Orichalcum Universe: Atlantis and the Antediluvian Age...

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Don’t tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.

Under the strain of the money drain of the Unity's construction projects
in Atlantis, the Circle of Ten and its governmental apparat found themselves
dealing with some serious budget problems. While, like all governments
and societies, Atlantis had long had taxes and a currency (in fact, Atlantis'
economy was more 'monetarized' than any society afterward would be
for thousands of years), the sort of budget shortfalls the government was
now facing were relatively new.

Under the loose ‘empire’ now rising up around Atlantis, individual taxation
in Atlantis proper was supplemented by regular tribute from the provinces,
which could be collected there as the local authorities and customs dictated.
Additional revenues came from tariffs on interprovincial and inter-city trade.
Since the expenditures of the Atlantean government had always been limited,
this had always been more-or-less sufficient.

Now, though, as the price of orichalcum rose, and the cost of maintaining
personnel and construction costs of the new projects rose, so did the taxes.
Individual taxes rose in Atlantis, but there the citizen/subjects were in a
position to resist to some degree, applying various indirect pressures to keep
the government from ramming taxes too high. There were old guilds and
powerful aristocratic alliances in the way.

Therefore, the annual tribute assessments on the colonies inevitably rose.
This bred no little resentment, since the bulk of the new expenditures
were (supposedly) for the various projects in Atlantis. It had no benefits
at all, even in theory, for the colony-states, leaving the colonials feeling
cheated. For the most part, however, it was difficult for the colony-states
to put up much practical resistance, since the Atlantean Army and Navy
were so powerful (compared to them) and because they were so unused
to such treatment anyway.

Except, of course, around the eastern region of the Mediterranean Sea,
lands now controlled by Athenia. Athenia was by now growing into a
strange sort of ‘empire within the empire', complete with a local inter-
provincial government, greater self-sufficiency than was found anywhere
else in the emerging empire, and a tradition of resisting outside pressures.
There, the new tribute assessments faced stiff forms of resistance, mostly
non-violent at first, but quite effective.

This was a frustration to the Circle of Ten, who were annoyed that the
richest province in the Empire was also the hardest to tax, and also
to the Unity, to which the Alliance was one of three thorns that it
had become aware were in its side (albeit unknowingly in each case).

The Unity was quietly working its tentacles all through society on the
island of Atlantis, sometimes by actually inserting one or more
'members' into a key position, sometimes by using subtle psionics and
bribery and other techniques to influence ordinary Atlanteans in key
places, (none of whom knew what they were really working for).
But there were three 'power centers' in the society of the Empire that the
Unity had almost intractable problems getting 'into'.

One was the very foundation of Atlantean economy and technology, the
orichalcum mining industry. Actually, calling it an 'industry' is a misnomer.
Other metals, as I've noted before, could be mined using psionics as a
tremendous assistance. Psychokinesis, telepathy, and even teleportation had
application in such mining efforts, enabling the Atlanteans to magnify their
still-limited base of ‘mundane’ technology to the point that they could often
match or surpass the mining abilities of even the 19th century West.

But orichalcum itself, critical to Atlantean psionic techniques, could not
be mined using those psionic mining methods. Trying it was a good way
to get oneself killed, usually collapsing the mine and cutting off access to
a major fraction of the ore body in the process.

So orichalcum was mined by ‘conventional’ techniques, techniques that
would have been quite familiar to miners in the Western Middle Ages
and early Renaissance. Humans crawled through narrow passages,
canaries and other animals detected dangerous gases, cave-ins and collapses
killed miners, and back-breaking, incredibly hard physical labor tore tiny
chunks of incomparably precious orichalcum from the igneous rock.

The orichalcum was not mined by slaves, though, but by skilled
mining professionals, who were organized into their own guild. This
guild had been a mutual support association under the Eldest, but
during the civil wars after his death it had turned into something
approximating a trade union, as we have seen. Since orichalcum was
indispensable to the Atlantean society, and there was never enough
to meet demand, the Orichalcum Guild was very powerful. Even the
Circle of Ten rarely tried to oppose them directly.

Infiltrating the Guild was difficult for the Unity, because the majority of
the miners were inducted into the Guild as offspring of other miners.
Orichalcum mining was something of a family affair. Even those who
joined from outside usually apprenticed as children. To make it trickier,
the very presence of unmined, raw orichalcum in the mines played havoc
with telepathy, and thus made individual components of the Unity
unreliable in the mines. The Unity found that just being close to the
mines was painful for its 'members', since their minds were wide open to
the intense Telepathic static from all that orichalcum being vibrated,
heated, chilled, etc.

As the better ore bodies became depleted, the skills of the Guild became
the more necessary to get the smaller and smaller supplies of metal out,
making the Guild even more indispensable. It became a very important
'player' in the politics of Atlantis, and the Unity had little influence over it.

The second major power center in the Empire that gave the Unity fits
was the Seafarers Guild. While the majority of shipping, both
governmental and civilian, in the empire was either privately owned or
government-owned, the fastest, biggest, safest, most reliable ships
were owned and crewed by the Seafarers Guild. This organization
started out as the first few Atlanteans who took to the seas, and by
this point they were sailing all over the world, and they stitched the
Empire together. The Seafarers had the only ships big enough to move
large numbers of troops fast enough to matter, meaning that the
military power of Atlantis hinged on the Seafarers' ability to transport
their armies, and making the Seafarers a power center that the Circle
of Ten could not sway with the implied threat of military force.

The Seafarers were hard for the Unity to infiltrate, because by their very
nature, they ranged from beyond the range of the Unity itself. The Unity
was limited in its dealings beyond the borders of the island of Atlantis,
since it could not just send one member-component out, it
had to send a small group to keep them from 'going independent'.
It could send out such groups, but arranging for them all to remain crew
on the same ship was hard, and like the Miners, the Seafarers tended
to recruit at a very young age.

Traditionally, the Seafarers maintained good relations with Athenia, making
for additional complications. Two of the three major 'trouble centers' of
the nascent Atlantean empire were thus allied, and the Unity knew this could
become a major problem, especially since the Seafarers were no more eager
to pay higher trade duties than the ProtoAthenians were to pay higher tribute.
Neither stood to draw much benefit from the great projects the Unity had set
in motion on the Great Isle.

As the Circle of Ten began to apply pressure to the Seafarers to restrict
their commerce with Athenia, the Seafarers displayed just why they could
be a problem. Already, many of the Seafarers were born in the colonies,
and now they established a secondary headquarters in a good harbor not
far from the city of ProtoAthens itself.

The ProtoAthenian Alliance cultivated their good relations with the Seafarers,
and indeed, if it had not been for their absolute dependence on the exported
orichalcum of Atlantis, the Alliance could and probably would have dealt
with the ever-rising demands for tribute by simply ignoring them. But their
dependence on the precious orichalcum forced them to continue dealing with
the mother government, on more-or-less the terms the Circle demanded.

Likewise, even the Seafarers, ultimately, required orichalcum. Their swift
ships were propelled by a combination of wind power and psychokinesis,
and there were meshes and pieces of alloyed orichalcum built into the very
structure of their ships. Though they didn't require huge amounts, without
that small amount of the rare meta-metal per vessel, the Seafarers simply
could not have built their amazing 'psi-remes'.

Pressure now began to build up, as the supply of orichalcum fell, the
price rose, the skills of those who mined in became ever more
indispensable, and the realization grew in the Atlantean government that
it was the necessity for orichalcum that was holding the empire together
in the face of the growing financial and cultural pressures. The Unity
knew this, but cared on insofar as it itself was affected. Unfortunately
for everyone involved, the Unity had also begun yet another new project,
one that would only make matters worse.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER

The Unity was determined to gain a better understanding of
human society, since its imperfect comprehension often led
it to make basic errors, for all its inherent intelligence. It began
performing 'psychology experiments', initially simple ones
involving individuals or only a few people, but later with steadily
expanding numbers. It would conspire for its subjects to find
themselves is pre-arranged situations, and try to predict their
actions. These situations could range from minor (will he or
will he not reveal that juicy gossip) to more serious (will she
or will she not be unfaithful to her husband) to the deadly serious
(will he take that seeming chance to kill his rival). These simple
experiments grew more complex, until the Unity was mani-
pulating whole institutions and families and clans in it efforts.

Bit by bit, the Unity got better at predicting human actions,
but it never quite reached the level of accuracy it wanted,
since it was too inhuman to quite grasp all the intangibles.
It discovered, though, that it was better at predicting the actions
of some people than others. In time, the Unity, in its alien but
brilliantly, almost insanely logical mind, arrived at a fantastically
dangerous conclusion: it determined that it was bad at predict-
ing the actions of 'irrational' people.

By 'irrational' it meant humans who would select a course of
action, or inaction, totally at variance with their self-interest,
for reasons the Unity simply could not comprehend. It knew
the terms morality, ethics, legality, etc, but it didn't really
have any grasp of what they meant. The dictionary definit-
ions of them merely conveyed to the Unity that people under
the influence of these 'conditions' behaved in unpredictably
irrational ways. The Unity lacked the frame of reference to
understand why 'x' would fail to steal the credit for his co-
worker's work when he had the chance to do so safely, or why
'y' remained faithful to her husband when a sexual dalliance
would further her financial interests, or why 'z' would refrain
from killing his life-long rival and tormentor when he was
given a chance to do so in apparent safety.

Naturally, not every person the Unity 'tested' was so restrained
by morality, but from the Unity's POV, those who behaved
morally were behaving 'irrationally', since it could not perceive,
or even conceive, of their actual motivations.

On the other hand, self-interest was quite comprehensible to the
Unity. It had a limited understanding of self-sacrifice in the
interest of one's genetic line, since it could understand the
advantage of that in a hereditary sense, but even there, to the
Unity self-sacrifice on the part of a father was somewhat
puzzling, since he could always father more children if the
current ones were lost. The Unity was fully intelligent enough
to grasp such concepts as ‘natural selection’ and ‘genetic
self-interest’, though it used other symbology to describe
them, but these concepts are not sufficient to explain the full
range of human self-sacrificial behavior, even toward offspring.

The Unity was made up of humans, but was itself utterly alien.

The Unity was a curious being, and found this human behavior
puzzling and fascinating, but also deeply frustrating, since the
Unity needed to be able to reliably predict human behavior,
at least to the degree that it could form its plans with reasonable
reliability.

The Unity was a pragmatic entity, and it concluded that if the
Atlanteans were going to be predictable enough to be useful,
it would have to find some way to neutralize the peculiar
irrationality in their behavior sufficiently to nullify their unpre-
dictable status. Thus, the Unity, like a stock breeder seeking
a cure for a disease in his herd animals, set out to find a 'treatment'
for this unpredictable status.

The Unity, for its own utterly logical and totally alien reasons,
had set out of find a cure for morality.

This was easier said than done, of course, but the Unity had
plenty of time and extensive resources to work with. It began
to apply the results of its psychology experiments, through its
pawns and servants in the Atlantean government and private
institutions. Subtly, it began to see to it that 'rational' behavior
(as defined by the Unity) was rewarded, while the peculiar
irrationality that so clouded its predictive models was not. It
reached out to infiltrate and control the Atlantean equivalent
of what we would call the mass media, which involve both a
variety of ‘mundane’ technologies (still primitive compared
to the developments of the modern West at this time) and also
their vastly subtler and more pervasive (and thus potentially
more dangerous) telepathic and extrasensory technologies.

The effects were very slow, very subtle, but also unrelenting.

It also began to promulgate, through various mouthpieces,
variations on traditional Atlantean philosophies, emphasizing
the importance of the personal will, of innate ability as the
marker of innate superiority. This, too, was done gradually,
and always as variations on traditions rather than entirely new
innovations, which the Unity had learned enough of Humans
to suspect would be rejected. The Unity was even clever
enough to make its new philosophies contradictory to each
other, letting competing schools form, to conceal the actual
pattern that existed beneath the surface variety.

The Unity focused especially carefully, but intensely, on the
education of the young. Moving slowly (the Unity had plenty
of patience), it altered the way the young in the upper classes
were taught. Over the course of fifty years, the Unity laid the
groundwork of the changes it wanted, all the while working
to subtly oppose and discredit voices (of which there were
many) that did not fit the new pattern it was encouraging.

In all the new ideas and philosophies that the Unity encouraged,
a few common concepts were present, though expressed in
apparently contradictory ways in the various schools of thought.
Among them were:

1. Ability is justification. If you can do something, it
follows that you have the right to do something. (‘Might
makes right’, more or less, though more subtly expressed.)

2. All concepts of ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘authority’ and so forth
depend on the point of view, and no absolute standards do or
even can exist. Thus each individual must be the sole judge
of his or her own actions, and of the actions of all other
individuals and groups as well.

3. Atlanteans were an inherently superior people, as proven
by their superior abilities both physical and psionic, and by
their superior culture and technological prowess.

4. Since everything is a matter of one's own point of view,
sensation is just as good a reason for action as any other. The
only 'rational' motivation is self-interest.

There were many others, but the essence of all of them was to
encourage motivations of pure self-interest, which the
Unity found easily predictable. The Unity found results
slow at first, but it kept the pressure on, and over time, it began
to see some progress, as it would define progress.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

One of the side-effects of this was that the Atlanteans, who
had been increasingly race-conscious even before, now began
to see themselves as fundamentally separate from the rest of
the Human race, which they were not. In time, the Circle of
Ten forbade anyone with less than fifty percent pure Atlantean
ancestry to even set foot on the island. Other laws meant to
emphasize Atlantean superiority followed.

Atlantis had long been governed in part by a set of unwritten
but iron customs and traditions, many of which operated to
enforce a minimum level of decent, civil behavior between
Atlanteans. By modern Western standards, these customs
would seem harsh and crude, but by the standards of the
tine and place and world, they were fair, if strict, and enlightened.
Now, however, the pressure from the Unity began to erode
them. What had been hallowed wisdom came to seem old-
fashioned, or quaint and irrelevant, to the younger generations.

Fifty years after the Unity began its intentional effort to 'de-
moralize' the Atlanteans, the effects were becoming quite
visible to those who were willing to see them. Unfortunately
for the Unity, it discovered that its project had an unexpected
(to it) side-effect: many Atlantean institutions and associations
were now beginning to function very poorly.

The Unity found that its 'more rational', more predictable
Atlanteans were having a harder time working together in the
Fleet, in the government, in many different areas of life,
public and private, since the old customs that had been the
social 'glue' were weakening. Not that the Unity could com-
prehend that connection. It found it could partly offset the
problem by emphasizing the use of imposed discipline
from outside to replace the internal discipline that was fraying.

Thus the discipline of the Atlantean Army, which had for cen-
turies been held together by the highest esprit de corps the
Antediluvian world had known, now came to be increasingly
maintained by harsh punishment and bribery. To the Unity,
these methods were simply 'rational', since it couldn't compre-
hend that a better way existed, or had existed before. Other
aspects of Atlantean society underwent a similar gradual change.

Another side-effect of the change was that laziness became a
more and more common vice in Atlantis, since the self-discipline
that opposes it was fading. Chattel slavery had never been a
part of the Atlantean traditions, as such. Contact with the
outside work had introduced the custom to the Atlanteans,
but for a long time they resisted the temptation, and even when
they began to make use of slave labor, for a time their ancient
traditions and customs kept the treatment of the slaves relatively
humane (compared to other slave-holding powers), and at first
it was largely limited to captured pirates, criminals not quite
offensive enough to execute, and the like.

Now, Atlantis began to develop a serious appetite for slaves,
since they do no form unions, don't cost as much as a paid
laborer, and they could always get more, or so they thought,
to make up for the lower efficiency of slavery vs. free labor.
The treatment of slaves in Atlantis went from very stern but
tolerable (at least by the standards of that age), as it had been
before the Unity's work, to an increasingly harsh and brutal
regime that treated the slaves as disposable workers, and then
a little later simply as disposable animals.

The slaves came, of course, from overseas. The slaves were
the one exception to the rule restricting access to half-blood
Atlanteans, since they were not considered genuinely human,
the rule did not apply. More and more, the Atlanteans of the
Island itself tended to see ‘commoners’ as a different breed,
a lesser kind of human. This began subtly, but under Unity
pressure it eventually reached a level that surpassed the worst
racisms of later ages in irrational intensity. Naturally, though,
it varied from person to person.

Though it was strictly illegal, human nature made matings
between slaves and masters/mistresses inevitable, and some-
times they resulted in children. In the 'new Atlantis' the Unity
was building, even 'pure-blood' Atlantean children had a harsher
youth than had been the case even 100 years before, since adults
were tending more and more with time to be quite self-focused.
The offspring of Atlanteans and slaves had it worse. Though
they tended to have greater psionic powers than their slave
parents (who usually had none), they could rarely match the
full-blooded Atlanteans, who had been bred semi-consciously
for psi power for millennia. They tended to end up as a higher
class of slave, the luckier ones ending up as second-class members
of the master/mistress's families, the unluckier ones meeting
fates best not dwelt on.

The appetite for slaves spread to much of the empire, but away
from the direct influence of the Unity, the poison was far more
dilute. The 'new realism' as the new outlook tended to be called,
was far more controversial in the colonies, and some colonies
outlawed slavery entirely, even though they did not fully escape
the growing taints of racism and superiorism that were poisoning
the collective Atlantean psychology.

Other colonies, however, became fabulously wealthy on the
slave trade. Slavers would capture commoners from beyond
the coastal cities, shipping them to the Island in exchange for
valuable commodities from the motherland, esp. orichalcum.

Naturally, the attitude of the people of the continents toward
the Atlanteans changed. Before, the people of the coastal cities
were sometimes hated, often feared, sometimes admired, and
some commoners had lived in and learned from the colony
states for centuries. But now the hunger for slaves and the
harsher, less civilized outlook of the Empire produced a
tendency toward abiding enmity.

Of course, as ever, humans vary. Some commoners in Europe,
mainland America, and Africa sold other commoners into slavery,
usually for a pittance from the Atlanteans, though it seemed
like fabulous wealth to the more primitive inland cultures.

Of all the colony-states of the empire, Athenia was the least
amenable to the slave trade, and the least ready to adopt the
'new realism' philosophy radiating outward from Atlantis.
In Athenia, the older customs and old traditions of Atlantis,
combined with the greater native openness of the society there,
created a deep resistance toward the 'new realism'.

This did not go unnoticed in Atlantis, by either the government,
or the Unity that lay like a great spider in the center of the
invisible web it was secretly weaving around Atlantis the
Island and the Atlantean 'empire' beyond.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The presence of the Unity in the middle of Atlantean civilization had
many subtle effects. One of the things the Unity did, pulling various
strings at various levels of society, was to encourage research into
and development of the Atlantean psionic sciences, and this
encouragement had its results. The Unity was itself a brilliant
composite intellect possessed of tremendous abilities, and it was quite
adept at combining insights from widely separated sources to gain greater
understanding. It hoarded some of this knowledge, but fed other
results back into society to encourage further gains.

Even without the Unity's invisible, steady encouragement and help, the
Atlantean society would have been progressing, but the Unity greatly
accelerated matters, and helped shape the direction of much of this
study, and this too had its effect.

One subject that interested the Unity almost from the moment it gained
self-consciousness was the attempt to understand how it came to be,
both out of intellectual curiosity (which was a Human trait the
collective entity did have) and out of its desire to expand and grow
and survive the inevitable deaths of its original unwitting ‘creator’
components. It never did entirely master the process by which it came
to exist, the number of factors were so huge, and the probability of
their conflation so low, that the Unity eventually concluded, reluctantly,
that its existence had to be ascribed to a one in a billion fluke. [1]

A side-effect of the resources it poured into this study was a great
improvement in the general Atlantean understanding of and ability with
'gestalting' techniques. The Unity's secretly-sponsored and aided
researches led the Atlanteans to breakthroughs in their ability to
combine individual psychic powers, it became possible for the
Atlanteans to create larger and larger gestalts, gaining greater and
greater raw power as a result. Since psionic power was one of the
primary basic foundations of Atlantean society, culture, and
technology, this was a development of great political importance. [2]

The increasing gestalt ability of the Atlantean sages enabled them to
make use of their highly trained esper faculty to understand more and
more about the universe around them. The Atlanteans started out with
far greater knowledge than any society would ‘typically’ possess at a
given level of practical technological advancement, in much because
their first ruler and founder had access to a wealth of knowledge as an
Avatar that he didn't understand how he knew, he just knew.

For example, even when they first settled in Atlantis, with a Neolithic
level of technological sophistication, the Atlanteans already knew that
the Earth was a sphere, and that it orbited the Sun. They didn't really
know what the Sun was, but they knew it was larger than Earth,
and they knew that the 'moving stars' in the night sky were objects more
like Earth than the fixed stars. They knew the Moon was smaller than
the Earth, and that it circled the Earth. They knew some odd bits and
pieces of chemistry and physics that normally would have eluded them
until they mastered a far higher level of technological skill. They
understood in a general sort of way how the seasons worked, and they
had a vague grasp of the 'whys' of the weather...in the late Neolithic.

As time passed, they built on this foundation, both by 'conventional'
means and psionic techniques. As a result, at any given level of
technology and art, they knew far more than would be expected, and
eventually this began to have technological side-effects.

The first crude-steam engine mentioned above came in 5023 BC, and by
5000 BC steam power was being adapted to other uses in the Atlantean
Age, uses where psionic power was unsuitable or inconvenient or
unavailable. The same artisanship that enabled the Orichalcum Guild
to invent steam power enabled them to refine it, and the pressure to
innovate began to turn the Orichalcum Guild into not only a mining
power but something of a technical force, the Atlantean version of art of
‘mechanical engineering’ had its roots in the orichalcum mines.

It was yet another incident in the orichalcum mines that would set the
stage for the greatest transformation in Atlantean resources and Human
society in the history the Antediluvian Age. As noted above, there was
a misguided attempt to use psychokinesis as a mining technique in the
orichalcum mines, someone thought he had perfected a technique that
would make this safe and effective. As it happened, he was not merely
wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

This technique was put to the test in a mine the locals called by a name
in Atlantean that would anglicize as ‘Goadeis’. The most accessible
ores in the mine had been extracted, the vein continued into the depths
but had reached a point where the ‘conventional’ technology of the time
was unequal to the challenge of extracting the ore. Other mines, which
sought other metals and minerals, could go considerably deeper through
the use of psionic techniques in mining work, but such techniques could
not be used with orichalcum ore. All this made Goadeis a promising
place to try out the new experimental technique to see if a way had been
found to make use of psionics in mining orichalcum.

It was northern summer of the year 5009 BC, a bright, sunny morning,
at about ten a.m. local time, or so it would have been if the Atlanteans
had used modern Western measures of time. From the outside, there was
nothing to be seen unusual in the mountain valley that was the site of
the mine entrance that was serving as a 'test bed'. One moment all
was normal and quiet, the next the entire valley went up in an
explosive blast that was sufficiently intense that it was initially
mistaken as some sort of volcanic event!

The actual event was over in less than a second, that is, the energy-
releasing reaction took only a split-second, but the after-effects
took weeks to settle. The entire area around the mine was shattered,
rock was pulverized, shattered, cracked, and broken, near the center
of the event a modest amount of rock had actually melted. Everyone in
the mine was instantly killed, as well as quite a few people in the
surrounding area, and more were wounded by flying rocks, collapsing
buildings, and the other side-effects of the entire rather spectacular
event.

When the dust settled (literally!), over two hundred people were dead
and over one thousand had been seriously wounded or crippled. The
mine had not contained much orichalcum ore, it had been largely mined
out, but the small amount remaining had been valuable, and was now
buried beneath hundreds of feet of broken and melted rock. So much
rock was pulverized that it got into the mountain streams all around
the site, fouling them with mud and rubble, clogging and blocking
stream beds, and disrupting the water supplies of several small towns
downslope, adding to the cost and confusion.

While the authorities and others tried to pick up the pieces, the sages
and miners and other experts, including (albeit secretly) the Unity,
began trying to piece together what had happened to produce
such an incredible reaction. [3]

MORE LATER.


[1] As it happens, it was partly right, but there was more to the
matter than it then knew.

[2] Recall that the Unity itself was accidentally 'born' out of an
experimental gestalt gone horribly wrong under bizarre circumstances.

[3] Everyone was shocked because of the scale. It was of
course well-known and had been for centuries that using PK around the
orichalcum ore was dangerous, and could produce violent reactions, but
nothing close to the scale of this incident! For comparison, imagine
a chemical experimenter who combined a few grams of sodium and
water, and in doing so produced an exothermic reaction that blew up an
entire city with a nuclear-scale detonation. That was how shocked and
puzzled the Atlanteans were by this event.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

While the Atlantean government and the Orichalcum Guild sought to pick
up the pieces of the disaster at the Goadeis [1] mine, Atlantean sages,
scientists, and the Unity itself sought to figure out exactly what had
happened in the tunnels to produce such a spectacularly violent reaction.
Nothing like it had ever been known to happen in all the history of the
Antediluvian Age, indeed, as noted above, the first mistaken impression
among the Atlanteans was that it must have been some sort of volcanic
event (they were of course quite familiar with volcanic activity, just from
living on the Great Isle).

It rapidly became clear that whatever had happened was not a volcanic
event, however, nothing about it fit the patterns of volcanic
activity, and it was in a part of the Island not known for volcanic
activity in 'modern' times. [2] There had been no preliminary tremors
or other warning signs, and the event seemed fairly clearly to have
been centered only about one hundred meters below the surface. All this
ruled out volcanic activity with reasonable certainty.

This left some result of the new psychokinetic mining technique that
had been under trial. Unfortunately, there was little information
available to use in studying the matter: the people involved had
mostly been in the tunnels at the time, and were now suffering from
terminal death. With them had gone most of the records and other
indicators of what might have happened, leaving those trying to put
the pieces together suffering from large gaps of missing data. Esper
techniques were nearly useless, the presence of orichalcum ore
rendered them unreliable at the best of times, and whatever the event
had been that had wrecked the mine, it had generated a flood of
psychic 'static' that had rendered extrasensory perceptions useless all
over Atlantis for days, and clouded later attempts to 'look back' through
time at the event itself through postcognitive techniques.

If not for a lucky break, the mystery might never have been solved,
but as it happened, about six months after the event, a set of
duplicate notes were discovered that detailed much about the planned
experiment, they had been stored in the private residence of one of
the sages involved, and they cast a great deal of illumination on the
matter when they were discovered. [3]

With this information to work with, it became possible for Atlantean
sages (including the Unity in secret) to begin piecing together
something of what had happened, though it took them five years to
strain the useful science out of the raw data, to the point that some
experimentation could be attempted to try and confirm or refute their
hypotheses. The experimental data was unnerving, even frightening,
and if it falsified some hypotheses it confirmed others, and the
emerging picture was fraught with both great potential for reward, and
some considerable risks.

What it amounted to, the sages realized in excitement, was that they
had discovered an entirely new source of psychic phenomena,
something that had not occurred in all the history of Atlantean
civilization. They had made tremendous strides in mastering their own
psionic abilities, and in discovering new ways to use those abilities,
and indeed they had half-intentionally, half-unconsciously bred
themselves for generations with high levels of psionic potential as a
goal, and in this they had been very successful.

They had even discovered that some other life-forms had some very
limited hints of psychic potential, such as their dogs. In each case,
though, the psi factor was an individual thing in its essence, even
their awesomely powerful psychic gestalts drew on the same inner
strengths that powered individual psi talents. Now, though, they had
discovered that there was an external psionic potential that could
interact with individuals and the inanimate world.

Once they discovered it, they could study it, and even perceive it dimly
with their own native extrasensory abilities, once they 'knew where to
look', for lack of a better metaphor. As they studied it, they discovered
theoretical ways it could be put to practical use, though there were
associated dangers that gave even the boldest sages considerable pause.
Between the hypnotically fascinating potentials and the unnerving
risks involved, it was 4993 BC before the first experimental efforts
in 'tapping' this new source of power were successful. It was not
terribly impressive, the first effort only produced activity
comparable to about the same psychokinetic power typical to a pre-teen
Atlantean, and that only briefly. It did, however, open the way to more
impressive results, by 4991 BC, their techniques were becoming reliable
and potent enough that the users of this new power were matching the
strongest psions in Atlantis in their ability to manipulate the physical world.

In basic theoretical terms, the Atlantean sages had determined that, for
want of a better description, it could be said that the Universe as a
whole was alive, or conscious, or unconscious, or perhaps none of
those words exactly applied, the sages were barely beginning to grasp
what they had discovered. There was a living presence associated with
the Universe, in its entirely, not a deity or a spirit exactly, but
something vaguely like those concepts. It seemed to be, from what
Atlantean esper study could determine, coterminous with space and time
themselves, but they lacked any symbology to quite grasp what that meant.
They were trying to comprehend phenomena with no 'ordinary' equivalents
in Human experience.

They discerned that just as individual Humans had an associated psionic
potential, a 'psychic field' that constantly pulsated through their minds
and bodies, so did this Universal life-essence. The Atlanteans had a word
of their own that they applied to this psychic potential, but it would simply
be a gibberish symbol to us, so we shall translate their word as 'the Flux'
more or less. What made it significant was that other minds could also
manipulate this vast psychic potential, other minds including properly
trained and practiced Humans.

As they experimented with this new technique, they discovered that
most (but not all) psionic techniques and abilities could be
duplicated by manipulating the Flux. This was significant for various
reasons, two of the most important of which were as follows:

1. The ability to manipulate the Flux, unlike 'normal' psionic Power,
was essentially purely a learned skill, it had little in the way of a
directly hereditary element. In theory, anyone could learn to
manipulate the Flux, regardless of ancestry.

2. In theory, the potential raw power of the Flux dwarfed Human
psionics. Any Human psionics. The theoretical understanding of the
Atlantean sages suggested that the potential was nearly limitless, the
boundaries determined more by the skill and discipline and will of the
manipulator than anything else.

The technological, economic, political, and social implications of the
discovery were staggering.

MORE LATER.


[1] 'Goadeis' is the closest reasonable Anglicization of the Atlantean
name.

[2] 'Modern' in this sense meaning since Man had come to Atlantis
thousands of years earlier.

[3] In light of what came of the discovery, the polarity of the luck
involved in the lucky break might be open to debate.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Here is a good moment to explain something that has received little
discussion so far in our explorations of the Atlantean Age. As has
been noted before, Atlantis was the site of the first Human
civilization on Earth. However, it should be noted that Humans
(meaning members of the species H. sapiens) were not the only
intelligent hominids on Earth in that Age, merely the most numerous.

As has been noted elsewhere, when the Eldren transplanted most of the
breeding stock of H. sapiens and our cousins across the Greater Milky
Way and the satellary galaxies thereof, there were a few people left
on Earth because of the various things that suddenly went wrong. Most
of those people were Human, but there the other species had a few
representatives left behind on Earth as well. Since H. sapiens can
breed faster than any of our cousins, and the majority of this remnant
were members of our species to begin with, Humans rapidly became by
far the most common Homosentients on Earth.

Most of the other species did not long survive (on Earth), but a very few
managed to find secure, or at least viable, niches that enabled them to
survive and even in some cases thrive. One such was a race of Human
cousins that the Atlanteans called by a name that would mean nothing to
us, but which meant, near enough, 'underground ones'. This name
seemed natural enough, given that this species was well adapted to
underground life, preferred underground dwellings and had a nocturnal
bent. Indeed, bright sunlight was uncomfortable to them at best,
damaging at worst.

The Atlanteans did not even realize these beings existed for some time
after they began to sail the oceans, even after they came back to the
great continents they missed them for a time because the underground
ones were not inclined to live too near the sea, and their preferred
underground life hid them for a time. Eventually, though, contact was
made, sometimes hostile, sometimes guardedly polite, in the later case
trade relationships emerged, because the underground ones had some
interesting skills and resources to offer in trade to the psionically
powerful Human rulers of the world.

They were superb metal workers, for one thing. As advanced as the
Atlanteans were, the underground ones were nearly as good with metal
working, and their skills were not in any way psionically enabled.
When combined with the options made available by cooperation with
various psions, their abilities leapt forward, to the benefit of both
species.

Also, the underground ones had knowledge of the still only-partly-
explored continental interiors, knowledge that was valuable to the
expanding global civilization centered in Atlantis.

This race has been known by many names throughout history, dwarves,
goblins, dark elves, various sorts of spirit, all confused with other
creatures. To avoid confusion, we shall call them Svarts.[1] [2]

In the late sixth century BC, Svarts were fairly common in Europe and
what would late be the British Isles (at this time the British Isles
are still land-connected to Europe, about which more later), parts of
central Asia, and also in parts of Africa and southeast Asia. The
largest concentration, though, was to be found in Europe and what we
now call Scandinavia. Over half of the entire species dwelt in these
areas, and had been doing so for tens of thousands of years.

It was these Svarts who mostly dealt with the Atlantean civilization.
Extensive trade relations existed, and by the year 5000 BC, the Svarts
of Europe had learned much of the Atlantean metal-working technology,
combined it with their own, and bettered either by the effort. It was
widely acknowledged that the very best metal processors and metal
workings in the world in that time dwelled not in Atlantis proper, but
in northern Europe, where Humans of Atlantean descent worked with
Svarts to produce metal that was in some ways the equal of anything to
be found in the modern West.

MORE LATER.


[1] Taxonomists of a far later time would classify these entities as
Homo svarta.

[2] These ‘other creatures’ Humans sometimes confused the Svarts with
are multifold and represent several stories in themselves. About them there
shall be more later.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.
One of the products of the fusion of Atlantean Human and Svart skills
was a metal mesh of considerable strength, made basically out of
multiple layers of tiny thin rings of aluminum alloy, shaped in part
by psychokinetic techniques and in part by the 'conventional' skills
the Svarts brought to the activity. This fine mesh was originally the
result of weapons research, an attempt to make an improved form of
armor. It did not quite work out for that, but it proved suitable for
something even more valuable.

The Atlanteans had known for millennia that a cloth container full of
hot air could be made to float, purely by buoyancy, it was in the year
5021 B.C. that someone realized that this could be put to practical
use. In essence, this inventor, who lived in the Atlantean colonies
along the east coast of North America, was trying to invest a manned
balloon or zeppelin type device, he had the idea in mind, but the
resources available defeated him at first. He succeeded in making
some balloons suitable for some aerial exploration, but they were
neither readily controllable nor very effective.

A minor aristocrat, he had the personal resources of money and
position to focus on his rather eccentric project, but for several
years he had little success. It was the development of the metal
cloth in Europe that gave him a material strong enough for his
purposes, and in 5015 BC he successfully built what amounted to a
small, crude hybrid of a balloon and a blimp. The mesh was strong
enough to serve as an envelope, and pyrokinesis could heat air to
sufficient temperatures for effective operation. Since pyrokinesis
meant that they could dispense with the mass/weight of the heat
source, his construction proved to be a workable flying machine.

That first crude model was not very practical, it was hard to steer,
tricky to land, and very vulnerable to wind and the elements, but it
was a flying machine, enabling Humans to fly (beyond the levitation
ability most Atlanteans had). Over the course of several years, he
experimented and refined, and after several attempts, he was able to
build a more practical version, incorporating lessons he'd learnt from his
first model, and successfully flew it up the North American coast from his
home base in what would someday be the coastal waters of what we
would call North Carolina as far as the mouth of that river that would
someday be called the Hudson, passing over several cities in the process. [1]

The stir he made spread rapidly, what began as a hobbyist's coup had
enormous implications. It was only a matter of time, and a short time,
before bright observers noted that this invention potentially had significant
commercial and military applications. The inventor himself had given
that aspect of the matter little thought, he simply wanted to build a flying
machine for the sake of the idea, and he was rich enough to operate that
way. Others, though, swiftly saw the enormous potentials inherent in
the new invention, and began considering how to use them.

By 5011 BC, various inventors were testing their own versions of the
original device, some hoping to use them for passenger transport and
cargo shipping, others having more sanguinary ideas in mind. The
effort paid off, the designs improved rapidly as newer and newer test
models were designed and built. The main limiting factor was
availability of the aluminum-alloy mesh that made the gasbags so
strong and light, and the new demand for the material rapidly made
fortunes in the mining and forging centers of northern Europe.

The Atlanteans rapidly developed multiple versions of these devices,
specialized for their various purposes, but all were still variations
on the concept of the ‘psi-blimp’. The Atlantean word for the devices
as a class would translate as something like 'air-boat', the meaning
might be approximated by the word 'aereme'. [2]

The military implications of the devices led the Circle of Ten to
restrict their ownership and flight areas to some degree, no aereme
was allowed to land directly in or around the capitol city of
Atlantica, or in other 'secure' areas, and most cities required that
the aeremes land outside the limits to the city and refrain from
overflights. Still, the economic potential was so great that every
major city encouraged the commerce of the devices, encouraging them to
land not far from the walls of their towns.

The aeremes also enabled a much more rapid exploration of the deep
continental interiors. The early versions of these flying craft had
limited ranges, since maintaining the heat in the gasbags required
significant pyrokinetic ability, and because the machines could only
carry so much in the way of supplies and because they needed
considerable maintenance. Even so, the borders of the unexplored
interiors of the great continents rapidly began to retreat before
advancing waves of airborne explorers.

By the year 4990 BC, a modest but growing fleet of cargo and passenger
aeremes was travelling from city to city, and even crossing Atlantic
from North America to Europe (and vice versa) by means of Iceland and
Greenland. The Atlantean military was experimenting with using
aeremes to transport personnel and supplies, though they had proven
difficult to make use of directly as war machines, their gas bags
being a dangerously vulnerable point and a very large target.

The Atlantean Age of Flight had begun.

MORE LATER.


[1] Global sea levels were slightly lower at that time, the home city
of our innovator was on what we would consider the ‘continental shelf’
off the coast of modern Virginia. Likewise, the mouth of the Hudson
was a bit further to the east then. By some twist of history, the first
and second ages of serious flight on Earth began in the same general part of
the world, the early tests of the first aeremes were not that far from the
site of what would one day be called ‘Kitty Hawk, North Carolina’, off
the coast on what is now the continental shelf.

[2] i.e. 'air-trireme'. Note that by this point, the Antediluvian Age was
far past the stage of true ‘triremes’ in its oceanic technology, but the
word the Atlanteans used for the new flying machines had the same root
as the word they had used for their early sea craft, and we shall follow
their lead in the translation. Throughout the late Antediluvian, the most
common word for the different kinds of flying machine used by that age
was the word we have translated as ‘aereme’.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As we have seen, things were changing fast in the ancient world around
the first half-century of the Fifth Millennium B.C. The development of
air travel, albeit limited and cumbersome air travel, was revolutionizing
warfare and commerce. The artisans of the Orichalcum Mining Guild
had constructed the first crude steam engines in their civilization's history
already, and now were starting to apply it to other applications. Metallurgy
had advanced to the point of being comparable in some ways with the 19C
and 20C AD, and, most important by far, the bizarre incident at the
Goadeis mine had revealed the existence of the Matrix and the Flux to
the Atlanteans.

Regarding steam power, as of 5000 B.C. the Atlanteans were about as
advanced with it as Westerners were around A.D. 1700. Advances came
rapidly, however, because the quality of metal and materials available
in the Atlantean Age was relatively greater than it would be in the
equivalent point in the development of steam technology in the West.
By 4950 B.C., Atlantean sages and engineers had produced reciprocating
steam engines as good as anything the West would build before 1850,
and improvements were continuing.

In counterpoint, however, the application of steam power to new areas
of effort came more slowly, for the most part, among the psi-powerful
Atlanteans. They simply did not need steam technology as much
as the West later would, which made its adoption a more leisurely affair,
with one large exception: the seafarers.

For many years, psychokinesis in various forms had, along with wind
power, been the literal driving force of sea travel. Psychokinesis gave
Atlantean sailors a degree of control over their travels, and a backup to
wind power in calm times and places. Psychokinesis meant that Atlantean
sailors did not fear the calm bands around the world, what a later age would
call the 'horse latitudes' or the doldrums. However, telekinesis could be
exhausting even with a skilled gestalt for a crew, which meant that wind
power was always vital.

It was not long before enterprising shipbuilders realized that the steam
engines the Orichalcum Guild was designing and building could be
adapted to power sea craft. At first the efforts were clumsy and crude,
powered by wood and neither swift nor reliable, but ere long steam-
powered ships were sailing the Earth's oceans, and the wood-
fueled early prototypes were replaced by coal-powered craft. Psionic
power still filled many roles aboard ship, but the new fueled ships
were faster, not so much in peak speed but in how long and how
steadily they could maintain that speed. In addition, the use of coal
fired steam to drive ocean vessels was considerably easier than driving
the vessels psychokinetically, and permitted much larger vessels.

Just as was would happen again thousands of years later, steam power
was beginning to initiate a revolution, not so much of industry as of
travel. An even larger change was brewing at the same time, however,
a more momentous change.

As mentioned above, the Atlanteans sages eventually discovered,
studying the incident at the Goadeis mine, that there was a living
essence associated with the Universe as a whole, indeed with the
larger framework within which the Universe was embedded. Their
mathematicians had long since posited schemes of four or more
dimensional spaces, now they had discovered a practical example
of this concept, because the new living essence they had discovered
mostly existed in higher-dimensional space, a concept even the most
skilled mathematical sages could barely grasp.

The Atlanteans had two words for their conceptualization of this
phenomenon, which we will translate into English as 'the Matrix' and
'the Flux'. The Matrix referred to the universal life-entity itself,
the Flux to the field of psychic potential it generated, analogous to
the (almost infinitely smaller) psychic flux individual Homosapients
generated. It was possible, the Atlanteans eventually realized, for
an individual with the proper knowledge and skill to attune himself to
the Flux, and direct the psychic potential for his own purposes. This
could be used to produce affects analogous to psionics, but requiring
no innate abilities, and potentially vastly stronger.

It took some time to begin to do this in a practical way, but by 4990
B.C. it was being done, and over the course of the following quarter of
a century, tremendous strides were made in this area, driven by the
enormous potential rewards. This effort was explosive, both in terms
of the raw power it promised and the social and political impact on
the society of the Atlantean Age.

As noted already, for generations psionic Power and psionic skill had
been, though not the only metric of status in Atlantis and Atlantean-
based society, but certainly one of the primary ones. The fact that
psionic ability has a large hereditary component made it a very useful
measure of superiority for the aristocracy, it gave their claims of
being an elite group a visible and objective and immediate basis.
Even among commoners, psionic ability was a vital measure of status.

Now, the new Flux science was upending and shattering this millennia-
old basis for the social hierarchy.

By 4950 B.C., Flux techniques had advanced to the point that fluxons
(the equivalent of a psion) could match the strongest psions in almost
every area, and fluxons were emerging from every level of society.
Though hereditary did exercise a limited and indirect influence on the
ability of fluxons, it was sufficiently diffuse that it could not be
used as a measure of anything. The primary factors for ability as a
fluxon were strength of will, intelligence, dedication and an
intangible factor that the Atlanteans recognized but which proved to be
unpredictable, one either was especially naturally adept at manipulating
the Flux, or one was not, much like talents for music or mathematics.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Meanwhile, tensions within the Atlantean empire were growing, for a
variety of reasons.

The first reason was simple scale, as the scope of the power of the empire
expanded, more and more different local factions and interests emerged,
complicating world politics. New alliances formed within the empire, and
though all were subordinated to the Circle of Ten and its associated power
structure, preventing serious outbreaks of violence, the tensions were real
and in some cases inherently irreconcilable.

Furthermore, alone with the tensions between the Atlantean-descended
ruling class that governed through the empire and the colonies, there
were tensions between and among the conquered indigenous peoples, from
the ancestors of the Amerinds of the Americas to the peoples of
Eurasia and even Australia and New Zealand and the other southern
lands, as Atlantean power waxed.

At first, Atlantean power in each conquered and settled region was simply
unassailable, the psionic, technological, and organizational advantages
of the Atlanteans were overwhelming, especially in contact with a
world that was often, initially, at a Neolithic level of development. The
passage of time, however, led to the inevitable, locals began to master
Atlantean knowledge, and while they could not match Atlantean psionic
power, they could and eventually did learn to make more advanced
weapons, better armor, and of especial importance, how to organize
themselves to deal with the Atlantean presence.

Attitudes by the conquerors toward the indigenous peoples of the
spreading world-wide Atlantean realm varied widely, from respectful to
condescending to contemptuous to xenophobic. The Unity's constant
program of 'rationalization' (using this word in a different sense
than usual) tended to take the edges off that curve in both
directions, oddly enough. The Unity preferred to encourage an ethic
and mental habit of what it considered to be rational self-
interest. To the degree it succeeded in inculcating these attitudes,
both exuberant curiosity and irrational xenophobia tended to be
blunted in favor of a range of attitudes based on self-centered
indifference. Some exceptions did exist, of course, and in the long
term the outcome was often somewhat different, as we shall see.

Treatment of the subordinated local peoples varied widely, from a sort
of condescending respect in Athenia to callous indifference in many of
the colonies in North America to extreme cruelty in Mesoamerica and
some regions of Asia. Much depended on the local quirks and cultural
shifts in a given region, and on the sort of aristocrats who actually governed
in a given colony. This variance included attitudes toward intermarriage,
which was seen as natural in Athenia and its associated colonial
territories, doubtful in some others, socially discouraged and even
forbidden by law in still others. Of course, only pureblood Atlanteans
were usually allowed on the Island proper. By 4990 BC, the penalty
for a 'half-blood' to travel to Atlantis without permission was
enslavement, the penalty for the same offense on the part of a 'pure
commoner' was immediate execution, and the government was deadly
serious about enforcement.

Another source of tension was the orichalcum supply. Even the new
Flux-based techniques had extensive uses for the material, so the
advent of fluxons and Matrix-technologies only increased demand for a
resource with a strictly limited supply. [1]

Since all the orichalcum in the world (as far as the peoples of the
Antediluvian Age knew) derived from the Island of Atlantis, that
provided one of the glues that held the empire together. Even if a
rebellion could have been successfully mounted, even if Atlantean-
derived colonists and local people could make common cause against
the rulers in Atlantica, a successful rebellion would have been cutting
themselves off from the only source of a commercially and militarily
indispensable resource.

Now, after centuries of mining, the best ore deposits in Atlantis were
beginning to be mined out.

This had predictable results, the price of the mysterious substance rose,
both the 'legal' price set by a combination of market pressure and imperial
fiat, and the unofficial and inevitable black market price that more
accurately reflected the real value of the material. The value of orichalcum,
relative to other commodities and other goods and services, rose, and rose,
and rose, and rose. Sometimes the increase leveled off for a while, when
the Orichalcum Guild perfected some new technique of mining or discovered
a better vein of the substance, but never did it decrease, and always,
always the price would begin to rise again, since demand for the
miracle material always outstripped the sharply limited supply.

Of course, the rising price made it worthwhile to mine poorer ore bodies, to
go to greater and more difficult lengths to mine out the remaining hard-to-get
supplies, to seek new sources in ever more remote parts of the Atlantis,
and so the metal kept coming, but to the far-sighted among the aristocracy,
the merchant classes, the military, and the commoners, it was possible to
foresee a day when the supply would level off, when the last of the low-grade
ore was mined out.

What would happen then was an increasingly common question on the minds
of the informed in 4990 B.C.

MORE LATER.


[1] Matrix/Flux power is still basically psychic power on a fantastic
scale, from an outside source. The underlying physics are the same,
and orichalcum is useful (and dangerous to) fluxons just as it is to psions.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

One of the informed people (or at least informed entities) pondering
the implications of the orichalcum shortage was the Unity. Grown by
now to include over 100 'components', it had gained enough strength
and power, but its projects required orichalcum, and while it cared
nothing at all for the Atlantean state per se, that state and the
social organization it imposed on a growing part of the world were
very useful to the Unity.

The trouble was that the problem was not readily solvable, orichalcum
was a physical commodity, it either existed in a given place, or it
did not. The Atlanteans themselves had no real idea of what
orichalcum was, throughout most of their millennia of history they had
tended to believe that orichalcum, which superficially resembled
copper, was a kind of copper. Indeed, this intuition was not
utterly wrong, orichalcum was related to copper in a certain sense,
the number of protons in an orichalcum nucleus was the same as the
number of true protons in a copper nucleus, for example. It did not
have enough neutrons to hold the nucleus together, other phenomena
were involved in creating that stability, and these were what granted
orichalcum its unique properties. Indeed, the nucleus of an atom of
orichalcum was not entirely confined the same brane as the normal
nucleons in conventional matter.

In many ways orichalcum behaved like copper chemically, at least
sometimes, and it certainly looked like copper...except that copper
did not glow red due to exposure to sunlight, and pure copper weighed
about thirty-five percent more per unit volume than pure orichalcum.
Its similarities to copper were such that it was often found together with
copper in nature...when it was found at all, which meant in practice only
in Atlantis, and it was none too common there.

By 4990 B.C., the sages of the Atlantean civilization had begun, just by
a little, to understand the underlying structure of matter, though they were
getting there by a very unconventional route, compared to most Homosapient
societies on most worlds. They had their own version of the periodic
table, though their version of it would look quite strange to a modern Terran
chemist, the data were the same and all of the familiar relationships were
present in it. They were studying static electricity, though their grasp of
electrical phenomena was rudimentary, they had used crude magnetic
compasses for a long time, but they had never really delved into the
'why and how' of such things, they were beginning to do so now.
They were studying light much more intensively, and this was leading
them into the structure of matter as well. The Atlantean sages had a
vague concept of the atom.

They had no conception of the nucleus or electrons, however. They
had no grasp of the relationship between magnets and chemistry, and
certainly not even a vague hint of basic quantum theory, though they had
encountered the effects of quantum mechanics routinely in using
their psi abilities, especially when using such talents as precognition or
teleportation. Trying to understand just it was that made orichalcum so
different in kind than copper, and indeed than all the other chemical
elements, was still well beyond their understanding. [1]

This left the Antediluvian Age sages almost helpless in the face of the
questions about orichalcum, including the question of where besides
Atlantis one might find more of the substance. Certainly many sages,
and the Unity as well, had asked themselves just why this strange
substance was to be found in Atlantis, and apparently nowhere else in
all the world. It was fairy clear to the people of that age that the
answer involved volcanoes...somehow. The orichalcum of Atlantis was
always found in volcanic rock, or in places where it had clearly
eroded out of volcanic rock. Yet there were volcanoes all over the
world, and near none of them did the eager searchers ever find any
other source of orichalcum.

Perhaps it was just volcanic islands, some speculated. Atlantean
sailors and sages searched volcanic islands from the Caribbean to the
southern Pacific, they searched Hawaii and the Galapagos and
Martinique and Santorini and Indonesia...and found no orichalcum.

Perhaps volcanoes somehow changed copper to orichalcum? Various
ingenious and bizarre experiments were carried out along these lines
near active volcanoes, the usual result being the loss of a supply of
refined copper and all too often of the experimenter(s). Certainly no
orichalcum ever was to be found after such an experiment.

One theory was that one had to have a 'seed' of orichalcum for a
volcano to turn copper to orichalcum. This experiment was performed
near an erupting volcano in the Hawaiian chain (Kilauea to be
precise). Several packages were made up, consisting of a small pellet
of orichalcum sheathed in ordinary copper, and left where the flowing
lava could bury them, the sites then guarded (to keep someone from
digging up the packages to get the seed pellet, it was that
expensive) for various times. Each time the package was dug out, each
time the result disappointing. Not even leaving the package buried in
lava to twenty years made any more orichalcum.

Some sages, and the Unity itself, concluded that the orichalcum must
be coming to the Atlantean volcanoes from somewhere deep within the
Earth, and that it only reached the surface in Atlantis for unknown
reasons. [2] The Unity took it a step further, it considered what it
knew of the nature of volcanoes, it gathered everything the Atlantean
sages knew or thought they knew about geology and the Earth, and
realized that deep beneath and within the island of Atlantis were
great chambers filled with immense masses of liquid rock under heavy
pressure, rich with dissolved gases. This much the Atlanteans
understood well, both in theory and practice, their ESPers having
actually 'seen' the deep magma chambers and their theoretical sages
had some grasp of how they worked. [3]

The Unity calculated that it seemed likely that if the surface lavas
in Atlantis contained orichalcum, then the great magma chambers
underneath the island ought to contain still more of it. Many
Atlantean sages had speculated to this effect. If it could somehow
gain access to that material, its supply problems would be solved
(assuming, the Unity knew, that theory about its presence was right).

This left only the interesting and non-trivial question of how to
actually get at this hypothetical supply of orichalcum, safely housed
in vast chambers deep below the surface, dissolved into masses of
ultra-hot liquid magma under fantastic pressure.

MORE LATER.


[1] Indeed, it (and psionics generally) would require a deeper grasp
of particle/field theory than the modern Standard Model provides,
orichalcum can only be grasped in terms of the unification of relativity and
quantum field theory, and requires a grasp of the physics of hyperspace.
The questions orichalcum would raise would be maddening to an early
21C physicist, Atlantean sages in 4990 B.C. were not even be equipped
to ask the relevant questions in the first place...yet.

[2] They were on the right track here, most of Earth's orichalcum is
actually in the outer core, only a trivial percentage was raised to the surface
in the tiny mantle plume underlying Atlantis.

[3] The Atlantean 'scientific community' lagged behind the later day West
in understanding electrical phenomena and deep structure in matter,
but their geologists would have recognized Yellowstone or Long Valley
for what they were at the technological equivalent of the 1600s. ESP was
a very significant aid to geology.