09-30-2010, 10:20 PM | #31 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
The Island of Atlantis proper, as has been noted in the past, was located west and slightly north of what the ancients called the Pillars of Hercules, what we call the Straits of Gibraltar, and it was much longer north-south than east-west, and the island was a volcanic quirk owing its existence in part to freaky natural conditions in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and in part to intervention by the Eldren in an earlier time. The entire island was created by and marked by the activity of volcanoes and related geological activity. Like Iceland to the north, Atlantis lay squarely across the line of sea-floor spreading where the North American and Eurasian plates emerge from the depths, and like Iceland that alone would be enough to maintain heavy volcanic activity there. However, Atlantis was more complex that that, and it occupied, more-or-less, a ‘plume site’. Magma from very deep within the Earth reached near-surface environs under Atlantis, there were magma chambers under the Isle to surpass anything under Yellowstone or Long Valley or Toba. The precise nature of this volcanic complex was unlike anything else on the planet. In some ways, it was akin to the oceanic volcanism that had produced Iceland, the Northern Isle as they called, along the same sea-floor spreading rift as Atlantis itself. In others way, it was more akin to ‘continental’ volcanic activity. We will examine the question of why Atlantis was so odd later. This immense supervolcanic system had been mostly quiescent in the millennia since Humans arrived. Secondary volcanic activity was common, however, there were many volcanoes in the central mountain spine that mostly bisected Atlantis north-south, some of them very large. Closer to the coasts, the slopes were gentler and level in places, though high cliffs faced the sea along much of the coast of Atlantis. The great plain in which the capitol city of Atlantis, both island and global empire, was located, was itself a huge volcanic caldera. The famous hill at the center of the rings of water and land that so distinctively marked the capitol city was a secondary volcanic cone of the huge caldera that made up the great plain. Even the famous warm spring that Plato would later mention had a volcanic basis, water circulated down to hot rock underneath the caldera, and came back up heated in a steady flow, lacking sufficient pressure to create a geyser. It was the weird nature of the volcanic activity under Atlantis, and the weird history that lay behind it, that made Atlantis special in a very unusual way for an Earth-like world: orichalcum was to be found near and at the planetary surface in Atlantis. While most planets have a certain amount of the super-rare meta-metal, it has a tendency to end up in the geological depths, most of Earth's native supply of orichalcum is to be found in the 'outer core' of liquid rock and metal, below the mantle, and for practical purposes beyond reach. In Atlantis, though, circumstances had brought a small amount of orichalcum up toward the surface in the plume, and it had concentrated in the great magma chambers under the Island. Periodically, eruptions carried modest amounts to the surface, where it became part of the surface rocks much like the copper it superficially so resembled. Atlantis' geological history had in fact gifted the Great Isle with significant deposits of several useful metals, the Atlanteans were more blessed in that area than they had any reasonable right to expect. As their psionic skills and native power developed over time, they found themselves able to find and extract and process this metal with an ease and effectiveness out of all proportion to their relatively low tech level.. As time passed, this ability continued to improve, though eventually the appetite for metal forced them to mine beyond the shores of the Island itself, to fuel both the Island's demand and the colonial demand. The metal miners were organized into various guilds and subguilds and they were not without influence in Atlantean society, especially the iron miners, once Atlantis advanced to the point of making effective use of iron. Atlantis was gifted with a certain amount of viable iron ore amid its volcanic rock, especially in the southern reaches of the central mountain spine. The orichalcum miners, though, were organized in a Guild of their own, and the political, social, and economic power they represented dwarfed the influence of all the other mining groups combined. Indeed, in the culminating years of the Antediluvian Age, the Orichalcum Guild was arguably second only to the central government in its power and influence, and much of the later's power was based upon the support of the former. No other single group in Atlantis was able to demand anything close to the deference and respect that the Orichalcum Guild could demand at will from the government, the merchants, or even the military. Ironically, this power derived in much from the more primitive mining techniques used to find and extract the precious orichalcum. MORE LATER. |
10-03-2010, 07:55 PM | #32 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
All other metals could be mined by the Atlanteans using psionic abilities to make the task easier and more efficient and more effective and (not least) safer. Espers with proper training and sufficient power could lead mining operations directly to large, otherwise hard-to-find ore deposits. Telepaths could make coordinating the effort easy and reduce the danger of the matter. Psychokinesis and its subsidiary abilities could assist in mining the ore, removing the ore, and processing the ore. ESPers trained in Danger Sense and more subtle skills reduced the dangers inherent in underground work, it was a rare thing for Atlantean miners to be caught by gas pockets or sudden floods. Mines that did flood could use telekinetic gestalts to pump water out, in shifts, producing much the same effect a later age would use steam engines and electricity to achieve. The mining efforts were self- reinforcing, in that the plentiful metal they produced enabled Atlantean smiths and artificers to produce high-quality mining tools which in turn made the effort easier and more efficient. In all this, orichalcum was indispensably useful, for its use in tools that could amplify, modify, or otherwise alter psionic activity, it underlay much Atlantean technology. Ironically, though, these techniques simply could not be used to mine the precious orichalcum itself. Why? Because of the very properties that made the meta-metal so useful. ESP was untrustworthy in searching for orichalcum, the psi-skills that made it useful to seek deposits of specific metals simply did not work when applied to orichalcum. A metal-trained esper who could sense a mass of lead or silver or iron-bearing ore from miles away might be blissfully unaware of orichalcum ore a few meters away. Likewise, ESP in general was unreliable in the presence of large amounts of unprocessed orichalcum ore, it became shaky, too sensitive or not sensitive enough, sometimes it became simply useless. Danger sense and other psi-based warning skills might become so hypersensitized as to be crippling, or so blind that they would miss imminent, deadly dangers. Telepathy was likewise untrustworthy in the presence of large amounts of raw orichalcum ore, sometimes it was so amplified that a telesent thought might miss the man next to you that it was directed at, only to make contact with someone ten miles away, or it might be so scrambled that a powerful psion would be unable to send a message across the room. Sometimes telepathy might ramp up to the point that the ordinary jumble of daily thoughts in others might become cacophonous, or one's own thoughts might impinge on others unwillingly. Thus the use of telepathy to communicate, so useful for other mining work, was utterly unworkable in the orichalcum mines. The 'active' applications of psi were worse, the use of powers such as psychokinesis or teleportation in the orichalcum mines had any number of ways to go spectacularly wrong, a highly-skilled pyrokinetic psion might spontaneously combust if he tried to use that ability in the mines, or a psychokinetic back-surge might rip the limbs off a psion trying to use PK to mine orichalcum ore, or worse. Some attempts to use PK in the orichalcum mines produced such exaggerated reactions that entire mines collapsed. [1] So, orichalcum was mined 'conventionally', up until the time period we are discussing. Men mined orichalcum with picks and shovels, chisels and buckets and rail-carts (plentiful high-quality ordinary metal did help the effort), with fire and water. Men tunneled into the Earth, men crawled through passages barely large enough to pass a single person on his belly, men carried ore, men cut and hammered and dug and men were wounded, men were maimed, and men were killed, in horrible ways and with dreary regularity. [2] The work was brutally hard, dangerous, and at once boring and terrifying. It required skill, and great physical strength and endurance, and it was work done to provide an absolutely and totally indispensable resource to a society hungry for more of it than could ever be supplied. Over the centuries, the Orichalcum Guild developed as a separate organization from the other mining guilds, with its own rules, its own recruitment, in many ways it was almost autonomous of outside authority as long as the precious metal was supplied. Slave labor was never used in the orichalcum mines, even after it was widely used in other areas, partly out of pride and partly because the Guild was quite aware of how valuable their work was. The orichalcum mines were the preserve of the Guild, and the Guild was jealous of their monopoly. Many families were part of the Guild, orichalcum mining became a proud family vocation, sometimes running for many, many generations. Because of the importance of the metal, and the monopoly the Guild held over supplying it, even the lowliest members of the Guild held considerable prestige in Atlantean society. A mere apprentice orichalcum miner, in his teens or early 20s, considered a lowly trainee within the Guild, were the social equivalent of successful merchant or low-ranking military officer. The Guild equivalent of a ‘journeyman’ or experienced miner was comparable in terms of social status to medium aristocracy, and the Senior Guild- master (that would be the closest English equivalent of the Guild's highest title) was almost on the level of the Circle of Ten or the heads of the armed forced in terms of prestige. The Guild could maintain this status and influence in part because of the vital importance of their work, in part because so few people were eager to engage in such dangerous and dreary hard word when alternative existed, and in part because the Guild leadership had historically been smart and farsighted enough to play their cards right. The Guild disciplined its own membership, knowing how much damage one 'bad apple' could to, and knowing the value of the high unofficial status. The Guild also took care of their own, a miner crippled in the work knew he could count on the Guild to take care of him, a miner knew that if he was killed his family would be taken care of by the Guild. In exchange, the Guild demanded loyalty from its membership, and got it. MORE LATER. [1] One such incident was so spectacular that it became a legend in Atlantis, and in time, it would provide a clue that would lead to a technological revolution in the Atlantean Age. But that came later. [2] In this case, gender segregation was nearly absolute, essentially all the Orichalcum Guild members who actually engaged in mining were males. |
10-03-2010, 09:00 PM | #33 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
Orichalcum mining tended to be shaft-based, rather than open-pit. Due to the fact that the orichalcum miners could not use psionic techniques as readily as other sorts of miners, they were some of the most inventive people in Atlantis in creating inventions and techniques for avoiding gas, draining water, shoring up tunnels, and all the other necessities of underground work. The first true steam engine ever built in Atlantis was the invention of an orichalcum miner, who used it to drain water from the deepest (and most productive) of the Island's orichalcum mines. [1] This steam engine was huge, clumsy, and inefficient, but it worked, providing a service for the orichalcum miners that psionic power provided for other miners. Once it was seen to work, the Guild adapted it to other mines as well, and even began to experiment with using steam power to do other tasks in the mines. It was a clumsy, uncertain process, but it was happening. The Guild had several weapons at their disposal to enforce their demands. They had a monopoly control over the most valuable substance in the Antediluvian Age, meaning they could, within limits, set their own prices. Demand for their product was effectively insatiable, no other supplier could even attempt to fill the demand, and the Guild could thus reduce production, or even 'go on strike' and by doing so send the entire economy of the Atlantean Age into a tailspin at will. The tunnel-and-shaft mines of the Guild had another advantage: they made superbly effective fortresses, for certain purposes. Most of the usefully rich orichalcum ore in Atlantis was concentrated in a few places, and the mines were worked for centuries on end, getting deeper and extending outward through the mountainous territory in which the ore bodies were located. Some of the tunnel networks literally extended laterally for miles, and might occupy ten levels or more of depth, more on occasion. The only complete maps were in the possession of the Guild, and well hidden and kept under constant armed guard. On those rare occasions when relations between the state and the Guild were bad enough that force was employed, the Atlantean Army was reluctant to send soldiers into the tunnels after hiding 'strikers', because the miners knew the tunnels, often had them booby-trapped or otherwise rigged for defense, and there were always secret exits, making a siege a tricky proposition. Furthermore, the psionic abilities the Atlantean soldiery were trained to use were utterly unreliable in the mines, while the Guild members know how to operate without psi, from long experience. Further, even if they could seal up the mines, and starve the miners or go down and manage to kill them, the state would be left with orichalcum mines and nobody who really knew how to operate them. [2] Thus a balance existed, the Guild knew that it was not in their interest to push their various advantages too far, while the rulers of the state knew that it was in their interest to let the Guild have its way in their own demesne. The price of the precious ‘metal’ was set in part by demand (which was unceasing) and in part by political negotiation. The largest orichalcum ore bodies existed in the southern reaches of the central mountain spine, which was also the region of the highest peaks (with a single northern exception) and the least accessible reaches. Secondary ore bodies existed up and down the central spine, and tiny masses were to be found here and there all over Atlantis, but the southern mines were the richest, oldest, and even by this point in time, still the most economical to exploit. The ore was thinning, but the skill and techniques available to the Guild were getting better, which more than made of for this, in the immediate term. MORE LATER. [1] In a later age, mining work would also be one of the first uses steam power was put to when it was redeveloped. [2] Imagine a 'dungeon crawl', except that instead of improbably symmetrical gelatin and the like, the dungeon inhabitants are grimly determined human beings, well-armed and ruthless, with home-team advantage and at least some tactical competence. Oh, by the way, no magic power or item works right or reliably in the dungeon. Have fun. |
10-03-2010, 09:38 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
Now let's zoom out again, and take a look at the world as a whole in the general neighborhood of the year 5000 BC. All over the world, civilizations were emerging from the background of the ‘Stone Age’. Atlantis was by far the largest and most powerful and technologically (both paraphysical and conventional) advanced such society, but it was by no means the only such society. In terms of their ‘conventional’ technology, the Atlanteans of this time were comparable to the West around the year 1450 A.D. In some ways they were behind this mark, in a few ways ahead, but the comparison was loosely valid. [1] The comparison is of limited utility, however, because of the extensive and powerful psionic power available to the Atlanteans, and their skill in utilizing this power. The Atlanteans were able, by the use of psychic ability, to duplicate many feats that the post-Cataclysmic world would achieve until well into the Twentieth Century A.D. Furthermore, they had developed an emerging technology based on psychic phenomena and the properties of orichalcum that further enabled their abilities. Naturally, the heaviest areas of Atlantean activity were along the Atlantic coasts, areas such as the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea were heavily sailed, the islands that a later age would call the Antilles, the Bahamas, and Bermuda were all settled by Atlanteans, and those islands were larger in that time than they would be later, since the great ice caps were still shrinking as the interglacial period advanced, sea levels were still rising and many places that are underwater today were still exposed then. Likewise, Atlantean settlements now dotted the coasts around that which would someday be called the Gulf of Mexico, and ran up and down the eastern seaboard of North America and all across what would eventually be the British Isles, parts of what would someday be the North Sea (not yet inundated), and swaths of western Africa. The great secondary 'empire within an empire' of Athenia occupied much of the eastern part of the Mediterranean and northern Africa, and was expanding up past what would eventually be the Bosporus and south along the lush Nile Valley. Much of what would one day be the Sahara Desert was more clement in those times, and agriculture was practiced in places that in a later time would be sand-choked waste. The greater river valleys of the Congo, the Mississippi, the Amazon, and the Hudson extended long 'fingers' of Atlantean settlement far inland. Those rivers did not necessarily always follow exactly the same paths that they do now (rivers change course locally on a fairly short historical scale), but they were close. Large Atlantean settlements rose where major rivers met inland, connecting the deep continental interiors to the ocean. Further away from the Great Isle, there were significant settlements in the lands that would one day be known as Australia and the Indian subcontinent, especially the later. The rich lands of India were extensively settled by the more adventurous breed of Atlantean, though the Atlantean settlements shared the land, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not, with a native culture of some sophistication. [2] Everywhere the Atlanteans went, or in most places anyway, they found other Humans. The Atlanteans were by far the most powerful and advanced culture on Earth, but hardly the only one. Technologically, the rest of the world had been far behind, but inevitably where the Atlantean culture came into contact with more primitive ones, along with the pain and conflict such contacts always bring, technological and sociological knowledge was transmitted. By the year 5000 BC, writing, the use of metals, and other techniques deriving from Atlantis were spreading around the planet, and more 'primitive' cultures were adapting as best they could to the spreading presence of Atlantean society, and absorbing knowledge from them, creating hybrid societies that combined native idea and traditions with Atlantean influences in various ratios. Not every culture adopted the Atlantean language, in fact most of them retained their own native tongues, but Atlantean, or rather an extensively bastardized version of the formal language of Atlantis, became a world- wide language of trade and politics. A man hailing from the native cultures of North America and a man from Australia or Africa might not speak each other's native languages, these tongues might not even be recognizably akin, but in those days it was likely that both understood and spoke trade-Atlantean in some form. The Atlantean Empire per se was the Earth's strongest power by far, but it did not rule the entire planet, and wars often raged between other cultures, and sometimes between Atlanteans and natives, though in the later case the outcome was generally determined by how badly the Atlanteans wanted to win and how much they were prepared to spend of blood and treasure to do so. Exploration continued, the coasts of the oceans were long since mapped with fair precision by 5000 BC, but there were still blank spots on the maps and globes of the Atlanteans in the continental interiors, but these blank areas were now shrinking fast year by year. Explorers coming up from those rivers we now call the Ohio and Mississippi met explorers coming down from the rivers we call the Saint Lawrence and the Hudson, explorers met other explorers in interior Africa and the open deserts of Australia and the jungles of South America. This later was a special case, though the Atlanteans explored up the Amazon and its vast web of tributaries, they were slow to penetrate most of the vast tropical forests around the river, there were easier pickings to be had elsewhere. The only land mass that the Atlanteans did little or nothing with in this time was that which we call Antarctica. Atlanteans had managed to reach the coasts of the icebound southern land before the death of the Eldest, but they did little with their access, their technology was not really equal to the challenge of matching Antarctica, their psi powers made it possible to survive there (in southern summer, anyway), but not to endure through a long Antarctic night or to make any sort of practical use of the icebound land. Still, the world was being explored, and settled, and civilized. MORE LATER. [1] In GURPS 3e terms, the Atlanteans were at low TL4 in 5000 B.C. [2] To reiterate, the indigenous culture of the Indian subcontinent was most definitely not like what would rise there after the Cataclysm. Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 10-03-2010 at 09:47 PM. |
10-03-2010, 10:38 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
Now that we have taken a look at the state of things in Atlantis and the world at the appropriate time, we can turn our attention to a more specific matter of some importance, equipped now to at least partly understand the background and the implications. We have seen how the political and social structure recongealed in Atlantis after the civil war that followed the death of the Eldest. We have seen how the Circle of Ten emerged as the new ruling power, and we have seen how the Atlanteans regained at least a semblance of the peace and social cohesion that they had enjoyed for millennia under the rule of the Eldest. The new order was not the old, however. It was functional, but the Atlantean society that came together after the first great civil war was different, less trusting, less cohesive, with more tensions and strains inherent to the new structure. Factions were everywhere, some along the lines of what moderns might call ‘political parties’, some based on various cultural or religious divisions. Clans vied with clans, guilds with guilds, and the removal of the Eldest meant that aspirations to the highest levels of power were now potentially viable for various contenders. One of those factions was born as the melding of a political pressure group, that sought to obtain greater influence on the Circle of Ten, as the new fully human rulers of Atlantis came to be known, and another group that was driven by a notion of increasing psionic power in new ways. This combination was less odd in that age and place than it would seem today, because of the close and entirely open and accepted connection between psychic ability and political and social power. Now, by this point just about everyone in Atlantis had a level of psionic power that later ages would call immense. Those who sat in the high levels of the Highest Court and the Circle of Ten were usually far stronger and more skilled than average at psionics, though that alone was not sufficient to achieve such power in a psi-saturated culture such as Atlantis. So ordinary use of high-power psi, which could make a psion a king in another culture, was of limited political utility there. That level of power was necessary simply to gain the initial admittance to the game. It was common knowledge in Atlantis that a psi-gestalt could greatly increase power for a given purpose, but what of that? Gestalts were common in Atlantis, it was a rare ten year old who had never been part of one. Further, the Atlanteans could sense the presence and operation of a psi-gestalt as casually, and naturally, as a Twenty-first Century Westerner would notice the sound of a car engine and look up to avoid being run down. The Atlanteans also knew well that certain natural and synthetic substances, of various origins and natures, could be used to increase psychic power temporarily, or produce other effects psionically useful. Again, what of that? Most of the substances were dangerous, some were illegal, and almost all were regarded as socially disreputable. The group in question hit on a new idea: why not try to create a new kind of gestalt, one that could do things ordinary gestalts could not? This effort came to involve deep study of telepathic techniques, the first systematic investigation of the effects of the natural psi-drugs, and, after a time, a growing ruthlessness about their testing. Their successes were few and far between, at first. They scarcely trusted each other, their motivations were often in conflict, and they had to operate more or less in secret, if whatever developments they managed were to be useful. But over a period of twenty years or so, by dint of testing various drugs on test subjects whose later disappearance could be explained away, and by deep study of telepathy, they did learn new psi skills, and new ways to apply them. A little at a time, the adepts of this half-study group/half conspiracy began to rise up through the ranks of the Atlantean government, in tandem with their secret psychic researches. They also began to accumulate wealth, and bit by bit the group grew, and its purposes subtly changed with new membership. One of the discoveries they made was that a higher 'level' of full telepathic communion was possible, one that led the way, in turn, to still more complex new skills. It was nearly fifty years after this group began its work that a discovery, in the jungles of South America, of a new psi-active plant derivative that could boost power without lethal or long- term side-effects (apparently) gave them the tool they needed to put themselves over the top. A selected member of their group was 'adopted' by a mind-influenced member of the Circle of Ten, not as an heir (that would have been too risky) but as a junior member of the clan, and not long after that the adoptive parent meant with a sudden and apparently accidental end. Though the adopted member of the conspiracy was not actively a member of the Circle, his adopted brother was now on the Circle, and secretly under the control of the adoptive sibling and the other members of the conspiracy. With effective control of a seat in the highest council, this secret society had access to greater funds, greater security, and greater possibilities. They also had advice from a source which most of the conspiracy knew little or nothing of, singularly useful, if cryptic, advice. Drawing on their own efforts, and the advice of their mysterious source, they managed, about a century after the conspiracy was founded, to finally achieve a 'new type' of gestalt. Unfortunately for them, it was not the new kind of gestalt they wanted. There were two dozen members of the secret society's innermost circle of initiation in the state of full communion when the breakthrough occurred. They were all hyped on several different psionically active substances from various sources. Some of those substances were hallucinogenic, psychoactive, physically and/or psychologically addictive, and/or had myriad other effects as well as being psionically influential. The synergistic results of these combinations would have been impossible for even a late 21st century medical expert to predict. Probably, normal humans would have been killed or brain- damaged by such a witch's brew. But these were psions, exceptionally capable even by Atlantean standards, and skilled in biocontrol and healing and other skills that could work to counteract the bad effects, or at least modify them. They had been using their various concoctions and combinations of ingested, inhaled, and injected substances long enough that their tissues were more-or-less ‘saturated’. They were in full communion pretty much all the time. Their minds had already begun to 'learn' to work in parallel, and they shared information mentally in a way vaguely analogous to a modern database system. But all that was simply the prelude to what happened when they finally achieved the 'breakthrough' their group had sought for over a century. It was on a dark and dreary night in what a later age would call November that they made this breakthough, while deep in a state of communion and experimenting with a new mental technique. When it happened, it happened suddenly, a flash of connection, a fusion, and a wrenching transformation of mentality. The servants and lesser acolytes of the group heard screams from the sealed meditation chamber, but when they broke in, all they found were their leaders unconscious but apparently unhurt, and within a few hours all twenty-four had regained consciousness, and seemed none the worse save for bruises from hitting the floor when they passed out. To all appearances, it had merely been an experiment gone wrong, like many others they had performed over the years. In fact, that night, in that screaming moment, the clock began to count down the decades, years, days, and seconds to the destruction of Atlantis and the end of the Antediluvian Age. MORE LATER. |
10-04-2010, 08:24 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
So, what exactly had happened in that strange, portentous, eerie moment? Consider that, the 24 leaders of the cult/party were all high-level psions, with both high levels of raw power and also and tremendous levels of skill in the use of those powers. They had been striving to create a new type of gestalt fusion, one which could, wielded in secret, grant them greater personal and political power in the psionics-based power structures of the Atlantean state. That night, in that strange, dark moment, everything came together. Twenty- four people, their minds already habituated to being in full communion pretty much 24/7, for weeks or months at a time. Twenty-four people, seven women and 17 men, ranging in age from 31 to 122, all of them using various psionics-enhancing or modifying drugs, none of them using the same exact mixture of drugs, or the same precise dosages. Twenty-four people, all of them highly intelligent, highly driven, with an appetite for power and wealth and attention (and the various concomitant perks that go with those). Twenty-four people, experimenting with techniques they barely comprehended and working in secret, without counsel or cautionary voices, ruthless with others and, in their own way, ruthless even with themselves. When the event happened, the inner circle of the conspiracy were meeting in a sealed chamber, within the 'headquarters' of their secretive society, an aristocratic 'private club' to all apparent outside appearances. They met in a sealed chamber, with walls of stone, inlaid with strips and sheets of orichalcum, a material with a variety of psionic properties. The very air of the chamber was a haze, as the chamber had no access to natural light, and was lit from within by fireplaces on each wall, and by braziers in which a variety of psi-actives and inhaled hallucinogens were heated into vapor. In that environment, something occurred. The 24 minds, in a split- second of unthinkably complex phenomena, operating in perfect parallel, developed a dual-state consciousness. [1] Each person now manifested, entirely unwillingly and without conscious awareness, a form of ‘split personality’ a second awareness occupying the same brain and central nervous system as the natural one. One compartment in each mind was the original intellect and persona of that person. The other compartment was something else, part of something new. A new intellect was 'born' in that moment, a collective consciousness made up of the 24 new compartments formed in the brains of the 24 psions. A collective consciousness, slightly like some massively parallel program running on 24 processors, with a fantastically complex and intricate mesh of mental interconnections linking the compartments into a single whole. The comparison is imperfect, of course, the new awareness was not simply software, the human brain is not a computer, but the metaphor does shed some light. There was more to it than just that, but the details of this complex and strange new entity can be examined later. For now, we are concerned primarily with the emergence of the new intelligence. It should not have happened. The odds of such a sapient gestalt forming, and stabilizing itself, were probably 100,000 to 1 against. But like an impactor collision or the coin landing on its side and standing, the most improbable events occasionally do occur. For the Atlantean civilization, it was a dark miracle. The newborn intellect was a psionic entity itself, of course. Indeed, it 'lived' and existed by virtue of psionics. It was formed out of human mentalities, but in itself it was a very alien sort of mind. It was neither exactly male nor female, though both formed part of its matrix. It had no kin, no peers, nothing to give it the same view of the world that a normal individual human would possess. It was very intelligent, but lacked any sort of human emotional structure. Naturally, at first, this new being, which we shall call the Unity, was very confused, very unsure of itself, barely comprehending the fact of its own existence. But it had the memories of 24 intelligent, very experienced, and educated Atlantean aristocrats to draw upon. It soon began to gain some understanding of what it was, where it was, and what sort of world it existed within. Did the 24 conspirators themselves know what had happened? Not exactly, not consciously. When they regained awareness after the agonizing 'birth trauma' of their unintended alien offspring, they could barely remember the last several minutes. They noticed that they were weak and dizzy for some hours, and they noticed that the orichalcum inlays of the walls had fractured and cracked. They did not know it, but the metal had resonated to the psionic energies at work in the birth of the Unity, and the vibrations had cracked the metal. One thing they did soon notice was that they had lost their 24/7 full communion, and they seemed unable to regain it. They attributed it to their 'failed' experiment, and assumed that they would be able to regain it later. In fact, of course, the communion remained, transformed beyond recognition, but no longer available to the individual personas, being absorbed entirely by the Unity. They could still telesend and telereceive with each other and others, but only at ordinary levels, and all 24 had lost (or so they thought) the ability to take part in psionic gestalts. They continued their lives, of course. All were high ranking aristocrats or scholars or merchants or soldiers, and though they seemed to have lost a bit of their psionic power, they were still stronger than the vast majority of Atlanteans, and still had their status and position, since even in Atlantis, there was more to rank than just psi power alone. Little appeared to have changed for a few years. Another of the original 24 rose to a position intimately close to a member of the Circle of Ten. The highest ranking soldier of the conspiracy became, in time, due to his genuine military skill and his political connections, a lieutenant of the Lord of the Atlantean Army. Others similarly rose in their respective hierarchies. The Unity did little at first, merely watching and learning, and developing its own unique and rather alien personality. As it did, it came to realize certain things about itself. For one thing, it knew it was not a human being. Though humans made up its components, or beings who had once been human, it was not a human. It was also potentially immortal. However, to the dismay of the Unity, it soon realized that it was by no means certain that this immortal potential would in fact be realized. In truth, as the Unity realized when it was perhaps two years old, it was facing a time limit that threatened its very existence. The Unity was made up of 24 compartmentalized mental 'cells', each of which was individually quite mortal. As they would die, one by one, the level of complexity of the combined matrix would fall, and when it fell below a certain critical point, there would be insufficient combined 'processing power and bandwidth' to sustain the existence of the Unity. It would destabilize and effectively just fade away. The Unity was not sure just where the critical point was, but it could sense that it could not lose many of its components and continue to exist, the limit was somewhere close to the full 24. The Unity was born out of the combination of 24 highly self-centered and driven minds, and like had begot like. It was likewise driven, likewise self-centered, and it had no more desire to cease existing than any sapient being would. Born out of the fusion of 24 ruthless personas, it shared that ruthlessness, raised the more from its alienness and lack of empathy with individual humans and their individual concerns. But in the face of the age and death of its component members, what could the Unity do? What recourse did the newborn entity have against the tide of entropy? Was there anything the Unity could do to save itself? MORE LATER. [1] In GURPS 3e terms, they developed Compartmentalized Mind, but it was not an Advantage, and each person had only two ‘compartments’. |
10-10-2010, 07:39 PM | #37 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
The Unity quickly realized that if it was to survive, it had to somehow add more members to its collective existence. The goal was simple, it's implementation promised to be extremely complex. Just how complex, how extraordinarily difficult, it would prove in practice the Unity did not immediately realize when it began its work. The Unity did not directly control its components, not at this time. Instead, preferring to remain safely hidden in the 'background', it subtly influenced them. One of its members might feel a sudden surge of curiosity about some odd point, and go to the open libraries or the secret libraries of their 'political cult' to find the answer. Of course, the curiosity was the Unity at work, getting information for its own purposes. This subtle approach was slower, and more frustrating, but far safer from the Unity's point of view. Its first plan, once it realized that it had to increase its size to survive, was to simply incorporate more people into its collective matrix. To do this, it had to work out the process by which it itself had come into existence. This rapidly proved to be a major undertaking, and the more the Unity studied the matter, the more dismayed it became. As it studied the freak event that led to its 'birth', the Unity began to realize just how improbable it had really been. The number of factors involved that the Unity was trying to analyze started in the dozens, rose to hundreds, and then to thousands, and the Unity had no direct observations to work from. After three years of intense study and thought, the Unity came to the reluctant conclusion that it would take centuries to sort through all the factors and work out a way to incorporate new people into its existing matrix. The Unity wasn't even sure it could do such a thing unless it could somehow persuade them to first attune their minds over a period to its own pattern, just as its twenty-four initial ‘members’ had unwittingly done. How to persuade any significant number of people to do such a thing while remaining secret was a non-trivial problem. The Unity's urgency was reinforced when the inevitable happened. One of its ‘members’ was killed. Ironically, the death was not of one of its several aged members, but of its youngest member, a by-then 37-year-old aristocrat and scholar. His death was quite mundane: he got himself stabbed to death at the hands of the jealous husband of one of his more attractive female students. This wasn't terribly surprising, the scholar in question had dallied with more than a few attractive married female students, trading on his good looks, money, and social status. The odd thing, perhaps, was that it took that long for somebody to object violently. To the Unity, it was a shock: it had been prepared for death of old age, disease, or even warfare, but it hadn't really mastered enough of the subtleties of human society to realize how dangerous routine everyday matters, especially those involving emotions and hormones, could potentially be. Its risk level was higher than it had known, and further, it had lost a valuable set of knowledge and a very strong psion from its 'membership'. The Unity was terrified by the implications of this event. Feeling time pressing in on it, it began to scour its mind and the available libraries for answers, and finally, it found one: perhaps it could extend its ‘membership’ by the reproductive activities of its members. Here, it its mixed extreme relief and bitter disappointment, it encountered some success. The Unity felt a tremendous sense of relief, because the entity did indeed discover a way to add new 'components'. It was bitterly disappointed in the success, because the process was very slow. Very slow, and inconvenient. The Unity discovered that its members, still genetically human, could easily produce offspring. The male 'components', however, always fathered ordinary Atlanteans, not new Unity members. The females, though, offered an opportunity. Since they would have easy psionic 'access' to the coalescing awarenesses of their own unborn children, the Unity was able to gain such access as well, and through that connection it discovered that it could indeed 'imprint' itself onto their condensing mentalities, complete with the dual-chamber compartmentalized mind and the Unity connection. It took the Unity several attempts to get this right, and it was hamstrung by the fact that most of its 'components' were male. It had only seven females in its initial matrix, two of whom were past menopause, too far past for psychic biocontrol to be of any use in restoring fertility. Further, if the older ones had mysteriously become pregnant, it would have been a risky indication of the Unity's existence. So with only five women of childbearing age to work with, the Unity had to work with agonizing care and slowness. All five were soon pregnant, but it took the Unity five failed tries just to get the hang of the technique. The next round of pregnancies came a year or so later, long enough to be inconspicuous, (the women did not publicly associate with each other, so the simultaneous pregnancies were not otherwise notable), and this time it worked. The Unity got four new members born from the five pregnancies. [1] Once it knew that it could make this work, the Unity determined that it was time to get down to business and secure its existence. The older children of the five women met with mysterious accidents, diseases, or just vanished over the course of a couple of years. Meanwhile, a new round of pregnancies began as soon as the Unity could safely manage it. Bringing this about was not all that hard, even without exercising direct control. The Unity could subtly increase the sexual drives in its components, of either sex, and could use psionic biocontrol to optimize conditions for impregnation. The same psionic techniques of healing and biocontrol could minimize (but not eliminate) the negative physical effects of rapidly repeated successive pregnancies. With more practice, the Unity was able to achieve a 100% success rate in 'imprinting' itself on the immature and helpless minds of the new offspring. It was still agonizingly slow, but each new birth was a margin of safety, and as they grew toward maturity, the Unity also gained increments of power and knowledge. It got better and better at the details with practice. Three of the women had husbands who might have proven a little too curious about the repeated pregnancies of their wives, all three met with natural- seeming accidents. With the political and social connections of the aristocrats who made up the Unity, it was trivial to move around Atlantis and avoid revealing patterns being shown. The Unity hit on a breakthrough when it discovered how to use biocontrol to determine which sperm cells reached the ova, thus giving it the ability to determine the sex of the offspring. The number of female births suddenly rose dramatically after this discovery. Shortly thereafter, the Unity discovered how to stimulate the ovaries to produce two or three eggs per cycle. Multiple births became common for the female 'members' of the Unity. Naturally, the women themselves began, after a time, to realize just how strange their own behavior had become. None of them were quite sure why the idea of constant pregnancy suddenly seemed appealing, or why they would barely be over the effects of the last pregnancy before they'd find themselves thinking with their glands again, and a new pregnancy going. When they compared notes, the oddities jumped out, everything from their inexplicably heightened sexual drives to the sudden incidence of multiple births among the female members of the cabal's leadership. Inevitably, as time passed, the pattern became visible. The Unity had covered its tracks well, it was several years into its project before its 'components' finally realized just how seriously weird their behavior and overall lives had become. But when they did realize it, the Unity and its component personalities were on track toward conflict, since it could only be a matter of time before these intelligent and experienced individuals began to put the pieces together to see the shape of the puzzle. MORE LATER. [1] The fertile period was longer among Atlanteans of this time than it was among non-psychic peoples then, or among modern 21C humans, but still limited. Menopause generally began around age sixty-seventy in Atlantean woman of this time. |
10-10-2010, 07:51 PM | #38 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
Unfortunately for the leaders of the cabal, and the human race as a whole, by this point it was largely too late. The Unity had been in existence for 12 years, long enough to learn a great deal, master much of its own power, and slowly and steadily explore the neural pathways and voluntary and involuntary nervous systems of its hosts. When they began to probe into the reason for their own strange behaviors, they discovered that they Unity was able to apply 'persuasion' to cease and desist. Persuasion could include such things as bursts of agonizing pain or even ecstatic pleasure from stimulated brain centers, or induced nausea and sickness in the body by deliberately disordering basic processes. The individual personas of the remaining 11 original 'components' were too disciplined and well trained for the Unity to directly control, but it could certainly apply pressure of various sorts. Likewise, they could shield their own personal memories from the Unity, once they knew they needed to, though by then it was mostly too late, the entity had had plenty of time to search through their mental ‘files’. When it takes 100% of your will just to keep your body from being frozen into paralysis from within, or to keep your own memory private, you are at a disadvantage in a struggle. Further, to their abject horror, the eleven ‘originals’ now discovered that the offspring of their female members, having been part of the Unity from birth and having had their minds directly telepathically shaped by it during gestation and early childhood, were subject to direct, total, puppet-master control from the Unity. The threat of being forced to watch one's five year old offspring insert his/her hand into an open fire is quite a potent ‘dissuader’ to a parent. The Unity was utterly ruthless, and it did not care if it maimed or damaged an individual component if that served its larger goals. The children did, of course, have their own minds, but they never had a chance. They shared their bodies from before birth with an alien presence that was vastly more powerful and experienced than they were, making them effectively almost passengers in their own bodies whenever it suited the Unity. Their mothers, and the other leaders of the conspiracy, as ruthless and driven as they had all always been, had never come anywhere close to this level of hardness, and they were stymied in their efforts by the fact that they barely, even after all this, understood what they were up against. Little by little they pieced it all together, shielding their thoughts from their undesired 'other self' and communicating as often as not in written messages, while using their full will and talents to cut off the Unity from their eyes long enough to keep their secrets. The five female members of the conspiratorial leadership had the worst of it, forced to endure round after round of pregnancies, from fathers they did not select, knowing their children would be slaves to a monstrous nightmare they barely comprehended, and unable to find a way to do anything about any of it. The males had it somewhat easier, since they weren't as useful to the Unity (just then), but their lives were far from pleasant, since the Unity watched them 24 hours a day, and was prepared to exert its full powers to keep them from revealing anything to anyone. All in all, not the outcome they had hoped for when they had set out on a quest for greater personal political and economic and social power, twenty years before. Unfortunately for them and the rest of Atlantis, and indeed for the entire human race, the worst was yet to come. Naturally, the remaining original 23 ‘founding members’ of the Unity tried to tap into the resources of their private organizations, but again, they discovered that it was, in essence, too late. While they themselves had minds of such discipline and strength that the Unity could not directly control them, the other members of the organization had lesser intellects (indeed, that was why were were lower ranking members). In many cases, the Unity had firm telecontrol over them. In others, they had been so subtly influenced that it was impossible to say what was their own idea and what was the Unity's silent suggestions. Still others were free in action and thought, but the Unity could read their minds at will. Of course, the Unity also did the same thing with minds outside the secret society. It soon became apparent to the 23 that one of their biggest challenges was going to be to figure out who they could trust and who they could not, in or out of their secret society. Matters were made the worse by the fact that every single one of the original 23 was individually guilty of offenses against Atlantean law and custom themselves that would be sufficient to get them executed, quite apart from the Unity's activities. Indeed, many of their offenses predated the 'birth' of the Unity. With that many strikes against them, it perhaps should not be surprising that they made relatively little progress. Meanwhile, the five women who could become pregnant, did become pregnant, over and over. Even after they were aware of what was happening, the Unity could still apply tremendous pressures, including threatening the lives of their loved ones (including the children they had already had, some of them did love them) to ensure their continued full cooperation'. As noted above, once the Unity mastered the appropriate biocontrol technique, all the new Unity-offspring were female, to accelerate the process of adding new 'components'. While the Unity's most important project remained insuring its own survival by increasing the number of components in its matrix, it did have other interests, and those were growing. Two of the surviving original 23 were in a position to strongly influence the Circle of Ten, the ruling body of Atlantis, and one was close to the commander of Atlantis' Armies. By subtle psionic influence, backed by its overwhelming telepathic power and its endless, sleepless patience, the Unity gained strong influence on several other wealthy and connected members of the power structure. MORE LATER. |
10-10-2010, 08:08 PM | #39 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
The Unity saw the psionically talented and powerful humans of Atlantis as simultaneously a potential resource AND a potential threat. Had it been discovered during this period, it would have been trivially simple for a few hundred or more Atlanteans to form a gestalt and blast it out of existence, so secrecy was its primary imperative. Alternatively, since its original members were all criminals themselves, in their own ways, had it been discovered soon enough the Unity could have been destroyed by the execution of its adult members. Again, secrecy was paramount. As both a resource and a threat, Atlantean humanity was something the Unity wanted badly to control. The first step to doing that was to gain as much control as it could over the government of the Empire. Further, born as it was out of the fusion of 24 power-hungry intellects, the Unity itself was infused from its origin with a not insubstantial hunger for power for its own sake, a not entirely rational urge to dominate. Having obtained direct or indirect influence over several seats on the ruling body and the upper command structure of the military, the Unity was well on its way to achieving its goal of political control. There were quite a number of obstacles still in the way, however, and the Unity was still only an embryonic hint, a foreshadowing, of what it now suspected it could become with the passage of time and the increase of power and knowledge. The 23 rebellious original component-members knew or suspected most of this, but they simply could not reveal it, between the mental pressure and the threats the Unity could apply. Further, they believed that they still had quite a bit of time, since the growth of the Unity in size and power was limited by the rate at which its adult female members could give birth. They thought they had some time before the new female members could themselves become pregnant. In practice, the time proved rather shorter than they had hoped or dared fear. They had forgotten the growing skill at psionic biocontrol that the Unity had been mastering, and they still even yet didn't fully appreciate its nightmarish ruthlessness. But it wasn't long before they began to realize that their Unity-infected offspring were growing rather faster than normal. At age five, they looked seven. At age seven, they looked to be about ten. The Unity had in fact accelerated their rate of biological growth as much as it could without inflicting permanent damage or revealing its own existence to the rest of the world. By the time the girls were twelve years old, they had the physical bodies of sixteen-year-olds. Their individual minds remained twelve, but the Unity could not have cared less about that just then. It wanted to grow and it knew how to go about doing that. It was about that time that the next generation of Unity components began to be born, usually in twins or triplets, almost all of them female. By this point, the Unity had about seventy members altogether, most of them not yet adult, but growing fast, and its native abilities and power were rising steadily. But even with its ruthless treatment of its components, it was still frustrated by the biological realities that limited its rate of growth. It longed to find a way to have its male members produce Unity-offspring, enabling it to grow exponentially over a short period, but the problem was not readily soluable. Unity fusion wasn't passed on genetically, it required a long period of psionic linkage with the target mind unable to escape or resist. [1] Furthermore, even as its new breeders reached an age where they could be useful, some of the originals were passing childbearing age, much to their relief. Indeed, it was coming early, for all the psionic power the Unity could apply to prevent it, since the strain of so many rapidly successive multiple births could not be entirely undone. As the Unity continued to slowly, creepingly expand its power over the Atlantean government, and to push its components to the limit to maximize its growth-rate, it also began to ponder something else: some odd coincidences that seemed to have been exactly what it took to make its existence possible in the first place. The Unity was, in its own alien way, a genius. Though it often failed to grasp many aspects of individual human life and society, it could easily recognize the laws of probability. It also began to realize that there was one single, specific, strange event that was an absolute and indispensable prerequisite to its own creation: the death of the Eldest. By this point, the Eldest had been dead for nearly a century and a half. Even so, the Atlanteans had not entirely gotten over the shock of his mysterious murder. Now the Unity turned its immensely powerful intellect to the question, pondering the nature of the ageless ruler, and the long- unsolved mystery of his murder. MORE LATER. [1] Such as provided by pregnancy, nine months with the ‘target’ unable to either flee or resist and with constant, easy access. |
10-10-2010, 08:39 PM | #40 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
|
Re: Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...
LATER.
The Unity studied the historical records for everything it could learn about the former immortal ruler and founder of Atlantean society. There was plenty to study. The Eldest had led the first settlers to the island, and had ruled Atlantis for well over four thousand years. Even by this point, well over a century after his death, and with the last living memory of him fading, the societal memory of the Eldest permeated Atlantean society. Even the Circle of Ten claimed its legal authority over the Empire 'in the name of the Eldest', though the Eldest was dead. The Unity brought a dispassionate eye to those records, and as it did, it perceived that the Eldest had grown steadily in psionic (and other) powers as he ruled, as well as in knowledge and skill. It did not take the Unity long to realize that if the Eldest had been alive, the conspiracy that had accidentally created it would never had been able to function. Further, though the Unity had no way to directly measure the power levels involved, it came to suspect with high certainty that the Eldest could fairly easily have destroyed it, even after it had begun to grow to the level of power it had by then reached. The Eldest had possessed psionic powers such as telepathy, psychokinesis, teleportation and extrasensory perceptions at levels of raw power beyond all Atlantean norms, and to be possessed of enormous skill in the use of those abilities. Some of his demonstrated abilities were unique to him, no other known human, Atlantean or otherwise, had been known to possess those abilities. Yet even in light of these abilities, somehow, in some way, he had been murdered, by the mundane technique of having his throat slit! The Unity coldly calculated that the chance of even the most psionically and combat- talented Atlantean human being able to sneak up on the Eldest and slit his throat (and get away ‘clean’ afterward!) at being less than 1 in 1,000. The Unity came to realize that the Eldest could not have been exactly human. This was no secret, of course, since humans do not live for millennia, but the Unity, with its colder view, was able to more clearly perceive just how different the Eldest really had to have been. The Unity could not yet understand how such a being could come to exist, but it knew it needed to gather more information, from Atlantis and from all over the colonial empire and beyond. So, as the Unity grew (slowly but inexorably), it turned its attention from its immediate activities to the larger world. It wanted to increase its control of Atlantean society, and it wanted information from beyond the edges of that society. The first thing that occurred to it was to send 'members' of itself to scout out the provinces, and report back. This proved easier said than done. The first scout it selected was one of the original males (since it had other uses for the females), and it impressed a tremendous psychic compulsion on him to carry out the instructions. It chose one of the older ones, with a capable mind and broad experiences, hoping to profit from those resources. In doing so it miscalculated badly. The Unity expected to lose direct contact when he passed beyond the telepathic range of the combined collective. What it didn't realize was that as the individual passed the edges of the Unity's collective range, it felt its controlling compulsions beginning to dissolve! To the Unity's horror, it discovered that when one of its members passed beyond the edge of its 'range', the Unity half of the consciousness was cut off from the whole, leaving the basic innate mind of the component in firm control! It didn't realize this right away. The first 'scout' it sent out was one of its 23 original members, possessed of a strong and disciplined mentality, and when he sensed the hold of the Unity compartment of his mind fading, he concealed it, until he was far enough away that the dismayed Unity could not pull him back, or strike him down with a mental blast. Indeed, by the time the slightly distracted Unity realized its error, its escaping 'member' was entirely beyond range. The Unity could act swiftly when it felt threatened, and it did feel threatened now! Knowing its escaped 'member' might ‘spill the beans’, it promptly, through its pawns in the Atlantean government, put out the word that he was wanted for various and serious offenses against Atlantean law. To make this the more effective, most of the charges were actually quite true, backed up with 'inside information' pilfered from the mind of the fugitive. He had broken the law, in multiple different and serious ways, long before he became an accidental 'parent' of the Unity. With the authorities of Atlantis proper on the lookout for his return, the Unity then had the legal authorities send messages to the provincial cities, sending out what were essentially arrest warrants. It hoped its errant member would be captured or killed quickly, anything he said discredited by his crimes. For a long time, the Unity was in an agony of fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But nothing happened. Its missing 'component' appeared to have simply vanished off the face of the Earth, and eventually the Unity concluded that he had simply run as far away as he could get. In that, the Unity was right on the facts, but quite wrong in the implications. In time, this error would come back to haunt the collective being, as we shall see. In the meantime, it still had to find some way to reach its tentacles beyond the island of Atlantis proper. It now dared not send individual ‘members’ out, since they would be free from it as soon as they moved beyond range. Eventually, it discovered that it could send small groups of members, and as long as they stayed within range of each other, their Unity-selves would endure, and could be merged back into the larger Collective later. This meant that yet again, the collective was stalled by its slow growth rate, and it was doubly galling because the Unity had been rather contemptuous of the Atlantean tendency toward ‘isolation syndrome’. Now, it discovered that its own basic multiple nature made it the prisoner of an even stronger sort of isolation syndrome. Still, though it was impatient and driven, it was also effectively immortal while it had a certain minimum number of 'components', and the offspring of its female 'members' were themselves part of it. Thus, though its growth rate was very slow at first, it did tend to accelerate with time. One century after it came into being, all but a few of the original 24 were dead (and one was missing), but it had grown to 200 members, of which over 3/4 were female, and thus giving birth to new members with each pregnancy. A tendency toward multiple births in the Unity women (limited by the need for secrecy) aided the process. The Unity could now begin to select outside males for specific, desired gene lines, or for political or economic advantage, in marrying off its female 'membership'. Like classic compound interest, an initially small exponential growth rate now began to accelerate to the Unity's benefit. The Unity also discovered something else of interest: in its studies of psionics, it found that it could utilize orichalcum to create a kind of 'amplifier relay', to boost its connectivity and power. Through its pawns/members in the Atlantean government, it began to construct an elaborate network of paraphysical machinesspread across the Great Isle, which acted to boost the efficiency of its internal communications, and secondarily helped in the creation of a more efficient Atlantis-wide communication network for public use (to help explain the presence of the expensive items). Expensive? Orichalcum had always been second only to gold in cost in Atlantis, and the most expensive substance known beyond the Great Isle. Now, the increasing demand for orichalcum in various paraphysical machines and applications was driving the cost higher, and higher, and ever higher with the passage of time. More importantly, orichalcum was far from common even in Atlantis itself, and this new project ate into the limited production from the steadily depleting ore bodies. The availability of the sine qua non substance fell slowly but steadily as this and many other ongoing projects ate into the reserves, and the price rose in consequence. Naturally, this did not work to the benefit of the colonial societies. MORE LATER. |
Tags |
orichalcum universe |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|