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Old 09-30-2010, 10:20 PM   #31
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-03-2010, 07:55 PM   #32
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-03-2010, 09:00 PM   #33
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-03-2010, 09:38 PM   #34
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-03-2010, 10:38 PM   #35
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-04-2010, 08:24 PM   #36
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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’.
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Old 10-10-2010, 07:39 PM   #37
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-10-2010, 07:51 PM   #38
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-10-2010, 08:08 PM   #39
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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Old 10-10-2010, 08:39 PM   #40
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default 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.
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