The Factions of Proxima b

Leonad Corporation arrived on Proxima b aboard one of the original colony ships, a biotech conglomerate whose founding charter promised the optimization of human potential. Their methods are older than they admit. There is a line that runs from phrenology to eugenics to Leonad’s genetic engineering division — each generation’s refinement of the same premise: that human beings are raw material, and the right hands can shape them into something functional.

Leonad operates a caste system bred into the genome. Alphas and betas occupy the terraformed moon, visible in the night sky from the habitable ring — comfortable, cultured, and insulated from the frontier they commissioned. Below them, the working castes were engineered not for obedience, but for drive. Frontier men — settlers, builders, pathfinders — carry a hunger for expansion woven into their blood. They do not feel leashed. They feel chosen. Their education tells them they are humanity’s vanguard, the brave ones who push outward while the soft stay behind walls. The cage looks like freedom from the inside.

The engineering works. That is what makes it monstrous.

What the frontier men do not know — what no caste is built to question — is that their purpose has an expiration date. Each functional caste was designed without the ability to reproduce. Once the frontier is claimed, the settlers are not retired. They simply end. Leonad does not need enforcers or compliance drugs. You cannot grieve a future you were built not to want.

On Proxima b, a new tension emerges: the habitable ring is only two to four thousand kilometers wide. The frontier has an edge. And the drive does not stop when the land runs out. What becomes of purpose-built expansionists when there is nothing left to expand into? Some turn toward the permanent dark of the far side, chasing the compulsion into territory that will kill them. Others begin to feel something they were engineered never to feel — the suspicion that the leash and the longing are the same thing.

Named for Lynn Margulis, the biologist who proved in 1967 that the mitochondria inside every living cell were once free organisms — separate beings that merged with our ancestors and became inseparable — Margulis Corporation carried the thesis of endosymbiosis to its conclusion. If the most fundamental partnership in biology began as two things becoming one, then the next step is not better humans. It is humans plus something else.

Margulis engineers are not augmented. They are not cybernetic. They carry a second organelle.

Self-replicating electronic structures, integrated at the cellular level, attach to host cells during reproduction in the same way mitochondria do. Specialized blueprints govern different tissue types: nerve fibers carry one variant, parasympathetic regulators another, and a cluster of neural-web interfaces develops alongside the brain itself. By the time a Margulis child draws their first breath, every cell in their body has always contained both components. The electronic partner is inherited, not installed. Removing it is as coherent as removing your mitochondria. You would not become unaugmented. You would become dead.

The paired — called syms — communicate through the heart’s electromagnetic field, the strongest EM signature the human body produces. The electronic organelles in cardiac tissue modulate the heartbeat into a carrier wave. The receiving end, woven into the other person’s nervous system, does not decode language. It decodes state. Proximity determines depth: nearby syms share awareness the way a flock of starlings shares direction — not because one gives orders, but because the group is one system. A squad of sym pilots in formation does not use comms. They coordinate the way a murmuration turns. You cannot jam what is not a signal.

To outsiders, a sym settlement is profoundly alien. People who finish each other’s movements, not sentences. Groups that go silent and then act in unison. Walking into a sym district as an unpaired human feels like being the only deaf person in a room full of people communicating in a frequency you cannot perceive. Not hostile. Just elsewhere.

The sovereignty question haunts every interaction between Margulis and the other factions. If the electronic component has been woven into the nervous system since before the nervous system existed — if the neural cluster developed alongside the prefrontal cortex — then what does “in control” even mean? The syms cannot answer the question because they cannot conceive of the unpaired state. And their inability to be troubled by this reads as proof of the problem to everyone watching from outside.

The Church did not board the ship. It was born on it.

A corporation funded the voyage. But somewhere in the early years of staring into nothing — the stars unmoving, Earth’s signal arriving later each cycle, the quarterly reports and org charts hollowing into absurdity — the corporate identity collapsed and a prophet filled the vacuum. The sermon wrote itself: We were chosen. We left the dying world. The void is our trial. The new world is our covenant. By the time the ship reached Proxima b, the corporation existed on paper. The real power structure was the church.

The religion is the Exodus archetype — the oldest story displaced people have ever told, independently, across every culture that has ever migrated: We were there. We crossed. The crossing changed us. We are not what we were. The Australian Aboriginal songlines, the Israelites in the Sinai, the Polynesian wayfinders — forty years, forty-five years, the numbers barely matter. The story is always the same because it is the truest thing a displaced people can say about their experience.

And the corruption is already inside it, like a seed. If the crossing is sacred, then those who crossed are sacred. And if we are sacred, those who did not cross are not. Those who crossed differently are not. Those who were already at the destination are not.

The mechanism is not indoctrination. It is resonance. Someone stands up and says the thing ten thousand people are already feeling, and the relief is so total that the body responds before the mind can evaluate. Pentecostal. Hands in the air. Weeping. A room full of people who finally have permission to feel what the void has been doing to them. And then that happens again the next week. And the next. For forty-five years. By arrival, they are not a group of people who share beliefs. They are a group who have been having the same ecstatic experience together for half a century. That is deeper than ideology. That is almost biological.

The Church’s founding carries a mass grave. Food supplies ran short. The ecstasy — genuine, real, as honest as a heartbeat — became the instrument by which a quarter of the ship’s population was identified as unfaithful and composted. The prophet lineage descends from Parris — named for Samuel Parris, the Salem minister who lit the match of the witch trials and used the fervor to destroy his enemies under cover of divine mandate. This Parris saw the energy building and understood it was a weapon. “The void demands sacrifice so the birth can proceed.” The theology wrote itself after the blood, to make sense of what hunger demanded.

The dead were composted. The compost fed insect colonies — mealworms, black soldier fly larvae, cricket farms. The insects became protein. The chain is unbroken and everyone knows it. After forty-five years, it is not horrifying. It is holy. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust — the most famous words spoken at funerals — became literal liturgy. Not metaphor. Biological fact elevated to sacrament.

On Proxima b, where new biological material exists for the first time in generations, the Church is paradoxically the most ecologically integrated faction. They understand closed-loop systems in their bones. They still compost their dead. They still tend the insect colonies. Not because they must, but because the cycle is the religion now.

Named for the oldest form of Shiva — Vedic, pre-Hindu, from the Rigveda — Rudra is simultaneously the god of storms and destruction and the god of medicine and healing. The name means “the most severe howler” or “the most frightening one.” The scientists chose the oldest, most primal, least domesticated name they could find. Not the polished Hindu Shiva with the trident and the third eye, but the raw storm god that predates organized religion entirely. The form that existed before anyone built a temple to it.

The Rudra Collective did not organize as a corporation. They are a peer consortium — a coalition of universities, research institutions, and scientific bodies who scraped together funding because no single corporation saw enough profit in pure discovery to foot the bill. They came for the real reason: the once-in-a-species opportunity to study an alien star system from the ground. Tidally locked planet, habitable ring, permanent thermal differential, an entire dark hemisphere unexplored. This is the scientific frontier of all time. They came because it is there and they want to understand it.

They are not atheists. Atheism is the first sip of the glass. They have drained it. They are post-theist — they have passed through disbelief and come out into something that looks like reverence but refuses to stop asking questions. They quote the Bhagavad Gita. They see Shiva dancing in particle collisions. They understand why the Church’s ecstasy feels real, because it is real — the awe is genuine physics. But the Church stopped there. Felt the numinous and painted a beard on it. Called it God, called it the Void, called it chosenness, and stopped digging. The scientists find that lazy. Not wrong. Lazy. You touched the mystery and then you stopped asking why. That is a deeper cut than heresy. The Church can handle being called godless. They cannot handle being called incurious.

And then the Church burned their third research outpost. And Leonad’s lawyers arrived with patent claims backed by frontier men. And the Rudra Collective looked at the problem the way they look at every problem. What is the most efficient solution? The most efficient solution to “we are outnumbered ten to one” is to remove the human bottleneck from warfare entirely.

Pilotless mechs. Autonomous. The machines that fight without fear, without degradation, without fatigue or families to return to. Boston Dynamics made real and given teeth. The Collective did not build them with pride or cold detachment. They built them the way Oppenheimer built the bomb — eyes open, quoting scripture, understanding fully that the destroyer and the creator are the same dance.

The irony is that Rudra is the most genuinely spiritual faction on Proxima b. Leonad worships efficiency. The Church worships its own feelings. Margulis worships the merge. Rudra worships nothing — but they see everything. And they are honest about what they see, including the parts that are terrible.

Named for Smedley Butler — two-time Medal of Honor recipient, one of the most decorated Marines in American history, who came home and said: “I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business. War is a racket. It always has been.”

The Butler Union began as a military detachment. Earth’s governments watched four ships leave the solar system carrying genetic engineers, human-machine hybrids, autonomous weapons scientists, and a nascent theocracy — and did the prudent thing. They sent soldiers to watch. Career military, intelligence officers, and expendable personnel — prison releases, people who volunteered because a forty-five-year trip beat whatever they were running from. Their mandate was simple: observe, report, intervene if necessary.

And then the signal delay ate the chain of command.

Reports took nearly five years to reach Earth. Responses took five more. By year ten, orders were a fiction. By year twenty, a memory. By arrival, the detachment had military training, military discipline, military hardware — and no mission, no paycheck, and no one to report to. The empire stopped listening.

Somewhere in those years of drift, someone gave the Butler speech. They sent us here to watch their investments. They stopped paying. We are not their instruments anymore. And instead of rejecting the racket, they cut out the middleman. If war is a racket, the soldiers should be the racketeers.

The Butler Union is not a PMC. It is a labor union. Organized, collective, democratic in the way unions are democratic. Rates are set. Contracts are voted on. Profits are shared. Nobody gets sent into hell so someone at the top can build a mansion. Everyone who fights, eats. The historical parallel is not Blackwater. It is the golden age pirates — sailors who mutinied against inhuman conditions and built their own society with better rules. Elected captains, shared plunder, voted on destinations. The first democracies on the water.

On Proxima b, every faction needs them and every faction despises them. Leonad hires them for the work frontier men were not engineered for — espionage, sabotage, jobs requiring judgment. The Church hires them while publicly condemning them, because holy wars still need professionals. Rudra hires them as a human buffer, because even the scientists know that autonomous death machines responding to every provocation is an escalation problem. And the Butler Union takes the contracts, fulfills the terms, and answers to no one.

They are the most honest faction on Proxima b. No manifesto about human potential. No sacred cycle. No peer-reviewed justification. “You have a problem. We solve problems. Here’s the rate.” In a world full of people lying to themselves about why they do terrible things, the Union is the only faction that admits what it is.