ATLANTIS: The Final Countdown...

Jefferson wrote:
> Johnny1a wrote:
>> If the Golden Age of Atlantis was passed . . .
>
> Hurray! We finally to get to find out how Atlantis ended, and how the
> Other managed to survive, and maybe even how old "Cousin Lucy" is!
>
How long has it been? I used to have an index of all the Atlantis
articles, but eventually I figured I must have been missing a lot.

David Alex Lamb wrote:
> Jefferson wrote:
>> Johnny1a wrote:
>>> If the Golden Age of Atlantis was passed . . .
>>
>> Hurray! We finally to get to find out how Atlantis ended, and how the
>> Other managed to survive, and maybe even how old "Cousin Lucy" is!
>
> How long has it been? I used to have an index of all the Atlantis
> articles, but eventually I figured I must have been missing a lot.

It looks to me like the last post on Atlantis (specifically) was
April 8, 2003, but Google is weird about dates sometimes. I have
all the posts in an archive, but don't have dates for the
Atlantis ones.

--
Jefferson
http://www.meanspc.com/~jeff_wilson63/rpg/

LATER.

Much was going in the sixth millennium BC, but let us 'zoom in' and
take a closer look at doings at the top of the great pyramid of power
that was the Atlantean realms.

After the death of the Eldest, a civil war over the succession had
ended in a realization that there could not _be_ a succession, no one
could possibly take the place of the Eldest, who was immortal,
individually the most powerful being in Atlantis in terms of physical
and psychic strength, and possessed experience and knowledge on one
else could match. As his exceptionally long-lived, but sterile
offspring passed from the scene in the aftermath of his death, a
tremendous struggle for power had ended with the emergence of a new
government, headed by a committee or board which we have called the
Circle of Ten.

The Circle of Ten would look to a modern like a cross between an
aristocratic coterie and a parliamentary cabinet government. Its
membership was drawn entirely from the highest circles of the
hereditary aristocracy, no commoner could hope to become a member.
[1] In theory membership was not hereditary, in practice it often
was. Often, but not always, because any member of the Circle could be
challenged for his seat by a variety of means, all legal and none
necessarily violent, as time passed a considerable body of official
and customary law grew up around the Circle.

If nobody challenged and took a seat, in theory when it was vacated
(by resignation or death), a new candidate was chosen by the remainder
of the Circle. In practice, this was more often than not the son of
the former holder, but this was never a certainty, the heir had to be
capable enough to hold the seat, and the Atlantean aristocrats were
power-wise enough to realize that their positions in society were not
written in stone. It was not unusual, when an open seat was being
filled, for some noble family with a promising scion to attempt to
slip their own kin into the empty chair, displacing the family that
held it, and this worked often enough to keep it a viable path to
power.

The amount of pressure, political, social, monetary, and
'extracurricular' that could be brought to bear to change a family's
hold on one of the seats in the Circle was enormous. A wise man would
not even _consider_ trying for a seat on the Circle unless he was very
sure of himself, and his abilities, political, social, financial, and
psionic. [2][3][4]

The Circle of Ten was organized in theory as a group of equals, in
practice, of course, some were more equal than others, though they
were usually comparable enough in ability and resources that the
shifts in power among them went back and forth over time. Rarely one
would be so skilled, or connected, or both that he would dominate the
Circle for long periods, acting in practical effect as a single ruler,
more often rovial power centers split the Circle and created their own
sort of ongoing stability.

The Circle of Ten in theory held the full governmental and legal
powers of the deceased Eldest, when they acted in concert. In fact,
even though the Eldest had now been dead for about a century and a
half, the Circle of Ten continued to rule 'in his name' as a legal
basis for their power. The very nature of the autocratic rule of the
Eldest had been such that there could never have been any sort of
succession system, the legal basis the Circle of Ten ruled under was
put together after the fact to legitimize the outcome of the civil war
that had erupted after the death of the Eldest.

For all of its convenient origins, though, the legal system that grew
up around the Circle of Ten proved functional enough, and the Circle
proved able to govern.

Along with ten highest aristocrats who sat on the Circle of Ten, there
were two other especially important public officials, their officials
titles would translate into modern English roughly as the Lord of the
Treasury and the Lord of the Fleet. The former controlled the money
and finances of the government, the later was the highest ranking
military official. In theory both answered to the Circle of Ten who
appointed them, in practice both seats tended to be filled by
aristocrats already so powerful that they were practically equal to
the Circle.

Thus these twelve men (and occasionally women) were the highest
political and social power in the Atlantean Age after the death of the
Eldest, they were the rulers of the rulers. [5]

However, it should not be thought that the Circle and the Two had
everything their own way. There were other centers of power,
financial, social, and other that had to be respected, as with any
state the actual workings of the government were different than their
theoretical basis. There were great merchant guilds whose combined
wealth made them a force to be reckoned with. There were great
aristocratic families who held no _formal_ power in the state, but who
were in practice almost equal to the twelve rulers. There were
colonial power centers on the continents, and there was the necessity
of keeping the military loyal, and there was as in any age the
question of how to pay for it all. The Circle ruled, but in practice
not absolutely.

One very important 'special' power center was, as has been noted
before, the Orichalcum Guild. This was important enough that we'll
address it in our next posting, it needs special attention.

MORE LATER.


Shermanlee


[1] However, the aristocracy of Atlantis was remarkably flexible,
while no commoner could become a member, a commoner could hope to
become an aristocrat and thus be, in theory, in consideration, since
he would not be a commoner any more.

[2] Psionic power was one of the key status markers of the Atlantean
society, their aristocracy really was 'rule of the best' if 'best' is
defined as possession of and skill with psychic Power. Being
psionically able was 'necessary but not sufficient' to rise to the
top.

[3] Trying and failing to gain a seat on the Circle could be
financially, socially, and politically disastrous for an unprepared
candidate and his family.

[4] Note: though I use the masculine pronoun, because the _large_
majority of Atlantis' rulers were male, it _was_ possible for a female
of sufficient ability to gain and hold a seat on the Circle of Ten.
It was not common, since the society was male-oriented, a female had
to be _better_ than the abilities and resources of a male to hold the
same status, but it did happen from time to time.

[5] In a much, much later age, these twelve officials would be mutated
by legend into twelve princes, as Plato would have it.

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 partly 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 than, and it occupied, more-or-less, a plume site. Magma
from _very_ deep in the Earth reached near-surface environs under
Atlantis, there were magma chambers under the Island to surpass
anything under Yellowstone or Long Valley or Toba.

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, rainwater 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 Island 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. When Atlantis was at TL2 [1], they were
able to mine and process metals such as tin and copper and even iron
with an ease to match low TL 5 cultures of a later age. 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 Atlantean 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.


Shermanlee



[1] TL2 on the 3e scale.

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 just 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
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, sometimes it was so amplified
that a Telesent thought might miss the man next to you that it was
aimed 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. So the use of telepathy to communicate in the mines, so
useful for other metals, was unworkable in 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 telekinetic 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', using techniques available
to a society operating at TL1, TL2, or TL3, up until the time period
we're discussing. Men mined orichalcum with picks and shovels,
chisels and buckets and rail-carts (plentiful 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.

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 as 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 its 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, had an effectice social
Status of 1 in Atlantean society at large. [2] An experienced
orichalcum miner would be Status 2, a senior miner would have Status 3
in Atlantean society. The really high-ranking Guild members were the
equivalent of medium aristocracy, and the Senior Guildmaster (that
would be the closest English equivalent of the Guild's highest title)
was almost on the level of the Circle of Ten 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 its 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.


Shermanlee


[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] GURPS 3s status scale.

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.

The center of civilization on Earth in those days was the Island of
Atlantis, or at least, it was the _biggest_ and by far the most
powerful society on Earth. Technologically Atlantis was in early TL4,
overall, with the tremendous psionic power at the disposal of the
Atlanteans giving them some abilities to match TL6 or TL7. Atlantean
ships sailed in every ocean, and had by the year 5000 BC touched every
major land mass except for Antarctica.

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 entirely inundated), and swaths of western Africa.
The great secondary 'empire within an empire' of ProtoAthens occupied
much of the eastern part of the Mediterranean and northern Africa, and
was expanding up past what would eventually be the Bosporus. The
greater river valleys of the Congo, the Mississippi, the Amazon, and
the Hudson extended long 'fingers' of Atlantean settlement far inland.

Further away from the Island, 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.

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. While Atlantis
had climbed up to early TL4, 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
retained their own native tongues, but Atlantean, or rather a
bastardized version of the formal language of Atlantis, became a world-
wide language of trade and politics. A man from 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
Atlantean in some form.

The Atlantean Empire _per se_ was the Earth's strongest state 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 fromt the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers met explorers coming
down from the St. 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.

In 4983 BC, an Atlantean ship managed to put Humans ashore on the
coast of Antarctica, breaching the last great land area that the great
mariners had not touched. 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 really make any _use_ of the icebound land.

Still, the world was being explored, and settled, and civilized.

MORE LATER.


Shermanlee

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
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 encouragement and help, the
Atlantean society would have been progressing, but the Unity
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 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 large 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 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 TL, 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, at TL1, 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 for many
higher TLs. They understood in a general sort of way how the seasons
worked, and they had a vague grasp of the 'whys' of the weather. At
TL1.

As time passed, they built on this foundation, both by 'conventional'
means and psionic techniques. As a result, at each TL 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 psi 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 art of
mechanical engineering had its roots here.

It was yet another incident in the orichalcum mines that would set the
stage for the greatest transformation in Atlantean resources in the
history that ancient age. As noted above, there was a misguided
attempt to use Psychokinesis as a mining technique in the orichalcum
mines, someone thought he had a technique that could make this safe.
As it happens, he was not just wrong, but _spectacularly_ wrong.

It was northern summer of the year 5009 BC, a bright, sunny morning,
at about ten am 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 200 people were dead and over
1000 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 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]


[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 added a few grams of sodium to water, and
somehow in doing so blew up an entire city with a nuclear-scale
detonation. That's how shocked and puzzled the Atlanteans were by
this event.

MORE 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 Atlantean 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 Island).

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 a few hundred feet 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 ESP useless all over Atlantis for
days, and clouded later attempts to 'look back' through time at the
event itself.

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 ESP, 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 no little 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 Power 10 Psychokinesis, and 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 some of the strongest psions in Atlantis
in their ability to manipulate the physical world.

In 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, 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 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 (both _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] 'Gaodeis' 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.

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, but a 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]

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 at TL7. [2]

MORE LATER.



[1] Taxonomists of a far later time would classify these entities as
_Homo svarta_.

[2] Recall that this is GURPS 3e tech scales.

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 BC 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). A year later, he 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 Virginia 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 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
possibilities.

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 town
of our innovator was on what we consider the continental shelf off the
coast of modern Virginia. Likewise, the mouth of the Hudson was a bit
further to the east then.

[2] i.e. 'air-trireme'.

As we have seen, things were changing fast in the ancient world around
the year 5000 BC. 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 perhaps most importantly, 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 BC the Atlanteans were about as
advanced with it as Westerners were around 1700. Advanced 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 BC, 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 power as much as the
West later would, which made its adoption a more leisurely affair,
with one large exception: the seafarers.

For many years, Telekinesis in various forms had, along with wind
pwoer, been the driving force of sea travel. PK gave Atlantean
sailors a degree of control over their travels, and a backup to wind
power in calm times and places. PK meant that Atlantean sailors did
not fear the calm bands around the world, what a later age would call
the 'horse latitudes'. 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 lond and how
steadily they could maintain that speed, and much, much easier than
driving the vessels telekinetically.

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 dicovered 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 Homosentients
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
BC 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, 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 meaure 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
unpredictable, one either was especially naturally adept at
manipulating the Flux, or one was not.

MORE 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 area was
unassailable, the psionic, technological, and organization advantages
of the Atlanteans were overwhelming, especially in contact with a
world that was largely, 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.

Treatment of the subordinated local peoples varied widely, from a sort
of condescending respect in ProtoAthens to callous indifference in
places like North America to extreme cruelty Mesoamerica and 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 ProtoAthens and its associated
territories, doubtful in some others, socially discouraged and even
forbidden by law in still others. Of course, no 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 techiques 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 be 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 fait, 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 levelled off for a while, when the Orichalcum Guild perfected
some new technique of mining or discovered a better vein of the metal,
but never did it decrease, and always, _always_ the price would begin
to rise again, since demand _always_ outstripped 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 queston on the minds
of the informed in 4990 BC.

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.

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 _and proton equivalents_ in an orichalcum
nucleus was the same as the number of true protons in a copper
nucleus, for example. In many ways it acted like copper chemically,
at least sometimes, and it certainly _looked_ like copper...except
that copper did not glow red after exposure to sunlight, and copper
weighed about 35% more per volume than orichalcum. Its similarities
to copper were such that it was often found together with copper in
nature...when it was found at all.

The Atlanteans were beginning, a little, in 4990 BC to understand the
underlying structures of matter, though they were getting there by a
very unconventional route, compared to most Homosentient 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 the familiar relationships were
present. 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 quantum theory, though they
encountered the _effects_ of quantum mechanics routinely in using
their psi abilities. Trying to understand what made orichalcum
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 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 considered. Atlanteans
sailors and sages searched volcanic islands from the Caribbean to the
southern Pacific, they searched Hawaii and the Galapagos and
Martinique and Santorini...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 often of the experimenter(s). Certainy no
orichalcum ever was to be found after such an experiment.

One theory was that you 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 20 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.

MORE LATER.


[1] Indeed, it (and psionics generally) would require a deeper grasp
of particle/field theory than the Standard Model provides, orichalcum
can only be grasped in terms of the unification of relativity and
quantum theory. The questions orichalcum would raise would be
maddening to an early 21C physicist, an Atlantean sage in 4990 BC
would 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.

[3] The Atlantean 'scientific community' lagged behind the later 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 equivalent of the 1600s. ESP was a big aid
to geology.