirrored skins, each one listening to the Worldmind and answering with fuel.

In the first decades on Proxima b, architecture was survival: thick domes, blunt corridors, rooms stacked where they fit. The colony endured, but it didn’t sing—more bunker than home. Drafted arrived with an idea that sounded almost too gentle for a frontier world: start with your vision. Not with load tables or radiation shielding or the hard math of airlocks—but with what mattered to the people who would live there.

In time, the Civic Codex earned a home: a sun-washed hall of arches and indoor palms, where a crystal sphere held a single human figure—the Measure—sealed in glass as a quiet oath. No matter how grand the towers outside rose, no matter how fast Pipedream’s Clearlines moved beneath the gardens, the city would remain scaled to a person: stride, breath, shade, gathering.

By Sol 2275, Proximans still use the old phrase when a new district unfurls in white and gold: You don’t build a city here—you draft it, and the world agrees.

When the forerunners arrived, Proxima’s light was too dim, too red, and too fickle under the star’s tantrum flares. In the early years the forerunners lived in half-dark domes along the terminator, forever between day and night. In Sol 2095 Reflect Orbital began construction of the Mirror Crown: a lattice of kilometer-wide reflectors suspended in slow, stable orbits. Each mirror caught Proxima’s scattered photons and poured them where life needed them most — over the Dome Gardens, the Sea Ports, the growing ring of cities. By Sol 2275, children in the Terminator Cities learned constellations not from distant stars but from the dance of Reflect’s moving beams, tracing the story of their civilization across the sky in bands of engineered daylight.

The first crops on Proxima died quickly. Some rotted overnight, others simply stalled — leaves waxy, roots uncurled, as if the world itself were politely refusing them. Beneath the soil, native microbes and strange minerals waged chemical war on Earth’s native biology. Klura’s scientists moved in with libraries of phages, tailored enzymes, and smart coatings that turned every seed and crate into a fortified citadel. They neutralized hostile biofilms in the hydroponic lines, armored packaging against invisible spores, and taught terrestrial plants to coexist with Proxima’s patient, alien life. The “Dome Gardens” — domed valleys where soil, steel, and glass blended into orderly green — became the colony’s larder. By Sol 2275, every Proximan meal carries a quiet benediction: to Klura, who negotiated the uneasy truce between two biologies so that humans could eat in peace.

Before the Underground Ways, travel on Proxima meant braving hard radiation, needle storms of dust, and the long freeze of the night-side winds. Convoys got lost, and people disappeared between domes. Pipedream changed that by going down instead of out. They bored tunnels through regolith and frozen basalt, laid ceramic conduits and mag-lines, and filled them with whispering capsules that flew on pressure and magnetism alone. By Sol 2275, an order placed in Dawnport could appear in a far terminator hab minutes later — food, medicine, reactor parts, messages, all rushing through the dark like blood through arteries. In the legends, Proxima is a great buried animal: domes as organs, mirrors as eyes, but Pipedream’s tunnels are always the veins, the thing that keeps it alive.

Proxima was stingy country: brittle regolith, buried ice, and mountains that had never heard the ring of tools. Lumina sent machines instead of armies — all-electric titans that crawled on many legs and tracks, blades wide enough to reshape valleys and arms strong enough to hoist prefab towers in thinner-than-Earth air. They dug the first harbor basins for Poseidon’s fleets, carved the rail trenches for Longshot’s guns, and sculpted terraces where Klura’s Dome Gardens would later bloom. At night, their work sites glowed like necklaces of blue-white motes strung along the terminator. By Sol 2275, many of the original machines sat retired on plinths in city plazas, kids climbing over scarred chassis that had once shoved mountains aside — monuments to the age when Lumina taught Proxima b how to move.

Even after the oceans came, Proxima’s air was skittish — too thin, too cold, prone to gathering into storms that punished the surface and then vanished for months. Rain fell where it pleased, and often not at all. Rainmaker’s towers appeared first as lonely spires along the habitable belt, whispering charge into clouds, nudging pressure gradients with heat and aerosols. Then came constellations of high-altitude drones, weaving invisible patterns into the sky. They were less gods of the weather than careful editors, taking Proxima’s raw climate and rewriting it line by line. The Belt of Rivers — a ring of managed watersheds around the terminator — was their masterwork. By Sol 2275, settlers could plan harvests years in advance, confident that when they asked the sky for rain, Rainmaker would answer.

It took a century of comets and careful greenhouse work before Proxima’s basins filled. When they did, the settlers discovered their new oceans the hard way — alien currents, sudden fogs, and storms born from a star that never quite slept. Poseidon’s engineers answered with hulls that could skim, float, and fly, airframes that shrugged off spray laced with unfamiliar chemistry. Their autonomous seaplanes stitched the first Sea Roads between floating platforms, kelp towers, and cliffside ports. They hauled Klura’s seed cultures, Lumina’s machine segments, and Rainmaker’s sky towers from shore to shore. By Sol 2275, the people of the Water Belt joked that they didn’t live on Proxima b at all, but on Poseidon’s routes — thin silver lines on a dark blue world, carrying their lives over endless, newly-made seas.

In the histories, the story of Proxima always begins with a sound no one on the planet ever heard: the thunderless kick of Longshot’s lunar guns, flinging the first forerunner seed-ships toward the red star. Decades later, when those Arks unfolded into crude habitats and ragged domes on Proxima b, the Longshot guns had already been reborn on the new world. Longshot’s mass drivers rose again as sloping canyons of metal along equatorial ridges, hurling ore, water, and finished structures into orbit. Reflect’s mirrors, Rainmaker’s high towers, Torch’s watchful platforms — all rode Longshot rails to the sky. By Sol 2275, launches were so routine that children timed games to the ripple of magnetic recoil under their feet, never quite grasping that each shudder was their world climbing a little higher.