Atlantis and Crisis
Johnny1A
Age, with settlements spread across the coasts on both sides of the
Atlantic Ocean, and further (and somewhat iconoclastic) settlements in
the Mediterranean Basin. I also mentioned that Atlantis was ruled by
a single immortal 'demigod' throughout its history, from its
settlement in the paleolithic up until the 5000s BC.
I mentioned in "Atlantis and Athens" that this reign of the Eldest
finally came to an end.
The end came suddenly, and unnaturally. All the Atlanteans knew was
that on a bright, sunny morning in May of 5193 BC, a scream echoed
through the Royal Palace atop the Central Peak of the Atlantean
Capitol. It was one of the Eldest's wives, who had walked into the
private chambers of the monarch to find him lying, dead and cold, on
the floor of his private 'study', his throat slit.
This was a tremendous shock on several levels. For one thing, the
Eldest was a telepath and telekinetic of immense power. For another,
he average stronger and faster and more alert than pure humans. Yet
somehow, someone or something had gotten into the palace, past guards,
watchers, psionically potent courtiers and servants, and into the
Eldest's private chambers, and then managed to cut the throat of a
demigod, and get out again undetected.
Politically, it threw Atlantis into a 'constitutional crisis'
unparalleled in its millennia-long history. The Eldest had ruled as
monarch throughout the history of Atlantis, generation after
generation, century after century, millenium after millenium. His
telepathic powers meant that most of his subjects had personally
communicated with him, at least occasionally, or at least had sensed
his presence. He _was_ Atlantis, psychologically, to most of his
subjects. Now, the eternal ruler was dead.
Naturally, it didn't take long for the Atlantean government and
society to begin to come undone. There simply _wasn't any_ mechanism
for an orderly succession. For that matter, since the Eldest had not
been altogether human, there _couldn't be_ an orderly succession,
since no mortal could hope to take the place of the Eldest in the
Atlantean society. Such a thing was not even psychologiclly
conceivable to the Atlanteans, esp. in the shock of the sudden death
of a being who had seemed as much a part of the natural order as dawn
and sunset.
The offspring of the Eldest governed under his authority in the
regions and cities, but they had no legal or cultural authority to
step into his place, even if they had been capable of it. Further,
there was no specific ranking among those offspring, no
straightforward way for any one to step forward for the role. Worse
yet, since the hybrid offspring of the Eldest were sterile, they could
not found royal lines anyway, at least not by the usual means.
What followed, beginning within a month of the death of the Eldest,
was the first true civil war in Atlantean history. There had been
occasional rebellion and violence in the history of the
island-continent, but always local, and always more a matter of
organized criminals or bridandage than actual war for power. This was
civil war, a combination of a succession struggle of sorts, and sheer
disruption and chaos as the psychological shock sank in.
The war went on, waxing and waning, for nine years. It was very
strange, waged with a combination of high TL2 weaponry and powerful
and subtle psionics. Warriors engaged in autoteleportation during
knife fights, used cryokinesis and pyrokinesis to destroy enemy crops
and facilities, used telereceive and ESP to spy on each other, etc,
while fighting with bows and arrows and swords and fire.
The war disrupted agriculture, disrupted shipping, and spread beyond
Atlantis to the settlements. Many of the most powerful and talented
psions were killed in the fighting. Training and education were
disrupted, the economy strained, the fabric of the whole society
unravelled. But eventually, the war did end.
The winners were a group of the Eldest's offspring. They were
psionically potent, skillful strategically and tactically, and lucky.
Many of the siblings and half-siblings were dead, or lined up behind
one of the major contenders or another. What emerged from the war was
a new social and political arrangement for Atlantis.
There were ten winners, and each one took one of the ten major
provinces of Atlantis as his personal domain. They elected from among
their own membership a single over-ruler, with limited powers over his
fellows. Atlantis breathed a sigh of relief with the end of the war,
and they were too battered and shocked by the death of the Eldest to
do otherwise anyway. Atlantis needed decades to begin to seriously
recover from the civil war.
The ten winners of the civil war still faced the succession problem,
since they were reproductively sterile. They solved it by a technique
that would later be used by the early Imperial Romans: each of the
winners _adopted_ (in legal theory) a promising and talented young
mortal, usually a teenager, and named him as his heir. Since these
adopted successors were pure mortals, not hybrid offspring of the
Eldest, they couldn't match the psi power of their adopted fathers,
but they were usually among the strongest pure-human psions, and
trained in the arts of rule by the initial committee of rulers.
Over half the offspring of the Eldest died in the civil war. The
remainder more or less governed Atlantis for the next couple of
centuries, either as part of the governing council of ten or
lieutenants of them. But there could be no more of this peculiar
group. One by one, the long-lived but mortal offspring of the Eldest
died, until, by ~4990, Atlantis was for the first time in its long
history ruled by entirely by humans. Another few decades saw the last
mortals who could remember the rule of the half-demigods were gone as
well. It was a fundamental change in Atlantis, things never were, and
could never be, the same again.
Meanwhile, the settlements had been on their own, more or less, after
the death of the Eldest and during the ensuing civil war. Some
declared their independence of Atlantis and each other, some warred on
each other, some formed alliances. Over the decades after the end of
the war, Atlantis began to reassert authority over the settlements,
but not without resistance.
Settlers who had been loyal to the Eldest often saw no particular
reason that the successor council should command them. Some
settlements found they liked independence, others eagerly adhered to
Atlantis again. But one by one, those city-states trying to remain
independent were reconquered by the resurgant power of the new
Atlantean government. Some were brought to heal by force, some by
bribes and promises, some by persuasion, some rejoined eagerly. But
the reunified empire was never as internally peaceful or 'comfortable'
as it had been previously, and never would be again.
In the Mediterranean Basin, the resistance was strongest, and the
city-states there were older and already more independent than the
others even before the murder of the Eldest. Here, far from Atlantis,
faced with stronger resistance, the Atlantean Empire found itself
tangled into an ongoing minor, stop-and-start war. The greatest of
the resisting city-states, the one near the sight of the future
Athens, formed its own federated alliance with her neighboring
Atlantean colony-cities, creating a mini-state that was about halfway
between a rebellious province and an independent nation.
Myths and legends grew up about the Eldest, and his mysterious murder.
The Atlanteans never did learn who murdered him, or how. As time
passed, and living memory of the former state of things faded away,
even the Atlanteans themselves began to remember it with a gloss of
nostalgia and a memory of horror at the end of it, and the war that
followed.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> Myths and legends grew up about the Eldest, and his mysterious murder.
> The Atlanteans never did learn who murdered him, or how. As time
> passed, and living memory of the former state of things faded away,
> even the Atlanteans themselves began to remember it with a gloss of
> nostalgia and a memory of horror at the end of it, and the war that
> followed.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
The new Atlantean Empire was much more of an 'empire' than the former
loose association of city-states in and out of Atlantis, unified by
loyalty to the Eldest. The new AE was more centrally governed, and at
the same time less cohesive. The psychological and sociological
changes brought about by the murder of the Eldest and the ensuing
civil wars were profound.
But Atlantis did recover, politically and militarily, anyway. Their
economy eventually began to hum again, albeit with a different
emphasis, and their growth in psionic power and skills resumed after
the downward slide during the civil wars. But Atlantis, as a culture,
was wearier, warier, and less internally trusting than it had been
before. Factions were everywhere, some along the lines of what
moderns would call political parties, some based on various cultural
or religious divisions.
One of those factions was born as the melding of a political pressure
group, that sought to obtain greater influence on the Circle of Ten,
as the new fully human rulers of Atlantis came to be known, and
another group that was driven by a notion of increasing psionic power
in new ways. It was an odd combination that proved fruitful, in the
short term.
Now, by this point just about everyone in Atlantis had a level of
psionic power that later ages would call immense. Those who sat in
the high levels of the Imperial Court and the Circle of Ten were
usually far stronger and more skilled than average at psionics, though
that alone was not sufficient to achieve such power in a psi-saturated
culture such as Atlantis. So ordinary use of high-Power psi, which
could make a psion a king in another culture, was of limited political
utility there.
It was common knowledge in Atlantis that a psi-gestalt could greatly
increase Power for a given purpose, but what of that? Gestalts were
common in Atlantis, it was a rare 10 year old who had never been part
of one. Further, the Atlanteans could sense the presence and
operation of a psi-gestalt as casually, and naturally, as a 21st
century American would notice the sound of a car engine and look up to
avoid being run down.
The Atlanteans also knew that certain natural substances, of various
origins and natures, could be used to increase Power temporarily, or
produce other effects psionically useful. Again, what of that? Most
of the substances were dangerous, some were illegal, and almost all
were regarded as socially disreputable.
The group in question hit on a new idea: why not try to create a new
_kind_ of gestalt, one that could do things ordinary gestalts could
not? This effort came to involve deep study of telepathic techniques,
the first systematic investigation of the effects of the natural
psi-drugs, and, after a time, a growing ruthlessness about their
testing.
Their successes were few and far between, at first. They scarcely
trusted each other, their motivations were often in conflict, and they
had to operate more or less in secret, if whatever developments they
managed were to be useful. But over a period of 20 years or so, by
dint of testing various drugs on test subjects whose later
disappearance could be explained away, and by deep study of Telepathy,
they did learn new psi skills, and new ways to apply them. Bit by
bit, the adepts of this half-cult/half political party began to rise
up through the ranks of the Atlantean government.
They also began to accumulate wealth, and bit by bit the group grew,
and its purposes subtly changed with new membership. One of the
discoveries they made was that a higher 'level' of full telepathic
communion was possible, one that led the way, in turn, to still more
complex new skills.
It was nearly 50 years after this group began its work that a
discovery, in the jungles of South America, of a new psi-active plant
that could boost Power without lethal or long-term side-effects
(apparently) gave them the tool they needed to put themselves over the
top. A selected member of their group was 'adopted' by a
mind-influenced member of the Circle of Ten, and later became a member
of that council when the adopter was found mysteriously drowned.
With a seat in the highest council, this secret society had access to
greater funds, greater security, and greater possibilities. They also
had advice from a source which most of the cult itself knew little or
nothing of, singularly useful, if cryptic, advice. Drawing on their
own efforts, and the advice of their mysterious source, they managed,
about a century after the secret society was founded, to finally
achieve a 'new type' of gestalt.
Unfortunately for them, it wasn't the new kind of gestalt they
_wanted_.
There were two dozen members of the secret society's innermost circle
of initiation in the state of full communion when the breakthrough
occurred. They were all hyped on several different psionically active
substances from various sources. Some of those substances were
hallucinogenic, psychoactive, physically and/or psychologically
addictive, and/or had myriad other effects as well as being
psionically-influential. The synergistic results of these combinations
would have been impossible for even a 21st century medical expert to
predict.
Probably, normal humans would have been killed or brain-damaged by
such a witch's brew. But these were psions, exceptionally capable
even by Atlantean standards, and skilled in Biocontrol and Healing and
other skills that could work to counteract the bad effects, or at
least modify them. They had been using their various concoctions and
combinations of ingested, inhaled, and injected (crudely) substances
long enough that their tissues were saturated.
They were in full communion pretty much all the time. Their minds had
already begun to 'learn' to work in parallel, and they shared
information mentally in a way vaguely analogous to a modern database
system. But all that was simply the prelude to what happened when
they finally achieved the 'breakthrough' their group had sought for
over a century.
It was on a dark and dreary night in what a later age would call
November that they made this breakthough, while deep in a state of
communion and experimenting with a new mental technique. When it
happened, it happened suddenly, a flash of connection, a fusion, and a
wrenching transformation of mentality.
The servants and lesser acolytes of the group heard screams from the
sealed meditation chamber, but when they broke in, all they found were
their leaders unconscious but apparently unhurt, and within a few
hours all 24 had regained consciousness, and seemed none the worse
save for bruies from hitting the floor when they passed out. To all
appearances, it had merely been an experiment gone wrong, like many
others they had performed over the years.
In fact, that night, in that screaming moment, the clock began to
count down the decades, years, days, and seconds to the ultimate
destruction of Atlantis.
Shermanlee
Mike Miller
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
> Fascinating. Keep this stuff coming.
>
> Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
I'm flattered you're interested. :)
More is coming soon!
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The servants and lesser acolytes of the group heard screams from the
> sealed meditation chamber, but when they broke in, all they found were
> their leaders unconscious but apparently unhurt, and within a few
> hours all 24 had regained consciousness, and seemed none the worse
> save for bruies from hitting the floor when they passed out. To all
> appearances, it had merely been an experiment gone wrong, like many
> others they had performed over the years.
>
> In fact, that night, in that screaming moment, the clock began to
> count down the decades, years, days, and seconds to the ultimate
> destruction of Atlantis.
>
> Shermanlee
What exactly had happened?
Well, the 24 leaders of the cult/party were all high-level psions,
with both high levels of Power (20-25 in some Powers) and high levels
of skill in those Powers. They had been striving to create a new type
of gestalt fusion, one which could, wielded in secret, grant them
greater personal and political power in the psionics-drenched society
of the Atlantean Empire.
That night, in that moment, everything came together. Twenty-four
people, their minds already used to being in full communion pretty
much 24/7, for weeks or months at a time. Twenty-four people, seven
women and 17 men, ranging in age from 31 to 122, all of them using
various psionics-enhancing or modifying drugs, none of them using the
same exact mixture of drugs, or the same precise dosages.
Twenty-four people, all of them highly intelligent, highly _driven_,
with an apptetite for power and wealth and attention (and the
concommitant perks that go with those). Twenty-four people,
experimenting with techniques they barely comprehended and working in
secret, without counsel or cautionary voices, ruthless with others
and, in their ways, ruthless with themselves.
They were meeting in a sealed chamber, within the 'headquarters' of
their secretive society, an aristocratic 'private club' to all
apparent outside appearances. They met in a sealed chamber, with
walls of stone, inlaid with strips and sheets of orichalcum, a
material with a variety of psionic properties. The very air of the
chamber was a haze, as the chamber had no access to natural light, and
was lit from within by fireplaces on each wall, and by braziers in
which hallucingens were heated into vapor.
In that environment, _something_ occurred. The 24 minds, in a
split-second of unthinkably complex phenomena, operating in perfect
parallel, developed the Compartmentalized Mind state (in this case, it
was _not_ an Advantage). However, each mind developed only two
compartments. One compartment in each mind was the original intellect
and persona of that person. The other compartment was something else,
part of something new.
A new intellect was 'born' in tha moment, a collective consciousness
made up of the 24 new compartments formed in the brains of the 24
psions. A collective consciousness, slightly like some massively
parallel program running on 24 processors, with a level of
interconnection at awesome levels. It should not have happened. The
odds of such a sentient gestalt forming, and stablizing itself, were
probably 100,000 to 1 against. But like an impactor collision or the
coin landing on its side and standing, the most improbable events
occasionally do occur. For the Atlantean civilization, it was a dark
miracle.
The newborn intellect was a psionic entity itself, of course. Indeed,
it 'lived' and existed by virture of psionics. It was formed out of
human mentalities, but in itself it was a very alien sort of mind. It
was neither exactly male nor female, though both formed part of its
matrix. It had no kin, no peers, nothing to give it the same view of
the world that a normal individual human would possess. It was very
bright, with a native IQ of at least 16 when it first came into
existence.
Naturally, at first, the new being, which we shall call the Unity, was
very confused, very unsure of itself, barely comprehending the fact of
its own existence. But it had the memories of 24 intelligent,
experienced, and educated Atlantean aristocrats to draw upon. It soon
began to gain some understanding of what it was, where it was, and
what sort of world it existed within.
Did the 24 individuals know what had happened? Not exactly, not
consciously. When they regained awareness after the agonizing 'birth
trauma' of their unintended alien offspring, they could barely
remember the last several minutes.
They noticed that they were weak and dizzy for some hours, and they
noticed that the orichalcum inlays of the walls had fractured and
cracked. They did not know it, but the metal had resonated to the
psionic energies at work in the birth of the Unity, and the vibrations
had cracked the metal.
One thing they did soon notice was that they had lost their 24/7 full
communion, and they seemed unable to regain it. They attributed it to
their 'failed' experiment, and assumed that they would be able to
regain it later. In fact, of course, the communion remained,
transformed beyond recognition, but no longer available to the
individual personas, being absorbed entirely by the Unity. They could
still telesend and telereceive with each other and others, but only at
ordinary levels, and all 24 had lost (they thought) the ability to
take part in psionic gestalts.
They continued their lives, of course. All were high ranking
aristocrats or scholars or merchants or soldiers, and though they
seemed to have lost a bit of their psionic power, they were still
stronger than the vast majority of Atlanteans, and still had their
status and position, since even in Atlantis, there was more to rank
than just psi power.
Little appeared to have changed for a few years. Another of the
original 24 rose to the Circle of Ten. The highest ranking soldier of
the 24 became, in time, due to his genuine military skill and his
political connections, the commander of the Atlantean army. Others
similarly rose in their respective hierarchies. The Unity did little
at first, merely watching and learning, and developing its own unique
and rather alien personality.
As it did, it came to realize certain things about itself. For one
thing, it knew it was not a human being. Though humans made up its
components, or beings who had once been human, it was not a human. It
was also _potentially_ immortal. However, to the Unity's dismay, it
soon realized that it was by no means certain that this immortal
potential would in fact be realized. In truth, the Unity realized
when it was perhaps two years old, it was facing a time limit that
threatened its very existence.
The Unity was made up of 24 compartmentalized mental 'cells', each of
which was individually quite mortal. As they would die, one by one,
the level of compexity of the combined matrix would fall, and when it
fell below a certain critical point, there would be insufficient
combined 'processing power and bandwidth' to sustain the existence of
the Unity. It would destabilize and effectively just fade away. The
Unity was not sure just where the critical point was, but it could
sense that it could not lose many of its components and continue to
exist, the limit was somewhere close to the full 24.
The Unity was born out of the combination of 24 highly self-centered
and driven minds, and like had begat like. It was likewise driven,
likewise self-centered, and it had no more desire to cease existing
than any sentient being would. Born out of the fusion of 24 ruthless
personas, it shared that ruthlessness, raised the more from its
alienness and lack of empathy with individual humans.
But in the face of the age and death of its component members, what
could the Unity do? What recourse did the newborn entity have against
the tide of entropy?
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Mike Miller
>
> But in the face of the age and death of its component members, what
> could the Unity do? What recourse did the newborn entity have against
> the tide of entropy?
Find a method of adding new/replacement processors.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Rob Kelk
Of course, but which method? I'm betting on something that will
directly lead to the Atlantis/Athens War...
Johnny1A definitely has an interesting backstory going for his campaign;
I must remember to Google all the parts and save them somewhere once
they're all posted.
--
Rob Kelk Personal address: robkelk -at- jksrv -dot- com
Any opinions here are mine, not the Government's.
Johnny1A
>
> But in the face of the age and death of its component members, what
> could the Unity do? What recourse did the newborn entity have against
> the tide of entropy?
>
> MORE LATER
LATER
The Unity quickly realized that if it was to survive, it _had_ to
somehow add more members to its collective existence. The goal was
simple, it's implementation promised to be more complex. Just how
complex it would prove in practice the Unity did not immediately
realize when it began its work.
The Unity did not directly _control_ its components, not at this time.
Instead, preferring to remain safely hidden in the 'background', it
subtly influenced them. One of its members might feel a sudden surge
of curiousity about some odd point, and go to the libraries or the
secret libraries of their 'political cult' to find the answer. Of
course, the curiosity was the Unity at work, getting information for
its own purposes. This subtle approach was slower, and more
frustrating, but far safer from the Unity's POV.
Its first plan, once it realized that it _had_ to increase its size to
survive, was to simply incorporate more powerful psions into its
matrix. To do this, it had to work out the process by which it itself
had come into existence. This rapidly proved to be a major
undertaking, and the more the Unity studied the matter, the more
dismayed it became.
As it studied the freak event that led to its 'birth', the Unity began
to realize just how improbable it had really been. The number of
factors involved that the Unity was trying to analyze started in the
dozens, rose to hundreds, and then to thousands, and the Unity had no
direct observations to work from. After three years of intense study
and thought, the Unity came to the reluctant conclusion that it would
take centuries to sort through all the factors and work out a way to
incorporate new people into its existing matrix. The Unity wasn't
even sure it _could_ do it unless it could somehow persuade them to
first attune their minds over a period to the pattern, just as its 24
members had unwittingly done. How to persuade any significant number
of people to do such a thing while remaining secret was a non-trivial
problem.
The Unity's urgency was reinforced when the inevitable happened. One
of its members was killed.
Ironically, the death was not of one of its aged members, but of its
youngest member, a by-then 37 year old aristocrat and scholar. His
death was quite mundane: he got himself stabbed to death at the hands
of the jealous husband of
one of his more attractive female students. This wasn't terribly
surprising, the scholar in question had dallied with more than a few
attractive married female students, trading on his good looks, money,
and social status. The odd thing was that it took that long for
somebody to object violently.
To the Unity, it was a shock: it had been prepared for death of old
age, disease, or even warfare, but it hadn't really mastered enough of
the subtleties of human society to realize how dangerous routine
everyday matters, especially those involving emotions and hormones,
could potentially be. It's risk level was higher than it had known,
and further, it had lost a valuable set of knowledge and a strong
psion from its 'membership'. This sort of thing was not acceptable
with the critical point so close.
Feeling time pressing in on it, it began to scour its mind and the
available libraries for answers, and finally, it found one: perhaps
it could extend its membership by the reproductive activities of its
members. Here, it its mixed relief and disappointment, it succeeded.
Relief, because the Unity did indeed discover a way to add new
'components'. Disappointment, because it was slow. Very slow, and
inconvenient.
The Unity discovered that its members, still genetically human, could
easily produce offspring. The male 'components', however, always
fathered ordinary Atlanteans, not new Unity members. The females,
though, offered an opportunity.
Since they would have easy psionic 'access' to the coalescing
awareness of their unborn children, the Unity was able to gain such
access as well, and through that connection it discovered that it
could indeed 'imprint' itself onto their condensing mentalities,
complete with the dual-chamber compartmentalized mind and the Unity
connection.
It took the Unity several tries to get this right, and it was
hamstrung by the fact that most of its 'components' were male. It had
only seven females in its initial matrix, two of whom were past
menopause, too far past for Biocontrol or Healing to be of use.
Further, if the older ones had mysteriously become pregnant, it would
have been a risky indication of the Unity's existence.
So with only five women of childbearing age to work with, the Unity
had to work with agonizing care and slowness. All five were soon
pregnant, but it took the Unity five failed tries just to get the hang
of the technique. The next round of pregnancies came a year or so
later, long enough to be inconspicuous, (the women did not publically
associate with each other, so the simultaneous pregnancies were not
otherwise notable), and this time it worked. The Unity got four new
members born from the five pregnancies.
Once it knew that it _could_ make this work, the Unity determined that
it was time to get down to business and secure its existence. The
older children of the five women met with mysterious accidents,
diseases, or just vanished over the course of a couple of years.
Meanwhile, a new round of pregnancies began as soon as the Unity could
safely manage it.
Bringing this about was not all that hard, even without exercising
direct control. The Unity could subtly kick up sexual drives in its
components, of either sex, and could use psionic biocontrol to
optimize conditions for impregnation. The same psionic techniques of
Healing and Biocontrol could minimize (but not eliminate) the physical
effects of rapid repeated pregnancies.
With practice, the Unity was able to achieve a 100% success rate in
'imprinting' itself on the immature and helpless minds of the new
offspring. It was still agonizingly slow, but each new birth was a
margin of safety, and as they grew toward maturity, the Unity also
gained increments of power and knowledge. It got better and better at
the details with practice. Three of the women had husbands who might
prove a little too curious about their wives steady pregnancies, all
three met with natural-seeming accidents. With the political and
social connections of the aristocrats who made up the Unity, it was
trivial to move around Atlantis and avoid revealing patterns being
shown.
The Unity hit on a breakthrough when it discovered how to use
Biocontrol to determine which sperm cells reached the ova, thus giving
it the ability to determine the sex of the offspring. The number of
female births suddenly rose dramatically after this discovery.
Shortly thereafter, the Unity discovered how to stimulate the ovaries
to produce two or three eggs per cycle. Multiple births became oddly
common for the female 'members' of the Unity.
Naturally, the women themselves began, after a bit, to realize how
strange their own behavior had become. None of them were quite sure
why the idea of constant pregnancy suddenly seemed appealing, or why
they would barely be over the effects of the last pregnancy before
they'd find themselves thinking with their glands again, and a new
pregnancy going. When they compared notes, the oddities jumped out,
everything from their weirdly heightened sexual drives to the sudden
incidence of multiple births among the female members of the cabal's
leadership.
The Unity had covered its tracks well, it was several years into its
project before its 'components' finally realized just how seriously
weird their behavior and overall lives had become. But when they did
realize it, the Unity and its component personalities were on the
track toward conflict, since it could only be a matter of time before
the intelligent and experienced individuals began to put all the weird
pieces together to see the shape of the puzzle.
Unfortunately for the leaders of the cabal, and the human race as a
whole, by this point it was largely too late. The Unity had been in
existence for 12 years, long enough to learn a great deal, master much
of its own power, and slowly and steadily explore the neural pathways
and voluntary and involuntary nervous systems of its hosts. When they
began to probe into the reason for their own strange behaviors, they
discovered that they Unity was able to apply 'persuasion' to cease and
desist.
Persuasion could include such things as bursts of agonizing pain or
ecstatic pleasure from stimulated brain centers, or induced nausea and
sickness in the body by deliberately disordering basic processes. The
individual personas of the remaining 11 original 'components' were too
disciplined and well trained for the Unity to directly _control_, but
it could certainly apply pressure of various sorts. Likewise, they
could shield their own personal memories from the Unity, once they
knew they needed to, though by then it was mostly too late, the thing
had had plenty of time to flip through their mental files. When it
takes 100% of your Will just to keep your body from being frozen into
paralysis from within, or to keep your own memory private, you are at
a disadvantage in a struggle.
Further, to their abject horror, the originals now discovered the the
offspring of their female members, having been part of the Unity from
birth and having had their minds _directly_ shaped by it psionically
during gestation and early childhood, _were_ subject to direct, total,
puppet-master control from the Unity. The thread of being forced to
watch one's 5 year old offspring stick his/her hand into an open fire
is quite a potent dissuader to a parent. The Unity was utterly
ruthless, and it didn't care if it maimed or damaged an individual
component if that served its larger goals.
The children did, of course, have their own minds, but they never had
a chance. They shared their bodies from before birth with an alien
presence that was vastly more powerful and experienced than they were,
making them effectively almost passengers in their own bodies whenever
it suited the Unity.
Their mothers and the other leaders of the Cabal, as ruthless and
driven as they had all always been, had never come anywhere close to
this level of hardness, and they were stymied in their efforts by the
fact that they barely, even after all this, understood what they were
up against. Bit by bit they pieced it all together, shielding their
thoughts from their undesired 'other self' and communicating as often
as not in written messages, while using their full Will to cut off the
Unity from their eyes long enough to keep their secrets.
The five female members of the cabal's leadership had the worst of it,
forced to endure round after round of pregnancies, from fathers they
did not select, knowing their children would be slaves to a monstrous
nightmare they barely comprehended, and unable to find a way to do
anything about any of it. The males had it somewhat easier, since
they weren't as *useful* to the Unity (just then), but their lives
were far from pleasant, since the Unity watched them 24 hours a day,
and was prepared to exert its full powers to keep them from revealing
anything to anyone.
All in all, not the outcome they had hoped for when they had set out
on a quest for greater personal political and economic and social
power, 20 years before. Unfortunately for them and the rest of
Atlantis, the worst was yet to come.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1A
>
> But in the face of the age and death of its component members, what
> could the Unity do? What recourse did the newborn entity have against
> the tide of entropy?
>
> MORE LATER
sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in message news:<b3030854.03020...@posting.google.com>...
>
> But in the face of the age and death of its component members, what
> could the Unity do? What recourse did the newborn entity have against
> the tide of entropy?
>
> MORE LATER
LATER
individual personas of the remaining 23 original 'components' were too
disciplined and well trained for the Unity to directly _control_, but
it could certainly apply pressure of various sorts. Likewise, they
could shield their own personal memories from the Unity, once they
knew they needed to, though by then it was mostly too late, the thing
had had plenty of time to flip through their mental files. When it
takes 100% of your Will just to keep your body from being frozen into
paralysis from within, or to keep your own memory private, you are at
a disadvantage in a struggle.
Further, to their abject horror, the originals now discovered the the
offspring of their female members, having been part of the Unity from
birth and having had their minds _directly_ shaped by it psionically
during gestation and early childhood, _were_ subject to direct, total,
puppet-master control from the Unity. The thread of being forced to
watch one's 5 year old offspring stick his/her hand into an open fire
is quite a potent dissuader to a parent. The Unity was utterly
ruthless, and it didn't care if it maimed or damaged an individual
component if that served its larger goals.
The children did, of course, have their own minds, but they never had
a chance. They shared their bodies from before birth with an alien
presence that was vastly more powerful and experienced than they were,
making them effectively almost passengers in their own bodies whenever
it suited the Unity. In their compartmentalized minds, the
Unity-compartment was dominant, rather than equal.
Their mothers and the other leaders of the Cabal, as ruthless and
driven as they had all always been, had never come anywhere close to
this level of coldness, and they were stymied in their efforts by the
fact that they barely, even after all this, understood what they were
up against. Bit by bit they pieced it all together, shielding their
thoughts from their undesired 'other self' and communicating as often
as not in written messages, while using their full Will to cut off the
Unity from their eyes long enough to keep their secrets.
The five 'reproduction-age' female members of the cabal's leadership
had the worst of it, forced to endure round after round of
pregnancies, from fathers they did not select, knowing their children
would be slaves to a monstrous nightmare they barely comprehended, and
unable to find a way to do anything about any of it. The males and
the older females had it slightly easier, since they weren't as
Johnny1A
>
> All in all, not the outcome they had hoped for when they had set out
> on a quest for greater personal political and economic and social
> power, 20 years before. Unfortunately for them and the rest of
> Atlantis, the worst was yet to come.
>
> MORE LATER.
LATER.
Naturally, the remaining original 23 members of the Unity tried to tap
into the resources of their private organization, but again, they
discovered that it was, in essence, too late. While they themselves
had minds of such discipline and strength that the Unity couldn't
directly control them, the other members of the organization had
lesser intellects (indeed, that was why were _were_ lower ranking
members). In many cases, the Unity had firm Telecontrol over them.
In others, they had been so subtly influenced that it was impossible
to say what was their own idea and what was the Unity's silent
suggestions. Still others were free in action and thought, but the
Unity could read their minds at will.
Of course, the Unity also did the same thing with minds outside the
secret society. It soon became apparent to the 23 that one of their
biggest challenges was going to be to figure out who they could trust
and who they could not, in or out of their secret society. Matters
were made the worse by the fact that every one of the original 23 was
individually guilty of offenses against Atlantean law and custom
themselves that would be sufficient to get them executed, quite apart
from the Unity's activities. Indeed, many of their offenses predated
the 'birth' of the Unity.
With that many strikes against them, it perhaps should not be
surprising that they made relatively little progress. Meanwhile, the
five women who could become pregnant, did become pregnant, over and
over. Even after they were aware of what was happening, the Unity
could still apply tremendous pressures, including threatening the
lives of their loved ones (including the children they had already
had, some of them did love them) to ensure their continued
'cooperation'. As noted above, once the Unity got the hang of the
appropriate Biocontrol technique, all the new Unity-offspring were
female, to accelerate the process of adding new 'components'.
While the Unity's most important project remained insuring its own
survival by increasing the number of components in its matrix, it did
have other interests, and those were growing. Two of the surviving
original 23 were members of the Circle of Ten, the ruling body of
Atlantis, and one was the commander of Atlantis' Armies. By subtle
psionic influence, backed by its overwhelming Telepathy Power (about
25 at this time) and its endless, sleepless patience, the Unity gained
strong influence on a couple more members of the Circle.
The Unity saw the psionically talented and powerful humans of Atlantis
as simultaneously a potential resource AND a potential _threat_. Had
it been discovered during this period, it would have been trivially
simple for a few hundred or more Atlanteans to form a gestalt and
blast it out of existence, so secrecy was its primary imperative.
Alternatively, since its original members were all criminals
themselves, in their own ways, had it been discovered soon enough the
Unity could have been destroyed by the execution of its adult members.
Again, secrecy was paramount.
As both a resource and a threat, Atlantean humanity was something the
Unity wanted badly to get firmly under its control. The first step to
doing that was to gain as much control as it could over the government
of the Empire. Further, born as it was out of the fusion of 24
power-hungry intellects, the Unity itself was infused from its origin
with a not insubstantial hunger for power for its own sake, a not
entirely rational urge to dominate.
With direct or indirect influence over 4 of the 10 seats on the ruling
body and one of its members in command of the armies, the Unity was
well on its way. But there were lots of obstacles in the way yet, and
the Unity was still only an embryonic hint of what now suspected it
could become.
The 23 rebellious original component-members knew or suspected most of
this, but they simply couldn't reveal it, between the mental pressure
and the threats the Unity could apply. Further, they believed that
still had quite a bit of time, since the Unity's growth in size and
power was limited by the rate at which its adult female members could
give birth. They thought they had some time before the new female
members could themselves become pregnant. In practice, the time
proved rather shorter than they had hoped.
They had forgotten the Unity's growing skill at Biocontrol, and they
still even yet didn't fully appreciate its nightmarish ruthlessness.
But it wasn't long before they began to realize that their
Unity-offspring were growing rather faster than normal. At age 5,
they looked 7. At age 7, they looked 10 or 11.
The Unity had in fact accelerated their rate of biological growth as
much as it could without inflicting permanent damage or revealing its
own existence to the rest of the world. By the time the girls were
12, they had the _physical_ bodies of 16 year olds. Their individual
minds remained 12, but the Unity could not have cared less about that
just then. It wanted to grow.
It was about that time that the next generation of Unity components
began to be born, usually in twins or triplets, almost all of them
female. By this point, the Unity had about 70 members altogether,
most of them not yet adult, but growing fast, and its native abilities
and Power were rising steadily. But even with its ruthless treatment
of its components, it was still frustrated by the biological realities
that limited its rate of growth. It longed to find a way to have its
male members produce Unity offspring, enabling it to grow
exponentially, but the problem wasn't readily solvable. Unity fusion
wasn't passed on genetically, it required a long period of psionic
linkage with the target mind unable to escape or resist.
Furthermore, even as its new breeders reached an age where they could
be useful, the originals were passing childbearing age, much to their
relief. Indeed, it was coming early, for all the psionic Power the
Unity could apply to prevent it, since the strain of so many rapidly
successive multiple births could not be entirely undone.
As the Unity continued to slowly, creepingly expand its power in the
Atlantean government, and to push its components to the limit to
maximize its growth-rate, it also began to ponder something else:
some odd coincidences that seemed to have been exactly what it took to
make its existence possible in the first place.
The Unity was, in its own alien way, a genius. It's effective IQ was
about 19 at this point. Though it often failed to grasp many aspects
of individual human life and society, it could easily recognize the
laws of probability. It also began to realize that there was one
single, specific, strange event that was an absolute and indispensable
_prerequisite_ to its own creation: the death of the Eldest.
By this point, the Eldest had been dead for over three and a half
centuries. Still the Atlanteans had not entirely gotten over the
shock of his mysterious murder. Now the Unity turned its immensely
powerful intellect to the question, pondering the nature of the
immortal ruler, and the mystery of his murder.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1A
>
> The Unity was, in its own alien way, a genius. It's effective IQ was
> about 19 at this point. Though it often failed to grasp many aspects
> of individual human life and society, it could easily recognize the
> laws of probability. It also began to realize that there was one
> single, specific, strange event that was an absolute and indispensable
> _prerequisite_ to its own creation: the death of the Eldest.
>
> By this point, the Eldest had been dead for over three and a half
> centuries. Still the Atlanteans had not entirely gotten over the
> shock of his mysterious murder. Now the Unity turned its immensely
> powerful intellect to the question, pondering the nature of the
> immortal ruler, and the mystery of his murder.
>
> MORE LATER.
LATER.
The Unity studied the historical records for everything it could learn
about the former immortal ruler and founder of Atlantean society.
There was plenty to study. The Eldest had led the first settlers to
the island, and had ruled Atlantis for well over four thousand years.
Even by this point, three centuries after his death, and with the last
living memory of him dead, the societal memory of the Eldest permeated
Atlantean society. Even the Circle of Ten claimed its legal authority
over the Empire 'in the name of the Eldest', though the Eldest was
dead.
The Unity brought a dispassionate eye to those records, and as it did,
it perceived that the Eldest had grown steadily in psionic (and other)
powers as he ruled, as well as in knowledge and skill. It did not
take the Unity long to realize that if the Eldest had been alive, the
'secret society' that had accidentally created it would never had been
able to function. Further, though the Unity had no way to directly
measure the power levels involved, it came to suspect with high
certainty that the Eldest could fairly easily have destroyed it, even
after it had begun to grow to the point it had by then reached.
The Eldest had possessed Power 25* Psychokinesis, Power 23 Telepathy,
and a range of other psi Powers, plus other less comprehensible
abilities. He was not known to require sleep. Yet somehow, in some
way, he had been murdered, by the mundane technique of having his
throat slit! The Unity coldly calculated that the chance of even the
most psionically and combat-talented Atlantean human being able to
sneak up on the Eldest and slit his throat (and get away clean
afterward!) at being less than 1 in 100,000.
The Unity came to realize that the Eldest could not have been exactly
human. This was no secret, of course, since humans don't live for
millennia, but the Unity, with its colder view, was able to more
clearly perceive just _how_ different the Eldest really had to have
been. The Unity could not yet understand how such a being could come
to exist, but it knew it needed to gather more information, from
Atlantis and from all over the Empire and beyond.
So, as the Unity grew (slowly but inexorably), it turned its attention
from its immediate doings to the larger world. It wanted to increase
its control of Atlantean society, and it wanted information from
beyond the edges of that society. The first thing that occurred to it
was to send 'members' of itself to scout out the provinces, and report
back.
This proved easier said than done.
The first scout it selected was one of the original males (since it
had other uses for the females), and it impressed a tremendous psychic
compulsion on him to carry out the instructions. It chose one of the
older ones, with a capable mind and broad experiences, hoping to
profit from those resources. In doing so it miscalculated badly.
The Unity expected to lose direct contact when he passed beyond the
Telepathic range of the combined collective. What it didn't realize
was that as the individual passed the edges of the Unity's collective
range, it felt its compulsions dissolve!
To the Unity's horror, it discovered that when one of its members
passed beyond the edge of its 'range', the Unity half of the
consciousness was cut off from the whole, leaving the basic innate
mind of the component in firm control! It didn't realize this right
away. The first 'scout' it sent out was one of its 23 original
members, possessed of a powerful and disciplined mentality, and when
he sensed the hold of the Unity compartment of his mind fading, he
concealed it, until he was far enough away that the dismayed
Collective could not yank him back, or strike him down with a mental
blast. Indeed, by the time the slightly distracted Unity realized its
error, its escaping 'member' was beyond range.
The Unity could act fast when it felt threatened, and it did feel
threatened now! Knowing its escaped 'member' might spill the beans,
it promptly, through its slaves in the Atlantean government, put out
the word that he was wanted for various and serious offenses against
Atlantean law. To make this the more effective, most of the charges
were actually quite true, backed up with 'inside information' pilfered
from the mind of the fugitive. He _had_ broken the law, in a dozen
different and serious ways, long before he became an accidental
'parent' of the Unity.
With the authorities of Atlantis proper on the lookout for his return,
the Unity then had the legal authorities send messages to the
provincial cities, sending out what were essentially arrest warrants.
It hoped its errant member would be captured or killed quickly,
anything he said discredited by his crimes. For a long time, the
Unity was in an agony of fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But nothing happened. Its missing 'component' appeared to have simply
vanished off the face of the Earth, and eventually the Unity concluded
that he had simply run as far away as he could get. In that, the
Unity was right in the facts, but quite wrong in the implications. In
time, this error would come back to haunt the collective being.
In the meantime, it still had to find some way to reach its tentacles
beyond the island of Atlantis proper. It now dared not send
individual members out, since they would be free from it as soon as
they moved beyond range. Eventually, it discovered that it could send
small groups of members, and as long as they stayed within range of
_each other_, their Unity-selves would endure, and could be merged
back into the larger Collective later. This meant that yet again, the
collective was stalled by its slow growth rate, and it was doubly
galling because the Unity had been rather contemptuous of the
Atlantean tendency toward Isolation Syndrome. Now, it discovered that
its own nature made it the prisoner of an even stronger sort of
isolation syndrome.
Still, though it was impatient and driven, it was also effectively
immortal while it had a certain minumum number of 'components', and
the offspring of its female 'members' were themselves part of it.
Thus, though its growth rate was very slow at first, it did tend to
accelerate with time. One century after it came into being, all but a
few of the original 24 were dead (and one was missing), but it had
grown to 200 members, of which over 3/4 were female, and thus giving
birth to new members with each pregnancy. A tendency toward multiple
births in the Unity women(limited by the need for secrecy) aided the
process. The Unity could now begin to select outside males for
specific, desired gene lines, or for political or economic advantage,
in marrying off its female 'membership'. Like classic compound
interest, an initially small exponential growth rate now began to
accelerate to the Unity's benefit.
The Unity also discovered something else of interest: in its studies
of psionics, it found that it could utilize orichalcum to create a
kind of 'amplifier relay', to boost its connectivity and power.
Through its slave/members in the Atlantean government, it began to
erect pillars of alloyed orichalcum in a network spread across the
island, which acted to boost the efficiency of its internal
communications, and secondarily helped in the creation of a more
efficient Atlantis-wide communication network for public use (to help
explain the presence of the expensive items).
Expensive? Each intricately shaped and alloyed (with silver and
copper) pillar was several _tons_ in mass, and had to be kept
precisely heated to work properly. This was far larger than they
really needed to be, if all they were to do was serve as telepathic
communications boosters. The 'heat', at low TL3, consisted of steady
coal fires blazing around the base of the pillars to keep the metal
hot (and thus in the proper psionic activity state). Given that
orichalcum was already nearly as expensive as gold, and the fires had
to be tended and watched (if they got _too_ hot, it also wouldn't work
right) this added up to a significant drain on the treasury. The
expensive metal, in turn, required constant guards. All in all, the
money drain became a constant thorn in the government's side, and
inevitably taxation now became a more-than-usually contentious matter
as a consequence.
More importantly, orichalcum was far from common even in Atlantis
itself, and this new project ate into the limited production from the
steadily depleting ore bodies. At TL3, only the higher-quality ores
were workable without psionics, which couldn't be used to mine
orichalcum (at least not safely). The availability of the sine qua
non metal fell slowly but steadily as this project ate into the
reserves, and the price rose in consequence.
Naturally, this did not work to the benefit of the imperial provinces.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The Eldest had possessed Power 25* Psychokinesis, Power 23 Telepathy,
> and a range of other psi Powers, plus other less comprehensible
> abilities. He was not known to require sleep.
NOTE: That figure for Psychkinetic Power uses my modified house
rules, in which the strength goes right on doubling as the scale
rises. Thus Power 25 PK can move 128 American _tons_ of matter a 2
yards/sec.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
Correction to my note: that should be 128 American tons (~116 metric
tons) at _one_ yard per sec, not 2. I only modified the rate of
increase, not the speed.
Johnny1A
> All in all, the
> money drain became a constant thorn in the government's side, and
> inevitably taxation now became a more-than-usually contentious matter
> as a consequence.
>
> More importantly, orichalcum was far from common even in Atlantis
> itself, and this new project ate into the limited production from the
> steadily depleting ore bodies. At TL3, only the higher-quality ores
> were workable without psionics, which couldn't be used to mine
> orichalcum (at least not safely). The availability of the sine qua
> non metal fell slowly but steadily as this project ate into the
> reserves, and the price rose in consequence.
>
> Naturally, this did not work to the benefit of the imperial provinces.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
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).
Under the Empire, individual taxation in Atlantis 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, in the
manner of most low-tech cultures, the expenditures of the Atlantean
government were relatively limited, this had always been 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 guilds and aristocratic alliances in the way.
Therefore, the tribute assessments on the provinces inevitably rose.
This bred no little resentment, since the bulk of the new expenditures
were (supposedly) for the communications system in Atlantis. It had
no benefits at all, even in theory, for the provinces, leaving the
provincials feeling robbed. But for the most part, it was difficult
for the provinces to put up much practical resistance, since the
Atlantean Armies were so powerful (compared to them) and because they
were so unused to such treatment anyway.
Except, of course, around the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea,
where the ProtoAthenean Alliance had grown into a sort of 'empire
within the empire', complete with a local interprovincial government,
greater self-sufficiency than was found anywhere else in the 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 problems getting 'into'.
One was the very base of Atlantean society, 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. PK, Telepathy, ESP, and even Teleportation
were all used in such mining efforts, enabling the Atlanteans at times
to magnify their low TL3 technologies to the point that they could
match high TL6 mining abilities.
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 big piece of the ore body in the process.
So orichalcum was mined by TL3 techniques. 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 bits of 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. Since orichalcum was _indispensable_ to
the Atlantean society, and there was never enough to meet demand, the
Mining Guild was very powerful. Even the Circle of Ten rarely tried
to oppose them directly.
Infiltrating the Guild was hard for the Unity, because the majority of
the miners were inducted into the Guild as offspring of other miners.
Orichalcum mining was a bit 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, etc.
As the ore bodies became depleted, the skills of the Guild became the
more necessary to get the smaller and smaller bits 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.
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 couldn't just send _one_ member-being out, it
had to sent a little 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 the
ProtoAthenian Alliance, making for additional complications. Two of
the three big 'trouble centers' of the Empire were thus allied, and
the Unity knew this could be a big 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 at home.
As the Circle of Ten began to apply pressure to the Seafarers to
restrict their commerce with the Alliance, the Seafarers displayed
just why they could be a problem. Already, many of the Seafarers were
born in the provinces, and now they established a secondary
headquarters in a good harbor in Iceland. It was cold and in some
ways inconvenient, but it meant that the Atlantean government could
not squeeze the Seafarers merely by occupying their original coastal
bases in Atlantis.
The ProtoAthenian Alliance retained its 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.
Likewise, even the Seafarers, ultimately, required orichalcum. Their
ships were propelled by a combination of wind power and Psychokinesis,
and there were meshes and bits of alloyed orichalcum built into the
structure of their ships. Though they didn't need huge amounts,
without that small amount of the rare pseudo-metal per ship, 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 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.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> 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 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 Shermanlee
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 arrange 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 won't he reveal that juicy gossip) to
more serious (will she or won't she cheat on 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
manipulating whole insitutions and families and tribes in its 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 some people's actions than
others, and it eventually came to a horribly dangerous conclusion: it
determined that it was bad at predicting the actions of 'irrational'
people.
By 'irrational' it meant humans would 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 idea what they
_meant_. The dictionary definitions 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
coworker'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 conceive, of
their motivations.
OTOH, self-interest was quite comprehensible to the Unity. It had a
limited understanding of self-sacrifice in the name of one's family
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 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 unpredictable 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 slaves 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. The effects were subtle, but 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 25 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 ideas 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.)
2. All ideas of right 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 everyone else's actions as
well.
3. Atlanteans were an inherently superior people, as proven by their
superior abilities.
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 gist of all of them was to encourage
motivation 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 it.
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
50% 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 incomplete, but by the
standards of the pre-Ancient world, they were fair, if strict, and
enlightened, but not 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 beginning to
function very poorly.
The Unity found that its 'more rational', more predictable Atlanteans
were having a harder time working together in the Armies, 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 comprehend 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 centuries
been held together by the highest esprit de corps the ancient world
had known, now came to be increasinly maintained by harsh punishment
and bribery. To the Unity, these methods were simply 'rational',
since it couldn't comprehend 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. Slavery had always been legal in Atlantis, but for the
most part limited to criminals or the like, or the occasional captured
foreign enemy. Now, Atlantis began to develop a serious appetite for
slaves, since they don't 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 weren't considered genuinely human the rule didn't apply.
More and more, the Atlanteans of the island itself tended to see
commoners as a whole other 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 sometimes 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 provinces, and some provinces 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 provinces, 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 city-colonies 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 TL0 cultures.
Of all the provinces of the Empire, ProtoAthens was the least amenable
to the slave trade, and the least ready to adopt the 'new realism'
philosophy radiating outward from Atlantis. In ProtoAthens, the older
customs and 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.
Shermanlee
Bryan J. Maloney
news:b3030854.03040...@posting.google.com:
> 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 conceive, of
> their motivations.
I think Unity went to my undergraduate school...
Bryan J. Maloney
> 1. Ability is justification. If you _can_ do something, it follows
> that you have the _right_ to do something. (Might makes right.)
>
> 2. All ideas of right 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 everyone else's actions as
> well.
>
> 3. Atlanteans were an inherently superior people, as proven by their
> superior abilities.
>
> 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.
Definitely, Unity went to my undergrad school--and he majored in social
science.
Johnny1A
As opposed to pre-law? <grin>
Shermanlee
Bryan J. Maloney
> "Bryan J. Maloney" <cavag...@sbcglobal.net.spam.must.die.com> wrote
> in message
> news:<Xns9357C8929CB41d...@206.141.193.32>...
>> sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in
>> news:b3030854.03040...@posting.google.com:
>>
>>
>> > 1. Ability is justification. If you _can_ do something, it
>> > follows that you have the _right_ to do something. (Might makes
>> > right.)
>> >
>> > 2. All ideas of right 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 everyone else's
>> > actions as well.
>> >
>> > 3. Atlanteans were an inherently superior people, as proven by
>> > their superior abilities.
>> >
>> > 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.
>>
>> Definitely, Unity went to my undergrad school--and he majored in
>> social science.
>
> As opposed to pre-law? <grin>
We didn't have any "pre-" programs. One had to have a real major. Thus,
the pre-lawyers were all social science majors.