ATLANTIS and CATACLYSM...
Johnny1a
civilization, the Antediluvian Age. The date is April 26th, 4798 BC,
the time is just past local dawn. The place is the mountains of
Atlantis' central spine, to the southern end of the Island. As
mountain spine nears the southern end of the serpentine island, the
heights decrease somewhat, and the last of the great mountains falls
off in steep cliffs that drop into the southern foothills. Atop one
of these secondary peaks is a fortified, heavily constructed private
estate, the skill of the artisans making the estate appear to grow out
of the volcanic rock of the mountain.
Only a single road approaches it, along a narrow ridge rising from the
northeast, wide enough to pass only a single vehicle at a time. The
fortress overlooks the road, which is open and unprotected from above,
anyone approaching the fortress is visible at all times to watchers in
the mountaintop fortress. In places, the road crosses crevices and
gaps that are bridged by not by strong spans of metal and stone, but
relatively fragile masses of wood and rope, easily destroyed at a
word.
From above, one could look down at a wall courtyard over two hundred
meters wide atop the flattened peak, the walls rising fifteen meters
above the floor of the court and separating the interior from the
outside with a thick barrier of basalt blocks three meters thick.
Only one large gate penetrates the wall, an arched opening through
which the single road enters the interior court. This gate is blocked
by double gates of high-quality steel.
At the northern side of the courtyard, where the mountains rise higher
behind the fortress, are heavily constructed buildings, made of the
same local basalt, in the midst of the courtyard is an artificial pool
that doubles as a rain-fed cistern, filled ever by hidden channels all
over the walls and buildings that funnel rain water to the central
pool. Fountains rise from the pool, in graceful arcs as the rising
morning light sparkles off the mist around them, casting rainbow light
about the pool.
Above the gate, which faces due south, is an observation tower built
of reinforced stone rising forty meters above the leveled peak, from
which a man or woman could look about, seeing the great mountains to
the north, the hills descending the coastal lowlands to the north and
south, and all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and the Hidden Bay in the
southernmost part of the Island. [1]
Along the top of the walls are battlements dating to an earlier age,
when the weapons of Man were more limited, when mere walls of stone
were sufficient defense against most foes. Spaced among the
battlements were statues of gold and marble, statues representing
legendary warriors, sages, and rulers of Atlantis dating back to the
great age of the Eldest.
Surrounding the central pool at also statues, not of marble and gold
but of pure clear glass, displaying a level of artistry that only the
wealthiest can command. The floor of the courtyard is marble, with
sections of garden interspersed among the stone. Amid the marble
stones that pave the solid areas are veins of quartz that sparkle in
the increasing light of the morning.
Yet our business here is not the artistic beauty revealed by the
morning light, nor is it the implied wealth and power on so elegantly
on display. Our interests must take us within one of the buildings to
the northern side of the courtyard. We pass inside, to find two
Homosentients sitting at a wooden table in a plain stone chamber,
dimly lit by a fire in a central fire pit, and by the soft glow of
living lamps in niches in the walls. [2]
The room is rather austere, indeed the only items within it are the
wooden table, two wooden chairs, both of plain oak, and the two people
who sat in the locked, windowless room seemed uninterested in their
surroundings. Neither spoke, both merely gazed at each other with
deep concentration, yet their eyes were open and moved, and
occasionally one of the two would show some sign of interest as if
something of import was occurring. The other was as motionless and
quiet as any Homosentient being might be capable of being. Both were
richly but conservatively dressed in the blue and brown robes of the
Atlantean high aristocracy.
One of the figures, the motionless, too-still one, was a man. His
long black hair flowed down his shoulders in a thick mass, across his
fine woven garments. He looked very young.
The other, the one who showed signs of being more normally aware, was
a woman who looked somehow both mature and young, with long brown hair
bound up atop her head in an elaborately shaped mass, bound with a
fine gold mesh. Her name, for what interest that may have, is
Sharondra.
The man has no name, because he is a Human only in body. Though there
is a sound that is assigned to his body, by which those who do not
know his true nature think of him and address him, it is no more than
a pretense, since this male figure has no separate personality of his
own, he is merely one element, one component, of a psionic collective
which we have identified for our convenience as the Unity.
The woman does know the nature of the Unity, and she knows that she
could be sitting there with any of hundreds of such 'components', male
or female in body, young or old in body, and it would make no
difference, because the same intellect is present no matter which
specific component was there. She is a servant, or slave, of this
collective entity, it is one and the same as far as the Unity is
concerned, and she is prepared to pay the price to gain the power and
wealth and knowledge she has been promised. By far the most capable
and trusted of the Unity's individual Human servants, she is
conferring with her invisible, secret patron concerning a new project.
Though the conversation is held entirely by means of Telepathy, for
our convenience we shall pretend otherwise, and present the discussion
as if it were held in words, and indeed as if the words were of the
English language.
Let us listen in on this silent discussion.
MORE LATER.
[1] We shall learn more about the Hidden Bay in due time.
[2] A common source of interior light in the Antediluvian Age was a
bioluminescent moss. Where it came from we shall see later.
Johnny1a
> Let us listen in on this silent discussion.
>
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"All is in readiness," Sharondra said, "the plan has been completed
down to that level of detail which can be reasonably foreseen."
"Are you confident that you can sufficiently manipulate the Orichalcum
Guild to permit our Great Project to progress?" the Unity component
asked.
At one time, Sharondra had been unnerved by the mannerisms, or rather
the utter _lack_ of mannerisms, that the components of the Unity
displayed when they removed their 'mask' of normality. Now, she was
utterly accustomed to it, and gave the matter no thought. She was no
longer disturbed to have the exact same flawlessly inhuman mannerisms
be displayed by individuals who might be 100 or 10, male or female, it
no longer bothered her to have the precise thread of a conversation go
from one apparently separate individual to another.
"Reasonably so," Sharondra replied. "When we begin the Project's
construction phase in earnest, the price of orichalcum will reach
levels never before seen in history. This could be disruptive, but we
can harness the pressure this will cause for our ends. As the supply
decreases and demand rises, simply keeping the empire operating, the
various factions within and without balanced off, will occupy all the
attention of those members of the aristocracy that we have not already
brought under our direct control. They will have neither the time nor
the resources to spare from that, or so it is to be hoped."
"Indeed. Though a war might be necessary as a distraction at some
point, it would also disrupt our own work. It is to be avoided if
possible. What of the supply of orichalcum itself? Is there any
danger of it proving to be insufficient?"
"Unfortunately, the answer is yes," Sharondra said, frowning a bit.
"There is only so much of it in the world, after all, and the mines
produce no more than a bare trickle of it now. According to the
projections of the Master of Mining in the Guild, the _entire_ annual
production of orichalcum for this year should be no more than two
hundred pounds, if that. Out of all the mines in Atlantis, no more
than two hundred pounds in a year of work. It is possible that even
after we sway the Speaker to confiscate private stocks, and divert
military supplies, that there just will not be enough orichalcum for
our work. We may be forced to scavenge other sources, and if so
difficulties will follow."
"This seems probable," the man, who was but a piece of the Unity,
said, his manne unchanged. Not by motion of body, face, or tone of
voice did he display any sign of anything but utter calm, an inhuman
calm. "If we are forced to compel the surrender of orichalcum from
the aristocrats, or the colonial states, it is likely that at least
some degree of warfare will be inevitable. Already, the Loyalist and
Resistor States are near the point of warfare, only their mutual
dependence on the supply of orichalcum from Atlantis keeps them at
peace. If it becomes clear that this supply is to be interrupted,
that stabilizing element will cease to operate."
"True, and the ensuing warfare would delay our efforts, perhaps by
years. We must be prepared to accept the possibility, however, and
plan accordingly. It is in light of that that I believe we should
make a contingency plan for total failure. We should prepare a hiding
place, a hidden fortress, which can serve us both as a repository for
things, people, and information we wish kept safely out of
circulation, and as an ultimate point of retreat should such a thing
be necessary."
"Agreed," the Unity component said without a moment's hesitation, as
that vast cold intellect processed her words and responded. "Where do
you propose to establish such a refuge?"
Sharondra rose, walking across the stone floor to a door, and
beckoning the component to follow. A normal man in his position might
have appreciated the spectacular figure half-concealed, half-revealaed
by her expensively tailored silk robe, but it meant nothing to the
component. They passed into another stone room, much like the first,
save that mounted on a marble platform, trimmed in gold and silver and
gems from Africa and Asia, was a six foot wide globe of the Earth,
with all its continents, oceans, and islands clearly marked out in
splendid detail. The seas were inlaid with lapis lazuli, the lands of
semi-precious gems, the entire sphere mounted on a gimbaled frame that
enabled it to be spun freely in three dimensions.
"All the world," she commented for effect, even as she was aware that
dramatic gestures were wasted on the Unity, "is Atlantis' domain,
either directly, indirectly, or in potential. No other state or power
can hope to challenge Atlantis directly, and all their rulers know
this all too well."
She spun the globe gently, letting the light of the fire-pit fall
across its sparkling surface.
"The fleets of Atlatnis, and her colony-states, rule all the Earth's
waters. Her aeremes make Atlantis master of the air. Yet there is a
place where the this matters little. A place little better known
today than two centuries ago, indeed little better known than it might
have been in the time of the Eldest!"
She spun the globe upward suddenly, and brought it to rest with its
southern pole facing herself and the component of her master.
"The Great Land of Ice, in the utter South," she said. "Covered all
the year in ice of incredible depth, save in rare spots here and
there, visited only occasionally by Men in known history. The winds
of that land are sufficient to make air travel all but impossible for
our aeremes, after all. It _can_ be done, but few wish to try and
there is little to be gained by the effort, for this vast empty land
of ice has little of value to offer any Atlantean. Save of course,
for us."
She paused, and continued thoughtfully, "It's nearly perfect, in its
way. The vast ice in the waters around the land, it prevents most
ships from approaching, save those made intentionally for such places,
or those who are prepared to spend great effort of psychic strength to
deal with the ice. Great effort, great expense. Once there, the land
is ice-bound! If one does not know the location of what one seeks,
one could search for many a long and tiresome year and find nothing.
Few go there, few have reason to remain long, if we make our refuge
there, it could remain safely hidden...for a very, very long time."
Human and Component stood looking thoughtfully at the globe...
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MORE LATER...
Johnny1a
fastness of southern Atlantis, let us turn out attention first due
eastward, through the descending hills and into the coastal lowlands,
where the stark beauty of the mountains gives way to the lush green of
fields and forest. Even in this late time, Atlantis is not utterly
without any wilderness, some bits and pieces remain untouched after
thousands of years, for various reasons. For the most part, though,
the Island is densely populated wherever the local terrain permits
agriculture, sylviculture, or settlement.
At last we reach the coast, and 'last' might be a poor word, because
Atlantis is not that wide as islands go. It runs long north to south,
twisting back and forth along the general line of the great Mid-
Atlantic Ridge, but it is long and narrow. As we reach the coasts,
the lowlands drop off fairly sharply to the surrounding sea in steep
cliffs, as with so much of the Island.
Now we follow the eastern coast of Atlantis to the north, snaking
along the serpentine shape of Atlantis until we come fairly suddenly
to a vast circular plain, open to the sea on the east but surrounded
by steep mountains. Within this lush green plain, which is actually
an ancient collapse caldera, we find an ancient cinder cone, carved
and cut and covered in buildings, and surrounded by three perfectly
circular nested lakes, connected to each other by tunnels through the
rings of land, and connected to the ocean to the east by a vast tunnel
through which entire ships can pass. Great metal and stone bridges
span the circular lakes, carrying traffic on foot, by machine, and by
carriage.
The cinder cone, the two rings of surrounding land, and a vast stretch
of the plain around the outer lake are covered in structures, roads,
towers, plazas, houses, mansions, hovels, all the appurtenances of a
great city. A single great marble-paved avenue spirals outward from
the greatest bridge over the outer lake, reaching all the way to the
outermost wall that surrounds the great city.
This is the city of Atlantica, the capitol city of both the Island of
Atlantis, and also of a vast, half-coherent empire stretching around
the world. It is the oldest city in Atlantis, indeed it is the oldest
true _H. sapiens_ city on Earth. Founded not long after Man first
came to Atlantis, almost five thousand years before, and it has been
continuously inhabited through this period, having grown from a tiny
village of 250 people to a mighty metropolis of two and a half million
souls. Here is the center of the Antediluvian Civilization, here is
the center of military strength, psychic Power, of trade and commerce,
of politics and science and art, here lies the tradition, the center,
the pride and the glory. Here the Eldest ruled Atlantis for thousands
of years, and here the Circle of Ten ruled for centuries, and here the
Destiny Movement and its Speaker have reduced the Circle of Ten to a
rubber stamp over their dictatorship.
We zoom in to the South Gate in the outermost wall, miles from the
outer Ring Lake. The huge city's great wall is really more for show
than anything else, in this age of psychic and physical weapons too
strong for ordinary walls to be of much defensive use. It is twenty
meters or so tall, the huge spires of the City rise up far above it,
and it is pierced by four gates at the cardinal points, though the
East Gate opens onto a narrow trip of land beyond which lies the
Atlantic Ocean.
The South Gate is the largest and most elaborate, heavily decorated
with gold and silver, and several huge diamonds from Africa glistening
in the Sunlight in the great arch. Beyond this Gate lies the Grand
Avenue of Atlantica, which beginning at the South Gate spirals
northward around the entire City, until it finally reaches the Silver
Bridge, which spans the outermost Ring Lake at the southern cardinal
point of the Lake. Each Lake has its own outer wall, and the
southernmost gate of the outer Lake Gate is in a perfect line with the
South Gate of the City.
The Grand Avenue ends here, but we cross the great bridge, which is
constructed of steel and designed to appear to the eyes as if made out
of gold, and work our way through the maze of streets that makes up
the Outer Ring, for this is the City's primary harbor and docking
area, facing both the Outer and Middle Lakes, which, linked to the sea
by tunnel, act as a single great harbor. Crossing another bridge
which appears to be, and is not, composed of gold and silver, we find
ourselves on the Inner Ring. This circular island is less bustling
than the Outer Ring, because it is home to the elite of the City.
Here are to be found the enormous and opulent mansions of the richest
and most powerful merchants and aristocrats, the heads of the great
Guilds, the immediate courtiers of the rulers. In an empire that
rules, directly or indirectly, half the planet, here are the ruling
class, here the money and the power reach the upper tiers of the
metaphorical pyramid.
Here fountains burble in the midst of the marbled avenues, here the
back streets are decorated with statuary and murals. Here are the
City's finest restaurants, finest entertainers, finest artists, finest
artisans, here are also the greatest prostitutes, the most illicit
pleasures, the drugs and the corrupt pastimes. Here are the great
arenas where slaves fight to the death for the entertainment of jaded
young lords and ladies. Here the best and the worst of the Age come
together, but quietly, all covered over by a layer of serenity and
peace that is all the more determinedly maintained for being
artificial and unnatural.
We now come to the Inner Lake, and cross yet another steel bridge, but
the illusion here is greater. A combination of careful construction,
optical trickery, and psychic/Flux activity makes the bridge _appear_
to be made of mist and light. Few even of the aristocrats are
permitted to cross these bridges, for they cross over to the innermost
island, the ancient cinder cone itself. This is the innermost part of
the City, this is the off-limits area within the off-limits area, open
only to the very highest aristocrats, the highest officials of the
inner circles of the Guilds. Here, for thousands of years, the Eldest
reigned over Atlantis. Here, the Circle of Ten meets in the
theoretical name of the Eldest.
So great is the tradition of inviolability of this island that even
the Speaker, the person who in actual practice now rules Atlantis,
dares not set foot here, for fear of the public reaction. So great is
this tradition that not even the personal guards and the aristocrats
themselves dare bear any weapon here, out of either a remaining shred
of reverence for tradition, or fear of public reaction, or both.
MORE LATER.
.
Johnny1a
pragmatism, however. The Unity is incapable of feeling such emotions,
other than fear, and it certainly feels no fear of this place.
Zadatharion and Aradel, themselves members of the same tiny 'race' as
the Eldest himself, likewise do not share the dread of the central
cone, and it is Zadatharion and Aradel that we find now, standing in a
tiny grove of trees on the central island, sheltered from convenient
view on all sides by the foliage and the lack of any bystanders to see
them.
As with our earlier observation of Sharondra and the Component of the
Unity, we must take a few liberties with the facts as they happened,
because if we were actually there to listen, we would hear nothing of
their conversation, it being purely Telepathic. Indeed, many a
discussion even among the ordinary Human Atlanteans would sound
strange to our ears, a mix of audible words and silent communication,
liberties have been taken where need be for the sake of our
convenience, and now we must do so again. So for our convenience, let
us pretend that had we been there to listen, we would have heard
audible discussion.
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Zadatharion and Aradel 'listened' as the discussion among the Circle
of Ten, meeting in the Great Palace higher on the side of the ancient
cone, finally broke up. There were few entities in Atlantis with the
Psionic Power and skill necessary to 'listen in' on the Circle of Ten,
but both Zadatharion and Aradel were among them. They stood in
silence, sheltered by the wooded slope, and after a time both opened
their eyes, and Aradel said, "Why do they bother with the farce?
Everyone in Atlantis knows that the Circle has no real power left
now. Yet they continue to meet and go through the motions of
discussing their business. Why bother? Who do they think they are
deceiving?"
Zadatharion smiled a little, without much humor.
"For the same reason that Speaker continues the pretense of merely
being a servant of the Circle," Zadatharion replied. "Habit.
Everyone is _used_ to the Circle ruling. They ruled for centuries,
and even if it's no longer true in the world of fact, it's true in the
world of perception. You'd be surprised how many people, the people
who give public affairs little thought, genuinely don't realize that
the Circle has been sidelined. Even those who do realize it find it
easier to work within the old habits, the old language.
"Hmm..." Aradel mused. "Like the Circle itself, they always claimed
to be ruling in the Eldest's name, even after he was murdered."
"Yes," Zadatharion nodded, running a hand through his silver-white
hair in a nervous habit he'd picked up, "exactly the same principle.
You asked who the Circle is trying to deceive, well, among other
people I'd say they're trying to fool themselves, to maintain the
habit that they're still in control even if they know, intellectually,
that they are not. It can't be entirely enjoyable to know that you've
climbed to the top of the power structure only to discover that you're
actually a mouthpiece. I suspect many of them don't even admit that
fully to themselves."
"I still don't see the point of the Speaker's current plan," Aradel
said. They'd learned the details of what the Speaker intended by
'listening in' on the telepathic discussion of the Circle, but they
still did not understand _why_. They could not read the Speaker's
mind because the Unity was shielding him, both Avatars were fairly
sure that this plan under discussion was at least as much the
inspiration of the Unity as it was the Speaker himself. "I can't see
who benefits from it, and it's going to cost enough that it may wreck
the economy, assuming they go through with it."
"Me either," Zadatharion admitted reluctantly. "The only thing we can
bet on is that this is a feint of some kind. Whatever the Unity is
planning, we have to assume that the constructions and work will
actually be used for some other thing, some other goal. But what that
goal is? I have no idea. The Speaker is proposing a massive
construction project, the biggest in history! He's planning major
construction all over the world, and it's going to require _tons_ of
orichalcum! You said it, if they do this too fast the economy is just
going to collapse!"
"Let's get out in the Sunlight," Aradel suggested, "I'm tired of this
place."
"All right," Zadatharion nodded. "There's no reason to stay here."
The two Avatars walked down the slope, until they came to a walkway
through the woods, paved with pink granite flagstones. The sunlight,
filtering down through the open slice of the walkway, made the
flagstones glisten and sparkle as the two Avatars walked along the
walkway, though neither looked like themselves, illusions shielded
their appearance from the few passerby, leaving them looking like two
Atlantean aristocrats with a perfect right to be on the Inner Island.
The Inner Island was an ancient volcanic cone, its scoria and broken
rock now bound and held by the roots of grass, trees, and brush, more
than half covered in woods that had been replanted centuries before,
with palaces and official buildings dotting the peaceful slopes here
and there. A handful of residences were present, residences of the
very highest of the high, but for the most part the Inner Island was a
public space...though the most of the public was never permitted near
it.
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Let us leave the Avatars to their discussion for the moment, because
we must now turn our attention yet elsewhere, still on this same day.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
following the eastern coast of Atlantis as it twists along its winding
path. Bending to the northwest, the east coast runs through a stretch
of relatively lightly settled, rocky highlands, then descends again
into a long coast which meets the sea relatively gently, enabling a
fishing industry to operate fairly easily, then the lands rise again
toward a knot of tormented mountain that mark the northern reaches of
Atlantis. In places where the land is richer and access to the sea
easier, cities exist, none so large as Atlantica but many boasting
populations in the hundreds of thousands.
At last, we come upon the northern reaches of Atlantis. Cold, wind-
swept, rocky, yet not entirely barren, home to a sparse population of
miners, small farmers, and fishermen, the slopes of these reaches are
heavy with fir and pine, and the mountains are snowcapped throughout
the year. In winter this region is harsh, in summer it is cool and
moist, and it can be a prosperous region in good years. The peoples
who live here are a bit different than the rest of Atlantis, this
region is rural and changes come more slowly here, both for the good
and the bad. Even the language is older here, the accent of the north
country is a joke in Atlantica, but they speak much as the Atlanticans
once did, in the time of the Eldest.
Nor is it merely a matter of speech, the peoples of the high north
live much as the rest of Atlantis once did as well. Not that the wave
of technological and psionic progress that has swept the Antediluvian
World has left them untouched, not my any means. Aeremes land at the
larger towns, the power of the Flux is used in manufacturing,
agriculture, and everyday life, the wealthier locals have
autocarriages much like those in the streets of Atlantica. The
fishing vessels that range out from the ports of the north country are
powered by coal, not wind or oar.
Yet even so, the changes that have swept the Island and the Empire
have left the north country less changed than the rest. Here the
Unity's effort to 'rationalize' Atlantean society, to make it more
predictable by the Unity, have had far less effect. The old norms of
Atlantis still hold here, at least sometimes, and for this very reason
the sophisticates of Atlantica and the larger cities, and the folk of
the northlands, hold each other in a certain disregard. Neither fully
respects the other, neither fully trusts the other, each knows that
the other is somehow different in a way they can not entirely define
even for themselves.
As we move north of the Island proper, first we encounter a handful of
smaller islands, geological outposts of Atlantis proper. In earlier
times, when the great ice sheets spread down the continents, these
tiny islands and islets were linked to the main land mass. Now a few
miles of sea separate them from each other and from the Island itself,
they are mostly uninhabited, save for a handful of Atlanteans so ill
disposed toward the presence of others that even the north country
seems crowded to them. The largest communities in these Northern
Isles number no more than 100 souls, and these centers of habitation
are widely scattered over 50 or so islands. The islands themselves
range in size from nearly 100 square miles down to bare specks of rock
a few hundred feet wide.
Were we to follow the line of northern Atlantis, we would continue to
the northwest, eventually coming to the northern reaches of will
someday be called North America. This is not our track, however, our
interests take us instead to the northeast, along the now-submerged
line of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and across hundreds of miles of cold,
storm-tossed Atlantic waters, until at last we come to that land that
will, one day in the distant future (as Homosentients think of time)
be known as Iceland. Here we find a large area of land almost devoid
of people, with only one town of any size and a wide scattering of
settlers with a taste for remoteness.
The city has a population of about 10,000, and it exists primarily
because this island is a key stopover point on the North American-
Europe aereme routes, they land here to restock and change crews, and
this community exists to service this trade. The town proper is not
far from the southern coast of the island, and within its walls it is
a bustling, active place. Beyond its walls, Iceland is mostly a vast
wilderness of mountain, glacier, and volcano. Fewer than 10,500
people call this island home, though it is a relatively short distance
of sea miles from the northern reaches of Atlantis, certainly as
easily accessible as North America or Europe.
As accessible...but far less inviting for settlement. There is more
ice here in 4798 than will be the case in a later age, the glaciers
are thicker, wider, extend further, the arable soil is less
accessible, the winds blow harder and the winters are longer. The
interglacial period has not advanced so far here as it has to the
south.
Our interest is not in the tiny but bustling Atlantean city on the
southern coast, but northward and eastward, along the line of valleys
and mountains that mark the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as it slices directly
across the island.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
on the Northern Isle, there is a relatively sheltered cove, a place
where rocky walls conceal a narrow inlet of the sea, barely 50 feet
wide, from all sides, only from directly above and to the east is this
cove visible. Only a few hundred feet of water is contained in this
crack in the rock, but it is sufficient to conceal the presence of a
small sail-powered ship. Unlike most ships in this modern technical
age, it lacks both steam power and Flux power, the ship is a true
sailing vessel harkening back to the great age of seafaring of a few
centuries earlier. The sails are furled now on the double masts, and
only a few men stand watch on the ship, waiting for the return of a
party that set out inland on foot days before.
We move inland from the cove, following the trail of the part of four
men as they crossed the rugged wilderness. They had emerged from the
small hidden seacraft, and moved inland on foot, through rugged
country rarely visited by Homosentient beings, the eastern region of
the Northern Isle was sparsely populated even by the standards of the
Isle. Days had passed since the men had seen any sign of sentient
activity, only the wild country, the painfully beautiful empty spaces
of the Northern Isle, had met their eyes since they came inland.
As they entered the central highlands of the Northern Isle, the
terrain changed, becoming rockier, dryer and heavy with sand and dark
rock, and still they continued on a path that would have seem most
peculiar to any observer. They would shift to the north, pause, then
move south again, zig zagging generally westward. Their motions would
have appeared to be purposeful to any observer who watched them over a
period of days, but that purpose would have been most obscure to an
uninformed watcher. All such an observer would have seen would be
that party gathering around a small piece of apparatus at each point
of their zig-zag path, notes being taken and then a change of
direction at each pause.
At times, the men were forced to pause long enough to bring down an
animal for food, they carried supplies, but were required also to
supplement their supplies with the occasional bit of hunting or
gathering, both of which were time consuming. Also, very rarely, an
aereme passed overhead, forcing the men to seek some cover, since none
of them had any wish for anyone to see them in that part of the world,
unlikely though it might have been that they would even be noticed.
Such delays added to the time it required for them to reach their
goal, a place none of them had ever visited, a place they were
approaching, and finding, only by means of the peculiar, complex
apparatus they periodically assembled and constructed.
At last, the four men found themselves in a great valley that ran
across much fo the Northern Isle, trending from the southwest to the
northeast. Within it their track led northward, until they approached
a province of recent volcanism, the basaltic rock sharp-edged and
broken, the terrain rough and difficult to cross. It so happened that
they approached a fissure in the rock, and taking a final observation
from their peculiar, tripod-mounted apparatus, they knew they had
reached their destination, and taking out the digging tools that they
had carried with so much labor across the empty spaces of the Northern
Isle, they began to dig.
At last, we close up to observe our party, as it happens on the same
day that Zadatharion and Aradel had their discussion on the Inner
Island, and that Unity and its servant Sharondra laid their secret
plans in southern Atlantis. Unlike these previous discussions, we
need not take quite so many liberties with the facts, we need only
pretend that their discussion this day occurred in English, since for
reasons of their own the four men refrained from the use of telepathy
in their discussions. So let us pretend that we could overhear their
discussion, and that if we did so we would hear it in modern English.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You're sure?" Ryth said softly, "there is no doubt?"
"There can be none," Nolon replied, sounding both proud and also as if
he were slightly frightened by the implications of his own words. "I
have rechecked the matter, there is no doubt or uncertainty left."
The later man, the one called Nolon, spoke with an unmistakable
accent, a pattern of pronunciation known the world around, that marked
him indelibly as Atlantean, a native of the very Island itself. As he
spoke he held up a piece of basalt, dug out from a pit the men had
laboriously excavated in the broken rock of the lava flow, and
continued, "This rock contains a small amount of orichalcum. Not very
much, just a little...but it's there."
Silence fell for a moment, and Nolon continued almost reverently, as
if afraid the very empty lands around might hear, "It's there."
Unlike Nolon, whose skin was lighter in color, whose features and
bearing spoke of pure-blood Atlantean ancestry, the other three men
were dark-tanned. All were about the same age but the other three
appeared a little older, their features marked by long years of
exposure to wind, Sun, and salt, their accents betraying their origins
in the warm Mediterranean coasts of ProtoAthens. Yet they seemed as
unsettled as Nolon, as if finding what they sought was not so much a
triumph as some disturbing portent.
"It worked," Shavor said. "The device actually worked."
The four men turned to look at the apparatus by which they had come to
this remote place. Resting on a tripod, the device was assembled. It
was portable only in the sense that it could be disassembled into its
component parts and those parts carried. It consisted of multiple
rings of orichalcum alloys, resting on carefully-crafted jeweled
bearings, surrounding a slim, long needle of orichalcum-silver alloy,
the needle surrounded by magnetized iron rings that never quite
touched the needle. The whole spherical assembly was about half a
meter in diameter, the central needle perhaps twenty-five centimeters
in length and about the thickness of a sewing needle.
As the four men stood looking, the central needle, free to rotate, was
pointing almost directly downward, and though it could be pushed in
other directions at a touch, it immediately swung back to the
vertical.
"It works," Ryth said. "The device actually works, it can find
orichalcum!"
"I told you so," Nolon replied, a hint of self-satisfied smugness in
his tone. "The larger one, in Asherai, directed us to the Northern
Isle, it detected the presence of the metal from its mount beside the
Great River. For this smaller one to bring us here was merely a
matter of time."
Ryth looked hard at the Atlantean renegade, wondering if he had truly
been as confident of his invention as he now claimed, or if his
confidence was visible now because the device had worked. Fearing
detection, they dared not use telepathy, and it was harder to judge
relying only on the spoken word. Then he shrugged, it hardly
mattered, after all.
"Orichalcum," Ryth breathed in a mixture of wonder, dread, excitement,
anticipation, and sheer fear. "Orichalcum. We've found
orichalcum...outside Atlantis."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now that we have observed some of the discussions and deeds occurring
on that strange day in 4798 BC, we can turn our attention to what it
all means, and how they connect together. This we will do...in due
time.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
the English speaking world as 'Iceland', were either criminals or
patriots, depending on one's point of view. The rulers of Atlantis
would have called them rebels, insurrectionists, or worse, the
Resistors of ProtoAthens and its allied states would have called them
patriots. They represented a faction of the Resistor States who
wished for full independence from an Atlantean society that they
considered not merely oppressive but morally corrupt and tyrannical.
The fourth figure, Nolon, was himself an Atlantean by birth, not an
aristocrat proper but a member of the Orichalcum Guild, of sufficient
rank that his status was equal to that of an aristocrat of moderate
rank. He was also a renegade, a defector if you will. For personal
reasons, he had turned against his fellows in the Guild and in
Atlantis, giving his services to the ProtoAthenians in deep secrecy.
He had left his place in Atlantis by faking his own death, and it
suited him and his desire to continue breathing that his former
fellows not learn that he actually was still breathing.
Nolon had brought to ProtoAthens several useful gifts, such in inside
knowledge of Atlantean government and Guild policies, first-hand
knowledge of movers and shakers on the great Isle itself, and
knowledge of orichalcum kept jealously secret by the Guild. More
importantly, he had brought to the ProtoAthenian independence movement
an inventive genius unsurpassed in his age. Nolon was one of the most
brilliant thinkers and practical operators of his generation, and he
had developed an invention that had the potential to be both
spectacularly lucrative and politically explosive. With great
application of his native genius, plus many long and tiresome years of
hard work and trial and error, Nolon had created a device that could
_detect_ orichalcum ore at a distance.
The mechanism itself required a significant amount of the meta-metal,
as well as considerable skill to construct, and the greater the
distance over which such detection was desired, the more of both was
necessary. The ProtoAthenian independence movement, knowing all too
well that the orichalcum monopoly was the key to Atlantis' control of
the world, was prepared to take a risk. It was a huge risk, even the
suspicion of what they were doing would have brought down the military
wrath of Atlantis in overwhelming force, but it was a risk they were
prepared to take.
In a city along the Great River, which we know as the Nile, the
ProtoAthenians constructed a huge version of Nolon's invention, an
effort that required many repeated attempts. The bearings, the gear
trains, the precision of construction necessary, all challenged the
skill of the artisans, the moreso because of the need for extreme
secrecy. Diverting sufficient orichalcum for the project was the
greatest expense, greater than all the other monetary costs together,
but the cost in time, effort, and secrecy was nearly more than the
independence movement could manage. Almost, but not quite.
The great detector was completed in 4801 BC, hidden within a great
warehouse near the docks of the river city, three great rings of metal
acting as the mount for an orichalcum 'needle' that was fifteen meters
long and ten centimeters thick. In theory, however, it should have
been sufficient to detect orichalcum anywhere in the world. Of
course, even after this proved to be the case, it required practice
and skill to learn to interpret the results the device produced. At
first, the Great Detector tended merely to oscillate through a few
degrees of vertical, pointing groundward. Though they could not know
this, the device was detecting the raw orichalcum of the planet's
inner depths, especially the liquid outer core of the planet. It took
Nolon months to work out a way to make the device 'ignore' these
readings, after he realized in an approximate sort of way what was
happening.
Once they learned how to 'tune' the device only to the surface layers
of the planet, it tended invariably to swing around to point to the
northwest, directly at Atlantis. Again, Nolon had to work out ways to
'tune' his creation to ignore the orichalcum of the Island. Then to
the dismay of of the independence movement, it took some time for the
device to detect any other large mass of the meta-metal. Almost all
the orichalcum in the Earth's accessible crust was in Atlantis.
Almost.
As Nolon refined his device's sensitivity, he discovered that it
sometimes pointed to the northwest even when tuned to ignore Atlantis,
it swung what way in a more than statistically likely percentage of
the time when the 'needle' was allowed to swing free. As he refined
the device and increased its sensitivity, he found that the new
readings were coming from a different direction than the readings from
Atlantis had, further north and not quite so far to the west.
Eventually, Nolon realized that the only two places likely to be in
line with the bearing were the Lesser Land of Ice (Greenland), and the
Northern Isle (Iceland).
Constructing smaller versions of his Great Detector, Nolon led secret
expeditions to the lands near the North Atlantic, taking bearings and
triangulating the location of the posible orichalcum ore, and by this
means, and eventually by means of a personal expedition, Nolon led his
ProtoAthenian patrons to the only other significant mass of orichalcum
ore above sea level, the only one of note outside Atlantis, along the
exposed Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Northern Isle.
It was a discovery with the potential to change the world.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
hard to convey, since the modern world has no equivalent single
resource so utterly critical to industry, trade, travel,
communication, and military power. Petroleum would be the closest
modern-day equivalent, and the equivalance is only marginal, the 21st
century is far less dependent upon petroleum than the late
Antediluvian Age was upon orichalcum. The entire Atlantean empire was
based on the orichalcum monopoly, and that monopoly had now been
broken, or at least, the potential to break it, after many centuries
of failed efforts, had been demonstrated.
Of course, the potential was not the actuality. There were many
problems standing between the Resistor alliance and their goal of
using the orichalcum from the Northern Isle, both internal and
external. To begin with, the cabal in ProtoAthens had to operate in
_extreme_ secrecy, they dared not risk involving more than the bare
minimum of personnel even from their own alliance, because even a
_whisper_ of the truth getting out would have meant the deaths of all
the members of the cabal and likely a world-rending war that would end
in defeat for the Resistor Alliance.
From the ProtoAthenian point of view, the new orichalcum was very
inconveniently situated. Though the Northern Isle was little visited
and mostly a backwater, it was still a relatively short distance from
Atlantis proper, within easy reach of the vast Atlantean naval and
aerial power, and far from the centers of power in the Resistor
Alliance. It was hopeless to attempt to hold the Northern Isle by
force, only stripping the entire Alliance of its armed strength would
have offered even a chance of securing the Northern Isle, and it would
have left the Alliance states defenseless to make the attempt. The
idea of seizing active control of the orichalcum in the Northern Isle
was rapidly dismissed by the leaders of the independence movement.
The only plan that had any hope of working, the leadership of the
cabal concluded, was to quietly, secretly mine enough orichalcum to
secretly arm their troops and prepare for war, and eventually, after a
long period of quiet preparation, present the Speaker and the
Atlanteans with a _fait accompli_ of Resistor independence. It was an
approach fraught with heavy risks, extreme difficulty, but it was the
only plan that looked as if it might work.
Thus is was that men began to secretly, very quietly, in twos and
fours, travel toward the Northern Isle. Some travelled through North
America, some through northern Europe and some by sea from Africa or
South America. A very few even travelled there across the Arctic,
from northern Asia and what would someday, in a far distant age, be
northern Canada. A small, secret mine was opened, a shaft mine being
dug under careful camouflage. This slowed the work, and matters were
made the worse because the miners, though experienced in mining other
metals, had never mined orichalcum and were unfamiliar with the
difficulty involved in TL2 and TL3 mining. The necessity for secrecy
meant that they could not even use the conventional steam age
technology readily available elsewhere.
Still, these men were highly motivated, intelligent, and the ore was
relatively rich, compared to the remaining ore in Atlantis proper. By
4795, ore was being moved out along a hidden route through the wilds
of the Northern Isle. This involved indirect routes, moving the ore
in small loads mostly by night, sometimes actually using tunnels
through rock or ice. Tiny boats picked up the ore, and moved it to
the coasts of what would later be called northern Europe, and smuggled
amid loads of ordinary metals through the densely populated region.
[1]
The ore was refined, under heavy secrecy, in the mine of carefully
paid-off and reliable Svarts. [2]
The refined ore was then shipped in secret through a variety of hidden
routes, blinds, and smuggling methods until it finally came to rest in
a number of hidden staging areas spread across Europe and Africa.
Some of the transit routes ran along the coasts of the new Black Sea,
where resentment over the Drowning of Livicia remained deep. Some ran
through classic (for the age) smuggling routes along the northern
Mediterranean, still others were shipped openly as orichalcum. This
last technique involved using clandestine orichalcum publicly,
enabling the diversion of 'above board' orichalcum to covert use
elsewhere. The leaders and operatives of the independence movement
showed enormous amounts of ingenuity in their work, and bit by bit
they did succeed in building up a small stockpile of orichalcum.
In all this secrecy was ultimately important. The cabal enforced
secrecy with ruthless, indeed draconian methods, it was made clear to
those 'in the know' that leaking would be lethal. Unacceptable
personal associations could be lethal. Bad judgement could be
lethal. More than one conspirator was executed simply for getting
drunk in public, for ex, because drunk people sometimes say things
they should not. One member of the cabal would have been executed
because his brother married a well-known Loyalist, except that the
cabal was able to kill the brother and his wife instead. [3]
All this was necessary, because the Quaestors and the spies of the
Atlantean rulers were all too capable, and becoming steadily more
ruthless themselves with the passage of time. This was partly a
function of the growing despotism of Atlantis' rulers, but also
because the supply of orichalcum was being strained as never before
because of the Great Work. Pressing a limited supply of a vital
commodity had its usual effect on the price, and when that price was
already astronomical, it had the effect of straining the entire global
economy.
About that Great Work...MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
[1] The ore in Iceland was never close to as rich as the ore in
Atlantis _had been_, but by the fifth millennium BC the accessible ore
in Atlantis had been heavily mined out.
[2] One of the side-effects of the rise of the Destiny Movement, and
the dictatorship of the Speakers of Atlantis, was a deterioration of
relations between Atlantis and some of the Svarts of Europe. This
made some of the highly isolationist Svart towns amenable to cautious
secret alliances with ProtoAthens.
[3] Of course, the executions were made to look accidental, or like
mundane murders or suicides.
Johnny1a
The Great Work. That's a fairly literal translation of a word in the
ancient language of Atlantis, a word applied to the larger 'public
works project' in the history of the Antediluvian Age. It was a
project implemented by the Destiny Party and the Speaker, through
their rubber-stamp Circle of Ten, the largest single effort of the
Atlantean government in the history of that state. Behind the scenes,
the Unity and Sharondra, it's chief agent, were prime movers in the
activity, with their own agenda. The Great Work was a project of
years, involving the entire government, every branch of the Atlantean
military, resources from every continent, and all the wealth and
resources that the world-wide empire of the Atlanteans could muster.
All this was none too much for the scale of the effort.
Recall that the Atlanteans had developed a technology we have called
the paralens, a device that concentrated and focused the Flux to make
it more readily available and accessible to Human fluxons. [1]
These devices also 'stabilized' the local Flux, 'calming' the Matrix
and making it safer to access the power of the Flux. Every major city
in the empire was dotted with hundreds of these paralenses, forming
the center of the industrial and economic system of the world. The
paralenses made each major city of the empire zone of high but
paradoxically safe Flux activity. Likewise major military bases and
other high-importance facilities were equipped with paralenses. The
volume of effect was always limited, however, a few miles beyond the
edge of any Atlantean city, on or off the Isle proper, and the local
Flux conditions reasserted themselves.
Paralenses came, broadly speaking, in two general forms. The most
common form took the form of an ovoid of what looked like lemon-yellow
glass, heavily faceted and covered at either end with metal caps made
of a special orichalcum alloy, an ovoid between two and three meters
long on the long axis. There were tens of thousands of these devices
in existence by 4795 BC, spread across the world, in every city ruled
by the Atlanteans. The precise design and exact performance of these
devices varied slightly, but the above description fit them as a
general matter.
There were also more potent versions, which the Atlanteans called by a
name that would translate reasonably well as 'grand paralens'. They
looked very much like the smaller versions, but these devices were
developed later and were much larger, approximately ninety meters on
the longest axis of the ovoid. They were similar in function to the
smaller version, but orders of magnitude more powerful. They could
increase the Flux Rating of regions miles in diameter all alone, and
amplifed by arrays of smaller paralenses they could boost Flux Ratings
for whole cities to the point that even a minor Flux skill could be
used for a huge variety of effects. Though the orichalcum these
devices incorporated was fantastically expensive, the paralenses were
the _sine qua non_ of the entire global economy in by the 4700s.
The Great Work was, in its simplest incarnation, an attempt to take
this Flux technology a huge step further. The Atlanteans wanted to
extend their amplified, stabilized artificial high-Flux zones to cover
the entire surface of the planet Earth, making their highly refined
Flux abilities orders of magnitude more useful. The Atlanteans had
also devised theoretical ways to control which individuals could
access the amplified Flux potential, restricting it to Atlanteans,
whille leaving others with lower levels of power or even just the
natural 'background' levels to draw upon. The rulers of Atlantis had
some suspicions that their Flux secrets were leaking to rival powers,
and were taking steps that they hoped would render this leakage moot.
The Unity, for its collective part, had its own plans for this
enormous new source of power. The Unity could not, itself, wield the
power of the Flux, though it greatly desired to do so. The Flux
skills the Atlanteans had perfected were based around _individual_
minds, and not directly adaptable to the sort of collective intellect
tha tmade up the Unity. Though it was certainly _theoretically_
possible for the Unity to use the Flux directly, as of 4795 BC it had
made no real progress toward this particular goal.
On the other hand, the Unity did have enormously gifted fluxons under
its control, bound to it by chains of money, fear, mental influence
and trickery and a number of other things as well. The amplification
of their abilities was potentially of great use to the Unity.
However, the Unity also had deeper and more secret plans involving the
Great Work.
The Great Work itself was years in the planning, and more years in the
execution. The plan was to construct an unprecedented number of great
paralenses, no bigger than the great paralenses already extant but of
an even more sophisticated design. Instead of installing these in
cities or bases as such, they were to be constructed and activated at
carefully selected, critical locations on Earth's surface, arranged in
intricate geometric patterns across the face of the planet, at
locations of high natural Flux activity, or low background count, at
places where local conditions affected the Flux in subtle ways, or in
places where the Flux was naturally active for its own reasons. The
calculations necessary were of exquisite fineness, the alignments with
each other had to be perfect to within millimeters, across tens of
thousands of miles of distance. The long axes of the new great
paralenses had to be in perfect alignment with the center of the
Earth, to within a tiny fraction of a second of arc, and they had to
_stay_ that way for the entire system to operate properly.
The calculations had to allow for literally thousands of factors, some
of them minute, some huge, all crucial for the Great Work, but the
calculations were the _easy_ part. The difficult part was the
physical execution of the calculations, and of course obtaining the
orichalcum necessary for the Great Work to be completed. This was by
far the hardest aspect of the matter, so much orichalcum was necessary
that it was straining the global economy, the government was buying,
confiscating, extorting, and otherwise squeezing orichalcum from every
source they could track down, the black market price of the metal
reached such levels as to impoverish entire regions, but still there
was never enough to keep the Great Work on schedule. Piece by piece,
paralens by paralens, the project did go forward, however.
The long-term goal was simple to state, but almost inconceivable to
execute: when finished and activated, the Atlanteans' Great Work
would use the very crust of the Earth, the planet's outer shell, as a
focusing array, the planet itself would act as the greatest imaginable
paralens, raising Flux density and stability and accessibility to
undreamed of levels, for those who would have access to that power.
[2]
Thus, the Resistor's discovery of orichalcum in the Northern Isle
corresponded to a raise in demand unprecedented in the history of the
Antediluvian Age.
MORE LATER.
[1] In game terms they raise the local Flux Rating and apply high
bonuses to success roles on the part of fluxons.
[2] In game terms, the project was intended to raise Flux Ratings
world wide to +5 or higher, without the dangers normally inherent in
such Flux intensities.
Johnny1a
ranged from master fluxons disputing the technical details of the
execution of the project, to aristocrats and politicians who
questioned the cost and benefits, to rivals who resented the awesome
resources being poured into the Great Work (and thus not into their
own preferred priorities), and also included those who questioned the
purposes of the work, the desirability of such concentrated power in a
few hands, or the sheer safety of the utilization of so much power on
such a scale. These last often pointed out that the Great Work,
however sound it might be in mathematical theory, nevertheless
represented an implementation of theory orders of magnitude larger
than anything tried previously, and also involved some aspects of
basic Flux theory that simply had never been given any small-scale
test.
Yet another criticism aimed at the Great Work was that it involved
taking a significant amount of the world-wide orichalcum supply and
locking it up, more-or-less permanently, in the immense, sophisticated
great paralenses that would be the anchor-points of the new system.
With the mines in Atlantis now producing only a tiny trickle of new
orichalcum each year, this meant that the Great Work was taking a
sizeable chunk of a finite and almost incalculably valuable resource
out of circulation, essentially permanently. There were many who
considered the inherent cost this implied to be greater than the
possible benefits of the Great Work.
The Atlantean society had never been democratic _per se_, not as
modern Westerners understand that concept, anyway. Throughout the
huge majority of Atlantean history, it was ruled by the Eldest, an
immortal, immensely powerful individual monarch, who governed for
thousands of years on end. Secondary and local power was mostly in
the hands of the Eldest's mortal, but very long-lived, offspring, who
functioned as viceroys, more or less. There was some mortal
representation in the system, but the central power was never
elective. After the murder of the Eldest, through brutal civil
warfare and trial-and-error, the characteristic form of Atlantean
government came to be the aristocratic republic. Again, though power
was dispersed among various groups and families and centers, and the
balance varied from one Atlantean state to another, it was never what
modern Westerners would think of as democratic.
This made it difficult for the opponens of the Great Work to
successfully made their objections felt, because now the government of
the central state in Atlantis proper, and the majority of the colony-
states, had been captured by that movement we have called the Destiny
Movement, and thus the real political power now lay in the hands of
unofficial officials, such as the Speaker. The opposition, even
within the Loyalist states, was fragmented, at odds with each other,
and relatively easy to marginalize. When some especially effective or
well-connected leader emerged in opposition to the Great Work, the
usual counter-move by proponents was to 'wedge' the opposition, buying
off or otherwise co-opting some particular faction. This was rarely
hard, because the opposition included many large groups and powerful
individuals who were opposing the Work entirely on self-interested
grounds. Often, the only thing necessary to 'wedge' the opposition at
any given time was simply to pick an amenable member and apply a large
infusion of money, openly or more often in secret.
Sometimes, more extreme measures were necessary, but the Destiny
Movement and its ruthless leaders rarely hesitated over a mere murder,
much less blackmail or bone-breaking. The public culture of the
Atleanteans had degenerated enormously under the slow, steady,
invisible pressure of the Unity, compared to the time a few centuries
earlier, corruption was a way of life. Of course, the late Atlanteans
did not think of themselves as being corrupt, they tended to see
themselves as simply pragmatic or practical, looking back at their
ancestors' moral and philosophical traditions with no little
amusement. The result was much the same.
Of course the opposition could attempt to make us of the same
techniques, and they certainly did make the attempt, but they were at
a huge disadvantage in terms of their resources of money, power, and
influence. One of the practical upshots of the moral decay of the
Atlanteans was to leave those who did have money and power at a
tremendous advantage, and leaving those relatively lack such with few
or no tools to fall back upon.
The Great Work cut across the Loyalist/Resistor divide, for reasons
both political and practical. The very _nature_ of the Great Work
required that it be implemented in far-flung locales around the world,
determined by the physics of the Matrix/Flux and the geology and
chemistry and psychic status of the planet Earth. Nature cared no
more then than it does now for Homosentient convenience, the
requirements of the Great Work gave no heed to political, social, or
religious boundaries, the great paralens installations had to be
installed where they had to be installed, or the Great Work would
simply fail to function. This meant that the installation of the
Great Work had to be performed in both Loyalist states, which was a
straightforward matter, and in the Resistor states, which was
politically and socially fraught.
Of course, the Great Work also required considerable amounts of work
in non-Atlantean regions, including some that were very hostile to the
Atlanteans. Here again, nature made its demands, and the Atlanteans
had to work within those requirements. In some places, it was
possible to buy off or intimidate the locals sufficiently to do the
necessary work, in others, force was necessary. In some cases the
local powers were weak enough relative to Atlantis that only modest
‘small wars’ were necessary to achieve the necessary access. Other
societies, though, were strong enough to be a serious challenge to the
Atlanteans, especially in their own homelands, which by the nature of
the matter was where the issue had to be decided.
By far the worst case of this category was Goravia, in far eastern
Asia. A powerful, cohesive, and well-governed society, with a
powerful army and technology not impossibly far behind that of the
Atlanteans, the Goravians were far from the centers of Atlantean power
and had mastered enough Flux knowledge to be able to match the
Atlanteans at their own specialties, at least well enough to be
troublesome. Though Goravia had only limited sea power, and could not
hope to challenge the naval or aerial might of Atlantis beyond their
own borders, now the Atlanteans needed access to sites well within the
heartland of Goravian power. It was a challenging problem for the
Atlantean rulers, and it was a problem that _had_ to be solved if the
Great Work was to be successful.
The Goravians proved to be unamenable to diplomatic pressure or
bribery. Their rulers were adamantly opposed to the extension of the
Great Work into their Asian heartland, the commoners, though not
always in accord with their rulers, were solidly behind them on this
matter, doubt of, suspicion toward, and often hatred of the Atlanteans
were well-ingrained into Goravian culture by this point, often with a
solid foundation based in the actions of the increasingly-corrupt
Atlanteans. Both the rulers and the ruled in Goravia recognized, well
enough, that the Atlanteans' power, already enormous, would become
unchallengeable should the Great Work succeed. Realizing that the
Great Work _could not_ succeed without access to the necessary sites
in Goravia, the Goravians came to see balking Atlantis on this matter
as an issue of basic interests, of their ability to live outside the
rule of the foreign and disdained Atlanteans, indeed perhaps an issue
of basic _survival_.
Tensions rose as the incompatible aspirations of the Goravians and the
Atlanteans came into conflict in the early 48th Century BC. The
pressure was increased by time considerations, the Great Work
necessitated not only that certain specific locations be utilized, but
that they be done in a certain sequence and pattern, since each
installation had to interaction with others around the face of the
world in a complex, carefully calculated pattern. Thus the bottleneck
in Goravia as interfering with the Great Work elsewhere, because work
on installations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas began to slow to
a halt because the effort could proceed no further until the
facilities in Goravia were ready, that part of the world-wide pattern
was essential to the rest.
It was clear to most observers on each side that war was now fast
becoming inevitable. By 4790, the work in South America was slowing
because of the stalled effort in Asia, by 4788 the effect was being
felt around the world. The Great Work was slowing, the project
slipping behind schedule, and this in turn made opportunities for
opponents to make more mischief. The vast resources of money, power,
skill, and manpower diverted to the Great Work could not sit idle for
long, it was economically and politically impossible. The bottleneck
_had_ to be removed, if the Great Work was to proceed.
The Goravians, meanwhile, considered that completion of the Great Work
would be contrary to their core interests, and many intelligent and
thoughtful Goravians believed that completion of the Great Work by the
Atlanteans could and probably would mean slavery for Goravia, and
perhaps worse, given the visible decline in Atlantean morality, the
rise of viscious blood sports, a world-wide slave trade, and a
tendency toward what could only be called malice in the highest
circles of the Atlantean government.
Insatiable ambition and political necessity on the Atlantean side was
set against basic fear for freedom and survival on the part of the
Goravians. There was little space for compromise, and neither was
prepared to yield, and in the northern spring of 4787 BC, the tension
reached the point of open war.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
one might have expected, given the domination of the Destiny Movement
and the radicalism and corruption associated with that movement.
There were a variety of reasons why the rulers of Atlantis were
reluctant, ranging from some remaining moral qualms in a few quarters,
to the fear of the economic, social, and political disruptions a large
war would inevitably bring, to the practical military-based fears of
the command staff of the Atlantean forces. Though on paper Atlantis
was vastly stronger than Goravia, in practice there were a number of
reasons for professional caution on the part of the experienced
military personnel of the Atlantean Fleets of air and sea.
For one thing, Atlantis was far stronger at sea and in the air than
she was on land, while the vast empire of Atlantis certainly _could_
field large land forces, some of them well-equipped and well-trained,
those land forces were spread out across the entire empire, on
multiple continents, and answerable directly to various colony-states
and indirectly to the central command authority in Atlantica City. To
assemble these forces into a single coherent army, properly trained
and equipped and answerable to discipline from central command was a
large project. To transport these armies across the world to Goravia
was a logistical nightmare. Yet this was inescapably necessary
because the coming war with Goravia would of necessity be a land war
fought on the enemy's home territories, halfway around the world from
the center of imperial power on Atlantis proper and the coasts of the
Atlantic Ocean.
Recall that the lands of the Goravian culture were to be found in
eastern Asia, roughly corresponding to what our age calls the lowlands
of eastern China, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese home
islands. Like the much later Chinese societies, the Goravians were
organized around the great river valleys and rich farmlands of the
lowlands, and they were the richest and most powerful and advanced non-
Atlantean culture of the early 48th century BC. Though they were not
the equal of Atlantis in technology, they were not far behind, and
though they utterly lacked most of the native Atlantean psi faculty,
they did have enough Flux knowledge to wield considerable raw power.
With a large population and a solid agricultural base, they were able
to field a large and highly motivated army, and their naval power,
though not world-spanning, was significant in their local waters, they
had enough of a fleet to make a naval battle in their home waters
potentially quite expensive in blood and treasure, even for Atlantis.
In air power the Goravians were far weaker, their 'air force'
consisted of a handful of aeremes decades behind the state of the art,
with half-trained crews, in this area Atlantis had a tremendous
superiority. It should be remembered, though, that Goravia existed at
the end of vastly long supply chains, with the vast Pacific Ocean on
one side and a huge and hostile continental interior on the other
separating them from the primary power of Atlantis. The closest
Atlantean colony-states were in the Forali lands [1] and separated by
mountain ranges from the Goravian heartland. The Atlanteans
controlled most of the islands of the Pacific, but the Pacific is
vast, the space between the islands immense. Atlantis had many colony-
states and military bases on the west coast of what our age calls
North America, but once again the vast distances of the Mother of
Oceans lay in the way of bringing that military strength to bear on
Gorava.
The closest major Atlantean naval base was on an island the Atlanteans
called Kaltak, south of the great easternmost archipelago of Goravia.
[2] This was primarily a wet-navy base, host to over one hundred
Atlantean warships, it existed there in part as a threat to Goravia,
in part as a defense against Goravia extending their nascent naval
power toward Atlantean holdings in the Southlands. [3] Along with the
naval power stationed there, the Atlanteans maintained a large airbase
and a force of twenty heavily armed aeremes.
The reluctance of the Atlantean commanders was compounded by the utter
impossibility of acheiving stratetic surprise and the near
impossibility of achieving tactical surprise. Every informed person
in the advanced world knew that the Great Project could n ot be
continued without access to the key locations in places such as
Goravia, and it was also equally clear that the Goravians had no
intention, then or ever, of granting such access. They simply did not
see it as being in their own vital self-interest, producing a
diplomatic impasse. Even as it became clear that war was inevitable,
and the Atlantean military planners began assembling assault forces in
places such as Kaltak, Mylinar [4], and the northern coasts of the
Southlands, the planners knew that those preparations could not be
hidden and their meaning could not be mistaken. The Goravians knew
they were coming, and would have time, a significant amount of time,
to make defensive preparations.
Yet the preparations were unavoidably necessary. While it would
certainly have been easier, faster, and 'safer' in a way to launch a
quick, surgical surprise attack, this would have availed nothing. The
Atlanteans did not need a simple concession from Goravia but rather
permanent, reliable access to various key locations deep within
Goravian territory, as well as access to local resources of people and
raw material for the Great Project. It was to be a war of invasion
and conquest against an established, advanced power, not a 'little
war'. The complications were enough to make veteran military planners
in Atlantis shudder when they contemplated them.
The Goravian leadership, for their part, were no more sanguine about
what was coming. If the Atlanteans were nervous at the prospect of
attacking an established and advanced power like Goravia, the
Goravians were in the position of defending against an attack force
sent out by the world's strongest and most advanced nation. The
Goravians were about to be defending against the military machine that
had already conquered half the world, and they knew all too well how
desperate their position was likely to be once the combat started.
Atlantis surpassed Goravia in wealth, population, military power,
technology, and psionic ability, and though Goravia was not helpless
in matters related to the Flux, their knowledge and skills were far
from equal to those of the fluxons of Atlantis.
Goravia did have a few allies, though.
MORE LATER.
[1] What we would call the Indian subcontinent.
[2] Our age calls Kaltak 'Okinawa'.
[3] Our age calls the Atlantean Southlands 'Indonesia', 'Australia'
and 'New Zealand'.
[4] Our age calls Mylinar ‘the Hawaiian Islands’.
Johnny1a
No major power dared ally with Goravia _openly_. Atlantis was too
powerful, militarily and economically, to take such a risk. At the
same time, however, those powers still independent of the empire knew
that Goravia was by default their champion, by far the strongest of
the 'independent' societies, for Goravia to fall was not in the
interest of the lesser independents. Thus various other powers did
_quietly_ assist the Goravians during the time before the hostilities
commenced, with smuggled resources, back-channel information and
intelligence, and money. Money was funneled to Goravia by a variety
of hidden pathways, especially during the last two years of hostile
peace, and money is always useful to a realm facing war.
Even more secretly, such armed forces as the other independent powers
could spare were moved into Goravia to reinforce the large Goravian
army, under false colors and false covers. No other power could spare
any significant number of infantry, not on the scale of this war and
Goravia's large army, but trained fluxons, along with specially
trained forces, special 'types' of forces, could be spared to make up
for gaps in the Goravian line of defense. In _deep_ secrecy, plans
were laid by Goravia's silent allies to sabotage Atlantean lines of
communication and supply, to distract the Atlanteans at key moments,
and generally do whatever seemed workable to hinder (in secret) the
Atlantean war effort. The Atlanteans, for their part, had their
suspicions about all this activity, but could prove little, and the
more pragmatic leaders of the Atlantean war machine knew that this was
just part of the 'lay of the land'.
Even more secretly, the Goravians had some unofficial allies _within_
the Atlantean empire.
The Resistor Alliance had been waiting for decades for a chance to
break free of central control, and if ever such a moment was to come,
the approaching war with Goravia looked like a probable time. There
was considerable sympathy for the Goravian cause in the Resistor
states, _especially_ in ProtoAthens, and this added to the pragmatic
considerations of realpolitick to drive secret efforts to assist the
Goravians against a central government which the Resistor states had
come to see as hostile and foreign. Yet so dangerous was this effort
that _utter_ secrecy had to be maintained for the sake of survival.
The secret alliance between Goravia and ProtoAthens was fantastically
cautious on both sides. Goravia distrusted the ProtoAthenians because
they were, ultimately, of Atlantean derivation. The ProtoAthenians
feared that their secrets would be betrayed to their hated overlords
in Atlantis proper. The dealings involved multiple layers of shells
and 'cut-outs', and a great many diplomatic circumlocutions and
cautious horse-trading. Goravia and ProtoAthens needed each other,
however. The Resistors were never likely to have a chance at
independence better than what a failed war against Goravia might
provide. As for Goravia, alliance with ProtoAthens offered access to
Atlantean knowledge, skills, and technology otherwise unavailable,
access to psionically powerful assistance, access to Flux knowledge
beyond what the Goravians themselves had mastered, and of course one
more especially vital commodity: untraceable orichalcum.
The ProtoAthenians were careful to reveal not the slightest _hint_
that they had discovered access to a supply of orichalcum outside
Atlantis. From their point of view, the Goravians certainly had no
need to know about that! The Goravians, for their part, were not
about to question where the small but steady flow of orichalcum from
ProtoAthens was coming from, they suspected it was somehow pilfered
from legitimate Atlantean sources, but they did not care as long as it
kept coming, because orichalcum was _vital_ to the defense effort,
every gram of the material was a precious help. During the two years
of hostile peace that led up to the onset of open warfare, the
ProtoAthenians were able to route small amounts of orichalcum to
Goravia by a variety of secret pathways.
In this secrecy they succeeded, one of the things the Atlanteans
thought they knew that was not actually so was how much orichalcum the
Goravians possessed. With every ounce of the metal so carefully
tracked as it emerged from the mines, the total world supply was known
to the Atlanteans down to an accuracy of kilogram or so. Though they
might lose track of some of the substance from time to time, they
knew, or thought they knew, how much there was overall, since all the
orichalcum in the world came from the island of Atlantis. This in
turn enabled the intelligence personnel to make what they thought were
solid, well-founded estimates of how much orichalcum the Goravians
could _possibly_ have, to within a very narrow range.
Because of the discovery of the deposit in the Northern Isle, and the
elaborate, secret, circuitous routes by which it was moved, the
Goravians had access to nearly a ton of the metal that the Atlanteans
did not suspect. This metal was hidden in caches or used in weapons
and defenses, supervised by a small group of Goravian officials sworn
to utter secrecy on penalty of death by torture. It was one of the
key secrets of the Goravian war machine, and one of the few things
that gave the Goravians a certain amount of cautious hope as the storm
drew close.
For two years the tensions rose, both sides preparing steadily for war
while making a pretense of negotiating an impasse. Finally, on April
18th of 4787, on a bright spring morning, the Atlantean attack began
in earnest, with Atlantean naval and air forces engaging the Goravian
navy and attacking coastal fortifications. So great was the Atlantean
naval force that came against Goravia that it was able to engage the
Goravian navy with sufficient ships to spare to assault the coasts at
the same time, while Atlantean aeremes flew inland, taking the battle
to the regions behind the coastal defenses. The Final War had begun.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The Goravians were not caught by surprise, they had been well aware
that an attack was coming, all that was in doubt was the day and the
hour, and they had their sources in the Atlantean ruling circles that
narrowed down the range of possible times. What did catch the
Goravians by surprise was the sheer _size_ of the Atlantean attack, so
many ships approached the coasts of Goravia that the Goravian navy was
fully occupied, and there was enough excess naval force to push onward
and engage coastal defenses on both the mainland and the Great
Archipelago [1] as well. The Atlanteans had managed to assemble a far
larger fleet than the Goravian intelligence officers had ever
suspected, and to position it for attack without giving away its
presence. To be sure, the ships were not all capital scale, but there
were enough of them, and htey were heavy enough, to rapidly overwhelm
the first lines of defense.
At the same time, Atlantean aeremes pushed inland, bringing the war
behind the coasts, and if there were far fewer aeremes than naval
vessels in the attack force, the Goravians had no real air force to
counter them, either. The majority of the aeremes were 'bombers',
designed to hover over a battlezone and attack the Goravians from
above, or troop carriers able to deliver as many as 500-1000 Atlantean
soldiers to an inland strike site. The effect of the later was
especially devastating in the first 24 hours of the war, enabling the
highly trained and psionically powerful Atlantean air-assault soldiers
to be placed right on their targets, leaving the numerically superior
but far slower Goravian defense forces hours behind.
Within 48 hours of the first engagements, which came at local dawn,
travel between mainland Goravia and the Archipelago was interdicted,
and firm beachheads had been established on the coasts of mainland
Goravia in a dozen locations, and more Atlantean forces were coming
ashore. The first line of defense had crumbled, overwhelmed by the
surprising size and sheer superiority of Atlantean power in the first
waves. Though the Goravian defenders outnumbered their attackers by
large margins, _each_ Atlantean attacker was psionically powerful,
training in combat using those abilities, backed up by naval and air
control, superior technology, and operating with vastly superior
command and control. At the end of the second day of fighting, the
defenders were falling back on most fronts.
The Goravians were neither overwhelmed nor vanquished, however.
Though caught by surprise (badly!) by the scale and intensity of the
first attack, they had known it was coming and their military
leadership were competent, they were all too aware that they probably
could not stop the Atlantean landings. Thus most of the coastal
forces were under orders to retreat rather than suffer crippling
losses, either to the largest and heaviest coastal citadels, which
continued to hold out, or, more preferably, inland to join up with the
large reserve forces stationed between fifty and two hundred miles
back, while inflicting as much punishment on the enemy as they could
during a fighting retreat.
In the event, though the sequence unfolded faster than expected, it
followed more-or-less the expected pattern. The Goravian naval
forces, rather than stand and risk annihilation, retreated to hidden
redoubts or the open ocean, and the Atlantean navy secured the local
waters and the landing sites, and support ships began to land and
unload reinforcements and supplies. It was at this point that the
Goravians inflicted a surprise in return on the Atlanteans.
The surprise came in midmorning of the fifth day of the war, as the
Atlanteans were assembling their forces on their captured coastal
bases for a major inland push, at about local midmorning. The
Atlanteans were caught entirely off guard by the sudden rain of multi-
ton shells onto their ships and fortified positions. The Antediluvian
Age was certainly familiar with gunpowder and heavy ordinance, but
these shells were beyond anything the naval ordinance or land
artillery of the age could handle. [2] Each of these 'shells' massed
approximately 100 metric tons, most of them struck their targets with
flawless accuracy, and they arrived with impact velocities far above
normal artillery. Each impact on a ship tended to immediately disable
it (if the ship was very lucky) or sink it (usually). Impact on a
land fortification usually smashed it to pieces, collapsing
underground chambers and crushing surface structures.
The 'shells' came flashing out of the sky so fast that they glowed
white-shot with friction, and the time gap between perception and
impact was too short for the stunned Atlanteans to do anything to
defend themselves, and the objects kept coming, and coming, and
coming, hour after hour. Huge warships and supply ships were sunk by
the dozen, land-assault forces were scattered by impacts on their
assembly points and fortifications, enormous quantities of supplies,
ammunition, and equipment that the Atlanteans had staged ashore were
destroyed, and the efforts of the Atlanteans to defend themselves were
singularly futile at that time. They did not even understand the
exact nature of the attack, and they had no real idea of how to
successfully counteract it.
Once they realized that a succession of such objects was coming in.
the Atlantean military ESPers could detect them several seconds ahead,
but so much momentum accompanied each huge 'shell' that even strong
psychokinetic gestalts were usually unable to meaningfully interfere.
Occasionally a strong group of talents were able to use PK to deflect
the course of a shell slightly, to make it miss the target, but even
this was an exception. Attempts to stop or deflect the objects
directly did not work, there was just too much energy in play.
After three straight days of this shelling, the Atlantean attack force
was in disarray, over three quarters of the naval power that had been
sent against Goravia was sunk or wrecked, and the land forces that had
made it ashore were scattered, though not totally disorganized. At
last, though, the shelling slowed and stopped, and the remaining
forces in the field began to regain their order. Just as the
defenders were not entirely overwhelmed by the initial Atlantean
success, the attackers were not entirely repelled by the Goravians
defense. Both sides were bleeding and exhausted after just a week of
war, but both sides remained viable.
MORE LATER.
[1] The Great Archipelago of Goravia is known to our Age as the
Japanese Islands.
[2] Actually, the 'shells' should technically be called 'shot' since
they were pure kinetic weapons.
Johnny1a
The Atlanteans, for their part, were stunned by the weapon the
Goravians had wielded against them. While gunpowder and heavy
artillery were known to the Antediluvians, nothing they had ever
fielded, nothing _any_ military of that age had ever fielded, utilized
(approximately) one hundred ton shot, nor did any known weapon
technology enable such awesome impact velocities. When they retrieved
the 'shells' from the ocean floor or bombarded land areas, the
Atlanteans discovered to their amazement that the 'shells' consisted
basically of masses of rock with a thin sheath of metal, in the form
of a sphere. There was nothing more to the devices, they relied for
their tremendous destructive potential on their mass and the enormous
velocity at which they impacted.
In fact, the Goravians had developed an entirely new application of
Flux science. Though their overall Flux knowledge lagged well behind
that of the Atlanteans, this did not prevent them from developing
specific unexpected applications, and sometimes the sophistication of
Atlantean psychic science caused them to miss options that depended on
raw brute force type applications. This was such a case.
Working in the mountainous interior of the continent, hundreds of
miles from the coast, the Goravians had prepared for the coming
invasion by constructing a combination weapon, an array of 'cannon'
which combined mundane and Flux techniques to enable them to hurl
spheres of rock, massing over 100 tons, into the upper atmosphere, and
then to steer them downward to a precise target. The Flux could also
be used to protect them from the effects of atmospheric friction
throughout most of their ascent and descent, surrounding the objects
with a 'slippery' protective field that only gave way as the 'shell'
was approaching the target. This both enabled the shells to strike
their target at far above 'terminal velocity' but prevented them from
being destroyed by atmospheric friction due to either their awesome
launch velocities or their fast return to the lower levels of the
atmosphere. [1]
Ironically, the Atlanteans had experimented with some very similar
techniques in their efforts to propel an object to escape or orbital
velocity, but had never pressed the techniques very far, and never
really considered their military applications. The Goravians, with
their backs to the mountain walls and facing slavery, had been more
highly motivated and quite prepared to copy ideas from their enemies
for their own uses.
The Goravians could not keep up a perpetual bombardment, however,
because their own fluxons had limits and it took time to prepare the
weapons, aim them, and maintain them, and ammunition had to be mined
and prepared with its metal coating. The emplacements in the
mountains had plenty of ammunition stockpiled, but the fluxons had to
rest, and it was dangerous to tap the Flux too often or too
repetitiously. Still, they had managed to break what could have been
a crippling initial blow, giving the retreating Goravian army time to
regroup, assemble, and turn a rout into a solid fighting retreat that
was making every mile of Atlantean advance costly.
Now the Goravian Navy revealed that their own orderly retreat from the
battlezone had not been random. The admirals of the small but capable
Goravian navy had their contingency orders, and they now began to
harry the Atlantean supply lines, raiding the troop and supply
carriers, striking at commercial shipping and disappearing, even
raiding coastal cities and territories of the Atlantean Southlands at
times, and they had a secret weapon of their own. The Goravians had
been experimenting with a secret technology for many years, once they
had not even shared with their secret allies in the Final War.
Goravian sages had been studying the structure of matter, and
perceived possibilities missed by most of the science of the age in
the general preoccupation with the psychic and paraphysical. They had
discovered much about the relationship between light waves and the
structure of matter, and discovered that it was possible to
artificially generate some forms of light that were far below the
frequencies the human eye could perceive.
The existence of these invisible frequencies of light had long been
known, but had been seen as a secondary issue by most sages of the
age. The Goravians had learned to generate and detect such forms of
light, and to communicate with them. In short, the Goravians had
invented radio. It was, by the standards of the 21st Century AD, very
crude radio...but it was radio, and the Goravian navy was now using it
to coordinate their ships at sea in their constant harrassment of the
enemy.
It's difficult to overstate how important this was, one of the great
advantages of the Atlanteans in any war in that Age was that their
telepathy enabled them to coordinate their forces with an ease and
reliability and precision that nobody else could even _begin_ to
match. The Atlantean Navy could communicate by telepathy across
hundreds of miles as easily as they could converse in person, no other
power had any means of communication from ship to ship or ship to
shore faster than a heliograph, save for the occasional natural psion
or rogue Atlantean. The Goravians, for the first time, could
partially match the Atlanteans at command and control, and the
Atlanteans had _no idea_ of the principles behind this ability, or
even that such a thing was possible.
The Goravians knew very well how crucial this secret was, they took
dire measures to make sure it did not fall into enemy hands. Only a
handful of officers on any ship knew what their radios were or how to
use them, none knew the operating principles. Matching techniques
were used on land, and those officers with access to the secret were
expected not to permit themselves to be captured.
As the War went on, the Atlanteans gradually secured most of the
coastlands, but their efforts to push inland, both on the mainland and
in the Archipelago, stalled, especially where coastal lowlands gave
way to hilly or mountainous terrains. The Goravians fought
tenaciously, drawing on resources long prepared, and were able to
throw back the Atlanteans in assault after assault, at tremendous cost
to their attackers in terms of both blood and treasure. But the
Atlanteans were still coming, and both sides were being drained by
what was rapidly becoming the bloodiest combat in half a century.
MORE LATER.
[1] Absent this protection, the shells would have behaved much like
meteors of comparable mass (albeit with lower velocities).
Johnny1a
As most of the world's attention was occupied by the ongoing and
bloody Goravian campaigns, other matters were going forward that were
in their own way important, some of them taking advantage of the
secrecy and distraction afforded by the Final War. One such project
was unfolding far from the usual haunts of men in those times, indeed,
it was happening in what might well be called the most remote place on
Earth in the Antediluvian Age.
Then as now, the continent surrounding the planet's south rotational
pole was a vast, icebound desolation, visited but never settled. The
Atlanteans (and other seafaring peoples) of the age did not even
maintain any permanent stations or bases, partly from lack of interest
and partly because their paraphysical technology was not really suited
for such a thing, and their 'mundane' technology was not developed
along those lines. Sages did occasionally visit in pursuit of
scientific matters, but the Antarctic was never as much studied or
commanded as much interest from that civilization as it would from our
own in a later age.
Now, though, humans came to Antarctica in secret, during the endless
daylight of the southern summer in the year 4786 BC. They came in
secret, aboard a small flotilla of ships that _officially_ were part
of a commercial activity thousands of miles away, their actual errand
covered by layer upon layer of deceptive paperwork and false trails.
They came to the south, and broke through the icy barrier around the
continent, powerful psionic abilities aiding the specially-built ships
in punching through to the actual shore of the continent, where a
small temporary base was established in one of the few dry, rocky
valleys of Antarctica. This was a temporary base, a place to prepare
their expedition inland.
The expedition inland was a challenge in itself, but their goal was
some modest distance from the coasts, within the vast icelands. In
fact, their destination was a mountain, rising partly out of the
surrounding terrain like a shard of rock somehow floating in an ocean
of ice. The ice of Antarctica covers almost all of the land mass, and
can be well over a mile deep. Lying icebound for millions of years,
the southernmost continent nevertheless is not without change. The
ice does move, and at times mountain peaks are exposed and then buried
again, and it so happened that this modest peak was revealed at that
time.
It so happened that this mountain was a volcano, though it had laid
dormant for tens of thousands of years at this time. The Atlanteans
who came to this place most certainly knew the nature of the mountain,
but they cared little, their interests were not scientific in nature.
What attracted them here was the available solid rock of the mountain,
a place where they could engage in an excavation operation unhindered
by the miles-deep ice surrounding the site in all directions. This
they did, choosing a hidden ledge from which they could delve a deep
tunnel into the side of the cone, cutting hundreds of feet into the
rock. Then they began to delve out a network of underground chambers
and passages around the inner end of the first tunnel, lining the rock
with metal and other artificial materials, laying out chimneys through
the solid rock by which fires could be vented, and generally preparing
an underground base of remarkable extent for such a remote locale.
In the end, three years were required to finishing delving out this
remote Enclave, because construction work had to stop for the
ferocious Antarctic winter, which was quite beyond the resources of
the construction crews to endure. By the time the endless winter
night fell across the site of the Enclave, the miners and builders had
to be long gone, returned to the warmer, kinder latitudes in which
winter was merely challenging rather than unendurable. With the
return of the Sun each year came the return ot the work crews to
continue digging and preparing this distant outpost.
Delving the passages and chambers was only the beginning, another five
years was required to finish the Enclave to the point that it could be
considered 'ready to use'. This time came in the late southern summer
of 4778 BC. When the work was done the crews that had prepared the
outpost received a surprise, instead of the high pay for which these
skilled laborers had been contracted, they were rewarded with a sudden
mass murder. The men and (and a few women) who had built this remote
base, with the precision and ability of skilled Atlantean artisans
that they were, were murdered and their bodies disposed of on-site.
Their employer had no wish for anyone to know about this remote
facility, and dead men tell no tales. Covers stories were ready,
friends and relatives and acquaintances had no idea of what had really
happened, the supposed storm-driven loss of the ship carrying them
back to their homelands was a tragedy, to be sure, but few if any
suspected anything untoward about the story.
Though none of the murdered workers knew this, they had in actual fact
been working for the Unity, through a variety of shells and false
fronts. Now that the facility was in place, the Unity began to stock
it, with supplies of preserved food, with weapons, with libraries of
rare or useful books and information, with unique and irreplaceable
items of a variety of sorts, with records and tools, with whatever the
Unity could think of that seemed likely to be useful. This facility
was the Unity's 'ace in the hole', its hidden base, its emergency fall-
back point, a place to shelter, to hide, to make a last stand if it
came to such a thing.
Thus the iron secrecy of its construction, and the draconian measures
taken to preserve that secrecy.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Now comes the time when we must turn out attention to a small
archipelago of limestone islands to the south and west of Atlantis.
In a later time, this cluster of islands would be known as 'Bermuda',
and in the late Antediluvian Age, it was the site of the primary
research and development complex of the dominant guild of master
fluxons, having been so for almost two centuries, after the
suppression of the rival Flux orders in the Great War of Assassins.
In the ensuing years, what had been a research and study complex in
some ways similar to a modern university had grown, and grown, and
grown, as the importance of Flux technology in civilized life and
military affairs had grown. In 4785 BC, the entire archipelago (which
then consisted of somewhat fewer, larger islands, due to he slightly
lower world sea levels of the time) was dedicated either directly or
indirectly to the work of the guild. Those inhabitants who were not
directly involved with the guild were there in one or another sort of
supporting role, the whole carefully supervised from Atlantica.
The paralenses that were the _sine qua non_ of the technological and
industrial base of the Age were conceived, invented, perfected, and
now were manufactured in Bermuda. [1] The millions of small
paralenses and the hundreds of Greater Paralenses were all constructed
here, assembled by master artisans and incorporating the precious
orichalcum from Atlantis, shipped to Bermuda in heavily escorted
freighters with the heaviest security in the empire. Now that the
Great Project had begun, the new Greatest Paralenses required for its
implementation, and much of the supporting technology for them, were
also being assembled in Bermuda, which was now busier and more heavily
inhabited than it had been in its entire history.
Over one hundred thousand people called Bermuda home, making for
crowded conditions. All the larger islands were heavily built up, and
a major naval base was also present, to support the protective cordon
of warships and aeremes that constantly guarded this nerve center of
Atlantean power. Unlike the colony-states, Bermuda was governed
directly from Atlantis, and legally was considered to be part of the
great Isle. All legal and political authority in Bermuda in that age
flowed from the assigned Quasetor, who was in turn answerable in
theory to the Circle of Ten directly, and in practice was always a
personal retainer of the Speaker. Access to Bermuda was restricted
more tightly than to Atlantis proper, the only place on the planet
where this was the case.
Along with the constant work of assembling the paralenses and other
equipment for the Great Project and general use, there was an ongoing
R&D effort in Bermuda, organized and carried out by some of the most
brilliant minds of the age. It was in 4785 BC that a breakthrough was
made, after some decades of development effort, and the symbiotic
crystal was finally perfected. [2]
These devices made both psionic and Flux skills far more reliable and
effective, and were widely coveted. Though no orichalcum proper was
required for their operation, that is, they contained none of the
precious extradimensional metal, orichalcum was required for their
creation, and they were fantastically complex, making them rare and
expensive (and highly restricted by law). The first few symbiotic
crystals produced in Bermuda went to the highest ranking master
fluxons of the order, to some of the highest ranking governmental
officials and aristocrats of Atlantis, and to a handful of highly
connected VIP types. Only about thirty symbiotic crystals were
produced in the first year of their availability, and after that the
production rate fell somewhat due to the other demands on the
resources of Bermuda and to the sheer difficulty of creating these
devices.
The fact of the existence of symbiotic crystals was not secret, but
they were utterly beyond the reach, beyond the hope of reach, for the
vast majority of all people, even in Atlantis, and distribution
outside Atlantis and Bermuda was strictly forbidden, with rather
draconian penalties for violation.
Even as the symbiotic crystals were being developed, the researchers
were going further, using the same basic engineering techniques to
attempt to createa more sophisticated Flux/psi devices. (The
underlying physics of psi and the Matrix/Flux are the same, so the
same techniques were adapatable to both, within limits.) This would
prove to be of vital importance as time passed and events moved toward
their coming confluence.
MORE LATER.
[1] The people of that age did not use the name 'Bermuda', of course.
We shall do so for our own convenience.
[2] This is _mostly_ the same thing as the device described in GURPS
3e Psionics, see related thread for details.
Johnny1a
There were other things going on in this time that were of importance,
indeed far more than we can hope to touch upon without creating
countless threads with hundreds of long postings. Of necessity we
must take a large view, and only occasionally 'zoom in' to observe the
details, when the situation demands it. One such situation involved a
particular Atlantean who name would be 'Anglicized' as something like
'Vylyrades'. [1]
Vylyrades was born in the rural north country of the great Isle
itself, in 4875 BC. Recall that the north country of the Isle was
somewhat out of the way, a bit isolated from the general mainstream of
Atlantean and Antediluvian culture and thinking, regarded by
'sophisticates' as being rude and unlettered. As a general thing this
condescension was unjustified, and indeed in some senses the slight
isolation of the northerners had a protective effect, because the
insidious effect of the Unity's long-term psychological engineering
project were less pronounced in the rural north country.
The son of a couple who made their living as fishermen, Vylyrades
demonstrated a tremendous intellectual ability and impressive personal
drive at an early age, and by the time he was 16 he had been admitted
to the fluxon guild and recognized as a 'journeyman' level fluxon by
the time he was eighteen, which was quite impressive, though hardly
unheard of, in those times. It was after he went to the central
academy on Bermuda to study higher-level skills that Vylyrades really
began to demonstrate his exceptional abilities, rapidly pulling ahead
of even the other 'gifted' students permitted to come to Bermuda to
train. Vylyrades was able to begin creating his own Controlled
Manifestations of the Flux by the age of 23,which was almost unheard
of, and by the time he was thirty years of age he had been recognized
as a 'master fluxon', a rank and status nobody else had ever achieved
before his or her fiftieth year.
Such a rapid rise would be expected to produce resentments and
jealousies, both on the part of his age-mates who resented and envied
his native skill and willingness to work intensely, and from elders
who would tend to see such a rapid rise as being insolent, or to see
him as 'not having paid his dues' to achieve his status. This
resentment was quite manifest and Vylyrades encountered it regularly.
In truth, he had earned his status and power, he was one of the most
driven students that had come to Bermuda in decades, and he had worked
far harder than most of his age-cohort of students in achieving his
success. Still, the resentment was a fact of life.
Matters were complicated by clashes of culture and personality, most
of his fellow students and then his fellow guild masters were city
bred, born and raised in the great metropoli of Atlantis, gregarious
and at the same time mistrustful, in the manner of the corrupted
culture of mainstream Atlantis. Outwardly all bonhomie and good will,
inwardly always alert for betrayal or for the next opportunity for
advancement, they were not by nature well-disposed toward a 'hick'
such as Vylyrades, and his indisputable, visible skill and ability
only made that resentment worse.
Vylyrades, for his part, was by innate nature something of a loner,
and his childhood experiences reinforced this. Vylyrades had spent
many an hour during his childhood aboard his parents' fishing boat,
standing watch or manning the helm as he got older, sometimes in the
small hours of the night, effectively alone with himself and the
ocean. When on land, he found himself drawn heavily to the fir-
covered slopes of the north country, often going on long hikes through
the thick woods simply for joy of being outside. He was quite at home
in the woods, and comfortable away from the surroundings fo
civilization, unlike so many oif his fellows. He was particularly
fond of the cold clear days of winter, when thick snow lay across the
evergreen forests of his home territory, and a serene quiet unlike
anything to be foudn in a large city lay over the land. Until his
sixteenth year, he had only rarely been in a city with a population
greater than ten thousand.
This all added up to create a certain amount of tension between
Vylyrades and bustling, cosmopolitan Bermuda.
Add in the tension caused by Vylyrades' continued adherence to certain
'quaint' customs and beliefs, and the potential for serious friction
was present, and sometimes it became manifest. Still, Vylyrades'
sheer, unquestioned talent overcome much of the prejudice he faced,
nobody could doubt that by the basic standards of the guild, Vylyrades
was unquestionably legitimate, by the time of his fortieth year, he
was one of the most powerful, and most skilled, fluxons ever to train
in Bermuda, and had become one of the 'stars' of the guild...much to
the consternation of some of his envious, resentful fellows.
MOTE LATER.
[1] The Atlantean language and alphabet was different from ours on
several levels.
Johnny1a
Why was Vylyrades important? Among other reasons, because he was
involved in the project to develop and perfect the symbiotic crystals,
and the knowledge he gained in that project percolated in his mind,
nagging at him with the potential hint another idea, another concept.
Like many creative minds, Vylyrades often had no full idea how he
reached his ideas, where his inspirations came from, and he had little
ability to hurry them, the concept was nagging at his brain for over a
year after his role in the symbiotic crystal work ended, and he was
never quite able to tell himself what it was he was mulling.
At the same time that Vylyrades was engaged in mulling over his half-
formed conceptual ideas, he was also engaged...literally. In 4784 BC,
Vylyrades was about ninety years old, early middle age by the
standards of his time and people, and he had already been married
once, but his first wife had perished in what looked to be an
accident, but which Vylyrades had other suspicions regarding. She had
been a minor aristocrat and her family had been involved in a feud
with another aristocratic family, and Vylyrades strongly suspected
that she had been the victim of a politically-motivated assassination.
[1]
This was actually fairly routine behavior in Atlantis in those days,
and if the people of the north country were not _quite_ so blasé and
hardened about it as those of the metropoli and the south, they were
far from unaffected by the Unity’s long-term effort at corruption.
Still, Vylyrades was bothered at a deep level, not just by the loss of
his wife, but by the implications of her loss. In fact, his first
marriage was more-or-less an arranged match, between a minor
aristocratic family and Vylyrades’ parents. Vylyrades’ had no
aristocratic pedigree whatever, born of commoners, but his visible
talents with the Flux made him a valuable marriage prospect to minor
aristocrats with daughters, trading social and political status in the
aristocracy for status and connections in the ever-more-influential
Flux guild.
Vylyrades was more-or-less content with this arrangement, it would be
false to say that he was madly in love with his first wife, but they
had a workable relationship, both were pragmatic about matters and a
mutual respect grew between them during their time together. Neither
was fully faithful to the other, but that too was more-or-less
accepted and expected in late Atlantean society. When after over
thirty years of marriage his wife apparently died in an accident,
Vylyrades mourned the loss of a friend, if not someone for whom he had
ever felt passionate romantic love. Had he known who to blame, he
would have been inclined (and equipped!) to seek revenge, but he had
only some general suspicions in that direction, and unlike some of his
fellows Vylyrades was not brutal or indifferent to life, the legacy of
the north country.
On some deep level, however, Vylyrades was disturbed by his wife’s
death in the abstract, it set him to thinking, _hard_, about the way
life was lived in modern Atlantis and her colony-states, and about the
archaic values that had once made life so very different a few
centuries before. Those values were still remembered, still present
in old stories, lip service was still given to them in lessons to
small children, but they were treated as a joke by older children and
adults, as proof of the ‘naivete’ and impracticality’ of their
ancestors. This was ingrained in the society, a view that had been
growing for generations…but not Vylyrades was questioning it more
deeply, in ways most people never did.
In any society, most people most of the time accept the basic rules
and nature of their society and just live their lives. Some people do
give such matters some thought, but only a small percentage take their
mental analysis to great depths. Vylyrades was one such, asking
himself questions he had never given thought to before his first
wife’s death but which seemed obvious and important to him now.
Over the course of several years, Vylyrades’ musings went from casual
thinking to deep thought, and then to a serious historical research
project. Vylyrades began delving into Atlantean history, with a heavy
emphasis on first-hand accounts and contemporary (with the events)
sources, trying to put himself into the mind of his ancestors, to
understand how they _really_ thought, how their _silly_ and
impractical values worked, generation after generation after
generation. The more he studied the matter, the more fascinated he
became, and the more disturbing the conclusions he kept reaching
seemed to become.
Vylyrades’ first wife left our world in 4823 BC. His musings did not
follow this all in one sudden flash of insight, they were a gradual
thing, over the course of several years, thoughts and questions
pursued by a very busy and active man. Gradually, though, Vylyrades
came to the conclusion that for the most part, his ancestors had been
neither naïve nor unsophisticated, but rather that they had been,
basically, _right_.
Vylyrades found this conclusion both paradoxical and deeply
disturbing. The paradox was that like most of his generation,
Vylyrades did not take the ancient religious basis of the former
societal morality seriously, yet he was self-honest enough to see that
those ‘naïve’ values has worked to hold society together generation
after generation after generation, for many thousands of years in a
society that lacked technological and paraphysical sophistication.
Part of that, Vylyrades recognized, was due to the presence of the
Eldest, a single, immortal ruler, but part of it was that that those
‘irrational’ values guided individual behavior in ways that
contributed to a society that had been, objectively, more internally
peaceful and more ‘functional’ than the one into which Vylyrades had
been born.
So used was Vylyrades and his generation to the sort of political
assassination that he believed had ended his first wife’s life that it
was taken for granted. Vylyrades could see from his delving into
history that there had been a time, not so long before, when such
things, while not unheard of, were seen as horrible aberrations,
serious crimes worthy of upending entire political alliances and
imprisoning or executing powerful people. There had been a time when
death over family disputes had been rare, and those usually in formal
duels or the like, secret killing had been condemned and they had
_meant_ it.
The paradox taunted Vylyrades, he found himself faced with the
difficulty of explaining why anybody should follow any values without
a reason, and yet the universal assumption of his society in his time
was that the only basis for any action or choice was pragmatic self-
interest. The question, when matters of motivation were considered,
was _always_ formulated as ‘What’s in it for me?’ or ‘What’s in it for
a hypothetical individual?’ This was certainly a rational question,
but it seemed to Vylyrades that it could never be _sufficient_, that
self-interest _alone_ could never be sufficient to hold any society of
individuals together, that without something else such a society could
not remain viable.
Yet Vylyrades could see from his studies that not so long before, many
institutions of his society had once worked better than they now did.
Trust had made up a far greater component of society only a few
generations before, trust not guaranteed by exchanged hostages as it
was between modern aristocratic families, not by threat of
retaliation, or not mainly by such, but simply trust routinely
extended and kept. So steeped in the attitudes of his society was
Vylyrades that he found this almost incomprehensible…and yet it had
_worked_ for thousands of years…and that led him to the recognition
that to a large extent such arrangements _still_ worked in the non-
Atlantean societies.
Oh, the values and customs of those societies _were_ different than
those of his ancestors, some of them radically so…and yet these
‘primitive’ societies functioned in ways that would be unthinkable for
‘practical, sophisticated’ Atlanteans. Something was clearly missing
in the Atlantean world view, their way of thinking simply was not
addressing the questions Vylyrades now was asking himself.
Vylyrades began, quietly, seeking other people who found the questions
interesting, and he found that there were some such people. He found
more of them in the north country of Atlantis (when he visited his
former home) than he did it the great metropoli, but such men and
women existed in both places. What Vylyrades did not realize was that
his studies and questions were leading him toward further questions
that were not merely disturbing, but actively dangerous to his
personal safety
The reason for this was that Vylyrades, one day, asked himself a
fateful thought-question: which might be expressed as 'How did we get
from what we used to be to what we are now?'
Once he asked it, Vylyrades found he could not let it go. The more he
studied the social and political and cultural changes since the time
of the death of the Eldest, the more convinced he became that somehow
it did not quite make sense. The change was too...fast,
too...efficient, for want of any better way to express it, Vylyrades
began to have paranoid thoughts that it was almost as if someone had
_planned_ it that way.
The first time Vylyrades had this thought, he dismissed it as
paranoia, but it kept coming back, and as he continued his studies it
seemed more and more plausible, even inescapable. He had no way of
knowing that what he was thinking, the questions he was now asking,
were potentially life-threatening.
MORE LATER.
[1] As it happens, he was right, though his top suspect was actually
innocent (of that particular killing, anyway).
Johnny1a
questioning of the established Atlantean cultural worldview began, it
took many years before he finally reached the point of suspecting that
some agency was _intentionally_ shaping the changes that had occurred
over the last few centuries. In fact, he did not begin seriously
contemplating that possibility until about 4800 BC, or close enough.
He himself could not have said precisely when his ongoing chain of
thought led to the specific idea of an intelligent actor, but it was
close to that year.
What Vylyrades did not suspect, then, was that he was being watched.
His studies, his questions, the discussions he had had with like-
minded others, all innocent in themselves, had come to the attention
of a 'component' of the Unity, which kept a general watch on the
doings of major fluxons and up-and-coming members of the Flux Guild.
As Vylyrades came closer and closer to matters the Unity preferred
kept hidden, the Unity debated killing him, and in fact would almost
certainly have done just that with most people who were getting that
close to the truth. What protected Vylyrades was that he was also so
_useful_ to the Unity.
His work on the ongoing project of the symbiotic crystals, for
example, was just one of the things that Vylyrades was involved in
that the Unity wanted to see succeed. Among other things, the Great
Project drew heavily on work Vylyrades had done in his Flux
researches, and the Unity was heavily invested in the Great Project.
The Unity was concerned about the potential security breach Vylyrades
could eventually represent, but hungered to make use of the special
genius with which Vylyrades was so clearly gifted.
The Unity settled provisionally on keeping a close watch on Vylyrades,
so that if he started to learn too much the collective remove him, but
otherwise his skills could still be useful. Vylyrades had no
suspicion that several of the people he encountered every day in
Bermuda were actually agents of the Unity, and occasionally he met
people who actually _were_ the Unity, which had become very adept at
pretending to be human through its component individuals.
The attention the Unity was paying to Vylyrades, however, in its turn
captured the attention of some other beings, specifically the secret
society known as the Rhaemyi, dedicated to opposing the Unity, and
through them the immortal Avatars who worked with the Rhaemyi,
Zadatharion and Aradel. Curious to see what was so important about
this particular fluxon that the Unity was so carefully watching him,
these beings also began covert observation, of both Vylyrades himself
and the Unity agents who were watching him.
When they realized just how impressive the creative genius possessed
by Vylyrades was, Zadatharion and Aradel became determined to make
sure they were not caught by surprise from anything he produced.
Also, both Avatars were fascinated by the implications of the
symbiotic crystals, and began to study the techniques for their
creation on their own part.
As for Vylyrades himself, he found that his equilibrium was disturbed
by other things as well as the weird implications of his meditations
and studies of history. One of the things that began to worry the
mind of the most brilliant theoretical fluxon of his age was the Great
Work itself. Vylyrades was not _directly_ part of the planning or
execution of the Great Project, but his theoretical work underlay much
of the work, and he was fascinated by the scale and intricacy of this
immense Flux project, and followed it avidly.
Unfortunately, Vylyrades began to perceive little things about the
Project that disturbed him. As he analysis the intricate mathematics
that formed the foundation of the design, he found that the
mathematical models incorporated assumptions and premises that were
not, in Vylyrades' view, entirely proven. The problems were subtle,
but definitely present, and even in the substantiated parts of the
math he found subtle implications that seemed to have been ignored by
the designers. It was not clear to Vylyrades exactly what all this
indicated, but given the scale of the Project, and the potential for
problems if it was not properly planned and executed, Vylyrades
considered the gaps to be important. Unfortunately he was not in any
position to bring any pressure to bear to examine the matter.
The Great Project had a tremendous inertia, millions of people were
directly involved in it, the planning had been done at high levels,
and enormous political and social pressures existed for rapid
completion. Vylyrades was politically naïve to a point, but he knew
perfectly well that questioning any aspect of the Great Project would
be dangerous, it cut too close to the Destiny Movement and the
interests of the Speaker who was the real ruler of the Atlantean
empire in those times. Vylyrades did ask some discreet questions, but
he did so with considerable caution…and he found the answers he got
less than satisfactory.
As he delved deeper and deeper into the math, Vylyrades began to get
the same slightly queasy sensation that his historical studies had
produced, the gaps in the work, the overlooked implications, the bits
and pieces that just did not seem to fit, started to look as if they
were falling into a pattern, not clear enough that he could make out
what was being hidden, but there _was_ a discernible sort of shape to
what was not being considered, as if someone were deliberately
covering up the subtle implications that Vylyrades was not seeing.
Vylyrades might have figured out what he was seeing sooner, but he was
distracted by something that can be very distracting: he fell in love
for the first time in his life, with a rather improbable person.
Vylyrades met this woman during one of his periodic visits to his
former home in the north country of Atlantis. Vylyrades still enjoyed
long winter hikes through the lower slopes of the north country, but
at the age of 85 he was now in early middle-age, and he had been
living a rather sedate life, so he was not in as good a physical
condition as he had been in his teens and twenties. While trying to
navigate a snowy slope he slipped, fell, and slide downhill to come to
a stop against a huge fir tree, breaking his left leg.
A telepathic call for help brought assistance fairly quickly, and
Vylyrades had sufficient Biopsionic Power and Healing skill to keep
the damage from getting any worse while he waited, and sufficient
pyrokinetic skill to light some nearby wood on fire for heat. All in
all he took remarkably little harm from a broken leg in a snowy,
subfreezing environment.
The physician who treated him was a woman named Crynaria, and she and
her temporary patient ‘hit it off’, and began to see each other
socially. Crynaria was an odd match for Vylyrades in some ways,
highly practical, very much younger (she was only 34), very
intelligent but not much interesting in theoretical matters, with a
lively sense of humor in contrast to Vylyrades’ sober manner and
mood. As a master fluxon who had formerly been married to an
aristocrat, Vylyrades possessed social rank far above Crynaria, who
was a pure commoner (Atlantean commoner, that is, not a ‘commoner’ in
the colonial sense).
Yet a romance began between them that soon became quite intense. It
was 4790 BC when Vylyrades and Crynaria met, and he and she became
engaged for the Atlantean version of marriage in 4788. This produced
something of a scandal, while a liaison between them was no big deal,
_marriage_ was quite another matter, bridging a large social gap and
creating a considerable amount of surprise and disdain.
The Unity was utterly uninterested in the social implications, it
could not have cared less about whether a commoner was getting above
her ‘station’ or an aristocrat had embarrassed himself. The Unity did
care that Crynaria was dangerously outspoken and embodied much of what
the Unity considered ‘worst’ about the north country attitudes, in
some ways her worldview would have been more at home two centuries
before.
When the symbiotic crystal project was finished, the Unity began to
consider that it seemed likely that the value Vylyrades provided was
no longer outweighed by the security threat he represented. In 4784,
the Unity decided that the time had come to eliminate Vylyrades.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The Unity decided that the best way to handle the murder would be the
classic means, i.e. make it look like an accident. In early 4784 BC,
specifically in what we would call March of that year, the Unity knew
that Vylyrades would be travelling by aereme from Bermuda to Atlantica
for a conference, and aeremes were known, occasionally, to crash. In
this case, the aereme went down into the ocean between Bermuda and
Atlantis, leaving no wreckage to examine for evidence, all hands
lost. The only problem for the Unity was that Vylyrades was not on
board the aereme when it went down.
What had happened, to make a long and complicated story short, was
that Zadatharion and the Rhaemyi had learned of the attempt ahead of
time, and snatched Vylyrades and Crynaria just before they would have
boarded the aereme. Thus when the ship went into the ocean the
intended targets were not aboard, though over fifty other people were
killed.
(Zadatharion and the Rhaemyi were not totally callous, they knew an
attempt on Vylyrades was coming during the trip to Atlantis, but their
intelligence had partly failed them, they had expected a
straightforward 'hit' while they were en route, not the entire aereme
being destroyed. Thus they had taken no steps to protect anyone
else. They were ruthless when need be, but they were not monsters.)
The Unity rapidly realized its intended target had not died, however.
The aereme had not _actually_ sunk on impact, they were designed to be
able to float in emergencies, and this one, supposedly too damaged to
do, had actually floated for some hours while the Unity's agents
checked to make sure that everyone who was supposed to be there was.
This told the Unity that it had missed its target, and a search began
for the now-fugitive fluxon and his wife, but the Rhaemyi had them
well-hidden in a sheltered site in Atlantis proper, and the Unity
found itself unable to find them.
This was the start of a fruitful alliance, Vylyrades proved to have
been well worth saving. His long-time suspicions and half-thoughts
now were confirmed by what Zadatharion and Aradel and the Rhaemyi
could tell him. His suspicions about an actor working to reshape
Atlantean society were confirmed, he now knew that that very entity
was the Unity and that it was out to kill him and his wife. He and
his wife were awed to meet beings of the same ilk as the Eldest,
indeed at first they found the very concept somewhat disturbing, given
the psychological 'space' the memory of the Eldest occupied in the
Atlantean mindset, even centuries after his death.
After the adjustment to the initial shocks, Vylyrades shared several
things with the Rhaemyi, including the technique for creating
symbiotic crystals. These were very useful to the Rhaemyi, and even
more so to the Avatars, Zadatharion and Aradel created symbiotic
crystals of their own, and with their already impressive skills the
gains made were especially impressive. Also, the Avatars began to
study Flux techniques that Vylyrades himself had perfected, more
advanced than any most beings had any access to. These things alone
would have made Vylyrades worth the trouble of rescuing him, but he
contributed considerably more than that.
Vylyrades had a perceptive genius, on his own he had begun to
recognize the shadow of the Unity's presence in the world, now with
access to full information he proved to be a genius at analyzing
intelligence, at finding patterns. Indeed, much of his genius with
the Flux flowed from the same underlying natural gift for discerning
hidden _patterns_.
Vylyrades revealed his doubts about the underlying math and design of
the Great Project, which were new to the Rhaemyi, and this in turn led
to a deep investigation of the Unity’s connections to the Project, and
it began to become clear to the Rhaemyi that there was something
strange going on, the Unity had been hiding a presence in the design
of the Great Project under a variety of distractions. The Rhaemyi had
always known the Unity was one of the forces pushing for the Great
Work, but the Unity had up until this point been able to distract
their investigations using layers of ‘red herring’ distractions.
With the new information Vylyrades provided, the Rhaemyi realized that
the Unity was doing something to alter the Great Paralenses at the
point of construction in Bermuda, making subtle additions to the
machines, adding its own subtle features or altering the function in
subtle ways. Not _every_ paralens was so altered, but a significant
number were, most of them the small ordinary paralenses but some of
the huge Great Paralenses as well.
Also, and more mysteriously, deep analysis of the math eventually
showed that Vylyrades had been correct in his doubts. The design for
the Great Project, as it was in the process of being implemented,
incorporated certain ‘shortcuts’ that simply were not viable, if the
Great Project was completed in accordance with the accepted design,
for which the work was already underway, it simply was not going to
_work_ when the time came to bring it ‘on-line’. The Unity, at least,
_had_ to realize that, as did some of the key members of the Great
Project design team, because the gaps and shortcuts were too carefully
hidden for it to have been anything but intentional. Someone had gone
well out of their way to conceal these problems.
Which seemed utterly strange. Though the construction work was
profitable and there were certainly people who would gain by arranging
a futile project simply to drain off money from the public coffers,
the people who planned the Great Project had a vested interest in its
success. Everything the Rhaemyi had learned over the years indicated
that these people genuinely expected the Project to _work_, and yet
they were the same people who had concealed the information that
showed fairly clearly that it was _not_ going to work. Clearly
something was missing, some factor their intelligence had not
uncovered.
Vylyrades also finally managed to pin down the technical idea that had
been nagging him since shortly after the work on the symbiotic crystal
project was finished, an extension of and combination of the
principles behind that project with other aspects of Flux and psi
paratechnology, and it was Vylyrades;' special genius that added a new
ingredient to that combination, creating the concept for an entirely
new kind of paraphysical devices, related to symbiotic crystals but
far more sophisticated.
The potentials of this new idea were impressive, but implementation
was difficult because it required resources available only in the Flux
Guild’s facilities in Bermuda, resources no longer readily available
to the fugitive Vylyrades. It took some time and effort to work out a
way to gain access to those facilities.
In 4781, Vylyrades returned to Bermuda, but few of his fellows on that
island would have immediately recognized him. He was heavily
disguised, the color of his hair and his eyes was different, the tone
of his skin was different, he walked differently, spoke with the
accent of Atlantica rather than the north country, used a different
vocabulary, only his height was unchanged and even that was partly
disguised by a slouch that was quite unlike anything Vylyrades had
been in the habit of displaying.
The Rhaemyi were good at this sort of thing, they had a cover ‘legend’
for Vylyrades ready to go, he was taking the place of a real person
who was part of the Rhaemyi, and who ‘vanished’ in time for the fluxon
to take over his identity, while he himself vanished into the
obscurity of the Rhaemyi network. The new legend Vylyrades was using
as also a fluxon, though nowhere close to as well-known or skillful,
Vylyrades had to be careful to hide his real abilities in his new
identity…but he had regained access to Bermuda.
His new name was ‘Krondymes’, he was known as a skilled master fluxon,
but at a far lower level than he really was, and he was part of a
project in Bermuda that was heavily infiltrated by the Rhaemyi. This
provided him access to Bermuda’s unique facilities, and enabled him to
begin work on his new idea under the cover of taking part in other
projects. Extreme care had to be used, because the Unity was still on
the look out for Vylyrades, but ‘hiding in plain sight’ was something
at which the Rhaemyi excelled. They had taught Vylyrades well, and he
found to his shock that even old friends did not recognize him.
During this period in Bermuda, Vylyrades also discovered something
else that he considered interesting: both those psions exceptionally
gifted and skilled in ESP and those fluxons who were particularly
skilled with the skill of Matrix Perception were encountering an
inexplicable phenomenon in their delvings.
That problem was a strange 'interference' that seemed to be getting
gradually stronger with the passage of time. It was noticeable
whenever ESP or Matrix Perception was used to observe or study
something more than a very short distance removed in space or time,
the larger the gap, the stronger the interference. The problem had
first become noticeable, Vylyrades learned from talking to specialists
in these areas, around 4850 BC, but at that time it had been just
barely noticeable, and had stayed that way for a long time. It had
begun to gain strength around 4800 BC, and had risen steadily since
then.
The problem was _especially_ noticeable for those ESPers and fluxons
who sought to look far ahead, using their abilities to observe the
potential futures. In fact, the consensus was that whatever was
causing the interference actually lay in a potential future or
futures, some event or events that might actually happen, and which
interfered with attempts to observe it or past it, and even, as it
grew in strength, interfering with attempts to look across time at
all.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The best way to describe the phenomenon the ESPers and fluxon-
perceptors were encountering it to listen as one of them explained it
to Vylyrades, in his guise as 'Krondymes’. On a warm spring morning
in what we would call April of 4780 BC, Vylyrades/Krondymes was
standing on a balconied overlook at a small recreational center on the
coast of Bermuda, talking to Zyloru, the head of the a subguild of
specialists in Flux Perception. They were talking shop, and Zyloru
was explaining the problems he and his fellows were encountering. Let
us listen in, once again assuming that what was actually a mix of
spoken words and Telepathy was a conventional conversation...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't understand," Krondymes said. "You're saying you have trouble
looking ahead, but hasn't that always been the case? My understanding
is that precognition is always chancy and hard to use."
"Oh yes," Zyloru laughed. "Even at the best of times, but it's been
getting steadily worse for a long time now. We first noticed it
nearly seventy years ago, when I was barely starting my studies as a
teenager, but it was so faint, I mean only the most sensitive ESPers
and the most skilled fluxons could discern its presence at all, and it
stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't able to personally discern
it until about twenty years afterward, and I had to work at it then.
It was mostly an academic curiosity at tha time, it was so faint and
it seemed to have no effect on anything else.
"But about twenty years ago or so...yeah, I guess it was just about
twenty years ago now, it started to get stronger, noticeably stronger,
and began to seriously interfere with attempts to look across Time.
Precognition especially was interfered with, but it started to be a
problem for retrocognitive efforts as well, and it kept getting
stronger. It was a Static across all our perceptions, it reduced both
our accuracy and our range, and it forced to us to work harder and
harder to achieve what began to be diminishing returns." [1]
Zyloru fell silent for a moment, listening the waves roll in below
their vantage, then continued, saying, "The thing is, it just keeps
getting stronger. About six, maybe seven years ago, it reached the
point that it started to interfere with ESP and Flux Perception as a
general thing, not just attempts to look 'out of time'. Up until then
it was mostly of concern to those of us with a professional interest
in time-perceptions, but over the last few years it's begun to become
a problem for a lot of refined uses of ESP, and Flux Perception is no
easier. Oh, it hits us in the different specialties differently, some
things are easier or harder in one or the other, but we're both being
seriously affected now, and it's spreading to the civilian sector as
well.
"We're starting to be asked questions about it by the government and
the commercial sector," Zyloru went on. "And we really don't have any
satisfactory answers. The only thing we're sure of it that's it
coming from the potential future."
Krondymes blinked. "From the future?! You're being interfered with
by something that hasn't even happened yet?!"
"No, no," Zyloru corrected impatiently, "from the _potential future_.
There's a difference."
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Look, any given event that might happen in the future has a certain
_probability_ of happening, it's not certain until it actually
happens, it's no zero unless and until the conditions in the present
become such that the event literally _cannot_ happen anymore. Do you
follow me so far?"
"I suppose so," Krondymes said carefully. "Go on."
"Well, precognition and Flux Perception doesn't permit one to see
_the_ future, there isn't any _one_ future. It permits us to look at
_potential_ futures, to see what may happen, and the higher the
probability of any given event, the easier it is to see it and
accurately describe it, whereas something really improbable is harder
to see, harder to analyze or grasp."
"Okay, I can see that," Krondymes said. "That makes sense, I know
I've hardly ever used precognition, but that fits with what I've seen
with it. I guess it's simple enough."
Zyloru laughed aloud.
"Simple? Not bloody damned likely!
"The thing is," Zyloru went on, "that probabilities change in
accordance with conditions in the present, and what we see in the
potential future can and does change the conditions in the present,
thus altering the potential future. The fact that an ESPer or a Flux
Perceptor perceives some future event alters his or her behavior and
choices, at least subtly, and sometimes in major ways, which in turn
can and does change the probability of the event that was first
perceived, making it either more or less likely, and making other
potential events likewise more or less likely. It's a feedback loop,
and the more people are using ESP or the Flux to study the future, the
more feedback there is and the more complicated the whole damned
business gets!"
"I guess I see..." Krondymes said thoughtfully. "But how does this
connect to this mysterious Static?"
"As far as we can tell," Zyloru said softly, "what we're seeing is the
interference, the noise, from some tremendous potential event. It's
something we see all the time, you know. ESP can be messed up if
somebody used other psionic powers in a big way close at hand, or a
large mass of orichalcum ore can do the same thing. This looks to me,
and most of my fellows, like exactly the same sort of thing...only on
a scale about a billion times bigger."
"Is that possible? I mean psychic interference from something that
only _might_ happen?"
"Oh yes," Zyloru said with a nervous nod. "Oh yes. When a Flux
Perceptor or an ESPer looks at a potential event, it becomes 'real',
sort of, half way anyway. I mean it's 'real enough' that we can see
it and hear and perceive it, it follows that a potential event can be
'real' enough to affect us in other ways too. We see this happen a
lot, in fact. Just for one example, I know a Flux Perceptor who
perceived a potential head injury to himself in the future, and used
the knowledge to avoid it, but the echo of the pain of a wound that
_might_ happen was enough that he needed pain killers in reality. The
potential future pain flowed back along his perceptive connection."
"Just thinking about that makes _my_ head hurt," Krondymes said.
"It's freaky, no question," Zyloru agreed. "But that's what I think,
and most of my fellows think for that matter, that we're seeing now.
Something, something big, something huge, has the pontential to happen
in the time before us, and it's so big and so psychically potent that
it's messing with our paraphysical senses. And that, my friends,
scares the living daylights out of me."
For the first time, even as he admitted it, Krondymes perceived that
what he had taken for nervousness in his friend was actually fear.
Real, serious fear, the kind that gets into the mind and soul and
paralyzes, twists, chills.
"You said...this started about seventy years ago, didn't you?"
"Did I? If I did I should really rephrase it, that's when we first
starting _noticing_ it. It could have been there for any given amount
of time before, too weak for us to detect. But what really scares me
is that for the last twenty-odd years it's been getting steadily
stronger. That means, if we're right about its nature, that whatever
event is causing this is getting steadily more _likely_. It was
really faint and weak up until then, which would mean that whatever we
were perceiving was only one little possibility out of a huge range of
potentiality, but now it's getting so strong that it's beginning to
swamp our perceptions, which means that whatever it is is no longer
unlikely, it's getting more probable, more and more likely to the
'the' future rather than 'a' future.
"To make it worse," Zyloru went on softly, "it hasn't risen in a
smooth, steady curve, it's had 'cliffs' where it jumps suddenly. It
jumped sharply about six or seven years ago. We don't know what
happened that made it more likely then, it could be something so
trivial that we'd never track it down, the event-chains are like
that. A dropped coin or a paper cut in the now can radically alter
future events when conditions are right. But..."
"But..." Krondymes prompted.
"But I can't help thinking that the sudden upsurge matched the start
of the fighting in Goravia spookily closely."
Krondymes started to say something in response, paused for thought,
and then said, "If the fighting there is so critical, wouldn't
subsequent events there make whatever this...thing...is more or less
likely?"
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Zyloru said. "But it's only risen
since then, no matter what happens in Goravia, so maybe there's no
real connection, just an paranoid hunch from too many late-night
musings."
"Well, the war has more-or-less fallen into a stalemate," Krondymes
said, "or so I gather from what my sources in the Fleet tell me. I
know the Speaker keeps saying that it'll be over soon, but from what I
gather the Goravians have managed to fight our forces to a standstill,
they've got their backs to the mountains and are heavily dug in. Even
the casualty rate has dropped off as the whole thing has turned into a
test of will."
"That's pretty much in accord with what I know," Zyloru said, "and
like I said, the association between the war and whatever this thing
is might be a coincidence. But somehow I can't make myself _believe_
that. Call it my professional instinct, if you want, but something in
me is fairly confident that the start of the fighting in Goravia is
directly connected to this whatever-it-is that we're perceiving!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The conversation turned to other matters of no great concern to us
then, but this discussion led Vylyrades/Krondymes to begin discreetly
seeking everything he could find out regarding this Static, and he
also passed on the information to his handlers in the Rhaemyi, and
through them it reached Zadatharion, who used his own ESP to provide
independent corroboration, he too detected the Static, which added to
Vylyrades' nervousness when the confirmation was reported back to him.
MORE LATER.
[1] The term Zyloru used would not literally translate as 'static',
nothing in the Antediluvian Age existed to give such a context. The
term would come into English with greater technical precision as 'the
blockage', but the way it was experienced and the way they thought of
it would seem close to 'static' to a modern.
Johnny1a
The above conversation to which we were privileged to listen in made
reference to the war in Goravia, so it worth our while to take a
moment to catch up with events in Asia. As Vyrylades and Zyloru
commented, the war had indeed dragged into a near-stalemate. The huge
and well-trained Goravian combined army had skilled professional
leadership, were fighting on home territory to protect their cities,
their families, and their children from invaders. Motivation was not
an issue. They had their backs to the mountain ranges of central
Asia, which made attack from the rear (on a strategic scale)
difficult, such an attack would have to have come from the lands that
would one day be India, or else across the vast central Asian steppe
from the European peninsula, with the Himalayas in the way of the
former and the huge distances blocking the later. The defending
Goravian army had the support of most of the populace, control of
internal lines of communication, short supply lines, and the advantage
of intimate familiarity with the entire battlezone.
The attacking Atlanteans had immensely long supply lines, relatively
smaller numbers on the ground, were on unfamiliar territory and facing
a hostile population. On the other hand, they did have a considerable
edge overall in paraphysical abilities and paraphysical technology,
vastly superior air power, and control of the seas (albeit expensive
control because of the Goravian navy, which had proven to be brilliant
at waging a harassment campaign).
Both sides were absolutely determined to win.
Under such conditions, the fight were long, harsh, and bloody, with
fantastic casualty rates on both sides. Eventually the war settled
down somewhat, with the Goravians more-or-less in control of the
interior and the Atlanteans holding the coastlands, after some hugely
bloody sieges to capture or reduce the remaining Goravian shore
fortifications. The Atlantean power extended up the river valleys,
but the upper valleys were held by the Goravians, and the valleys were
the scene of battles that set records for their age in lethality. The
Atlantean-occupied territories were further riven by local partisan
groups working in tandem with the Goravian forces holding the
interior, it was not enough to cripple action but it most certainl
made the effort considerably more expensive for Atlantis.
Still, the Atlantean control of the coastlands was solid enough to
begin constuction of the local sites of the Great Project for which
the entire war was being waged. This too was incredibly expensive, by
now the combination of the empire's diversion of orichalcum for both
the Great Project and the War was driving the price of the
Antediluvian Age's most expensive commodity to heghts never before
imagined. The economy was suffering both from the rising cost of its
currency standard (orichlacum) and from the dislocations caused by the
absence of the metal from industrial, communication, and other
civilian uses. Employment was falling, wages were stagnant while
prices rose seemingly without end, grumbling spread across the empire,
sometimes turning into violent protests. These were usually put down
by force, sometimes with extreme force.
Each side of the war hoped to exhaust the other, but this was not an
outcome either side could hope to achieve easily, because the
Goravians were fighting for the freedom and their very survival, and
the Atlanteans were motivated by less respectable motive to complete
their Great Project at any cost. The war went on, and on, and on, and
if the casualty rate fell as the battle lines settled, it remained
high in absolute terms. Nevertheless, the war was only a near-
stalemate, because bit by painful, expensive, bloody bit, the
Atlanteans were winning.
The combined advantages of the Atlanteans, though not sufficient to
overwhelm Goravia in the short term, were ever-so-gradually forcing
the defenders back in the long, each passing month saw small gains by
the invaders, small loses by the natives. Occasional reverses slowed
the process, but did not change the trend, both sides could see where
the trend of events was leading. At the rate things were proceeding,
it would still require several years, maybe a decade, for Atlantis to
finally squeeze the life out of the Goravian defense, but both sides
knew that unless things changed, that day was coming.
This visible coming defeat, though still some years distant at this
point, was very much on the minds of the increasingly desperate
Goravian leadership.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Vylyrades found himself rather haunted by what he learned about the
mysterious 'Static', and he was also concerned about the danger he had
come to recognize from his own studies, the danger that valuable
knowledge could be lost. He feared many things, in fact, not all of
which he was able to define precisely, but these fears led him, over
time, even as he continued work on his own new paratechnological
project, to press with the Rhaemyi for the creation of a refuge, a
hidden place where valuable things could be protected, a hidden 'ace
in the hole' against future disasters. Ironically, he had no idea
that similar ideas were driving the Unity to create its own version of
such a refuse in the ice barrens of Antarctica.
Vylyrades was intelligent and a capable leader, he was eventually able
to persuade the Rhaemyi to assist him in the creation of his desired
hidden refuge. Ironically, not even allies as close as Zadatharion
and Aradel knew about this project, secrecy was second nature to these
people by this time.
The refuge Vylyrades created was far less elaborate than the one the
Unity was establishing, but it was certainly remote enough on its own
terms. Construction began in 4778, at just about the same time,
ironically, that the Unity was finishing its own far-southern
bolthole. The location was a matter of deep consideration, certainly
Atlantis itself was out of the question, for obvious reasons.
Vylyrades, his wife, and his allies among the Rhaemyi worked hard to
select a useful site from a long list of possibilities, and in the end
they selected a place in the vast Amazon River valley, amid the dense
rain forests of that continent that would one day be known as South
America.
Then as later, the vast network of river valleys that were tributary
to the Amazon River were thickly grown, the glacial grasslands of a
previous time long gone. Even as late as 4778 BC, this region was but
lightly explored and even more lightly settled. The interior was host
to some peoples who had withdrawn before the inexorable advance of
Atlantean power, some of them quite primitive, and there were a
handful of Atlantean towns and trading posts to be found, but much of
the vast region was quite unknown in detail. The secondary and
tertiary tributaries of the Amazon River were as large as major river
systems elsewhere, the web of feeder streams vast beyond any hope of
mapping It was a good place to hide a very small base.
Vylyrades visited the site a few times, but not often, because he
could not permit himself long absences from his legend in Bermuda. He
did visit to ascertain whether construction was proceeding as he
intended, with due attention to security, secrecy, and safety. What
they ended up constructing was basically a very small town, or it
might be more like a rather heavily fortified academic campus. A
dozen buildings, on either side of a tributary river of a tributary
river of a tributary river of the Amazon. Carefully concealed from
overhead observation, the buildings had plentiful fresh water near at
hand, and for a very small population it would have been possible to
maintain existence with only limited agriculture and feeding off the
local resources.
Vylyrades had various purposes in mind for his hidden refuge, but one
of them was to house a library.
Not just any library, of course. There were libraries aplenty in the
world, especially in Atlantis, but none that served the specific
purpose Vylyrades had in mind. For one thing, none of them were
complete, for another, their books were inadequate, in Vylyrades'
view. There were many reasons for that, but one of them was the fact
that every Atlantean was skilled in mental powers such as Telepathy.
Because of this ability, many books were incomplete, lacking
illustrations, diagrams, or parts of the subject matter usually passed
on by mental communication of images. Some vitally important
information about their society was almost never written down at all,
being universally known due to the Telepathic networks. Some shadow
of fear suggested to Vylyrades that this was no longer sufficient.
Into his hidden Library went copies of every important book Vylyrades
knew of, every source he considered vital and many he did not. He was
not collecting for the sake of collection, it was a matter of utter
indifference to him whether the book was an 'original edition' or a
copy, as long as it was an _accurate_ copy. Vylyrades was biased in
favor of technical works regarding science, engineering, mathematics,
paraphysics, treatises about the Flux, information about the nature of
psionic abilities, books about subjects we would call astronomy,
biology, geology, and the other hard sciences (though the Atlanteans
'divided' those subjects up differently than we do), books of history
and philosophy, often in multiple copies for safety.
This hidden Library was not filled overnight. It took many years for
Vylyrades and his associates to build it up to what it eventually
became, the moreso because of the need to work in extreme secrecy.
Vylyrades also recruited other academics and technical specialists for
his project, with _extreme_ caution and secrecy, and the effort would
go on for many years. Indeed, the Great Library was still being
expanded right up until a major event that interrupted many projects.
Recognizing that conventional paper was highly perishable, Vylyrades
commissioned work that found a way to make a form of 'paper' that was
far more enduring, and pages of this material were bound within
protective metal and other hard covers. Some information was
duplicated or triplicated in other media, including carved stone for
especially important information. A great deal of careful thought and
effort went into the Great Library.
As noted, the Great Library was on ongoing project, but the hidden
Refuge in the Amazon was ready by 4773 AD, and Vylyrades visited it
only three more times in his life. As a legacy, however, the Refuge
and the Great Library would prove to be very important in times to
come.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
As it happens, the Goravian desperation about their prospects was all
too well-founded, nor did they have as much time as they had hoped.
Though their calculations were accurate enough given what they knew or
could reasonably suspect or guess, there were factors in play beyond
anything the Goravians ever imagined. Several of those factors were
coming together in the year 4777, the tenth year of the incredibly
bloody and expensive Goravian conflict. Atlantis continued to ever-so-
slowly drive back the Goravian defenders, but as the Goravians'
prospects sank and remaining territories shrunk, their fury and
motivation only seemed to increase, they fought the harder to defend
what remained, and holding the conquered territory was proving to be
debilitatingly expensive on its own.
The expense of the war combined with the ongoing expense of the Great
Project was breaking the global economy, and Atlantis' forces were
becoming exhausted by their expensive 'victory'. The would-be
secessionist Atlantean colony-states, led secretly by ProtoAthens,
were laying their plans and hopes were rising, though the time was not
quite yet, they continued stockpiling orichalcum from their secret
source in the Northern Isle, more paranoid by the passing day about
discovery. The increasing restiveness of the would-be secessionists
was itself adding to the economic and military strain, the Speaker and
the central government were not blind to the problem, and forces had
to be kept in reserve against the possibility of internal rebellion.
Behind the scenes, the Unity was growing impatient, insomuch as the
collective entity knew such emotional states. For the most part, it
was simply a matter of calm calculation, that the cost of the ongoing
struggle, on several levels, was becoming greater than the potential
cost of drastic action to cut the struggle short. The Unity
calculated that it had several options, of greater or less complexity
and risk, that ought to bring the Goravian conflict to an end, and now
it was considering each of them in light of cost and risk. Unknown to
the Unity, another player was pushing for a quick end, a player whose
nature would have been mysterious, and indeed almost incomprehensible,
to everyone else that we've met in the great game of these last years
of the Antediluvian Age.
The player in question appeared to be an Atlantean aristocrat, about
ninety years old, placing him in the early stages of 'middle age' as
the Atlanteans saw such matters. He was a scion of a very influental
family, his ancestors appeared to include members of the Circle of
Ten, commanders of the Fleet, scholars and soldiers, it was an old
name and the family rank went back to the days of the Eldest. It was
known that this family had been something of a holdout in the cultural
changes of the recent centuries, previous lords of the family had a
reputation for 'old-fashioned' thinking, and the family had become
somewhat aloof and reclusive as the world and Atlantean society had
changed.
This particular youth had come into the family rank when his parents
and older brother and younger sister had died in a family feud with
another house, and he had apparently come into his power at the age of
35, young for an Atlantean to inherit a title. He had made his name
first by wiping out the family against which his family was at private
war, establishing both a reputation for being dangerous to cross and
for avenging harm to his kin, both important in the increasingly
degraded culture of late Atlantis. Then he had joined the emerging
Destiny Movement, marking him as something of an apostate from his
family's customary positions, he was certainly not an 'old-fashioned'
Atlantean.
He did have a reputation for certain eccentricities, for one thing, he
rarely displayed his own psionic abilities in public. On occasion he
did, often with deadly force, but usually he would have a retainer do
the task if it called for psychic strength. For another, he was known
to be remarkably able both physically and intellectually, he was said
to never forget a fact, a face, or a conversation. But again this was
nothing terribly rare in Atlantis.
As he rose in the Destiny Movement, this aristocrat eventually became
one of the Speaker's immediate lieutenants, and was known to be one of
the more powerful men in Atlantis. Yet his loyalty to the Speaker
appeared firm. There were those courtiers and political players who
sought to move against him in secret, in every case this ended in
disaster for the plotters, something subtly, sometimes very publicly.
This aristocrat, whose name we shall Anglicize as 'Tynares', was
something of a hard-liner on the subject of Goravia. Tynares argued
quietly that the war was being allowed to drag on too long, draining
too much money, too much time, too many lives and too many resources
from more important things, especially the Great Project, which
Tynares pushed with energy and ability. Along with the Unity's quiet
pressure for fast action, the political force of Tynares and his
faction at the Speaker's court was now pressing for action.
The Flux Guild fluxons had taken part in the Goravian war, of course,
but there had been a formal policy decision to limit the scale of what
could be done. The memory of the Drowning of Livicia, now over 160
years before, had still not entirely faded, and though Atlantis was a
far more degraded, more corrupt society in 4777 BC than it had been in
4940, there were still those who called the Drowning an atrocity.
There was little living memory left of that event among mortal men,
though, and the younger generations were more eager to make use of the
vast theoretical power of the Flux for war than their elders. The
younger men and women were simply m more ruthless, the product of
additional time under the Unity's slow poison of 'rationalization',
and it had been a long time since the Drowning.
Considerable debate went on in the Flux Guild between 4779 and 4777,
but in the end the activists won. The decision was taken by the
government and the leadership of the Flux Guild to attempt to execute
the dire plan that the Unity now backed.
The Atlantean name for this option would mean nothing, even literally
translated. The spirit of what they called it might be captured by
calling it ‘Operation Strikeslip”.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Recall that the Atlanteans had always run 'ahead' of our age in
scientific understandng of certain matters, partly because of 'inside
information' from the Eldest, partly because their psionic abilities
made it possible to directly _perceive_ some things that a later age
(and people on many another planet) had to deduce by reason from
evidence. One such area of study was geology. The Atlanteans
understood basic vulcanology, plate tectonics, and other concepts at
their equivalent of TL4, any competent Atlantean geologist from the
Antediluvian Age's equivalent of TL3 or TL4 would have immediately
recognized Yellowstone as a collapse caldera, for example. Likewise,
they had long comprehended the basics of earthquakes, though lacking
seismographs and other tools, some aspects of these matters were not
as clear to them as they would be to the 20th Century AD. They had
only a vague idea of the inner structure of the Earth, for ex, and no
conception of the liquid 'outer core', or the nature of mantle plumes.
[1]
Now that geological knowledge was turned to destruction. The
Strikeslip project involved the 60 strongest, most skilled fluxons in
the Guild on a single project, using techniques only recently
developed to permit unusually large groups of fluxons to work together
on a single Manifestation. All of these men and women were firmly
dedicated to their goal, indeed they had to be, if a fluxon does not
really want to do what he or she is seeking to do, that reluctance
will undercut the effort. The newest paraphysical technologies were
used to aid their effort, including several of the new super-
paralenses of the same sort that were being used in the Great Project,
and in addition, each of the fluxons in the Strikeslip effort had his
or her own symbiotic crystal, magnifying Flux skills by 50% or so, and
adding additional ability to reach out to the Matrix. Indeed, without
the symbiotic crystals, the effort could not have worked at all, even
with them it strained their abilities to the limit.
The fluxons remained secluded for some time before the zero hour,
carefully refraining from any use of their abilities to avoid draining
the tolerance of the Matrix, meditating and preparing. They studied
information derived both from the Atlantean 'geologists' work and from
careful, delicate Flux Perception and ESPer work. When they were
ready, the sixty gathered in a hidden place in Bermuda, and invoked
the most powerful Controlled Manifestation in history up until that
time. It was delicate and audacious, and risky, but they were
extremely skilled and carefully prepared, and they succeeded in their
effort, producing something quite close to their precise desire, which
manifested within a few days of their completing their work. This
occurred on July 9th, 4776 BC.
Actually, it might be more accurate to say that the effects manifested
or began to manifest immediatley, but it took a little time to reach
the spectacular crescendo. The upshot either way is the same: all
across Goravia, the ground began to shake.
Earthquakes were nothing unusual in Goravia, located as it was on the
western rim of the 'Ring of Fire' that surrounds the Pacific Ocean,
but never had so many earthquake faults suddenly shifted at once, or
within a few days of each other, major quake after major quake rocked
the entire region, sending cities into chaos, disrupting military
operations, shattering supply lines, rending communications.
Assistance could hardly be sent to the afflicted cities or regions,
because even as the quakes would cease in one region they would spread
to another. A tremendous amount of energy had been pumped into the
crust in far eastern Asia, and that energy was now working its way out
through the fractures in the plate structure, doing awesome damage as
it did.
The Atlanteans in the region were affected too, of course. The
coastal regions conquered by the Atlanteans were nearly as devastated
as the central areas targeted by the fluxons, and the quakes spread
outward with decreasing intensity along the networks of faults and
plate boundaries, sometimes triggering additional major quakes at a
distance where tension in the crust was already high and the new crust
motions suddenly released that tension, The Forali lands of what
would someday be India were badly shaken, as were the still-
independent and half-primitive peoples of the Asian deep interior.
Quakes spread around the Pacific rim over the course of the following
weeks, some of them quite intense, doing considerable secondary
damage, much of it to various Atlantean colony-states.
Most of the Atlanteans, including the forces in the field in Goravia,
had no idea of what was coming, it had been a deep secret of the
highest circles of the government and the Guild, and so casualties
were steep even among the Atlanteans. The secondary disturbances went
on for months, some of them quite powerful, and the death toll was not
trivial.
The Goravians, at the center of the event, however, took by far the
worst of it. Over the course of several days, the entire Goravian
nation simple collapsed into chaos, as their cities crumbled into
ruin, their roads bucked, their supply lines were shattered,
agriculture was disrupted, irrigation systems destroyed, the war was
reduced to a mopping up action once the Atlantean forces regained
their own cohesion. Not that all resistance stopped by any means, but
any hope on the part of the Goravians that they might retain their
cultural and political integrity against their enemies was shattered
forever.
The fluxons who had brought about these events had little chance to
enjoy their success. Though their theoretical work was confirmed by
the results, none of them survived to see it happen, because the
hidden redoubt in Bermuda from which they operated suffered a disaster
of its own. A massive explosion, from somewhere _within_ the complex,
destroyed the entire facility and everyone within, killing sixty of
the more powerful and skilled fluxons in the world in one stroke. A
few days later the Drowning Sun organization, long thought extinct,
claimed credit for this strike in the name of the dead of Livicia and
Goravia, sending a shudder to the top of the power structure in the
empire.
The Drowning Sun had been a major problem for some decades after the
Drowning of Livicia, but the authorities had thought they had
successfully broken the back of the organization over a century
before. Now it appeared to have survived in hiding for over a
century, and to have the ability to penetrate both the highest secrecy
and highest protective security of the Atlantean state. The explosion
had come from _inside_ the complex, which meant an insider had to be
involved, or so the rulers of Atlantis and the leaders of the Flux
Guild concluded.
Tynares was authorized by the Speaker to tighten security and hunt
down any hint of activity by any subversive group, and now a reign of
terror began in Atlantis proper, as no stone was left unturned by the
thorough Tynares in his search for the enemy. Along the way, any
number of rival aristocrats came to sudden grief.
Meanwhile, the rulers of Atlantis found that they had ended one war at
the cost of a new one, because now the secessionists took advantage of
the chaos and confusion left by Operation Strikeslip to declare their
full, formal independence from the Atlantean empire, at a declaration
by an assembly of delegates and rulers in ProtoAthens. This occurred
in August, and now a new civil war spread across the world in place of
the former Goravian conflict. The fighting did not even come to a
stop in Asia, though all _large scale, organized_ resistance was
broken, hundreds of local centers of resistance remained, and now that
fighting was rapidly swept up in the larger war that was sweeping
across the world. By the end of the year, there was fighting on every
continent except Antarctica, and the Fleet itself had split as many
ships with Resistor crews mutinied against Loyalist officers. Both
the wet navy and the air navy split, though the former, being vastly
larger, had a wider variety of personnel from different backgrounds
and so was more deeply split as civil warfare spread.
Atlantis was caught by surprise. Though the Speaker and the
government certainly knew of the hostility toward the central
government by the Resistor states, they had never suspected how well-
prepared they were, and their hidden supplies of orichalcum now made
themselves felt, as impossibly well equipped armies and navies took to
the field, supplied with orichalcum from the Northern Isle. So sudden
was their onslaught and so effectively was it executed that in the
first year of the war, almost every battle went against the Loyalists,
land, sea or air.
The rebellion was carefully timed, and the secessionists drew courage
from the fact that the best, most capable fluxons of the central state
were dead from an act of what had appeared to be terrorism. The
Resistor states, being of Atlantean derivation, could match the
central state both at personal psionics and (almost) in Flux ability,
and their collective resources were vastly greater than Goravia had
ever possessed, while the central state was now much weakened.
In the meantime, periodic earthquakes continued to rock every area
with significant faulting, as the Earth's crust sought to regain
equilibrium after Strikeslip. The quakes were far weaker than before,
but they continued to ripple around the world.
MORE LATER.
[1] In fact the Atlanteans had no 'geologists' as such, they divided
up the study of the natural world differently than we do, but they did
study the Earth.
Johnny1a
Now we must expand our omniscient vision, because things have become
sufficiently obscure that some explanation is probably needed as to
just what exactly is going on, and who is really trying to do just
what to who. Keeping in mind that we already have a larger 'bird's
eye' view of the matter than the people of the Antediluvian Age did,
let us step back and try to understand exactly what was going on at
the deepest levels.
It all goes back to the death of the Eldest. Just about everything
that happened in the last few centuries of Antediluvian history flowed
from that moment one way or another, and the unsolved mystery of the
murder of the Atlanteans' immortal ruler. Somehow, in some unknown
way, someone had managed to sneak into the royal place, past extensive
guards, past functionaries of a dozen sorts, in broad daylight, and
slit the throat of an entity possessing psionic powers beyond any
normal human measure, and then the assassin had gotten away through
the hue and cry. The mystery was still unexplained even centuries
later, not even the Unity knew the truth of the matter, and it had
sought answers and given the matter considerable thought.
How could a normal human, even a psionically gifted normal human,
armed with the TL2 technology of that time, have managed such a
thing? Well, the answer is that no normal human, psionic or
otherwise, armed with the TL2 technology of the time, did such a
thing. In fact, the entity who murdered the Eldest was not even
alive.
The ultimate source of the death of the Eldest can not be found in
Atlantis. The proximate cause lies in the ocean, off the eastern
coast of the Great Isle, under about one hundred meters of water along
a stretch of rarely-visited coastline. To find the ultimate cause,
however, we must turn our gaze away from Earth and the Sol System
entirely, and cast our awareness across the Galaxy. Thousands of
light-years from Sol, we approach a yellow dwarf a bit cooler than the
Sun, and we find that it has a living Solarigen world orbiting it,
boasting a rich biosphere, and orbiting this planet we find a moon, a
body of stony nickel-iron about two hundred miles in diameter. Though
nothing external marks this moonlet as anything but a natural object,
were we to peer beneath the surface we would find that it is
intricately tunneled, and deep within it lies a chamber chilled to the
temperature of liquid helium.
Here resides the ultimate source of the murder of the Eldest:
NEMESIS.
NEMESIS had long been aware of Earth, of course, having been watching
the source-world of all Solarigen life for half a billion years.
Though it had been very subtle in its occasional interventions since
the end of the Mesozoic Era, and the mass extinction it had inflicted
with an impactor, it never stopped watching, though it could not watch
_all the time_. The gaps in its observations, forced by the need to
hide from the Eldren, enabled sapient life to evolve on Earth, and the
Eldren had scattered that life across the Galaxy before NEMESIS had
even become aware that it existed. Also, and of vital importance,
NEMESIS had not observed the events that had brought the relocation of
the Homosentient genus to an end, and had no idea that the Familiar
Eldren were in fact forbidden to act by higher authority. All NEMESIS
knew was that it had seen no sign of Eldren activity near any
Solarigen world for approximately 67,000 Earth years.
From the point of view of NEMESIS and its long secret war against
Solarigen life and the Familiar Eldren, 67,000 Earth years was the
blink of an eye, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the half-
billion year history of the affair. NEMESIS was certainly not
prepared to make any assumptions about what the Eldren were doing or
where they were based on such a short absence of activity, indeed,
there were many longer periods in the Phanerozoic Eon in which there
was little or no sign of Eldren activity. NEMESIS remained bound by
its programmed caution.
Already, NEMESIS had seen a Homosentient species rise, from far-off
Eosia, to found a star-travelling multistellar group of societies, and
had by subtle manipulation managed to bring about the downfall of that
association and knock the species within it back to primitive levels,
but as a side-effect NEMESIS had accidentally helped bring about the
creation of yet _another_ sapient tool-using Solarigen race, the
infamous Beasties. This example of unintended consequences was taken
by the ancient AI as one more example of why extreme caution was
called for in its activities.
NEMESIS was now being challenged by another legacy of the Eosians,
they had left behind their own artificial intelligence, which called
itself ARNETHIS, and now the ancient Helian AI found itself locked in
an ongoing struggle with that AI...and the outcome was in doubt. It
was against this background that we must consider the interaction of
NEMESIS and Earth in the Antediluvian Age.
When NEMESIS had first discovered the Eosian Hegemony, and the
multiplicity of Homosentient species within it, it had analyzed the
various species on the various different worlds and instantly
recognized that they all had to share a common evolutionary origin in
the very recent biological past, their similarities stretched any
viable model of convergence far past the bounds of plausibility.
Further, none of the 'home worlds' of any of these species that the
Hegemony contained fit the necessary profile of that planet. NEMESIS
was able to calculate to a high degree of certainty what sort of
planetary environment would most likely 'fit' the ancestral form of
these closely-related species, and it instantly recognized that Earth
itself fit the profile almost to perfection. NEMESIS calculated a
better than 99% probability that the point of origin of the various
Homosentient species in the Eosian Hegemony was the planet Earth.
This in turn led NEMESIS to break its usual schedule of observations
and send a carefully-concealed ship to make a special look at the Sol
System. This involved the vehicle sneaking close enough to the Solar
System to interrogate the automatic observation stations that kept
watch, and as soon as it did it returned to NEMESIS with a report that
Earth was indeed home to its own breeding population of Homosentient
species, the large majority of which were _H. sapiens_.
This information reached NEMESIS in 31,508 BC. At that time Atlantis
was not yet inhabited, indeed the entire planetary population was
miniscule by comparison to what was to come. The highest technology
in use on Earth at that time was TL0, and by all indications there was
nothing occurring on Earth _at that time_ to compare in importance to
the ongoing problem of the Eosians, who were at TL10 and spreading
across the Galaxy. NEMESIS began keeping a much closer watch on
Earth, however, taking the risk of sending a ship to interrogate the
observation stations as often as every one thousand Earth years
(approximately).
Thus NEMESIS was not unaware as _H. sapiens_ multiplied and spread all
over the planet Earth, it was aware of the smaller communities of
other Homosentients as they found their various open or hidden
niches. It took note, but assigned the fact little specific
importance at that time, when a survey check showed that a community
of humans had spread to the island of Atlantis, at the time NEMESIS
regarded this as of no more importance than any of the other
expansions of the species around the world
However, this particular survey came only about two centuries after
the Eldest led humans to Atlantis in the first place, and the
community there was still TL0 and very small. Between eight and nine
centuries later, the next survey report informed NEMESIS that the
settlements in Atlantis were thriving, and more importantly, the
survey reported something that had been missed before: the humans in
Atlantis were displaying impressive levels of psionic ability.
This fact, when NEMESIS processed it, gave the ancient AI pause for
thought.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
It should be noted that NEMESIS was most certainly aware that
Homosentients had an innate potential for developing and displaying
psionic abilities. It knew this because the Eosian Hegemony had made
_use_ of such abilities in their interstellar communications system,
and some of the other abilities were also known to both the Hegemony
and NEMESIS through its observation of the Hegemony. Telepathy in
especial was well-known and reasonably well-understood by the science
of the Hegemony, and the Beasties created By Koalidi Byth-Kormadois
used Telepathy as a primary means of communication.
Likewise, the basic physics that underlie and permit psionic abilities
were well-known to the Helians who had originally created NEMESIS,
although the manifestation of those physics as ‘psi’ was mostly
unknown to the Helians, save for Telepathy. The full range of psionic
abilities was mostly a manifestation of Solarigen life, especially
sapient Solarigen life.
The appearance of a culture making extensive use of psionics in
Atlantis, however, gave NEMESIS a level of surprise. While NEMESIS
was incapable of being ‘disturbed’ in the Homosentient sense, the
ancient AI could be and was able to assign high priorities to sudden
serious developments, and it considered this to be one such
development for a number of reasons.
To begin with, extensive use of psionics at such a low level of
general technology (about TL1 at the time) was very unusual. To make
the situation more alarming from the point of view of NEMESIS, not
only did the _H. sapiens_ community in Atlantis display unusual
strength of psi abilities, but an unusual breadth of skills and a
remarkably sophisticated grasp of subtle psionic applications.
NEMESIS decided that the Atlantean settlement merited much closer
scrutiny.
This was a complicated and clumy procedure, because of the extreme
need for secrecy on the part of NEMESIS. The once-per-millennium
(roughly) survey checks NEMESIS was now performing on the Sol System
involved two stages. First NEMESIS sent a starship to Sol, which was
carefully disguised to be able to appear to be a random bit of cosmic
debris, and upon arrival near the edge of the Solar System it would
shut down its engines and enter a long parabolic orbit around the Sun,
and let nature do the work of carrying it down into the inner Solar
System and out again. Most of its systems would barely be ticking
over, and while it passed through the inner System it would
interrogate the hidden survey centers using ultra-tight-beam high-
frequency short-burst lasercoms. At the same time that it downloaded
the current batch of observations, the shuttle-probe would upload the
latest instructions from NEMESIS.
When its orbit carried it back out to the cold depths, then the
NEMESIS messenger-shuttle would engage its dimensionators and return
to report on its findings to the master AI.
This process necessarily took many years, since the parabolic orbital
entry and exit that enabled the shuttle to remain hidden from any
Eldren who might be observing was slow, in fact the entire procedure
from arrival to departure took centuries. Thus when NEMESIS decided
to raise the priority rank of Atlantean observations, it was nearly a
full millennium later that the instructions were implemented, during
the next regular download of observational data. When this batch of
data in turn arrived back at the NEMESIS planetoid, the AI found
itself even more concerned by what they revealed.
In just over a thousand Earth years, the community in Atlantis had
developed several new technologies of metal working and learned how to
make use of the local supply of orichalcum in extending and refining
their own growing psychic powers. Unintentional (or mostly so)
selective breeding had acted to make the Atlanteans far more
psionically 'active' than the average of the Terran Homosentient
population, and they had developed literacy, arts, and sciences
suggestive of a much more advanced culture. Further, it was from this
third batch of observations that NEMESIS became aware of a truly
surprising piece of intelligence: the ruler of the Atlantean society
was still the same being who had governed them over one thousand Earth
years before.
In no case in the files of NEMESIS was there any instance of an
individual Homosentient with such a life-span. Even the highly
advanced starfaring Eosians displayed no such instance, though their
medical science had extended lifespans to two hundred Earth years or
more. The TL1-2 technology base of the Atlanteans should not have
permitted _any_ extension of life-span, indeed according to the models
NEMESIS maintained of Homosentient societies, the average life-span at
the technology level should have been no more then three to five Earth
decades _at best_.
NEMESIS concluded that distant observation from space was simply not
sufficient, it needed close-up data, and this was problematic. It had
no major facilities left on Earth proper, the Eldren had scoured the
planet after the Dinosaur Killer impact, and wiped out most of what
the AI had installed and kept hidden. In the subsequent megayears
NEMESIS had never dared attempt to place any large facilities, the
risk-to-benefit ratio had not been sufficient to overcome the risk of
Eldren detection.
Now the risk/benefit ratio had shifted, and with the mathematical
coldness of a computer intellect, NEMESIS began working on how to
place a nemetic brain and the associated support equipment on Earth'
surface without Eldren awareness. [1]
The question was how to do this. NEMESIS was aware that the Eldren
were aware of some of its past tactics, but in the end it settled on a
means it had used before on occasion. On the next arrival of the
messenger-shuttle, there was a small collision as it passed through
the inner asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The piece of
asteroidal debris which the messenger-unit appeared to be collided
with another bit of asteroid rock, this one exactly what it seemed.
Among the bits of debris that emerged from the collision was one that
now followed a complicated orbital path among the worlds of the inner
System, as well as a couple of passes near Jupiter and the Galilean
Satellites. Over the course of a century or more, this speck of rock,
bounced around the worlds until at last it entered Earth's atmosphere
and burned up, the last core bit of it apparently exploding in the
lower atmosphere above what would someday be called South America.
There was no impact crater as such, since the meteor shattered in an
airburst, a stretch of the vast jungle was leveled, but in the fecund
conditions of the Amazon Basin, within a few years there was little
sign that anything had ever happened.
The airburst also left a single small, carefully-designed and shielded
item intact, which fell, precisely as planned, into the river system
that drained the vast basin, and proceeded to float through the
tributary feeder into what would one day be called the Amazon River,
and in due time into the Atlantic Ocean itself.
MORE LATER.
[1] Keeping in mind that NEMESIS still had no knowledge that the
Familiar Eldren were, for the time being, sidelined.
Johnny1a
The package that floated down the Amazon, carried along passively by
the current, was as stripped-down and stealthed as NEMESIS could
design it to be. It basically consisted of a nemetic brain in
suspended animation, with the necessarily bulky temperature shielding,
and a package of automated assembly and construction tools, many of
them microbotic. NEMESIS would vastly have preferred to send only the
necessary robots and microbots, but it had no way around the necessity
of budding off a nemetic brain from its own mass to operate the
proposed construction. That was the only way available to NEMESIS to
put a sapient mind in control of its 'field forces', which meant in
turn that it _had_ to send the budding across the Galaxy physically.
The package floated to the ocean, and into it, and sank as it was
designed to do. It rolled out onto the continental shelf, which was
not as extensive in 6091 BC as it would be later, but which certainly
had room enough to hide such a relatively tiny device. On the shelf,
it released the microbots, which in accordance with their programming
sought out raw materials, ores, everything necessary to construct a
life-support system for the nemetic brain, a robotic body to give it
mobility and manipulative capacity, weapons and sensors and the other
associated paraphernalia NEMESIS wished its proxy to possess.
This was not a swift process! Lacking any infrastructure to assist,
the microbots had to first build the tools to build the tools to build
the tools, small forges, chemical reactors, larger robots to perform
large-scale work, all the while taking care to produce the minimum
possible 'signature' of their activities. They carefully, in
accordance with their programming, remained underwater, letting the
ocean itself provide an additional layer of protective coloration.
All in all, it took approximately five centuries for the original
package of microbots and handful of larger units (none larger than a
mouse!) to complete their programming and place the nemetic brain in
the control module. When this sub-version of the NEMESIS AI came out
of suspension, it assumed control of the robotic system that had been
constructed for it, and began executing its overall instructions from
NEMESIS. This involved swimming from the construction site off the
coast of South America toward the distant island of Atlantis. The
machine was not a swift swimmer, but NEMESIS and its 'offspring'
operated on a scale of millions of years, the several months necessary
for the machine to swim to Atlantis was a triviality.
When it arrived, it constructed what amounted to a small, carefully
hidden construction site off the eastern shore of Atlantis. It was
not elaborate, compared to some of what NEMESIS had maintain on Earth
in the Paleozoic. Scattered sites were tapped for ore, slow-but-
concealable chemical and other forging facilties were created, the
whole thing kept off the shoreline of Atlantis. It took over a
century to built the first Infiltrator unit, which was not shaped as a
human but rather as an animal. The local nemetic brain dared not yet
attempt to pass off a robot as a human among the Atlanteans, their psi
senses would make this a major challenge. Over the course of the
following years, it build more robots to spy on the Atlanteans,
usually in the form of small, innocuous animals that could observe
from far enough way to avoid seeming odd to the psionically-capable
Atlanteans. Such small animal-bots could also plant tiny microphones,
cameras, and other concealed sensors in the cities and facilities of
the Atlanteans, who were psychically advanced by technologically
barely TL2.
Now the nemetic brain could begin to gather data in earnest, and make
contingency plans within the overall priorities NEMESIS had assigned
to it.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Now the local nemetic brain that was acting as a proxy for NEMESIS
could gather data relatively easily. The robotics animals that it
used as its agents could plant optical pickups and listening devices
in the cities, in the estates of the aristocrats, even in the very
palace of the Eldest, and as long as the animal-bot was in and out
swiftly and secretly, there was little danger of any detection. For
all their psionic and anomalous scientific skill, the Atlanteans of
that time were a TL1/TL2 culture, there was only a vanishingly tiny
chance that they would detect or perceive as a threat concealed
sensors operating at TL10/11. They had no way to detect the faint
radio and microwave and laser pulses that send their data to hidden
receivers, no way to even _grasp_ what these devices were doing even
if they had known the devices were present. The nemetic brain rapidly
began to build a fairly detailed picture of what was happening on the
Island of Atlantis.
The rapidly improving Atlantean ability in psionics, both in terms of
raw Power and personal skill with that power, was alarming. Equally
disturbing was the entity who ruled the Atlanteans, the one they knew
as 'the Eldest'. The Eldest ruled the Atlanteans as a whole, his
offspring acted as his deputies and agents, and even these offspring
of the Eldest and his human mates and wives displayed multi-century
lifespans, though they did age and eventually die, unlike their
father. The nemetic brain learned that the offspring of the Eldest
did suffer from sterility, in no case throughout the history of
Atlantis did any offspring of the Eldest ever sire a child or become
pregnant. On the other hand, along with extended lifespans, the
offspring of the Eldest displayed psionic abilities beyond even those
of the average Atlantean, in terms of strength and usually in terms of
skill, though the later was more of an individual matter.
As for the Eldest himself, the psionic abilities he displayed were
beyond anything anyone else in Atlantis ever came close to revealing.
NEMESIS had given its proxy on Earth a fairly complete set of
datafiles about observed psionic phenomena in Homosentients, and there
was no case in the experience base of NEMESIS of any Homosentient
displaying the levels of psychic power and skill that the Eldest
routinely exercised. Indeed, over the course of the observation
period, it became clear that there was a gradual upward trend to the
abilities the Eldest was displaying. Plotting the increase in his raw
strength yielded a gently sloped but increasing curve, while his skill
was rising at a greater rate with the passage of time.
Periodically, the nemetic brain would release a 'buoy' that would
float to the surface, connected to the underwater installation by a
thin cable, and the buoy mounted a lasercom that would fire irregular
pulsed messages to concealed receiving stations in space, and when the
regular stealthed message-shuttle from NEMESIS arrived in the Solar
System, the observations would be sent on to NEMESIS with the rest of
the information the stations gathered. NEMESIS was now sufficiently
concerned to increase slightly its risk tolerance for detection,
message shuttles were arriving roughly every two centuries.
The nemetic brain watched, and through it at a remove NEMESIS also
observed, as the Atlanteans gained in knowledge, skill, and power,
especially paraphysical power. With increasing alarm, the hidden
observers watched as the Atlanteans learned to create psychic
gestalts, and to use drugs and other means to boost their native
abilities. They watched as the ever-more-capable Atlanteans became
capable of massive civil engineering projects, carving out a circular
irrigation channel around their central city, carving an underground
tunnel from their ringed capital city all the way to the Atlantic, and
constructing ships that made them ever more capable at sea, until at
last Atlanteans were reaching out across the waters to the continents
to the east and west.
NEMESIS and its proxy wanted as much information as they could get
about the Eldest and his offspring. With exquisite caution, tissue
samples were taken, by means of robotic insects mostly. Tombs of dead
former offspring of the Eldest were opened, and samples taken there as
well. Eventually the need for information led the nemetic brain to
the drastic step of faking the death of one of the Eldest's offspring
in what appeared to be a normal accident, so as to be able to dissect
him. Much was learned by these means, especially by the analysis of
the DNA and other elements of heredity.
The tissue samples from the Eldest himself were particularly
revealing. The DNA pattern of the Eldest was not _exactly_ that of an
_H. sapiens_, though it was very close, nor was it _exactly_ that of
any of the other known Homosentient species, though genetic traces
common to each were present. There were also DNA sequences present
absent from any known Homosentient or indeed any known hominid form.
Also, the cellular mechanisms that the DNA organized had myriad small
but detectable differences. All the usual mechanisms were present and
operational, but the cells of the Eldest also contained organelles and
other structures that were simply not present in normal Homosentient
cells, or indeed in _any_ known Solarigen cells. These additional
structures, for the most part, were _not_ heritable, they were never
present in the tissue samples of any of the offspring of the Eldest.
As the nemetic brain attempt to solve the puzzle of the nature of the
Eldest, it was also facing the problem that Atlantis, as a
civilization, was becoming dangerously powerful. Their paraphysical
abilities were able to offset the limitations of their technology in
countless ways, and their overall knowledge base was steadily
increasing. The nemetic brain and its ancient progenitor were
becoming seriously concerned. Some projections showed the possibility
that Atlantis could, in the fullness of time, give rise to a high-tech
high-psionic culture, a civilization of star-farers like the Eosians,
save that the individuals would add immense psionic abilities to their
dangerous technology. Though this remained only a possibility, and it
would clearly require thousands of years for such a thing to come to
pass, the mere possibility was more than enough to push NEMESIS into
concluding that some sort of action to restrain the Atlanteans was now
necessary.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
NEMESIS concluded that the key to the problem was the Eldest. The
Eldest in many ways _was_ the Atlantean state and the unifying glue
that held the ancient (by Human standards) society together. If the
Eldest were to be removed, then it was likely that the entire system
would begin to break down. Further, it seemed desirable from the
point of view of NEMESIS to neutralize this dangerously powerful
entity before he gained any more power. Thus the decision was made by
NEMESIS to approve of the local nemetic brain's recommendation that
the Eldest be removed. [1]
This was not a trivial issue, but in the end the nemetic brain
concluded that the low 'mundane' tech level of the Atlanteans would
permit it to take what was, for the minions of NEMESIS, a fairly
direct approach to the problem. For the first time, the nemetic brain
constructed a human-form Infiltrator, a project that required some
years due to the extreme constraints on the supply of the necessary
raw materials. Designed to physically resemble an Atlantean to the
last detail, the machine was infiltrated into the capital city and it
lay carefully in wait, avoiding contact with people because their
psionic senses might have detected its lack of the traits of a living
thing, waiting. It worked its way into the palace, and hid, and
remained hidden, silent, unbreathing, needing neither food nor water,
motionless, for its assigned target to come within striking range of
the knife if had been issued to carry out the termination.
The robot was in no sense sapient, but it did have a fairly
sophisticated neural-net processor core, and a great deal of
information, gathered over the course of centuries, about the habits
and movements of the Eldest. After a time, the machine's unliving
patience paid off, the Eldest happened to come within range, and the
robot struck with the speed and precision of the machine it was.
The killing machine remained in place, waiting for its opportunity,
for over three weeks. On a day that we would call May 19th, 5193 BC,
the Infiltrator struck and killed the Eldest, drawing a razor-sharp
blade across his throat in a single perfect movement, planned by a
sophisticated computer and executed with the speed and precision of
electronic reflexes. Even so, had the strike been one second slower,
the Eldest would have survived, because his psionic senses warned him,
at the last moment, of the danger he faced, and he was turning to meet
it when the robot struck, ending his millennia-long existence almost
instantaneously. [2][3]
The robot fled the scene immediately upon slaying the Eldest, and it
escaped being detected by swimming entering one of the circular
harbors, and swimming entirely underwater through the interconnected
harbors and out the long tunnel to the sea. No human, not even the
paraphysically potent Atlanteans, could ever have done such a thing,
and they lacked the necessary technological background to even imagine
the sort of entity that could do such a thing. Thus the mystery that
would haunt Atlantean Civilization to the very end was born, the
mysterious murder of the Eldest in the safety of his own guarded
palace.
The results were far better than NEMESIS and its proxy had hoped, the
results were even better than the 'optimistic' end of the range of
possibilities it had projected. So psychologically shattering was the
death of the Eldest, so profoundly disturbing was the nature of his
unsolved murder, that the Atlantean culture rapidly came apart, the
first civil warfare in its millennia-long history breaking out within
a month of the death of the Eldest. A civilization had had been
marked by a very unusual (for _H. sapiens_) history of near-total
peace was now torn to shreds by brutal internecine warfare, which
ended with the rise of the Circle of Ten to rule Atlantis in the name
of the deceased immortal ruler, as we have elsewhere observed.
For a time after the death of the Eldest, the proxy ceased all
operations other than observation, content to watch as Atlantean
Civilization shuddered and endured a catastrophe from which they would
emerge permanently changed. The nemetic brain and its master NEMESIS
were not the only entities working invisibly to bring harm to the
greatest civilization of the Antediluvian World. There was another
being at work, an entity unknown even to NEMESIS...an entity, in its
own way, potentially every bit as dangerous as the ancient AI itself.
That entity had no name, as we think of that concept. It was older
than NEMESIS, and ultimately more powerful, though at this time most
of its vast power was suspended, unavailable. For lack of any other
meaningful English moniker that would describe this entity, we shall
simply call it the Rival.
MORE LATER.
[1] Had NEMESIS any inkling of the true nature of the Eldest or the
direct connection between him and the Familiar Eldren, the AI would
not have dared attempt what it had now decided to attempt.
[2] In GURPS terms, the Eldest had the danger sense advantage, but it
barely worked in this case because the Eldest had no grasp of the
nature of the danger he faced, and so his subconscious could not
stitch together the data from his psychic senses to produce a
recognizable threat. Only when the knife was drawn did the Eldest
face a sufficiently familiar threat for his subconscious to recognize
it as such and sound an alarm in his mind.
[3] Given a moment of warning, the Eldest would have been easily a
match for the robotic assassin.
Johnny1a
Recall that at the time when the Eldren were in the process of moving
the various Homosentient species away from Earth, the Watcher's
'opponent', whom we have called the Rival for convenience, sprung a
surprise, that went wrong and left both the Watcher and a subset of
its Familiar Eldren trapped in a near-coma state, as planned, but
which also trapped the Rival itself and some of its followers as
well. In the time of the great Atlantean civilization, both groups of
Eldren remained much as they had been for over sixty thousands years.
Both groups remained mostly unconscious, their vast intellects barely
aware of the Universe, thinking a thought every year or five, dimly
perceiving the passage of time and events. The Watcher had managed to
focus its awareness enough, from time to time, to create the first of
the Avatars, the immortal near-human entities of the same ilk as the
Eldest. Others of the Familiar Eldren had also created humanoid
Avatars, with the long-term goal of breaking free of their near-
stasis. The Avatars themselves did not understand their own nature,
partly out of a matter of policy on the part of their creators, partly
because their creators were too far gone in their dreamless timeless
suspension to be able to fully explain themselves to their creations.
The Watcher was the first of the trapped Eldren to succeed in creating
a successful Avatar, after some failed attempts best not dwelt upon,
and the other Familiar Eldren copied the Watcher's success in their
own creations. The Rival was dimly aware of all this, but opted
against creating an along the same lines as those of the Familiar
Eldren. Instead, the Rival watched, and waited, and pondered how best
to proceed to free itself from its own failed trap. It was certainly
capable of making an Avatar, especially once its perceived the basic
technique the Watcher had used, but it preferred to take a different
approach to the challenge.
The Rival found the emerging psionically-based civilization of
Atlantis interesting, and it saw a possibility in that society. A bit
over one century after the murder of the Eldest, a group of Atlantean
sages and aristocrats and politicians were attempting to create a new
_kind_ of psionic gestalt, one an order of magnitude more potent and
versatile than the gestalts which were an integral part of Atlantean
society. The group had intentions of using their new gestalt to
increase their own political, social, and economic power.
They had a theoretical concept of what they were trying to do, but
their execution was shaky. Had events taken their natural course,
perhaps they would have succeeded given time, or perhaps their efforts
would have come to naught, but the intervention of the Rival turned
matters into a new path. On a fateful night in November (to use a
later calendar), one of this group's attempts to create this
hypothetical new gestalt was touched, lightly but in a complex way, by
the mind of the Rival, and the result was that instead of a new kind
of temporary gestalt, they accidentally created the collective entity
we have called the Unity.
The Rival did not achieve its exact intent any more than its victims
did. The Rival had planned to imprint it's _own_ goals onto the new
collective entity it had helped to birth, making the Unity into its
own version of an Avatar, a version that could grow steadily in power
and ability in proportion to its size. Had this worked the Rival
would have gained a supremely effective tool to use in the service of
regaining its freedom from the trap it had accidentally sprung upon
itself. Unfortunately, the effort of pushing the Unity into existence
proved exhausting in terms of the necessary concentration, the Rival
could not remain 'focused' long enough to finish the task of
imprinting its goals onto the collective. Instead it slipped back
into its dreamless near-catatonia before it was ready, and the newborn
Unity retained its own goals and its own agenda. [1]
Thus, when in later years the Unity attempted to determine its own
origin, to analyze and understand the enormously complex confluence of
factors that had brought it into being, it was unable to do so because
it lacked the necessary data. The Unity had no idea of the existence
of the Rival, or the Eldren as a group.
MORE LATER.
[1] When one considers the near god-like nature of the Eldren in their
normal state, this is a measure of how nearly total the entrapment
was. Beings with minds normally able to span the Cosmos were reduced
to a state where concentrating on mortal affairs for more than a few
moments at a time was exhausting.
Johnny1a
(NOTE: All discussions of tech levels and other GURPS matters are in
terms of a modified 3e system, not 4e.)
All right, just for the sake of clarity, perhaps we should take a
moment to review the matters as they stood in the first fifty years of
the 48th Century BC.
The planet Earth was divided into multiple sovereign powers, of which
by far the strongest was the Atlantean empire and its core state on
the island of Atlantis proper. The other states, peoples, and powers
ranged from major regional powers down to local city-states and tribal
associations. World population was about a billion, world-wide tech
levels ranged from TL5 in the centers of Atlantean power (and in some
rival states) down to TL0 in remote spots, with many TL2-4 areas in
the continental interiors, especially central Asia. In a handful of
places experimental TL6 concepts were in development.
Though the tech level was TL5 in the most advanced areas, the
paraphysical sciences and technologies are far more advanced. Through
these areas of study and art, the peoples of Atlantis (and to a lesser
extent the other major powers) could produce effects to match TL8 or
higher conventional technology in some areas. Their ability to
manipulate the planetary environment was at least equal to that of the
moderrn West, though their tools and approaches were radically
different.
There were many 'hidden' powers at play beneath the surface. The
Unity, the collective entity born of human accident and Rival
intervention, had ensconced itself at the heart of Atlantean culture,
and engaged in a centuries-long 'rationalization' project that had as
its practical effect a corruption of the moral and social structure of
the Atlantean Civilization. By the point in time we observe, this had
been underway for centuries and had borne evil fruit. In large part
because of the Unity's manipulations (though not necessarily entirely
as it had planned), an iron dictatorship had come to rule in Atlantis,
and a civil war had torn the empire into warring factions.
A vast project was underway, under the auspices of the central
government and (behind the scenes) of the Unity, a Great Project to
‘wire’ the world with paralenses to amplify the Flux power that
underlay so much of the industry and commerce of the Age. The effort
to do this required the total disruption of Goravia, the second
strongest and more advanced of the societies of the time, by use of a
weapon of mass destruction drawing upon Flux power itself. This was
the second time such power was used on that scale, over a century
earlier an entire nation, Livicia, was submerged by the Atlantean
empire, creating that body of water we now know as the Black Sea, and
leaving behind a secret society of a sort, the Drowning Sun, dedicated
to the total destruction of the Atlantean Civilization.
The Unity was also faced with an order of men and women dedicated to
its destruction, one founded by an escapee among the original twenty
four members of the collective. The Rhaemyi, as they called
themselves, remained active and a hidden presence in this time, always
engaged in an invisible war with the Unity. The Rhaemyi had other
allies as well, immortal beings of the same ilk as the Eldest, and
indeed one of these beings was older than ‘the Eldest’, being
Zadatharion, the very first of the immortal Avatars of the Familiar
Eldren who lay helpless and unknown in stasis still.
Plots swirled within the plots, move and counter-move, aristocrat and
common Atlantean, Atlantean and common man, male and female, family
vs. family, it was an age of intrigue at a level of complexity and
baroque subtlety that our modern historical world has only rarely
approached. It was a harsh age, and yet a decadently luxurious one in
the halls of power and privilege.
Amid all this, Vylyrades was perfecting his new technology, drawing
upon his previous work with the symbiotic crystals. It would be a
mistake, of course, to assume that he developed everything about this
new technology personally, he drew on the work of many as with any
such project, but he did bring is special gifts to bear on the matter,
and in the end he was the one who applied the special spark of
creativity to the work, that brought forth, in 4772 BC, the first
crude Flux Focus.
This first device was only a shadow of what was soon to come, but it
opened up possibilities at which no previous paraphysical technology
had ever hinted. Vylyrades was able to use that first crude Focus to
advance the cause of his allies in the Rhaemyi enormously, it was a
tremendously useful, albeit subtle, weapon against the Unity.
Vylyrades, however, saw this device as a mere beginning, and he began
to refine his invention, working with a fervor that began to worry his
wife and confederates. Many of them feared that it was beginning to
verge upon an obsession.
They were not wrong. Vylyrades was in a mental state that combined
obsession with a sort of focused genius that only a handful of people
in history could have known or grasped, and it enabled him to make an
achievement of invention with few rivals in the Antediluvian Age.
After years of work, neglecting family, health, safety, and to some
degree duty, Vylyrades created the Great Focus, which was arguably the
most powerful singe device created in the entire Antediluvian Age.
MORE LATER
Johnny1a
Vylyrades made use of his Great Focus almost immediately. [1]
Wielding its power, Vylyrades made an attempt to use the process of
Matrix Perception to examine the nature of the Unity, which Vylyrades
and his compatriots still only half-grasped. His amplified Matrix
Perception revealed a great deal about the Unity's nature and past to
Vylyrades, but he was unable to immediately understand what he
learned. He also learned something about the Rival, a vague hint of
its presence that left Vylyrades almost overwhelmed by the impression
of power and age that he received through his Perception effort. [2]
Vylyrades also used the abilities of the Great Focus to attempt to
discern the nature and origin of the Static that clouded Atlantean
(and other) efforts to use paraphysical senses across time and space.
What he learned was not terribly useful, the Static was so intense as
one looked toward it's 'source' in the potential futures that not even
the Great Focus could fully overcome the effect. Vylyrades did
perceive a sense of vast energy, change, and an emotional void that he
could barely comprehend, a sense of _loss_ that almost overwhelmed
him.
In his personal life, Vylyrades had seen better days. His wife
Crynaria was more-or-less separated from him, alienated by his
obsession on creating the Great Focus, she remained part of the
Rhaemyi, which always needs doctors, but she and Vylyrades rarely saw
each other in 4761 BC. Crynaria was working at that time in Atlantica
itself, acting as a shadow source of medical care for Rhaemyi
operatives there, while Vylyrades was dividing his time between
legends in Bermuda and the Southlands. The gap between himself and
Crynaria was painful for Vylyrades, but it did leave him time to focus
on another priority: the Great Project.
Recall that one of the things that led to the attempt by the Unity to
assassinate Vylyrades (and his wife) was that Vylyrades had developed
suspicions about the Great Project, he was asking inconvenient
questions that the Unity had no wish to address. The Rhaemyi had
gotten word of what was in the works and had rescued Vylyrades and his
wife, one of the best 'investments' that the Rhaemyi ever made.
Now, many years later, and armed with the power of the Great Focus,
Vylyrades turned his attention anew to the questions about the Great
Work, which continued forward even amid civil warfare that was rapidly
spreading across the entire world. The power of his new tool enabled
Vylyrades to penetrate many mysteries in an amazingly short time, and
a year after he began his study Vylyrades had learned a great deal
about the truth of the Great Project, and almost every aspect of what
he learned he found at least disturbing and often terrifying.
He discovered that some of the paralenses, both the smaller
'secondary' systems and the huge main paralenses, often incorporated
devices and subsystems that were not part of the 'official'
blueprints, and performed functions he himself, as one of the most
competent paraphysical engineers of his age, did not recognize. He
discovered that some of the inner planning staff of the Great Project
were Unity components, a fact that had entirely escaped the Rhaemyi
until this point. Vylyrades discovered that the calculations for
intensity and energy distribution in the supersystem being built were
subtly and critically flawed, clearly by deliberate effort, the system
would in fact harness for more power and operate on a vastly larger
scale than the 'official' plans admitted or even recognized as a
possibility.
When Vylyrades attempted to calculate what the extra systems he had
discovered in the paralenses actually did, it took him a long time to
get any workable answer because he was not asking the right
questions. Indeed, it was 4759 before Vylyrades finally pieced
together what was happening, or close enough. What he learned left
him almost numb with terror, both because of the risk inherent in what
was being attempted and because of the sheer scale and audacity of the
effort.
Vylyrades and the Rhaemyi had (correctly) surmised long since that the
Unity could not directly make use of Flux skills and knowledge,
because all such knowledge was predicated on use by individuals.
While it remained a theoretical possibility for the Unity to master a
version of those skills suitable to a collective being like the Unity,
but on its own the Unity had not been able to develop these skills and
no mortal Antediluvian had any reason to even take such an idea into
consideration.
Based on his analysis of the 'additional' systems and components of
the Great Project, Vylyrades now concluded that the _real_ purpose of
the Great Work, alongside the stated ones which were real enough, was
that it would enable the Unity to fuse itself or connect itself with
the fabric of the Matrix, giving itself full access to the powers of
the Flux. Between the Unity's vast intellect and will and native
strength, and the amplifying, connecting ability that the Great
Project would provide once it was operational, the Unity would be able
to manipulate the Universe on a scale grander than anyone had ever
pondered. Mere contemplation of what the Unity might be capable if
its goals came to pass left Vylyrades almost numb with terror.
MORE LATER.
[1] The words 'Great Focus' give an approximate translation of the
Atlantean word for this device.
[2] The Rival was powerful beyond mortal scales, and over a _billion_
years old.
Johnny1a
The discovery by Vylyrades of what the Unity was planning, implicit in
the discrepancies and additional systems in the Great Project, he
immediately informed his contacts in the inner circles of the
Rhaemyi. It took him some months to convince them of the nature and
sheer _scale_ of the danger, it was simultaneously so subtle and so
huge that it could be difficult to quite grasp. When Zadatharion and
Aradel were brought into the discussion, their own work confirmed that
of Vylyrades, and Zadatharion's own sources of information backed up
what Vylyrades had discovered. Thus it was that as the winter
solstice of the year 4759 BC, the Rhaemyi leadership was convinced of
the threat, and beginning to plan countermoves. [1]
Unfortunately, their options were limited because the entire society
was so invested in the Great Project, almost every aspect of the
'loyalist' faction of the Atlantean global society was invested in the
Project in one way or another. The Speaker who dominated the
government, the Destiny Movement, the aristocrats and the guilds,
almost everyone was involved, and even with the ongoing civil was
slowing progress, the Project was going steadily if slowly forward.
The other major problem was that the Unity was close to being ready
for then, far closer than any of its opponents had suspected.
The Unity had long suspected that it was too much to hope for that its
secret would be kept hidden until completed. It was too large, there
were too many pieces of it scattered (by inescapable necessity) all
over the world, too many people knew too many things. The Unity had
calculated that there was, at best, no more than a twenty percent
chance that its plan could be kept secret until its culmination. As
time had passed, and events had moved more-or-less along the path the
Unity wished, it had begun to wonder if it might just make the smaller
chance, year after year the secret held, or leaked only to people who
could be 'dealt with' by such means as hefty bribes, telepathic
compulsions, or the traditional means of the unfortunate (and
convenient) fatal 'accident'.
Still, the Unity had kept fallback plans in place. It also had
calculated likely actions on the part of its various opponents, those
who knew of its existence, if they discovered what it was actually
trying to do. It was hampered in this by its own limitations and lack
of knowledge about some of them, but there were only so many
countermoves that were realistically possible. The Unity was not so
foolish as to discount some totally unexpected 'unknown unknown' from
coming into play, but it was also pragmatic enough not to let the
possibility of such keep it from making preparations for the 'known
unknowns' as best it could. The Unity's best was very good indeed,
with centuries of experience and an enormous intellect and vast
resources to draw upon.
The Rhaemyi, up until now, had hidden both their own existence and
that of the Unity, for a variety of reasons. Now, faced with a threat
on this scale and driven by a desperation they had never felt in their
long struggle, the Unity opted to 'break cover'. In the northern
spring of 4758, the Rhaemyi, through a number of sources and channels,
made public the existence of the Unity, along with extensively
evidenced information about several historical events that had been
heavily influenced by the ongoing secret wars. This information was
publicized in both the loyalist and resistor states, as well as in the
other major powers. It was out world-wide, and inevitably so was the
existence of the Rhaemyi and a number of other 'secret' organizations
and groups and activities. The die was cast.
The Unity was caught slightly off-guard by the precipitate action of
the Rhaemyi, but it had made contingency plans for just such a
development, and it immediately put them into effect, as chaos was
breaking out across the world, even _within_ the already-warring
camps. The Rhaemyi had put out sufficient evidence that any attempt
to refute its own existence would be futile, so the Unity made no such
pointless effort. Instead it immediately made a play for full open
control, mobilizing its own hidden forces, agents, and personnel,
using its powers openly, attempting to turn the chaos to its own
advantage.
The Rhaemyi, though themselves struggling to survive in the chaos they
had unleashed, retained enough power to block some of the Unity's
moves, enough that its effort to seize control of the Island of
Atlantis was frustrated. The Speaker found that his Destiny Movement
was fracturing, it was always shot through with agents and components
of the Unity, and now the Unity no longer needed its 'front' and
'shell' organizations. The military, already hollowed out by the
Unity's centuries-long attack on the soft tissue of society, rapidly
degenerated into armed mobs, except for rare places were a strong
willed leader or a chance collection of unusual men enabled the
retention of a certain amount of _esprit de corps_.
Balked in its initial attack, the Unity now unleashed secret weapons
it had been quietly preparing in secret for decades. Many of them
were biological weapons, what another later age would call
'monsters'. Others were diseases. One such manipulated disease
struck at the agricultural basis of the Antediluvian World, wiping out
much (but not all) of the cereal crops. Another rendered the tissues
of some meat animals toxic. Still other diseases struck directly at
humans, and the Unity, having access to the cures, could extort
submission from entire regions using disease as a weapon.
Fluxons used their abilities on all sides to turn the very elements of
nature against their foes, the ground shook, the winds howled, flood
and drought were weapons of war, the seas woudl rise up against enemy
fleets, the clouds could hurl aeremes from the sky. These distortions
in the global environment had their side-effects, as the energy poured
into the crust, ocean, and atmosphere strove to find a new
equilibrium.
Fluxons in the service of the Unity constructed fluxoids as war
machines for the Unity, more powerful and harder to stop than the war
fluxoids of what remained of the Atlantean government's military.
Also, the Unity now revealed that its fluxons had discovered new
processes, new ways to 'make' Flux Revenants, creatures suitable not
merely for manual labor but for combat, using corpses previously
considered too damaged or too decayed for utilization.
The truth about the Great Project being revealed, many of the sites
were destroyed either by mobs or by intentional action on the part of
the Rhaemyi or local authorities, but the Unity remained determined to
push forward, and enough others retained a vested interest to assist,
the Project slowed in many regions but actually accelerated in others,
where the Unity had sufficient control to maintain order and could
dispense with the pretense of other priorities.
As the semblance of order broke down at the top, the long-decaying
Atlantean society began to disintegrate. Individuals with power
indulged it without restraint, old grievances were settled, often
brutally, the already sadistic Games worsened where society remained
ordered enough for them to continue, and spread and metastasized on a
smaller scale where it was not sufficiently ordered for the organized
Games to go on. Or so matters were in most places, islands of order
remained. The North Country of Atlantis proper more or less 'seceded'
during the chaos, retaining sufficient moral strength to sustain
order. The Rhaemyi found themselves basing their now-open war against
the Unity out of the North Country.
As hunger, horror, and fear spread through the world, communications
and travel became more difficult. Much of what organized effort
remained continued to be absorbed by the wasteful but unavoidable
warfare involved it holding off rival power centers and defending
resources. Even the least corrupt, most noble factions and
individuals had little choice but to spend blood and treasure in the
effort to avoid being overwhelmed, and these resources were
irreplaceable under the circumstances that now gripped the world.
In the northern autumn of 4758, in the month a later age would call
October, Vylyrades made what would be his last visit to the Refuge in
the Amazon basin. He assigned some of his most trusted staff to the
site, with orders to keep it absolutely secret, and to stockpile as
much information there as they could, in hopes of preserving some of
what was otherwise rapidly being destroyed by the ongoing warfare and
chaos. Vylyrades had every intention of returning when he left, but
events were now accelerating and as it happens he would never again
visit the site, or see the friend he left in charge with his
departure.
In December of 4758, Vylyrades fled Bermuda for the last time, as the
Unity managed to seize control of it with a surprise combined naval/
air assault, aided by agents and sympathizers on Bermuda proper.
Vylyrades escaped, barely, with all too few others, and made his way
to the main Island of Atlantis, on the rocky and forbidding
southwestern coast. From there he made a dangerous and daring cross-
country trip, surviving multiple combats and close calls, until he
reached the relative safety of the newly independent North Country,
which was his homeland originally.
MORE LATER.
[1] As it happens, the Winter Solstice was the middle of the 'year' as
the Atlanteans measured it, they started the count of each of their
years at the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere.
Johnny1a
Vylyrades met with the surviving leadership of the Rhaemyi, and
compared notes, the world was rapidly falling into a state of near-
total chaos, though ProtoAthens retained much more social cohesion
than the rest of the empire, or the other major powers.
The Unity was now firmly in control of most of the southern part of
the Island of Atlantis, and the area around the capitol. The normal
humans who lived in those regions were either conscious servitors of
the Unity, for reasons of gain or common interest, or else were kept
firmly under the thumb of their inhuman collective ruler. The North
Country was firmly under human control, with the remainder a debatable
area riven by struggles between the Rhaemyi and the Unity, and as well
by lesser battles between lesser factions and powers.
With the use of the Great Focus that Vylyrades still retained, it was
possible to make gains, and secure the fortresses that held the North
Country. It was also possible to make contact with allies on the
major continents, and coordinate efforts to sabotage the Great Project
using the Focus as the tool. Still, the work crawled slowly forward
in spite of all the obstacles that the Rhaemyi and their allies were
able to raise, the Unity was now ruthlessly using every tool and
weapon in its arsenal to press its work forward, and it had grown into
a vast power on its own.
Where the Unity had had one time been unable to send individual
components too far away for fear of losing its connection to them, now
it numbered in the thousands of 'components' and had spread
'clusters' of components at strategic locations all around the planet,
so that few locales were beyond the reach of the collective entity,
and its individual components could come and go at need without danger
of losing contact. [1]
The raw power of the Unity, just its native psionic strength and
fantastic skill, made it an awesome force. It's vast intellect and
knowledge and experience and wealth made it a world-shaping force, its
will was felt from pole to pole and on every continent, and now it was
no longer bound by any need for secrecy. Where once secrecy was its
priority, making it cautious, now haste was its watchword, making it
ruthless and bold.
In the meantime, Atlantis was rocked by periodic earthquakes, both
those created intentionally by one side or the other of the warring
factions, and the side-effect tremblers produced by these efforts.
Those sages who made a study of the geology of the island were deeply
worried. They were aware of the existence of the vast magma chambers
below the island, and aware that the artificially induced twisting and
stretching of the surface crust was weakening the structure of the
rock that made up the island. Yet both sides continued to unleash
natural forces at each other as weapons, they _had_ to if they were to
avoid defeat.
During this period, Vylyrades met again with his estranged wife
Crynaria, and their relationship remained tense and angry. However,
human nature was the same than as now, and in 4758, on a night in what
we would call June, in a drunken moment of weakness, Vylyrades and
Crynaria conceived a son, whom they would name Gerodacles. Husband
and wife did not reconcile entirely, even after the birth of their
child, but they did attempt to set aside their recriminations and
anger enough to care for their child decently.
Elsewhere, the situation continued to degenerate, The Great Project
required vast amounts of orichalcum, and with secrecy no longer a
priority, the Unity and Sharondra were simply confiscating it from
every available source, shattering the economy of entire regions.
Resistance was mounted, but the Unity generally proved stronger, and
with the supply of orichalcum from the mines in Atlantis now
essentially exhausted, there seemed to be no solution to the exploding
resource war. [2]
The Unity, for its part, was frustrated by the slow progress of its
Great Project, it was haunted by the continuing fear that its enemies
might find some way to prevent it from completing the Project,
depriving it of the vast power it could practically taste. Cut off
from that power, it might be that eventually its multiple enemies
might even find a way to defeat and destroy it entirely. The Unity
was driven to make faster progress, and in the last weeks of what we
would call the year 4758, the Unity and its servitors made a
'breakthrough' of a sort that offered the hope of cutting decades off
the completion time of the Great Project.
The Unity and its research teams discovered that a paralens could be
'supercharged' by infusing it with the life-essence of a living
creature, 'harnessing' that life-essence as part of the functioning
nature of the device. This process could be used to reduce the number
of paralenses necessary to make a working version of the Great
Project, and also to amplify the strength of the system and make it
more versatile. The price, of course, was high: 'augmenting' a minor
paralens in this way cost the life of a living Human, to do likewise
with a Great Paralens could require the death of as many as one
hundred people.
The Unity, of course, placed no inherent value whatever on human life.
MORE LATER.
[1] Recall that it was the 'escape' of one of the Unity's unintending
progenitors that led to the foundation of the Rhaemyi that haunted it.
[2] As yet only a handful of people knew about the orichalcum of
Iceland.
Johnny1a
As word came of the Unity's new practices, the Rhaemyi were almost
numb, the new horror came atop so many previous ones that there was
little energy left for anything but the next countermove. People were
being murdered by the hundreds, for the sake of and by the means of
draining their life-energies into the modified paralenses through a
process remotely analogous to 'psychic vampirism'. From what the
Rhaemyi and their allies could learn, it was a slow and agonizing
death, and it was accelerating the progress of the Great Project
perilously.
The only thing left standing solidly in the path of the completion of
the Great Project was ProtoAthens, by virtue of that state's control
of several key locations that _had_ to be utilized to make the Great
Project work. Just as Goravia had done a three decades earlier, the
ProtoAthenians were in possession of key sites, and the Unity was
determined to gain control of those sites. Indeed, ProtoAthens was
the last power in possession of such a key site that could make any
serious resistance to those who sought to complete the Project.
However, ProtoAthens was a harder target than Goravia for several
reasons.
The first reason was that ProtoAthens, as an Atlantean colony-state
(albeit one with an unusual history and culture) and as such had full
access to the paraphysical technology and knowledge of Atlantean
culture, plus their technological and cultural heritage. Of all the
hundreds of Atlantean colony-states, ProtoAthens had retained more
cohesion and integrity than any of the others when total chaos broke
out, for reasons of their heritage and culture. In 4757 BC,
ProtoAthens was the closest thing on the planet to a healthy
functioning polity.
The second reason was that unknown to any but a handful of people,
even within ProtoAthens, they had access to a limited but separate
source of orichalcum.
The third reason was that the chaos of civil war that had swept the
world had nearly crippled the Atlantean empire, while what resources
the empire could still command had been appropriated by the Unity for
its Great Project. The empire as such simply could not focus the
scale of naval and aerial power against ProtoAthens that it had been
able to focus against Goravia a few decades before.
Not, that is, unless the work on the Project were set aside to free up
resources to settle accounts with ProtoAthens. The Unity calculated
that if it could knock out ProtoAthens, which was providing much of
the material support that enabled the Rhaemyi and their allies to hold
the North Country, it would then be free to suppress its other enemies
and still have sufficient resources to continue work on the Great
Project. On the other hand, if it became entangled in an invasion of
ProtoAthens it could find itself vulnerable to various attacks on its
flanks from other enemies. The Unity would have liked to use Flux
power to reduce ProtoAthens much as the Atlanteans had done to Goravia
nineteen years before, but the ProtoAthenians had protected themselves
on that front well.
The Unity went back and forth on this issue, weighing the prospects,
and eventually it concluded that the invasion looked like the best
option out of several bad choices. As soon as it reached that
conclusion, the Unity began assembling its forces for a massive and
(it hoped) decisive strike against the ProtoAthenians.
The preparations began in the early northern spring of 4755, and the
work on the Great Project slowed as personnel, money, and resources,
including the precious and irreplaceable orichalcum, were diverted
from that to the invasion force being assembled on the eastern coasts
of Atlantis. As ever, a large military invasion force was a
complicated and expensive undertaking, that required time and
resources that few other activities could rival. The effort was
complicated by attacks and interference from both the Rhaemyi and the
ProtoAthenian Navy, as well as factions and forces splintered off from
the former imperial military. Still, day by day, week by week, the
invasion force grew, and the Unity sent out expeditionary forces in
what we would call September of 4755 to seize control of the lands
what we would call the Straits of Gibraltar. The ProtoAthenians had
fortified this region, and bloody battles were fought that lasted well
into the early part of 4754, but the Atlanteans under the Unity's
command were successful in gaining mastery of the sea gate, aided by
the hordes of monsters the Unity had created.
While the expeditionary forces fortified the Straits, scouting
expeditions passed through and began to probe at the sea and air
defenses of the ProtoAthenians. The defenders were ready, and
repelled the initial probing forces with heavy losses. The
ProtoAthenians had long since fortified what we would call the coasts
of Italy, Sicily, Malta, and key sites in North Africa. Great sea
bases at the Nile Delta and the Greek coast were manufacturing
warships as fast as they could, and the ProtoAthenian air force,
though smaller than the attack forces, was better trained and had much
shorter lines of supply and communication.
In the meantime the attack force continued to build up, though slowed
enormously in March of 4754 and again in May when Vylyrades combined
the skills of a dozen of the strongest fluxons in the North Country
with the power of the Focus, and hurled vast storms that sank many of
the invasion ships at anchor. Shortly thereafter, daring sabotage
squads began to sneak aboard the attack force ships and did amazing
amounts of damage. Still, the Unity's vast power and resources were
able to keep the invasion force growing and its plans advancing,
against all the resistance of ProtoAthens' allies.
In the early summer of 4754, the great attack force set out, making
for the Straits of Gibraltar.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The fleet that set sail from the eastern ports of Atlantis was, by
far, the largest oceanic military force the Antediluvian Age had ever
seen. Tens of thousands of ships, ranging in size from enormous
battlewagons down to tiny coast defense ships, set sail, all making
for the narrow sea gate that opened onto the inner sea that had been,
until recent times, a ProtoAthenian lake. However, though this fleet
was the largest such force ever assembled at that time, it was far
from the most well prepared or well-trained. Gone was the former
discipline and skill that had made the former Atlantean Navy the
strongest military force on Earth. The former skill and discipline
had faded away over the decades, eroded by the Unity's own
'rationalization' of Atlantean society and culture. [1]
With the collapse of organized government (other the a despotism of
raw power) just a few years before, the Navy had fractured into tiny
fleets and factions, and the invasion force the Unity had assembled
was haphazard, some ships were crewed by former Atlantean Naval
professionals, some by mercenaries of various levels of
professionalism and competence, some by press-ganged crews, some by
mindlocked individuals in command of crews of revenants. Some of the
ships were in superb condition, well-constructed and well-maintained,
some were less so, some were hurriedly assembled in shipyards by half-
trained artisans, some were merely civilian ships pressed into service
as transports or hastily modified for combat.
The entire force was under the direct command of an admiral selected
by Sharondra, the Unity's chief 'singleton' servant/slave. This
officer, a former Naval officer with extensive skill and little in the
way of conscience, was given the unenviable task of welding this vast,
disparate fleet into a coherent fighting force, and directing it
against the ProtoAthenians.
For their part, the ProtoAthenians were badly outnumbered, but their
defending forces were more professional, better trained and better
disciplined, more homogenous in both their origins and their training,
and on the whole, far better motivated. Much of the Unity's attack
force was motivated by payment or the hope of loot, the defenders of
ProtoAthens were protecting their homes, their families, their state,
and their backs were to the wall. The ships of the ProtoAthenians
were of higher quality on the whole, and their ports and lines of
support were near at hand.
The ProtoAthenians had already extracted a heavy price in blood and
treasure from the invaders in the process of losing control of what we
would call the Straits of Gibraltar, and as the great invasion fleet
approached that very strait in the summer of 4754 BC, launched a
daring and risky attack of their own from the east, seeking to regain
control of the vital sea gate and use it to shut the immense attack
force out, to force the attackers to come at ProtoAthens by land over
hostile territory, past many barriers of land and water. The effort
failed, but before the ProtoAthenians were repulsed they managed to
place floating explosives in the straits, 'mining' it, the bombs held
in place against wind and current by a simple but effect Flux
manifestation. The necessity of clearing the straits delayed the
attackers by many days.
Unfortunately for the ProtoAthenians, a delay is all they achieved.
The invasion force penetrated the strait, and proceeded to launch
attacks against key bases and ports in what we would call Italy and
Sicily and Libya, and they had sufficient force to do all this at
once. The ProtoAthenian navy made a ferocious resistance, but bit by
bit were forced back by the sheer force of superior numbers, and the
fact that the invasion commander was remarkably skilled and managed in
several cases to outthink the defenders and strike at points of
vulnerability that the defenders simply had not recognized.
In Atlantis, the Rhaemyi decided that matters were dire enough that
like the Unity, they had little choice but to make a highly risky
throw of the dice. The Unity had stripped most of its military power
to assemble its immense invasion force, but not all of it, there was
still some force in place to defend the Unity and its key sites and
facilities and resource base. A strike against the Unity at this
point was far from a sure thing, but the leaders of the Rhaemyi and
the North Country enclaves knew that if the Unity succeeded in
reducing ProtoAthens, it would be far too power to challenge
afterward, and the returning forces would make any attack suicidal.
From the point of view of the North Country leadership, they were
facing a 'now or never' choice of evils.
It was decided that an attack would be made on the Unity's primary
fortress in southern Atlantis, and that the attack would be led by
none other than Zadatharion himself. Vylyrades was to accompany the
attack force, wielding their most potent weapon, the Great Focus. The
goal of the attack was twofold, with a subtle and vastly more
important objective wrapped within an overt and relatively minor
goal. The outer goal was to inflict as much damage as possible on the
Unity's servants and support structure, much of which was centered in
its southern Atlantean fortress. The inner goal was secret, and
something of a long shot, but the potential payoff was so enormous
that the Rhaemyi and Zadatharion concluded that it was a risk worth
taking.
According to a theory developed by Zadatharion, Aradel, Vylyrades, and
some of the other psionically and Fluxively skilled leadership of the
Rhaemyi, there was a theoretical way to destroy the Unity entirely, if
they could pin down a large enough group of 'components' in one place,
under such conditions that the full power of the Great Focus could be
used against them. It was a theoretical idea, they simply had no way
to test it other than to try it, but if it worked, the Unity would
simply cease to exist, which would transform the entire situation.
The problem for making the attempt was that the Unity was spread out
all over Atlantis and the world.
Except in its huge fortress in the southeast of Atlantis, that is.
There, hundreds or components were usually to be found, and according
to the theoretical calculations of the northerners, the ought to be
more than sufficient components in one place to make a test of their
theories. This long shot goal was the real mission within the more
conventional and visible objectives of the Great Raid of 4753.
[1] Though the Unity was utterly unable to comprehend the 'why' of
this.
Johnny1a
The Great Raid was of course vastly smaller than the invasion and
defense around ProtoAthens, but for the resources available to the
Rhaemyi is was large. The problem facing the planners of the attack
was that the Unity had given a great deal of hard thought to its
defense, and the fortress it used as its headquarters base in Atlantis
was superbly well-protected by both active and passive defenses. The
passive defense began with the location.
Most of Atlantis met the sea in steep cliffs, indeed historically this
was a problem for the Atlanteans because they had a dearth of good
ports. Those same cliffs could be used for defense, and the Unity had
done so. It had chosen a peninsula on the southeast coast, with steep
cliffs on either side dropping over fifty meters to the sea,
surrounded by sharp rocks. The fortress itself was constructed of
heavy basalt on the tip of the peninsula, with only a narrow land
approach, which opened onto the part of Atlantis most tightly under
the control of the Unity. Land approaches required crossing through
over one hundred miles of territory firmly under the Unity’s
domination, ocean approach required passing through rock-strewn
shallows and dealing with steep and guarded cliffs, air approach was
guarded against by a dedicated force of aeremes, heavily armed and
constantly on patrol.
The Rhaemyi had a secret weapon, though, a weapon they hoped to use to
make a sneak attack successful. They were not entirely sanguine about
it, in military matters the phrase 'secret weapon' carries a
distinctly mixed connotation to a professional in any age. Sometimes,
however, plans based on secret weapons do work, and this one looked
like a serious possibility. The key to it was that even in 4754 BC,
very little experience existed on working underwater for any length of
time. The general level of 'conventional' technology was a high TL5,
verging on TL6 in a handful of areas, which on its own was not
sufficient to create a really practical submarine. The addition of
psionic and Flux ability could go a good way toward making up the
difference, but it simply was not something that had drawn much
interest. There had been some scientific interest in exploring
underwater, but little work had been done on creating actual
underwater vehicles.
The plan was to approach the fortress along a deep channel that lay on
the sea floor close at hand, using a 'submarine' the raiders assembled
more-or-less on the fly, while a larger forced launched a diversionary
attack. Normally, this plan would have been suicidal, when combined
with the tremendous amoung to psi and Flux ability available to the
raiders, it was merely insane. Unfortunately, the prospects facing
the North Country and the Rhaemyi were so bad, long term, that this
plan was actually the least bad option available to them, or so it
appeared based on what they knew at the time. The plan was made
potentially practical, using a _very_ stretchy definition of this last
word, by the fact that they only had to penetrate the fortress with a
very small group of people to potentially make the plan work.
In the event, nothing went according to plan.
For one thing, the Unity had already 'scouted' the underwater environs
of its fortress using its enormous ESP ability, it knew about the
deeper channel and while it had no particular fear of an undewater
attack, it was _itself_ active underwater, in projects ranging from
its breeding of the dragons to its own military work, the Unity was
toying with the idea of the underwater vehicle as a weapon itself.
The crude submarine by which the attack force tried to sneak up on the
fortress had already nearly come to fatal grief a dozen times or more
before they even got close to the peninsula, one of the lessons the
intrepid would-be raiders learned was that manned underwater
operations were both much more difficult and much more dangerous than
they had ever expected. The tiny crew was nearly killed many times
long before they got close to the Unity's demesne, and when they
finally did get close the Unity detected their approach and launched
an attack on them well before they got close enough to achieve
anything useful. Indeed, they were attacked well before they thought
they were even in danger of detection.
Only the fact that a genuinely enormous amount of paraphysical power
was held by the small crew enabled any of them to survive. Between
Zadatharion and Aradel, there was enough psychic strength available to
stave off the attack and bring the crew to shore...barely. Several
people were severely wounded, and one of them was Vylyrades, who
suffered from broken bones, a perforated lung, and permanently lost
the use of his left eye. He was in no condition for combat, and they
were stranded ashore amidst enemy territory. At that, Vylyrades was
lucky, not everyone survived the attack, and even the Avatars were
slightly wounded. They did manage to conceal exactly where they came
ashore, and to conceal them further from the Unity's prying senses,
but their situation was rather dire and they knew it.
They concluded that the only chance they had was to go forward, they
were far too deep into enemy territory to escape, even if the entire
party had been in any sort of good condition, which they manifestly
were not. Vylyrades was too weak to use the Great Focus in any
meaningful way, and this led him to one of the hardest decisions of
his life: he realized he would have to entrust the Focus to someone
else.
This came very hard to him, the Focus was his greatest creation, the
culmination of his life's work, and it magnified his own abilities by
orders of magnitude. Few people find surrendering power easy, once
they've possessed it, and Vylyrades was as human as anyone. While the
Focus _could_ certainly be used by others, he'd designed it that way,
only he himself had ever actually used it. It was not that he feared
losing it permanently, he had designed the device in such a way that
he could always regain control of it just by being within range, and
it could not be used _directly_ against him. Still, it was hard to
let it go.
On the other hand, it was not as if he had any practical choice if he
wanted to have any chance of survival!
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
There was only three really _strong_ fluxons in the party, and the
Great Focus, while a very potent psionic tool, had as its greatest
abilities its connection to and ability to harness the Flux. Aside
from Vylyrades himself, both the Avatars were potent fluxons.
Vylyrades chose to entrust the female Avatar, Aradel, with his Focus,
partly because she was actually the less powerful of the two, and he
preferred that for his own reasons, and partly because he knew the
Unity would _expect_ him to entrust the device to Zadatharion.
Zadatharion, for his part, agreed with Vylyrades about the decision,
for reasons of his own.
The trouble (actually _a_ trouble, they had a multiplicity of
troubles) was that the Great Focus could not be mastered
instantaneously. It took far less time in those days than it would in
a later age, because the Focus itself was simpler than, it had not yet
'absorbed' so many human personality traits into its structure, but it
still required _time_ to learn to use the device effectively, and time
was something they lacked.
One thing could be done, though. After sending a telepathic signal to
call off the distracting raid, which was now useless, they attempted
this. It was something that Vylyrades himself could not have done,
even using the Focus. Something made possible by combining Aradel's
vast psionic power and knowledge _and_ her Flux skills (many of them
taught to her by Vylyrades himself) _and_ Vylyrades Flux knowledge
_and_ the Great Focus, all together. Aradel entered Vylyrades' mind
with her own telepathy, which rivaled that of the Eldest, and
connected their minds, and thus their skills, and that unified dual
mind, amplified by the Focus, opened a 'psi gate' connecting their
location with the North Country, and through that gate the wounded
were evacuated to safety almost literally in the blink of an eye.
Vylyrades had never _imagined_ that such a thing could be done until
he combined his own abilities with those of Aradel, and while she knew
of the _potential_ of psi gates, using them on that scale was
something she could not hope to do on her own (at least then).
The Avatars remained in the Unity's territory, since the plan was
still necessary, the Unity was never likely to be quiet as vulnerable
as it was during that period, when so much of its military power was
committed to the war in Europe and north Africa.
So it was that Zadatharion and Aradel began a somewhat desperate plan,
which began with the two of them 'going to ground' in enemy territory.
This was not as difficult as one might expect. Either alone had
psionic power on a scale no ordinary Atlantean, even the strongest of
the aristocrats, could hope to match, power on the same scale as that
of the Eldest, greater power in the case of Zadatharion. Both had
literally _thousands of years_ of life experience to draw on, and
Aradel had lived 'under cover' in Atlantis from the time of the first
arrival, in the summer of 9453 BC. She had extensive experience in
‘passing’ as a normal Atlantean, within 48 hours the two of them had
established preliminary ‘cover’ in a town dominated by the Unity’s
forces.
What then followed was a 'crash course' on the part of Aradel in the
use of the Great Focus. It had to be done in extreme secrecy, and
with great care, and with as much haste as could be arranged. The
Unity _knew_ they were within its territory, and was searching
intensively for these two particularly dangerous enemies, it had known
for a long time that it was being stalked by beings comparable to the
Eldest, and they were among its great fears. Now it was a cat-and-
mouse game between the Unity, its servitors, and Zadatharion and
Aradel, which both sides playing the role of both cat and mouse.
It took Aradel about three months to really begin to be able to use
the Focus in a serious way. While the task was made easier than it
would be in later ages by the 'youth' of the Focus, it was at the same
time made more difficult because that same 'youth' made the Focus less
responsive and flexible, mostly canceling out the advantage. Once she
began to really 'grasp' the nature and form and use of the device,
however, Aradel began to make rapidly progress, her own enormous
intellect and high affinity for the Flux contributing to her abilities
with it. Indeed, though she could not duplicate everything Vylyrades
could do with it as its creator, she was able to use its amplifying
ability and her own greater 'native' Flux affinity to do things with
it that its creator could not, as well.
Aradel found using the device was more than simply useful, it was fun,
indeed almost addictively so, it increased her abilities by orders of
magnitude. One of the things she learned to do with it was to engage
in the process of Matrix Perception at a level beyond anything she had
ever dreamed of previously, and now she used this ability to spy out
the secrets of the Unity while hiding from the collective entity 'in
plain sight'. Aradel learned more about the Unity during the last
three months of 4753 BC than the Rhaemyi had been able to learn in
_centuries_ of previous work. She learned about the nature of the
dragons, as well as the other ‘monsters’ that the Unity had deployed
as living weapons. She learned the location of the Unity’s secret
bases (those in Atlantis, at least), she cast her ‘gaze’ on the Unity
itself, discovering much about its nature and structure and function.
All this went into the planning on the part of Zadatharion and
herself, planning that had taken on a newer urgency than before
because of Aradel’s experimentation with the Focus. One of the things
she found was that even her abilities, even amplified by the Focus,
could not overcome the Static that was clouding all efforts to view
into the future. Her own enormous talents, combined with the Focus,
were able to penetrate the Static to look across space, at least to
some degree. While she could probe all over Atlantis in a way that
not even Vylyrades had been able to manage, her attempts to look
further afield, at the ongoing war in the eastern Mediterranean or the
social and economic and political chaos in the Americas, simply did
not work. The Static was too strong even for Aradel wielding the
Great Focus, and if viewing across space was difficult, viewing across
or forward in time was simply futile. The Static blocked Aradel from
sensing anything useful, by either ESP or Flux Perception, further
than a day or two into the future.
And yet...a sense of deep foreboding, almost a dread, was growing on
Aradel. It was irrational, she had no solid basis for it. It was not
that the situation was good, far from it, but the dread coming across
the immortal woman was derived from something else, something that she
could not consciously name. It was a free floating fear, a sense of
impending horror that she could not rationally explain nor explain
away. Her inability to probe into the future only seemed to make that
dread worse.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Aradel would have liked to have more time to familiarize herself with
Vylyrades' greatest creation, she knew that she was still far from
plumbing the depths of what the device could be used to do.
Unfortunately, time was running swiftly against them, it was only a
matter of time, so to speak, before the Unity discovered its two most
powerful individual enemies hiding in its territory, since it new they
were there somewhere. Zadatharion and Aradel concluded that they
dared not wait much more than three months. It was in late summer of
4753 BC that two Avatars made their move, trusting to luck and
surprise and overwhelming power.
The key to their plan lay in the fact that they were, individually,
the two most potent psionic individuals left in Atlantis, and they
also had a combined ability in wielding the Flux that few in Atlantis
could match. Trained by Vylyrades, arguably the greatest fluxon of
the Antediluvian Age, with natural strength greater than any ordinary
mortal could achieve, and with Aradel in possession of the Great
Focus, they had enough power in theory to take on a small army by
themselves.
Of course, everything works in theory. Practice can be a different
place.
Still, they regarded it as a real possibility that they might be able
to achieve both strategic and tactical surprise. This might seem odd
at first glance, since the Unity most certainly knew they were
somewhere in its territory and had some idea of what they were capable
of, but at the same time they doubted the Unity had any idea of
exactly what they had been tryng to achieve, with just a little luck
they hoped the Unity still believed that the abortive Great Raid had
been what it appeared to be, a straightforward surprise military
attack. Further, they knew that the Unity was, in its own alien way,
a supremely _rational_ entity, and that it tended to evaluate others
in terms of its own version of 'rationality'.
For two people, even two such people as Zadatharion and Aradel, to
launch a head on attack against an entity as powerful as the Unity,
while on its own territory, outnumbered literally thousands to one
even aside from the Unity's multiple nature, out of touch with any
support, lacking any reinforcements or support personnel, could only
be described as an irrational act by _any_ standard. They suspected,
or rather they hoped, that it simply would not _occur_ to the Unity
that they would do something so manifestly insane.
In fact, the only reason they were contemplating such an act was that
their goal was such that two people might just be able to carry it
off...theoretically. The Unity was uniquely vulnerable, in theory, to
any attack that could scramble the fantastically complex web of
psychic connections that linked its tens of thousands of component
nervous systems into a single mentality. Armed with the Great Focus,
such an attack was a possibility for these two very special
individuals.
It was not a huge chance, but Zadatharion estimated it might be a one-
in-three chance of success and probably a two-in-three chance that
they could survive a failure. Of course, that still left a better
than sixty percent chance that the attack would not succeed and a
better than thirty percent chance that they would not survive, which
was really pretty daunting odds. On the other hand, the long-term
odds they faced if the Unity survived and won its ongoing multi-front
wars were worse, and Zadatharion had other motivations as well, which
led him to decide to take the shot. Aradel was less sanguine, but
Zadatharion was the unquestioned leader, for reasons Aradel herself
did not entirely understand, she found it very difficult to so ‘no’ to
his orders once he made up his mind. [1]
In what we would call September of 4753 BC, the two Avatars made their
move.
They began with a series of carefully planned Flux Manifestations.
Zadatharion and Aradel carefully 'wove' these over a course of weeks,
'programming' a series of effects that could be triggered by single
mental 'signal'. Once these were ready, and they had to prepared
_very_ subtly because the Unity had mortal fluxons always on watch for
Flux activity directed against it, the two Avatars prepared their
weapons and tools, rested as well as they could for maximum
preparadness, and then on September 4th, 4753, they 'triggered' their
prepared manifestations.
The first visible effect of this was a massive hurricane system, which
came together in the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, and tracked
across the ocean toward Atlantis, guided by suddenly out-of-average
high altitude winds. The storm came together and crossed the ocean
remarkably swiftly, and gathered force as it went, drawing strength
from the warm waters of September and suddenly near-ideal conditions,
and it slammed across southeastern Atlantis on September 13th, bearing
almost directly across the Unity's coastal fortress.
On the same day that the hurricane's full strength struck the
fortress, another Flux manifestation triggered earthquakes in the
region, shifting masses of magma deep below the Island of Atlantis to
do so. Zadatharion and Aradel had planned their attack carefully, and
the specific magmatic movements they brought about produced a
'focused' earthquake, the intersecting waves interacted constructively
in the immediate region of the fortress, with the effect that the
Unity's central fortification suffered a magnitude 8 earthquake in the
midst of a Category Five hurricane. [2]
It was a very effective double-blow, it simply overwhelmed most of the
Unity’s security precautions.
So carefully had Aradel and Zadatharion worked, so subtle had been
their work and so potent their skills, that the Unity's own fluxons
were caught totally by surprise, their wards utterly inadequate
against the power and subtlety of the attack.
MORE LATER.
[1] There was a reason for this, based in the fundamental nature of
the Avatars.
[2] To use our terminology, the Atlanteans, of course, did not use
those scales.
Johnny1a
In the midst of the chaos, Aradel and Zadatharion arrived by means of
a psi-gate.
Normally this would have been suicidal, the Unity itself through its
ESP could have sensed their arrival, since psi-gates are inherently
highly 'noisy'. Also, any of the trained fluxons 'on watch' using
Flux Perception skills could have and would have sensed such a potent
manifestation as soon as it began, in the time it would take for a
gate to form and stabilize, the Unity and its minions would have been
ready for whatever came through it, even such entities as Zadatharion
and Aradel.
These were not, however, 'normal' circumstances. In the midst of the
chaos of the aftermath of a major earthquake, in the midst on an
_ongoing_ Category Five hurricane tearing across the region, none of
the Unity's minions were ready for their arrival, the psi-gate opened
and deposited the two Avatars in the midst of the fortress with hardly
any notice amid the chaos and the confusion. The handful of personnel
who did see them arrive were expeditiously dealt with.
The simplest and best way to describe the events that followed would
be to take an 'up close' look. As in our previous such glimpses, we
should remember that a few liberties are being taken for the sake of
clarity, conversations made up of words and telepathy are rendered as
modern English, terms of Atlantean reference are translated into terms
and references we might recognize. With that in mind, let us turn our
own gaze back to the chaos on a stormy night the autumn of 4753 BC.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 13th, 4753 BC, far southeastern Atlantis...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The howl of the wind was like nothing any ordinary storm would ever
produce, it was a banshee wail that penetrated through the solid
basalt walls of the ancient fortress, a howl like the torment of a
lost soul, a howl that shook the very land in a vibration that was
felt more than heard.
The shimmering, swirling motes of rainbow light collapsed on
themselves and faded away, as the short circuit in spacetime ended
having done its work, depositing two tall, nearly-human figures in the
midst of a corridor strewn liberally with fallen rubble and fallen
corpses, a few of them have been struck down only seconds before,
basically victims of the ancient terminal condition of having been in
the wrong place at the wrong time and in so doing having seen too
much.
"Watch your step, Ara," Zadatharion ordered, "this place is a wreck!
We may over overdone that quake."
The corridor was nearly completely dark, save for the faint patchy
close of spilled lights on the floor, their bioluminescence mostly
gone already as the delicate cultures died. Even to the inhumanly
sharp night vision of two Avatars, the corridor was all but utterly
dark. That darkness faded an instant later, however, as Zadatharion
manifested a photokinetic glow a few meters away, giving them enough
light to make their way through the rubble toward the far end of the
corridor.
"Here's hoping those maps we paid so much for are accurate," Aradel
muttered grimly. "If they aren't, our chances are probably somewhere
between slim and nil."
"Don't borrow any trouble, Ara," Zadatharion advised, most of his
attention on watching and listening and 'scanning' for any sign of
immediate danger. It was difficult to sort out ESPer impressions in
the fortress, so many psions and fluxons in such close proximity, amid
so much orichalcum and so many psitech and fluxtech, and the close,
oppressive proximity of the Unity all contributed their own forms of
'interference' to the psychic landscape. While the Avatars might
ordinarily sense trouble from miles away, now even the space a few
meters away could easily be too far to accurately scan.
Aradel ran a nervous hand through her currently short-cut emerald-
green hair, and said, "We won't have much time, even in all this. We
need to find a cluster of Unity components, and try and do this before
we get done to." [1]
Zadatharion nodded. “It shouldn’t be all that hard to find, just
follow the ‘feel’. There are so many components around here that the
‘taste’ of them is clogging my ESP.”
Over the course of the following hour or so, the two Avatars made
their stealthy way through the chaos, avoiding combat where possible,
using their own subtle senses to avoid as many of the Unity's minions
as they could, slaying those they could not avoid, opting to use
'mundane' weaponry as much as possible to avoid making any more
psychic 'noise' than they could help. Both Avatars were armed with
firearms and blades, and skilled in the use of both. [2]
The chaos produced by the quake and the ongoing weather was everything
the Avatars had hoped for, and more besides. The hurricane itself,
fed by the warm waters of September and the extra 'kick' from the
Flux, howled through the inky darkness outside at 170 miles per hour,
but because of the lay of the land matters were rather worse near the
fortress. The winds were being funneled down a long ravine and
mounting up to the neighborhood of 200 miles per hour by the time they
swept out over the peninsula and its fortress. Even the heavy,
superbly constructed solid basalt walls and foundations were hard-
pressed to resist this awesome force, even aside from the damage and
undermining the earlier 'artificial' earthquake had inflicted.
However, it rapidly became apparent to the Avatars that something else
was going on, something unexpected. Even allowing for the number of
deaths their double attack with wind and quake had inflicted, even
allowing for the chaos and confusion associated with that among the
survivors, they were encountering too little resistance to be quite
plausible. They encountered the occasional panic-stricken guards or
soldiers, usually running or hiding as they did, they met up with a
handful of more disciplined officers and men trying to regain control
of the situation, but not _enough_ allowing for their being in the
Unity's central command fortress! The brief combats they were forced
to engage in were far less resistance than either had expected.
"Do you think it could be some kind of a trap?" Aradel asked her
fellow Avatar as they snuck cautiously through an open area, alert for
trouble.
"I suppose that's technically possible," Zadatharion allowed, "but it
hardly seems _likely_. If the Unity knew we were here, it could hit
us with overwhelming force, right now, or it ought to be able to do
so. It's almost as if the fortress is undermanned, but we know that
isn't the case...or at least it _wasn't_ the case before tonight!"
As the two reached the far end of what they knew _should_ have been a
vast assembly hall, they reached a doorway that would normally have
been sealed by a heavy alloy door, but that door was half-off the
heavy hinges, the earthquake having opened the sealed doorway for them
ahead of time. The door was too heavy for their unaided muscles to
move, especially with one hinge warped, but for their psychokinetic
power it was trivial to pull it open, and in the chamber beyond they
finally discovered where some of the personnel that they had expected
to resist their arrival were to be found...in a form that left both
Avatars sick with horror.
MORE LATER.
[1] Some of the Avatars manifested 'odd' side-effects from the various
combinations of genes and epigenetic signals their Eldren creators
used to 'design' them. For one example, Aradel's natural hair color
is a distinctive soft green.
[2] Antediluvian firearms were far less refined than TL7 Western
weapons, but quite sufficiently deadly.
Johnny1a
"Oh my dear Heaven..." Aradel breathed in a soft horrified whisper as
immortal pair looked on what was revealed in the chamber they had
entered.
"Heaven had very little to do with this," Zadatharion replied, his own
voice just as subdued. Two pairs of wide eyes swept from place to
place in the chamber, taking in sights out of a nightmare.
The new chamber was about the same size as the empty rubble-strewn
chamber they had just crossed without incident, but unlike that
chamber this one was all too full of things and people, living, dead,
and in stages in between. This room too had its rubble, large chunks
of the ceiling high overhead had come down during the earthquake, and
the wind was louder here, they were closer to the outer part of the
fortress, some of which had already crumbled into the sea. Neither
Avatar had any thought for rubble or howling wind in that first horror-
stricken moment, however!
The room was filled with tables, or beds, or things that seemed to
combine the functions of the two items, and atop each 'bed' lay a
human-shaped figure, there were _hundreds_ of them in the room,
figures male and female, figures of early childhood and figures of
extreme age, figures deeply and mercifully unconscious and figures
moaning in half-aware agony. Every reclining figure was touched by
vines of some sort, vines that ran around their bodies, and _into_
their bodies, piercing into their skins, clinging to their bodies with
sharp barbs grown from the tissue of the vine. The vines ran from the
helpless figures to join with the vines from others, assembling into
great clusters that ran to central plants, rooting in huge bowls of
soil and liquid. Other vines ran from these central plantings toward
rows of lemon-yellow glass ovoids, about the height of a tall man,
five of them rested in a row at one end of the great chamber, atop
metal stands that held these objects up vertically.
The snaky 'vines' were like no ordinary plant, indeed they appeared
almost animal-life in some ways, semi-transparent tubes ran through
the vines, carrying liquids over to away from the figures on the
tables, and also to and from the 'glass' ovoids. Also, the vines
_moved_, slowly shifting back and forth across the floor like
serpentine plants, motivated by contraction and expansion of tissues
within the very vines themselves. They did not move swiftly, they
could not match the pace of motion of even a normal human walk, but
they did move in a way that seemed almost nauseating to watch, and as
the two stunned, blanching Avatars watched vines would reach a victim
on one of the table-beds, and extrude the barbs and cling and begin to
penetrate into their skins.
Along with the victims on the tables were dozens of men in the livery
of the Unity's army, and more 'civilians' who were clearly support
personnel for the whole vast and sickening assemblage, but none of
them were doing any supporting now. Guards and 'scientists' lay on
the floor, eyes open but motionless, their positions showing clearly
that they had simply fallen at once, when something took away their
power of their bodies to move. Guards lay inches from weapons they
had dropped, unable to reach them, scientists and support personnel
watched in abject horror as the mobile, serpentine vines began to
slowly inch toward them as well, some of them had already been 'taken'
by the plants and were making most of the noise of screaming that
filled the entire chamber, audible even through the wind's nightmare
wail.
Of the five ovoids, three were broken and shattered from fallen
rubble, one lay on its side intact but knocked out of place, and one
remained standing, pulsing with a soft yellow light within itself and
absorbing the liquids and solids and living energy the strange plant-
things were transferring from the people on the tables. Out of that
ovoid a sense of dark, hungry _presence_ radiated, impressing itself
against the ESPer senses of the two Avatars with almost palpable
malevolence.
Near the ovoid, in the immediate area around it, lay what were clearly
recognizable as human remains, or rather human _bones_. Several
skulls, limb bones, pelvic girdles, ribs, in a loose pile. Bones
white and clean, without a trace of flesh anywhere to be seen, but
amid the bones were clothing and items to match those lying near the
living but paralyzed soldiers and attendants spread over the rest of
the room. There was little doubt in either Avatar’s mind that those
bones had been living beings only a short times earlier.
Aradel switched to her ESP, peering at the room observing the auras of
the beings present, and winced, because the overwhelming impression
this poured into her mind was one of agonizing pain and freezing fear
and terrible hunger. The 'auras' of the figures on the tables were
weak, and flickering, the 'colors' and shadings horribly evocative of
death and pain. Some were weaker than others, all were fading, as the
living energies of the people were slowly consumed, drawn out of them
and passed into the remaining 'glass' ovoid. The auras of the fallen
soldiers and attendants were brighter, but blazing wih the colors of
fear and panic and confusion, and the few just being touched now by
the strange mobile vines were beginning to flicker as well. The plant
things themselves shone with an aura unlike anything Aradel had ever
perceived, something darkly foreign, something that no living thing
should have displayed, an aura that seemed to partake both of the
plant's own life and the energy being drained from the figures lying
on those tables.
There was another living aura 'visible' to her psychic senses: an
aura blazing around the remaining glass-like object that was the focus
of the 'vines'. This aura was like nothing she had ever seen, even
more alien than that of the vine-things, and yet...it was familiar, as
if it were the familiar aura of humans taken and refracted through
some mad prism, bent and reshaped into something alien. The colors
were not real, of course, they were efforts by Aradel's brain and mind
to assign meaning to the sensory impressions of her ESP, but they
nevertheless told her much about what she looked upon, and nothing
about it was reassuring! There was little impression of anything like
thought, nothing that suggested anything that might be called
cognition or empathy. Instead, the overwhelming impressions were of a
hunger beyond anything Aradel had ever perceived in a any living
thing, couple to a hatred, a malevolence, that was the more repulsive
for its lack of any focused target, the malevolence she detected was
directed at everyone, everything, that was alive other than the
'thing' in the ovoid itself. She was sensing, interpreting, a life
essence that had no regard for other life in any form other than a
burning hatred and desire to devour. [1]
Beside her, Zadatharion whispered, “We knew this was going on, that
they were human life essences in the creation of their
paralenses...but I never imagined it would be like this!”
MORE LATER.
[1] The psychic ability of ‘see aura’ is actually nothing to do with
sight, or light. Most psions interpret the information this skill
provides in visual terms, but this is not universal.
Johnny1a
The two Avatars stared in horrified disbelief, this was the first time
they had actually _seen_ the process that the Unity had been using to
drain the living essence out of human victims to make its paralenses
so quickly. This scene, however, was odd, because it seemed that even
the guards and personnel _performing_ the activity had fallen victim
to the process, and it had to have happened fairly recently, from the
looks of the situation.
"Sh-should we intervene?" Aradel asked her leader softly.
For a long moment Zadatharion stared at the horrific scene, then shook
his head. "We haven't the time, and if we do anything we'll attract
to much attention to ourselves. We have a job to do and we have to
get it done...no matter what it costs. We don't have the time to sort
out who could be helped and who can't, we'll come back for them
afterward...if we can."
Aradel hesitated, caught between revulsion, pity, and a recognition
with the rational part of her mind that Zadatharion was right. After
a moment she nodded reluctantly, and the two immortals looked for the
fastest way across the room, avoiding the vines, the strange ovoid,
and stealing themselves against the pitiable cries from the victims on
the tables and on the floor.
It was not difficult to avoid the vines, they could move but only very
slowly, it required only alertness for a mobile human or near-human to
evade them, and their motions seemed to be mostly undirected, or
perhaps drawn by body heat, the two had little trouble with the vine-
things. The mysterious living presence in the surviving ovoid,
though, made them both more nervous, each had the distinct sense, via
ESP, that the thing in the ‘glass oval’ was aware of their presence,
and ‘watching’ them, and with that awareness came a sense of a hate
and a hunger that was like nothing either had ever encountered
previously.
There were several doors opening off the chamber, the two immortals,
following their ESPer sense of the presence of the Unity, eventually
made their way to the one that seemed to most promising route, and as
they passed through it, leaving the chamber of horror behind, Aradel
looked down to see a guard lying alive on the floor of the corridor
outside, eyes open, body twitching, as one of the vine-things
penetrated his chest and throat. She reminded herself sternly that he
had been one of the Unity’s soldiers, until a short time earlier
guarding and protecting that chamber of horrors. She suspected that
his fate might even be a case of ‘poetic justice’, and told herself
so...and still her heart shuddered. On some deep level, she was
convinced that there was no crime severe enough to deserve what had
happened, and was still happening, to those people.
Oddly enough, as they followed the ‘trail’ of the Unity’s presence on
the psychic level, they seemed to be approaching the outer walls of
the fortress, rather than penetrating deeper into the maze as they had
more than half expected. The howling wind of the hurricane was loud
now, they were not far from the outer walls and the wind was making
the very stone vibrate in sympathy.
“I don’t understand this,” Zadatharion finally admitted. “The
components ought to be down near the center, in the most protected,
reinforced area. They have to realize that such a concentration of
components represents a vulnerability for the Unity, even if it
doesn’t care about the survival of any one. Even this storm could
inflict a great deal of damage on the Unity if it destroyed that huge
collection of components!”
“Could it be some kind of trap?”
“Why bother? If the Unity knew we were coming, it would have been
ready to strike as soon as we arrived, if it knew we were here now it
could still direct a considerable force against us. No, there’s
something else in play, some other factor...but we’ve come too far to
turn back now. We might as well forge ahead and see what we find, we
should know the score soon either way.”
The two made their cautious way through the maze of corridors, and
then they reached a door that was tightly closed, and now the wind was
howling so loudly that they literally had to shout to make the verbal
part of their conversation audible to the other, though standing only
a meter apart. Zadatharion was reaching for the door to open it when
it suddenly _slammed_ open before he hand touched, and a blast of wind
and water, so fast and driven that they seemed to have merged into one
thing, struck both immortals head on, driving them back, as the force
of the wind came howling into the corridor!
The door had opened into a fully collapsed area, leaving it facing the
fury of the storm, even the deflected, indirect power of that gale was
enough to drive to the immortals backward helplessly, their
psychokinesis sufficient only to preserve their lives, not to
withstand the incredible power of the elements. All around them that
part of the fortress was shaking, the heavy basalt blocks threatening
to come apart from each other, and by the time the two were driven
back to a relatively safer area of the structure and able to shut a
door against the force, both were soaked to the skin, exhausted,
gasping for air, and terrified.
“I think,” Aradel said after a while as she lay against a wall, still
coughing up water, “that we might have called up a bit too strong a
storm.”
“That looks to me like a plausible observation,” the older immortal
admitted, with a twisted and rueful laugh. “Our own storm may be
enough to keep us from getting our job done.”
“They’re out there,” Aradel said in disbelief. “The components are
standing out there _in the middle of that_! How can they be doing
it? How can they even survive out in that courtyard?!”
The door through which the storm had broken in upon them had opened
onto a rooftop ‘courtyard’ surrounded by high walls, or it had been at
one time. It was anybody’s guess now if the walls still stood, but
the ‘sense’ of the presence of the Unity’s components was clear,
somehow they were surviving out there in the midst of the incredible
storm!
“Do you think the Unity knows we’re here?” Aradel asked.
“No,” Zadatharion said. “I don’t think it’s even _noticed_ us, the
storm knocked us back before we got close enough to strike anyway.
Can’t you sense its mood? It’s concentrating very intently on
_something_, something to do with its standing out there in the middle
of a damned hurricane! The Unity is powerful, but its psychokinesis
is nowhere close to strong enough to endure that! But _something_ is
protecting it, keeping those mindless components alive out there to
sustain it.”
"We've been avoiding using Flux Perception," Aradel said, "for fear of
being detected...but I don't think that's an issue anymore. I have
the Focus, I'm inclined to try and use it to amplify my Flux
perception, maybe I can _see_ what's going on up there! With your
permission?"
After a moment, Zadatharion nodded grimly. “Nothing to lose at this
point. Go for it.”
Aradel opened the backpack she had worn all through their trek through
the fortress, and released the Flux-locks on it. Anybody but she
herself opening those latches would have triggered a rather nasty Flux
manifestation that would likely have left little but a pile of
smoldering meat in its wake. For her, they were just high-quality
metal catches.
Inside was an object, wrapped in layers of thin metal foil, which she
unwrapped, to reveal what looked very much like a large chunk of
glass, cut and faceted like some impossibly huge diamond. As she drew
it out, it began to sparkle as if more light were falling upon it than
was present in the dimly lit chamber.
Aradel reached out telepathically, and Zadatharion linked his mind to
hers, so that they could both perceive whatever she learned using the
Focus, and then she tapped into the Focus as she had practiced doing,
and made an attempt to use the Flux to ‘perceive’ what was happening
on the roof above them.
The first thing they perceived was the Static. Aradel and Zadatharion
were quite startled, because they had made no attempt to ‘perceive’
across time, or any large distance of space, their target was only a
few tens of meters overhead! Yet the Static, which only days before
had been no problem for real-time work even across tens or hundreds of
miles, was now so intense, so pervasive, that it was interfering with
their ability to perceive via the Flux even at nearly zero range.
“I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “How can it have grown so much
stronger in so short a time?!”
“No time to worry about it,” Zadatharion observed. “Try and punch
through to the roof!”
Both Avatars were skilled fluxons, and amplified by the Great Focus,
they were able, with some difficulty, to eventually press their
awareness through the Static to perceive that roof area, and the
gathered Unity components, over one hundred of them, standing in a
great circle amid the howling, nearly 200 mile per hour wind...utterly
ignoring it. They stood straight, not even straining against the
fantastic force, which seemed impossible to the two Avatars.
The components of the Unity were, physically speaking, human. They
had the strength and health and physical endurance of humans, and
though any given component could act a focal point for the full
combined psychic strength of the Unity, even that combined power
should not have been able to stand up to that weather for a moment!
Yet they stood there, and endured the weather that was gradually
tearing a stone fortress to pieces around them.
Then, as they ‘looked’ more closely, the Avatars saw that the wind was
not even touching the group of components, the rain was not reaching
them, it was striking some invisible barrier around the ground and
defected away, around, over, even the hair of the components was lying
still in a bubble of calm air.
“That’s why the door broke down,” Zadatharion noted, “that protective
bubble is creating a vortex around them, and when it brushed that door
it broke down instantly, just as we were standing there!”
“What’s powerful enough to _do_ a barrier like that?!” Aradel asked in
wonder. “Not even the Unity can marshal enough psychokinetic force to
do something like _that_!”
As they looked closer, the Avatars then realized that the components
were not alone. In the midst of the circle in which they stood
was...something. Neither immediately recognized it, it seemed by both
there and not there, but as they 'looked' more closely, they suddenly
had a set of impressions that left both of them nearly overwhelmed. A
sense of fantastic age, vast age, age beyond anything either could
comprehend, age that made their thousands of years of memory and
experience seem like nothing, like the blink of eye, less than a blink
of an eye.
Age...and _power_. There was a sense of power so incredibly enormous
that the storm was nothing to it, the earthquake earlier had been
nothing, nothing they could imagine was anything to it, and it was
_alien_, inhuman, foreign in a way they could not describe, and yet at
the same time it felt as familiar as their own thoughts. And with all
those instantaneous impressions came another...that whatever it was
was only a reflection, an echo, of something vastly larger and
greater.
And with all that came another certainty to both Avatars at once.
"We have to stop this," Zadatharion said, and Aradel nodded in
absolute harmony. "Now."
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Neither Avatar was quite sure _why_ they were suddenly possessed of an
absolute conviction that whatever was going on up on the roof needed
to be interrupted with extreme prejudice, and immediately so. Under
other circumstances the two, both expert and experienced psions, might
have suspected some outside influence on their minds, but this did not
'feel' like such, it seemed, if anything, to be coming from the
deepest parts of their own awareness. Both were fully convinced,
without knowing quite why, that secrecy was no longer imperative,
their original purpose had now changed, the mission had been revised
'on the fly'.
"The Focus," Aradel said. "I can use it to create a Manifestation
that will bring down the roof."
"On our heads?" Zadatharion observed. Though both were determined to
stop whatever was happening over their heads, neither was suicidal.
"We can retreat ot of the direct line," she replied, "and our
metashields should be strong enough to protect us from the rubble. It
only has to last a few moments, since I'm planning to use the Focus to
make a psi-gate for a quick exit."
"Can you do both manifestations at once?"
"I think so," Aradel replied. "Especially if you handle the
metashield to protect us from the side-effects so I don't have to."
"Sounds workable," Zadatharion replied. "Let's get this over with."
It took the two of them about fifteen minutes to get things ready, and
another fifteen for Aradel to prepare the two Flux Manifestations that
she was planning to deploy. The first one was relatively simple, the
second very complex, both had to be executed in rapid succession and
without a mistake. When the time came, she focused her will through
the Great Focus and initiated the first Manifestation, which consisted
of a massive sudden strain on the structural integrity of the roof of
the ancient fortress. The strain took the form of a vast wave of
psychokinetic energy that rippled out of (apparently) nowhere across
the interlocked stone blocks of the roof and the heavy vaulted arches
of stone that supported them.
Weakened already by the earthquake and the storm, the roof still held
for several moments, a testament to the engineering skills of the
builders of the fortress, trained and skilled Atlantean artisans of
the time before the slow corruption of all Atlantis' professions and
skills. Then, slowly, almost ponderously, blocks of basalt began to
give way, sliding out of their interlocked positions, and with each
stone removed other stones were weakened and loosened, and in moments
the roof of the fortress began to crumble inward, and it happened
swiftly enough that the Unity's crowd of components on the roof were
caught almost totally by surprise.
While the Unity's psychic senses were certainly sharp enough to detect
the forces tearing at the structural integrity of the roof, once they
manifested, it was heavily occupied already with its collective
attention split between the _thing_ it was communing with and the
effort of holding itself together amid the chaos of the situation, and
it reacted several seconds too slow to defend itself. As the
connection between the Unity and the 'thing' broke in the shock of the
collapsing roof, the ability of the alien force to protect the
components from the storm also vanished, and amid the combined threat
of ~200 mile per hour winds and a roof caving in under their feet, the
components were overwhelmed almost immediately.
Nearly two hundred components of the Unity perished that day, in a
matter of moments. The psychic/psychological shock to the collective
was stagging, it was the largest mass death of its own 'members' that
the Unity had experienced in its entire multi-century existence. If
Aradel and Zadatharion had been ready, in that moment they could
almost certainly have used the Great Focus to strike at the entity,
much as originally planned, and expunged it entirely from the
Universe, once and for all. Unfortunately, they were in no immediate
condition to do anything other than try to survive and escape the
chaos they had unleashed.
While Zadatharion did his best to shield them both from the rain of
falling rubble, blocks of basalt weighing tons, and a almost insane
elemental fury as the storm broke in upon through the shattered roof,
Aradel initiated her second and more complex Manifestation, calling a
psi-gate into existence, though in this case it would have been more
accurate to call it a Flux-gate, since the identical phenomenon was
empowered not by her own psionic potential but by the Flux.
Such transfer portals were supremely difficult and complex to create
and maintain. The greater tha size of the portal the more difficult
it was to open it and hold it, and the greater the distance the worse
the difficulty. Furthermore, the creator of the gate had to allow for
factors such as differences in vector motion between the two endpoints
of the dimensional conduit, differences in gravitational potential,
electrical charge, and other factors that the Universe insisted be
conserved. The phenomena that underlay such gateways enabled these
laws of physics to be bent slightly, but certainly not broken.
On the other hand, Aradel was one of the best at what she did, both
with her native psionic potential and in her use of the Flux. To the
relief of the two Avatars, the gate opened as she desired, and the two
of them managed to pass through it just moments before a 2000 ton mass
of broken basalt came sliding through the space in which they had
stood just seconds before. So close was the call that small bits of
basaltic 'gravel' came flying through the gate with them, and before
the gate had entirely collapsed they saw the entire fortress coming
down behind them by the light which the gate passed.
Then the gate was shut, dissipated, gone, and the two Avatars lay in
the gentle rain at their arrival coordinates, more than fifty miles to
the north of the fortress, gasping for breath and shaking. Gone was
the banshee wail of the wind, now they were at the very edge of the
storm's influence, experiencing little more than a modest breeze and a
steady drizzle of rain.
It took the two of them a few moments to realize that they were not
alone.
The two jumped to their feet when the realization struck them,
impelled into the minds just in time by a sudden eruption of both
Avatars' danger sense. The arrival site had been carefully chosen,
and was _supposed_ to be known only to a handful of Rhaemyi leaders,
who would meet them when a prearranged signal went out. It was clear,
though, that these beings had been waiting for their arrival for some
time, because they were in a ring around them, and a second larger
ring some distance back reinforced the trap. There was no way so many
of the creatures could have been moved into place in the few moments
since their arrival!
"Wh-what are they?" Aradel asked nervously. In thousands of years of
life, she had never seen or imagined anything quite like them.
"I have no idea," her older compatriot said, which she did not find
entirely reassuring. "I've never seen them before."
The creatures were squat, but wide and looked strong. Each one had
eight limbs, spread around their almost circular bodies, and heads
that rose like a single lump of tissue out of the center of the tops
of their bodies. No mouth was visible on the head, but there were
clusters of eyes all around the head. They were covered in a strange,
stiff-looking fur that seemed to ignore the steady rain, shedding the
water. In the dim light of the rising Sun, filtering through the
clouds, Zadatharion and Aradel could see that the fur was an odd
greenish color, with shadings of gray and blue and black in various
individual creatures.
The creatures had them surrounded, and were holding position in their
double ring, but they were clearly restless, jittery, moving up and
down in place, shifting from limb to limb as they stood there. There
was disturbing sense of sapience about them, it impinged intensely on
the ESP senses of the two Avatars, whatever these things were, they
were more than just animals.
Both Avatars looked around the ring of creatures, and their danger
senses were practically screaming as they did.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Zadatharion and Aradel stood back to back, facing the ring of
creatures who had been waiting on site. Even if their own ESPer
senses had not sensed the fact of sapience in the creatures, the truth
of that would have been revealed by the fact that the creatures were
armed. Their limbs, which they used for locomotion, seemed also to be
equipped to handle tools, and it appeared that they could use any of
the limbs for either purpose. Most of them were armed with bladed
weapons, but alarmingly a few were equipped with various sorts of
firearm, mostly of the kind used by the formal Atlantean Army before
that institution had come apart.
The guns were alarming because even in their tired, weary state, the
PK abilities of the two Avatars could almost surely have defended them
against any sort of blade or spear or arrow, but guns were harder,
much harder, to defend against. A gunpowder-driven projectile had a
momentum and kinetic energy orders of magnitude greater than any
lesser weapon, deflecting a single large-scale shell could tax a psion
more than dozens of arrows or any number of sword or mace stroke.
The moment seemed to last forever, but in fact it lasted only moments
before the nearest of the creatures rushed the Avatars...and
discovered that even a very tired, winded, even an exhausted Avatar is
a dangerous foe. The first two monsters to charge them tried to
'spear' them with claws that appeared on the end of their limbs, only
to be picked up and hurled back against their fellows, very hard. The
Avatars wasted no time waiting, they struck out offensively and with
ruthless ferocity.
The monsters made a basic tactical error, had they all attacked in
masse even the Avatars might have been overwhelmed, since they could
only focus on a certain number of targets at a time, but instead the
first few moments of the battle were wasted by the monsters in a
chaotic, half-organized rush that gave the Avatars time to act and
plan, and that proved catastrophic for the attackers.
Zadatharion used pyrokinesis to focus intense heat on the first two
monsters to approach him, and though it was and is difficult to burn
living tissue, the heat was intense enough to inflict burns all over
the monsters. One monster attempted to swing a net over the Avatar,
only to see it burst into flames, and a surge of telekinetic force
sent the flaming net back against the monster wielding it. The rain
rapidly put out the flames, but the wounded monsters were in the way
of the next attacker, who saw its long razor-sharp iron spear yanked
from its multi-limbed grasp and rammed through its own body by
Zadatharion's telekinetic power.
Aradel had resorted to telepathy as her weapon, channeling her psionic
power through the Focus to boost her skills, and with this boost to
skill she was able to hurl mind bolts that punched directly through
the mental defenses of her targets. They were not entirely
unprotected, their minds had some shielding, but the mindbolts Aradel
was throwing were explosively hot and 'tuned' in ways that carried
them 'past' the defenses of her targets, making their defenses less
effective. From the point of view of the monsters attacking them, one
after another of their number simply collapsed dead or mindless,
untouched by any physical force.
By now their attackers had realized that their prey was far more
dangerous than they had initially realized, but the opportunity for a
coordinated attack had been lost, there was a knot of monsters all
around the defending Avatars, the occasional attempt by the gun-armed
monsters to 'pick off' one of the near-humans simply resulted in
monsters falling from friendly fire. Then Aradel managed to
telekinetically snatch one of the military-issue guns, it went flying
through the air and she caught it, and it had four shots in its
chambers. She fired them into the monsters, and at such point-blank
range she could scarcely miss, four shots killed three monsters and
left one helplessly wounded. She threw the gun aside and picked up a
dropped spear, and along with psionic attacks she began to use the
spear with devastating effect on any monster that came within its
range.
A flash of his danger sense warned Zadatharion of a particularly
intense threat from one of the monsters, and he wasted no time in
striking with pyrokinesis that had proven so effective so far against
the creatures. This nearly proved to be a lethal error on his part,
because the creature was carrying a complex apparatus of some kind
strapped to it that instantly burst into furious, phosphorus-driven
flame, turning the creature into a living fireball that was only a
meter or so away from the Avatar! [1]
The flames nearly caught Zadatharion, but he was _just_ far enough
back to have time to raise his shield, and then he grabbed the flame-
engulfed monster, picked it up in the air telekinetically, and began
to wield the living, thrashing monster as a flaming missile that he
could move back and forth against his foes.
By this point half the initial force of monsters were dead or
incapacitated, and the initial battle had begun with a numerical edge
of 30 to 2 against (apparently) unarmed foes. The enemy morale broke,
and the monsters ran, abandoning the field, though a few of them
retained enough discipline to take a moment to kill the wounded who
could not flee before running themselves. Zadatharion and Aradel were
too exhausted to give chase, as they might otherwise would have done,
they leaned against each other in the steady rain, gasping for breath
and staring in disbelief at the burnt, frozen, shredded, and otherwise
mangled corpses of these strange creatures. For a several minutes the
two of them just remained where they were, gasping for air and trying
to regain some energy to make a useful decision.
They knew they had to move, though, because there was too much change
those _things_, whatever they had been, would soon return with greater
numbers or more impressive weaponry, and they were both exhausted. As
soon as they had regained enough air to move, they began to head away
from their arrival point, making for one of the prearranged sites for
the meet with the Rhaemyi who had been waiting for them by
prearrangement. The original plan had been that the Avatars would
send out a signal to their waiting allies, but since that was not
practical now the two sought the various sites that they might be
waiting. It took them less than an hour to find their allies...or
rather what was left of them.
They found them in the shelter of a small tent, hidden from the nearby
eastern coast by a line of hills and from the highlands to the west by
careful camouflage, but since they knew roughly where to look it was
not hard for the two to find. The tent was shredded, and the remains
of their four contacts lay in the rain in front of the remains of the
tent. The bodies had been...damaged. In fact, it was fairly clear
that something had been in the process of _eating_ them until very
shortly previous.
"L-look at those bite marks," Aradel said in horror. "What kind of
mouth-what kind of-I mean-"
[1] The creature had been carrying a crude flamethrower, fueled by a
phosphorus-based liquid. It was devastatingly effective, but
suicidally dangerous to use.
Johnny1a
"It had to be those _things_," Zadatharion opined. "We couldn't see
their mouths, but they're alive, they _have_ to eat, so they have to
have mouths somewhere, and until I see evidence to the contrary I'm
assuming they were the ones who, well...ate them." [1]
Aradel began to speak, but before the mixture of words and thoughts
even finished forming, both Avatars felt the impact of a telepathic
attack of such force that both were almost instantly overwhelmed.
If they had been rested, alert, they might have been able to fight off
the assault. Both were at the limits of their endurance, however.
They had been awake by now for over 36 hours straight, had been in
repeated combat, high stress, and great fear, and they simply did not
have enough left in them to repel this latest assault on the fabric of
their awareness. Both Avatars went down, dazed, unconscious, sprawled
on the ground defenseless and defeated.
Zadatharion was the first to regain a semblance of consciousness, and
when he did he rather wished he had not. It felt as if every muscle
in his body was aching, every square inch of his skin bruised and
battered, his head ready to explode. Aradel was still unconscious a
few meters away, and Zadatharion could not yet move, his head was
still spinning from the impact of the telepathic assault, his body
felt as it was made of stone as far as his ability to move went.
They were not alone. There were humans standing about, and after a
dazed moment Zadatharion realized that he had been tied at the ankles,
his wrists behind his back, with some kind of heavy cord, and Aradel
similarly, and the six male figures were going through their
belongings, clearly looking for something.
They were speaking very softly, in a language that it took the dazed
Avatar a moment to place: it was the variant dialect of Atlantean
spoken in ProtoAthens, rich with loan words from more primitive
tongues. In his stunned state he had to strain to understand what was
being said, while ocncealing the fact that he had regained
consciousness (for want of a better word to describe what he had
regained). After a moment, though, he managed to pick out the thread
of what they were saying.
"-damn it, it has to be here _somewhere_!"
"Hurry up, it's been nearly an hour already and I don't trust his
ability to keep those damned _creatures_ under control, if they get
loose they'd eat us as soon as they would anybody else."
"Stop bickering you two! Look, either they have it or they don't! If
they don't, let's get out of here!"
"If we go back without it, _he'll_ feed us to his creatures! Damn it,
we _know_ they have it, they _used_ it during that fight, he sensed
it. It's not that small, where could they have hidden it?!"
"There's a big empty pouch in her backpack," a fourth voice said.
"I'll bet it was in that. But it's not there now, and I can't imagine
she'd have just left it behind, it's only the most valuable damn thing
you could carry with you!'
"We are running out of time! Look, the _he_ doesn't lose control of
his monsters while we're near them, then one or both of these two are
going to wake up if we don't hurry up! You saw what they did the
monsters, there were thirty of them, they were armed, they had the
advantage of surprise, and these two cut through them like a knife
through butter! What do you think they could do to us?!"
"Look, think it through!" snapped the second voice. "If it's not in
the pouch, she has to have concealed it somewhere. If she didn't have
time to hide it the normal way, maybe she teleported it somewhere
before she went down. If so it's got to be close at hand, she had no
time to do anything fancy with it. Search the area, it can't be far
away!"
Zadatharion cursed, he did not know himself just what the truth was,
but he was pretty sure they were right. Aradel had been carrying the
Focus, which had to be what they were looking for, and the only she
would have had time to do was teleport the device away from her
psionically. At best, it could not be much further than thirty to
fifty meters away by that means. He struggled to regain some
volition, but he was still too tired and weak, still too far from
himself, to have any chance of doing anything. Even breaking the
ropes that bound him was too much, something that would normally have
been literally as easy as thinking about it.
"I still don't see why we should't just kill them both before they
wake up!" came one of the voices.
"And risk setting off a death-bomb? No, thank you, I'd rather live to
spend my money, thank you very much!" [2]
As Zadatharion lay there, hoping against hope for rescue, or to regain
enough strength to do something himself, their mysterious captors
continued to search the area. Just as he began to feel his head
clearing, and began to have some faint hope he might be a be able to
regain his strength in time to matter, he heard one of them yell
triumphantly, "I think I found it!"
MORE LATER.
[1] The Antediluvian Age was marked by a cultural aversion to
cannibalism, or anything connected to it, even stronger than our own.
[2] More about 'death bombs' in this context soon.
Johnny1a
'Damn', Zadatharion thought helplessly, 'please please let him be
wrong!'
Unfortunately, Zadatharion saw that his plea would not be answered,
because heard another one saying, "Yes! That's it!"
"Does that mean we can _please_ get moving?" said one of the voices he
had heard earlier. "Time is pressing and if these two don't wake up,
something else will go wrong, the longer we wait the worse the
situation gets!"
“Yeah, he’s right,” another one was saying. “What about it, do we
risk killing these two or not?”
“You can try it if you want,” came the voice that had commented on the
possibility of a death bomb. “I won’t, not for what we’re being
paid. It’s just too bloody damned risky!”
“You’re probably right,” another one said. “Leave them there, we’re
not being paid enough to risk something like that and we’ve _got_ what
we came for!”
Zadatharion cursed to himself and struggled to find his psionic power
within himself, but he was just too tired, too dazed, too weak, he
knew he would not be able to generate enough power to deal with a
hostile rodent, much less several armed and motivated mercenaries. If
not for the ‘death bombs’ that he and Aradel had set, and that the
mercenaries so justifiably feared, he knew their millennia-long lives
would have almost surely been over that night.
The rain was still falling gently, and about thirty minutes after
their captors fled, Zadatharion began to sense some of his psionic
strength returning. He was able to break the ropes binding his hands,
and to shakily sit up and untie his ankles afterward. Then he managed
to half-crawl, half stagger over to where his companion lay, still and
silent. For a moment Zadatharion feared the worst, but she was still
breathing, still had a pulse, clearly she was alive, though a nasty
bruise was spreading across one side of her head. For a moment he
wondered if one of their captors had struck her while she was
unconscious, but then he saw what had happened: her head had struck a
large rock when she collapsed under the telepathic assault.
‘Damn, that’s nasty,’ he thought, ‘but if she wakes up at all she
should able to heal it herself. Question is, will she wake up?’
As it happened, she did, at just about the time that the Rhaemyi
reinforcements arrived.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now that we’ve had an up close look at how it happened, and a chance
to get an up close look at two of our more important players, we can
pull our omniscient view back a bit and look at what was happening in
the big picture and what followed from this sequence of events in
September of 4753 BC.
Multiple effects followed, good and bad, for all the major players in
the dark game of that time. The Unity had lost well over one hundred
of its components in a moment, even for a creature made up of
thousands of individual components, this was a heavy blow. The lost
of any single ‘component’ meant little or nothing to the collective,
but so many at once was painful, disorienting, disruptive. The
psionic power of the group mind was shaken and weakened, its ability
to concentrate and focus reduced, and it knew a new kind of fear from
the sudden and unexpected loss of so much of its own multiplex self.
More importantly, the Unity discovered that it had lost contact with
the being it had been communicating with when Zadatharion and Aradel
had disrupted matters. This entity, the perception of which had so
mysteriously alarmed the two Avatars, was in fact the Rival, the
ancient Eldren enemy of the Watcher, the being who had assisted in the
first accidental (from the human point of view) creation of the Unity.
The Rival, trapped in a semi-conscious state by the misfire of its own
trap for the Watcher, had managed to make contact with its partial
creation only a relatively short time previously, less than five
years, and it had required a great deal of painful effort on the part
of the Watcher to ‘focus’ enough to maintain a meaningful
communication with the vastly smaller and weaker, but fully awake and
active, collective entity. However, it had finally managed to
establish such a connection, though it took the physical presence of a
large number of ‘components’ of the Unity to act as ‘telepathic foci’
to give the barely-awake Rival something to lock onto, an ‘anchor’
around which it could focus its vast but diffuse awareness. The Unity
had engaged in such mass assemblies for communication only a few times
when Zadatharion and Aradel encountered one such during their sneak
attack on the Unity in 4753 BC.
With its contact with the Unity broken so abruptly, the Rival sank
helplessly back into its half-aware daze, but not so far from
consciousness as it had been. Its periodic contacts with the Unity
had helped bring the entity just that much closer to full wakefulness,
a situation fraught with peril for mortal kind. [1] Now it was filled
with as much rage as it was capable of feeling in its dreamy half-
aware state.
MORE LATER.
[1] Zadatharion is the Avatar within which the Watcher’s consciousness
partially dwells, which is why he _instinctively_ recognized a danger
in what was happening and knew it _had_ to be stopped. Something
similar was true of Aradel, though she is the Avatar of a different
trapped Familiar Eldren. Neither knew quite why or how they knew what
they knew, but they knew.
Zadatharion cursed to himself and struggled to find his psionic power
within himself, but he was just too tired, too dazed, too weak, he
knew he would not be able to generate enough power to deal with a
hostile rodent, much less several armed and motivated mercenaries. If
not for the ‘death bombs’ that he and Aradel had set, and that the
mercenaries so justifiably feared, he knew their millennia-long lives
would have almost surely been over that night.
Johnny1a
Other changes followed from the events as well. When the two Avatars
were reunited with the leadership of what was left of the Rhaemyi,
Vylyrades learned that his precious Focus had been taken by some
unknown enemy, it was a dire blow to him. The Focus had been his
greatest work, as both technician and artist, it embodied the peak of
his skills and abilities, and it had the potential to be very
dangerous in the wrong hands. Vylyrades had indeed taken some steps
during its creation to prevent its misuse, there were things
inherently difficult to achieve using the Focus precisely because
Vylyrades had designed it that way.
Also, Vylyrades had designed a feature into the Focus that enabled
him, personally, uniquely in the Universe, to sense it location at
enormous distances, unlike its proximate masters who could detect its
location only at a modest range. To his surprise, when he tapped the
Flux to attempt to perceive the location of his creation, he perceived
that it had been taken to the lands of ProtoAthens, specifically to a
site along that great river a later age would call the Nile.
The ProtoAthenian Alliance was centered on a colony-city that was, in
fact, not far away from the modern location of the city we call
Athens, but it covered a vast area around the eastern Mediterranean
Sea and a long strip of land that extended southward up what we call
the Nile Valley. A chain of rich and prosperous cities lay along the
river, and it was within one such city that the Great Focus had now
come to rest.
Vylyrades managed to ‘pinpoint’ the location of the device in December
of 4753 BC, and he determined that it was in the city of Ultanik
(among many other names), near the confluence of the primary
tributaries of the Great River. [1] This was the very city in which
the still ultra-secret orichalcum detector had been built, decades
before, the device that had led to the discovery of the hidden
orichalcum sources in Iceland and thus to the possibility of
independence contemplated by the leaders of ProtoAthens. Though
Nolon, the Atlantean renegade who had invented the device, was now
dead of natural causes, the device remained, and the city remained one
of the key centers of power and influence within the ProtoAthenian
Alliance. It sat not far north of the confluence of those rivers we
would call the Blue and White Niles, in that area which would in a far
later time be known as the Sudan.
The ‘governor’ of Ultanik was a powerful (politically and psionically)
aristocrat whose birth-name is lost to history, but who would in later
times be known by the appellation ‘Ahkrinor’. [2] We will use that
name, keeping in mind as we do that it was not necessarily what _they_
called him in his own time.
Ahkrinor was relatively young for a person of his position, but he had
displayed energy and intelligence, as well as significant psionic
power and skill, and he was known to have some limited Flux skills at
his disposal as well. At the age of 73 in 4753 BC, Ahkrinor was only
in early middle age, and widely respected for his political,
rhetorical, and practical skills. He was handsome and popular,
wealthy both as a private person and as a facet of his position, and
he was one of the circle of leaders who had been planning
ProtoAthenian independence for decades, and he was a member of the
anti-Unity secret society, the Rhaemyi. [3]
What few had learned (and fewer survived learning) was that he was a
traitor, to both the Alliance and the Rhaemyi, he had long had
dealings with the Unity, acting as a ‘double agent’. However, he had
grander ambitions and was double-dealing his collective master as
well, seeking his own personal agenda with both great skill and
intelligence and an utter ruthlessness remarkable even for a very
ruthless time. So well did he mask this driving ambition behind
layers of masks that not even such paranoid, perceptive entities as
the Avatars, the Unity, or the leaders of the Rhaemyi and the Alliance
suspected his true nature until too late.
It had been Ahkrinor who had laid a trap for Zadatharion and Aradel,
using his knowledge as a member of the Rhaemyi leadership to manage to
deed. It was Ahkrinor who had long known of the existence of the
Great Focus, and whose plans now required access to that device, and
he achieved this in alliance with a force that up until this time, few
if any others had suspected existed, the strange monsters that had
waylaid Aradel and Zadatharion upon their arrival by psi-gate after
their escape from the Unity’s southeastern base.
The monsters were, of course, that artificial race that would someday
be known as the ‘Beasties’. How a number of these insanely hostile
creatures had come to be in Atlantis, or why these descendents of TL10
starfarers were working at a tech level of barely TL5, will be
revealed in the time to come, for now let it be enough to know that
Ahkrinor had made contact with them and concluded a cautious alliance
of convenience, though each side fully intended to betray the other in
due course.
Ahkrinor had ambitions possibly beyond any other individual of his
time. Among the things about himself and his past that he had so
skillfully concealed was a mastery of Flux skill among the top ten in
the world of his time. His abilities were indeed _almost_ comparable
to those of Vylyrades himself, and Vylyrades was the greatest fluxon
of his time by almost any metric.
To these enormous secret Flux skills, Ahkrinor also added high levels
(also concealed) of scientific skills, and these he had combined in
pursuit of a goal of his own, one related to, and perhaps inspired by,
the goals of the Unity in the Great Project (goals to which Ahkrinor
had long been privy), but also driven by his intense _individual_
ambitions, a perspective beyond the full comprehension of the Unity’s
collective view.
To clarify the matter, the goal of Ahkrinor was a combination of
personal power and personal immortality.
MORE LATER.
[1] The name of the Nile used by the Antediluvians would translate
almost precisely as ‘the Great River’, a name so applied long before
the Atlanteans had encountered the Amazon or any of the other super-
rivers.
[2] The actual title of the ruler of Ultanik would be a meaningless
noise. It would translate, rather roughly, as ‘the law master’.
Functionally in an Alliance at war it would mean ‘governor’.
[3] Though of course by 4753 BC the Rhaemyi were ‘out’, no longer
secret.
Johnny1a
Of course, little of this was known to anybody who mattered at the end
of 4753 BC. Vylyrades had tracked his Focus to Ultanik, but knew
nothing of who had it or how it had come to be there. The Unity still
thought Ahkrinor was its 'man in the resistance', the Rhaemyi still
thought he was one of their most important assets in place, the
Alliance still thought him a key member of their leadership.
Ahkrinor, however, knew that the time had come to 'break cover' to
some degree, because he was ready to bring his plans to their next
stage.
For one thing, Ahkrinor was intelligent enough, and understood
Vylyrades (whom he had met several times) well enough to suspect he
would have some way to track down his Focus, given time. Since that
would inevitably lead unwelcome attention directly towards him,
Ahkrinor decided that it was time to start kicking over the traces.
His first major act in this direction came in what we would call early
January of the year 4752 BC, when he announced the Ultanik, and the
other major cities along the Great River, were ‘seceding’ from the
ProtoAthenian Alliance that they had been a central part of for many
centuries.
Though Ahkrinor was directly only the ruler of Ultanik, he had long
been cultivating the other rulers of the Great River cities, some he
had brought in line by persuasion, some by extortion, some by bribery,
some by even less savory means. So careful and subtle had been his
work that the secession, when it came, caught the rest of the Alliance
completely by surprise.
ProtoAthens was of course struggling to survive on ongoing assault
from the Unity, the vast attack forces that the Unity had sent against
it continued to press inward, driving back the defenders inch by
bloody inch at great cost in blood and treasure. The damage that
Zadatharion and Aradel had inflicted on the Unity the year before
continued to weaken it, but that had little _direct_ effect on the
military and paraphysical assault which was slowly but steadily
constricting around ProtoAthens.
Under such circumstances, the secession of the entire Great River
region, taking with them the shipyards and naval bases around the
Great Delta [1] and the rich agricultural resources of the river
valley, as well as key bases in the northern coast of Africa, came as
a devastating blow, both in terms of material warmaking ability and
morale. Indeed, to many in what remained of the Alliance, this looked
like a final death knell.
The Unity was expecting this act of treachery, it had long planned it
in secret with Ahkrinor, and now it pressed its advantage, managing to
drive the defending ProtoAthenians out of the lowlands of what we
would call Italy and successfully destroying key bases in what we
would call Malta and Sicily. The forces that had been tied down
besieging the southern coasts of the Mediterranean were now free to
press against the very heartlands of the Alliance, supported by the
resources of the former ProtoAthenian territories.
Ahkrinor was triple-dealing still, however. He withheld from the
Unity all knowledge of the Icelandic orichalcum and the device which
could detect the miracle-metal, and he was able to cripple any effort
by the Alliance to take him out or regain the loyalty of the Great
River territories by threatening their leaders with the revelation of
that slim but steady flow of secret orichalcum, which was all that
enabled the defenders to hang on in their now desperate straits.
In the meantime, though, just as the secession pressed the prospect of
utter disaster on the Alliance and at the same time teased the Unity
with the prospect of final success, a changing circumstance gave the
Alliance a peculiar sort of reprieve. The Static had grown enormous
worse, to the point that by the northern spring of 4752 BC, it was now
interfering even with basic, everyday interpersonal telepathy.
For centuries, telepathy had been a basic, integral part of the life
of every Atlantean, both those at home on the Great Isle and those
dwelling in the colony-states. In both daily interpersonal
communication and in long-range messages, telepathy was indispensable
and had been for thousands of years. For those of Atlantean
derivation, the absence of telepathy was almost unimaginable, to the
point that most pure-blood Atlanteans found themselves seriously
crippled, psychologically, if cut off from other minds by distance.
Even at lower tech levels, the Atlanteans had known telepathy, and it
had made instantaneous and easy communication over vast distances a
routine thing, even at tech levels barely above the Stone Age. Now
that was seriously fading, as the mysterious Static grew so intense as
to interfere even with such basic skills, so intense as to make long-
range communication impossible and short-range messaging difficult.
The Static had been growing more intense steadily and alarmingly, from
its faint beginnings as a shadow on attempts to look into the future,
but it jumped sharply at around the time Zadatharion and Aradel had
damaged the Unity, and the accelerated rate of growth continued
afterward. Over the course of mere months the Static began to
seriously impinge on the use of telepathy, blocking first long-range
(hundreds of miles or more) communication, and the range of useful
communication fell steadily until by late northern spring of 4752 BC,
telepathy was reduced to a means of immediate interpersonal
communication. [2]
This made life harder for both the attackers and the defenders in the
ProtoAthenian War...but the ProtoAthenians had the aid of Goravian
survivors, and those renegades brought with them the secret of what we
call radio telegraphy, meaning that now ProtoAthens could more easily
coordinate their forces on a larger scale than the totally telepathy-
dependent Atlantean assault forces. [3]
MORE LATER.
[1] The Nile Delta.
[2] By what we would call May of 4752 BC, the practical range limit
for most people was about one hundred meters, down from ranges of many
tens of miles or more just months earlier.
[3] The Unity and the Atlantean military forces had known the
Goravians had some means of secret communication, but had been
disdainful of it, since telepathy was so obviously superior to it and
more convenient as well. They never realized they might someday
_need_ that ability, after all.
Johnny1a
Events now began to accelerate swiftly. Even as the Unity pressed its
advantage against the remnants of the ProtoAthenian Alliance, and the
Rhaemyi began launching desperate sorties elsewhere, especially in
Atlantis itself, to distract as much of the Unity’s attention as they
could from its assault, Ahkrinor was moving to implement the next
stage of his complex plan, a plan he knew the Unity would swiftly
crush if it even _suspected_ what Ahkrinor was doing. Now, while the
Unity was occupied, and did not know that Ahkrinor had seized the
Great Focus, was the only time he would ever have any real chance of
success. [1]
Ahkrinor had been preparing for his effort for over thirty years, and
though he was sure that the core theory behind it was sound, he had
begun to despair of living long enough to properly execute it. When
he had learned of Vylyrades’ creation of the Great Focus, he had
recognized that this device could provide the necessary ‘short cut’
that would theoretically enable him to make up for the shortcomings of
his own preparations in the time available. Ahkrinor had always been
a very successful man, he had little experience of serious failure,
and as a result he might charitably have been described as ‘highly
confident’.
Still, Ahkrinor was not stupid, and he was not unaware of the high
inherent risk in what he was planning to attempt. He had carefully
checked, rechecked, and then re-rechecked his calculations, and
mathematically they were perfectly sound. If it ever occurred to him
that it could be dangerous that the basic _premises_ on which the
calculations were based might not be sound, no record suggests such a
thing. In any case, he proceeded with his work, taking care with
regard to the factors he could control, but nevertheless engaging in
what might have been the most daring single effort paraphysical
manipulation up until that time.
Location matters where the Flux is concerned. For a variety of
reasons, certain locations upon the Earth’s surface are much more
‘amenable’ to Flux work than others, and for a project of the
complexity and difficulty that Ahkrinor was planning, the stronger the
‘site’ the better. Unfortunately, all the best sites on Earth were
plotted and known and were precisely the locations necessary for the
installations of the Great Project of the Unity and the remnants of
the former government of Atlantis. There was no way to make use of
any such site without the Unity and its minions rapidly learning of
it, and yet the effort really _required_ such a site to have any
significant chance of success. Thus Ahkrinor knew he would have only
one chance to carry off his own project, if he failed the Unity would
see to it that no second chance was available.
For that reason, Ahkrinor chose a site in what we would call the Atlas
Mountains, where construction on the Great Project installation there
had long been on hiatus, waiting for the outcome of the war against
ProtoAthens. The site was potent [3] but inconveniently located,
meaning that fluxons had rarely made much use of it even before the
beginning of the Great Project.
Now, though, it had a half-completed Project installation sitting on-
site, and it was guarded by a small but heavily armed and well-trained
company of the Unity’s finest soldiers, and no unauthorized approach
was permitted. The garrison had orders to treat any violation of a
two mile security perimeter around the site as a capitol offense, and
this was enforced with ruthless efficiency.
Ahkrinor made his move on what we now would call July 21st of 4752
BC. The site was called Shimaris, in the tongue of the locals, and
other names in other languages, though it by that name that it would
be remembered later. Ahkrinor and his followers struck
treacherously. This was possible because Ahkrinor was an agent of the
Unity (among other masters), and knew enough about how the collective
operated to be able to falsify orders and identifying materials. This
enabled him and a force of armed men to get close enough to strike by
surprise shortly before local dawn, overcoming the garrison and
butchering them without mercy, securing the area, and enabling
Ahkrinor to begin his dangerous Flux work.
This was a complex effort, making use of the materials already on-site
for the Great Work, which he now diverted to his own needs, and
supplies he brought with him as well. It was an exceedingly dangerous
process, that would require many steps and the assistance of several
highly trained deputies. The process was really a make-or-break
through of the dice, since Ahkrinor knew that if it did not succeed,
it would almost surely mean his death in the process of failure. The
supremely confident plotter had decided to risk it all on this high-
stakes gamble, in which either he would live or die.
He never stopped to consider whether there might be a third
possibility.
MORE LATER.
[1] The Rhaemyi had not revealed the loss of the Great Focus, it was
known only to the innermost circle of the leadership.
[2] In those times, the Sahara Desert was not yet _completely_
desertified.
[3] In game terms, it had a Flux Rating of +5.
Johnny1a
It took several precious hours of constant, steady effort for Ahkrinor
and his followers to perform the necessary preliminaries, and then
came the point of no return, the injection of the necessary chemical
preparations into his body. Some of these substances would have been,
under 'normal' conditions, deadly toxins. Others were simply
inorganic substances that had no proper place in the biochemical and
biophysical balance of a human body.
These substances all played crucial roles in the process to which
Ahkrinor planned to subject himself, they were injected or ingested by
him in precise sequence, amounts, and ratios. Once the first
injection was completed it was too late to turn back, either his
process would successfully execute or the substances he was
introducing into his body would kill him in a relatively short time.
While Ahkrinor was preparing himself in this way, his lieutenants,
master fluxons all of them, were setting up the preliminaries for the
final manifestation. This involved dozens of smaller Flux workings
spread out over the same hours that Ahkrinor was spending in his
personal preparations, and everyone involved was all too aware that
seconds were precious, at any time some missed regular call from the
garrison could reveal that something was wrong, and the Unity was
certainly powerful enough, between its own collective psionic power
and the services of its own tame fluxons, to strike at them from great
distances. They might have been able to defend themselves with their
own skills, long enough to get away, but they could not do that and
continue the preparations for Ahkrinor’s own quixotic plan for
transcendence.
They reached the final stage of this process in the middle of the
afternoon, racing as swiftly as they dared given the risks and
delicacy of what they were attempting. The final stage involved a
joint Flux manifestation invoked by all of his lieutenants, which
Ahkrinor used the Great Focus that had been stolen from Zadatharion
and Aradel to harness these powers and connect himself to the working
on a core level.
What the armed men who were guarding the site for Ahkrinor, and who
had no actual involvement in the process itself, saw that day would
endure in the memories of each one to their dying day, be that day
close or distant. The process began in accordance with Ahkrinor’s
plans, a ring of twenty supremely skilled fluxons, locked in a trance,
chanting to focus their minds on what they were seeking to
accomplish. Around the ring of fluxons was the equipment they had
‘liberated’ from the construction site, intricate and carefully
designed mechanisms turned to uses quite different than those their
designers had in mind.
Spaced all around the entire group was a set of two-meter long
glassine ovoids of translucent material, paralenses boosting and
focusing the Flux, stabilizing it and making it more amenable for
use. These devices were indispensable to the trade and commerce and
infrastructure of the age, and they were critical to Ahkrinor’s
project as well, without their effect the entire exercise would have
been utterly futile.
Ahkrinor and his followers had taken the paralenses from the Project
site, for convenience, and they had arranged them in a complex
geometric pattern around the center of the activity, and some were
even above and below, on hastily but precisely erected scaffoldings
and in pits, to create a three-dimensional pattern that would provide
the precise Flux effects that Ahkrinor required for his goal.
The final stage of the work came, and the soldiers in Ahkrinor’s
service saw the fluxons standing around their leader, and that leader
was standing motionless, connected to a complex of intricate Flux-
based apparatus by thin threads of gold wire and tubes of translucent
liquids, his very blood stream interacting with reservoirs of various
chemicals. Held firmly in his hands was the diamond-like Great Focus,
glittering in the brilliant late-afternoon sunlight. Like his fluxon
servants, Ahkrinor was chanting quietly, his eyes closed, his
awareness turned both deep within and far beyond his body.
As the soldiery watched, a soft white glow enveloped their leader,
shimmering like St. Elmo’s Fire along the exposed flesh of his body,
and rings of colored light began to race up and down around his
frame. The Focus in his hands began to glow on its own with a
multicolored rainbow aura that was simultaneously both painfully
beautiful and disturbing to watch, and many of the mercenaries found
that they had difficulty in either turning their eyes away or keeping
them open, something about the scene was both fascinating and
repellent, and now the light grew brighter and began to spread around
the man standing in the center.
Up until this point, all had gone according to Ahkrinor’s projections,
but now something began to change, an initially subtle but still
unexpected deviation from Ahkrinor’s calculations. One of the
paralenses in the array around the fluxons began to glow on its own, a
soft yellow light a little more golden-tinged than normal sunlight.
At first the glow was faint enough that nobody noticed, but it rapidly
brightened, and alarm started to spread among the fluxons who were
carrying out the critical steps of the activity.
The effect escalated rapidly, over the course of a few minutes it
became clear that something had gone off the rails, but the Flux
manifestation they were attempting was far too complex and dangerous
to stop ‘on a dime’, even if the fluxons had understood what was
happening. Before there was time to do more than realize that
something had gone wrong, the paralens that had begun to glow
exploded!
The explosion was strong enough to totally destroyed the complex
scaffolding holding the other paralenses, which immediately tumbled to
the ground, and the entire attempted manifestation went instantly out
of control. The ground began to shake, hard enough to hurl men from
their feet, to destroy buildings in the construction area, landslides
began on the surrounding mountain slopes. [1]
Tremendous flashes of raw energy leaped from fluxon to fluxon as the
effort collapsed, several of them fell dead on the spot, their bodies
burned and blasted, their internal organs mangled. Others survived
but were crippled for the remainder of their lives, their health
disrupted, their bodies twisted. A lucky few had time to raise some
sort of compensating manifestation and emerged from the debacle alive
and safe.
The waves of energy flashed from machine to machine, from structure to
structure, tearing apart both the new systems installed that day by
the conspirators and the long-standing half-finished structures and
apparatus of the Great Project site. The mercenaries and surviving
fluxons fled for their lives, the entire site rapidly degenerating
into a ground zero of chaos and destruction.
At the very center of the storm, Ahkrinor could be seen by the few in
a position to observe and who had the nerve to watch, as his body
seemed to suddenly -_shrivel_, as if a century of natural
mummification was happening in a matter of seconds. His mouth opened
in a silent, helpless scream of incomprehensible agony, his eyes
squeezed shut as the skin of his face shrunk against his skull, his
grip on the Focus only grew tighter as his hands seemed to contract,
to tighten, tendons and muscles warping and twisting under the
influence of the phenomena interacting around and within and through
his body. A blaze of hot light shown from the Focus, too bright for
any of the survivors to look at directly, as if a tiny speck of the
Sun were held in the hands of the tormented man, and then the last
observers were forced to flee as wave after wave of psychokinetic
energy flashed outward from the center, strong enough to shred metal
and rip a living person to tiny scraps in moments.
By the time the handful of survivors were far enough away to turn back
and look through their telescopes and binoculars, there was little
left to see. [2]
Where the Project site had been, there was now little left but a red-
hot mass of twisted, half-molten metal and shattered rock and
pulverized glass, still rumbling and twisting under the influence of
random psychokinetic fields flashing out of the ruins.
MORE LATER.
[1] The quake was actually about Magnitude 7, though extremely
localized.
[2] By this point, Antediluvian societies were quite advanced enough
to make good quality optics.
Johnny1a
Most of Ahkrinor's confederates died in the psychokinetic 'explosion'
that destroyed Shimaris. Only those few who were far enough away from
the center or who had sufficient Flux skill and time to protect
themselves, survived, and of those not all escaped unscathed. The
survivors fled, but their transportation, a flotilla of small aeremes,
had been destroyed by the explosion and the side-effects, the
survivors faced a long and dangerous trek before they could reach any
sort of civilization. Many of them were wounded, these fell by the
wayside and died on the way, as did some of those who were healthy,
only a tiny handful ever made it to any sort of safety, and they
vanished into the mists of history as they did.
Normally, the total capture and destruction of a Great Project site
such as Shimaris would have brought an immediate response from the
Unity, but under the chaos and confusion of that time it was some
weeks before the Unity could arrange to have some of its people
arrive, accompanied by a few 'components' of the collective, and what
the4y found was a wreckage of half-molten, resolidified metal,
shattered equipment, the very ground rent by deep fractures and much
of the site buried by avalanches from the surrounding mountains.
Reconstruction of the site would have been a major project, and the
more futile because of Flux 'contamination' of the area, it would be
decades before the site could be safely used for the sort of delicate
work the Great Project required.
This was inconvenient for the Unity, but there were backup sites that
could be used, none of them _quite_ as good as Shimaris, but good
enough. Thus the Unity decided to switch the operation to the next
best site, and more or less ‘write off’ Shimaris, except of course for
extracting the irreplaceable, fantastically precious orichalcum from
the wreckage. Even this could not be done immediately, all of the
Unity’s remaining resources were dedicated elsewhere. In light of
that fact, the Unity opted to post a guard to watch over the site and
its precious orichalcum, and to turn its attentions elsewhere.
It should be noted that even at this point, the Unity did not really
understand what had _happened_ at the Shimaris site. All the Unity
knew was that its double-agent Ahkrinor had attempted to betray it,
and in the process of failing lethally had also somehow destroyed an
important, albeit remote, Great Project site. Though the Unity was
most certainly curious, determining the truth was a low priority at
that time. From the point of view of the Unity, Ahkrinor was now dead
and thus the question of his intentions could wait.
The Unity, distracted by many other matters, was mistaken on several
points. The most important such point involved its working assumption
that Ahkrinor was dead. That might have been considered true, or it
might not, depending on what the definition of the word ‘dead’ was
assumed to be.
In fact, Ahkrinor’s personal project, though not successful, had not
been a complete failure either. As far as they went, the calculations
the man had prepared had been accurate enough, they simply were
incomplete and based on false premises, incomplete and inaccurate
data. One of the things Ahkrinor had not allowed for was that one of
the paralenses he was using in his work was one of the new ones, the
ones the Unity and its fluxons had prepared using the life-essences of
living humans as a ‘shortcut’. As far as the Unity and its fluxons
(and therefore Ahkrinor) knew, the result of this shortcut was
identical to the traditional means of preparing a paralens, but this
was in fact untrue. [1]
Only one of the paralenses used by Ahkrinor had been of the ‘new’
sort...but it had been the one which had gone awry and exploded
initially, throwing the entire process out of kilter.
There was nobody there to watch what happened on August 12th, 4752
B.C. We can, however, turn our own omniscient gaze that way, as if
we had been there to watch.
It would in fact have been difficult for a Homosentient to observe
what happened in the small hours before local dawn, because the
_thing_ that had once been a human being known as Ahkrinor lay
motionless in a tiny cavity surrounded by thousands of tons of rubble
and twisted metal, with only a tiny gap on any side.
If someone could have been present, what who he or she have seen?
A figure closely resembling a corpse, a corpse that would have seemed
to all appearances to be ancient, dry and cold, like a natural mummy
in the desert. One who did not know the truth might have guessed this
corpse to have been centuries, perhaps millennia dead, not merely a
matter of a few months. The skin was dark and dry, the facial
expression preserved in a rictus of agony, the limbs twisted in a last
spasm of pain, the fingers clawing at the empty air, the dried tissues
rigid.
This being so, it is likely that any observer would have been very
startled when those stiff and apparently mummified fingers began, ever
so slowly, to move...
MORE LATER.
[1] Vylyrades had long suspected that the shortcut would have side
effects, but he lacked the necessary data to prove it, his view was
more trained professional instinct than solid science.
Johnny1a
Moments later, an observer would have seen the dried lids over what
had once been human eyes shudder, and slide open, revealing
disturbingly alive-seeming orbs, and a spasm pass through the
withered, twisted frame of what had been a human being just a few
weeks before. Then our observer would have seen this withered,
apparently dead corpse begin to dig, and claw, at the rubble around
it, and as it did the rubble would be seen to begin to shift, as if
the corpse were possessed of a strength far beyond anything any human
being could be expected to wield.
Our hypothetical observer would see chunks of rubble torn loose, bit
by bit, widening the gap around the now clearly animate corpse-thing.
The thing would be seen to dig, and dig, and dig, tirelessly, until at
last it broke through to the upper world, crawling out into the dim
cool light of early dawn. For a long time the thing would remain
still, quiet, again seeming to be dead but for the wide-open, aware
eyes, and then the creature would be seen to stagger to its feet,
balancing unsteadily on impossibly withered legs, and it would be seen
to begin staggering forward, in a parody of a human walk, its stride
becoming steadier, and faster, as it did, but never approaching the
grace and precision of a typical human pace.
The creature would be seen, by our hypothetical observer, to head off
to the east, toward the vast grasslands of what would one day be the
Sahara, and a far-distant river valley. As the creature dwindled into
the far distance, eventually it would vanish.
Ahkrinor was not dead...but neither was the creature exactly alive in
the usual sense. A human being had been utterly destroyed by the
failure of his bid for immortality, but something else had been
‘born’. At this point the new creature was still only half-aware,
dazed, and this would prove fortuitous for the entire human race,
because in its confusion it left something behind in the wreckage at
Shimaris, something important. It left behind the Great Focus.
Indeed, at this point there was little in what just then passed for
Ahkrinor’s mind but a half-coherent urge to return to its ‘home’.
This was not well thought out, Ahkrinor could barely even be said to
_be_ thinking at this point, but dim memories of its human home drove
it. Ahkrinor was now able to walk without pause, around the clock,
needing neither rest nor sleep, nor even food, air, or water. [1]
It simply walked, and walked, and walked, day and night, across the
vast reaches of northern Africa, avoiding humans by instinct, moving
ever toward the distant valley of the Great River. Day after day,
week after week, until at last, after many tireless weeks of travel,
it drew close to the Great River.
By this point, however, Ahkrinor’s mind was coming together, it was
regaining the ability to really think and analyze, and to question its
own motives. The creature was no longer the man it had been, the
entity was quite a different being, with different motivations and
priorities, different fears and hopes, but the former human was not
entirely without a share in what the creature now was. Though its
desire for immortality was now irrelevant (it was immortal in a sense
now, and in another the question was moot), it still retained the
human’s hungry desire for knowledge and power...lacking now any
restraint of fellow feeling or any recognition of common humanity with
the other beings with whom it shared the planet.
Also, as the mind of the new entity that had once been Ahkrinor the
human came together, so too did its vast Flux skills, its power
returning rapidly, and even mounting new heights for reasons that we
shall explore later. Armed with all the knowledge it possessed as a
human, and new levels of Flux power, it was not a great challenge for
the creature to capture control of the government of the city-state it
had formerly ruled, though now it ruled through terrified and cowed
and suborned human puppets.
One thing the creature discovered to its puzzlement and dismay:
though its Flux power was stronger than ever, it had _entirely_ lost
all psi abilities. There was no so much as a hint of the former psi
power it had possessed as a human, the power that was the (almost
literal) birth right of those of Atlantean descent. That ability was
just simply _gone_. [2]
Something else now also concerned Ahkrinor. It had now remembered the
Great Focus, and why it was important, but now it was too late to
easily retrieve that device. At the time that Ahkrinor awakened and
dug its way out of the rubble, the Unity had not yet found the time to
send operatives to survey and guard the wreckage, but by this point
(we would call this period November of 4752 B.C.) matters had
changed. The Unity had once more garrisoned the site, and the last
thing Ahkrinor dared do was anything that might direct the Unity’s
attention to the presence of such a treasure amid the rubble!]
Ahkrinor began to ponder ways to retrieve that device without alerting
the Unity.
MORE LATER.
[1] In some ways Ahkrinor was now a puppet, physically speaking, its
body animated psychokinetically by the Flux. It didn’t really have a
‘metabolism’ as such.
[2] We’ll discover the reason for this in due time.
Johnny1a
Events were now proceeding apace, faster than the ability of anyone
active in that Age to keep track of them all, or to understand the
larger pattern. There were beings who were not active but who could
perceive much of that pattern and trend, however. These beings, for
the most part, were drifting in a state of near-total unconsciousness,
stirring a little only every few centuries. These entities were of
course the Trapped Eldren, both Familiar and Rivalrous. Most of them
were so utterly somnolent that they could scarcely be said to be
'aware' of anything at that time, but there were exceptions, among
them the Watcher and the Rival.
The difference was one of degree, neither entity was free of the
misfired trap that had been sprung so long before, but both were more
‘awake’ than any of their fellows. The Rival raged against the trap
in which it was caught, the more so because it was caught in its _own_
trap, the Watcher was calmer, but just as eager to be free, operating
as best it could through its ‘agent’, the oldest Avatar, Zadatharion.
Through Zadatharion’s physical and psychic senses, the Watcher could
perceive the world, and by urgings it had built into Zadatharion’s
mind it could try to manipulate the world, with the long-term goal of
gaining freedom. As Zadatharion had proceeded, the Watcher found that
it could focus a little more, stay ‘awake’ a little longer and more
often, because of the steady flow of information the Avatar was
unwittingly providing. This was useful, but as of late in the year we
would call 4752 B.C., the Watcher was becoming alarmed. It was
beginning to sense the possibility of a disaster unparalleled in many
a long megayear.
This was partly based on cognition, information from what sources were
available to it processed through the vast intellect of the billion-
year-old Eldren. In part, it was a matter of its own native ability
to probe the dimensions of time, looking ‘forward’ and ‘sideways’
across Time, scanning the pattern of the potential futures. The
Static that so clouded the efforts of the human psions and fluxons of
the age was far less of an impediment to an Eldren, even one so
trapped and reduced as the Watcher. Even with the intensity of the
Static that prevailed in 4752 B.C., the Watcher could perceive much
through its paraphysical senses.
The Watcher observed the way the human fluxons had been and were using
the vast power they wielded to manipulate nature, the atmosphere,
hydrosphere, and lithosphere were all being affected at a dangerous
scale, energy was being poured into the environment and that
environment was struggling to reach a state of equilibrium. Rift
systems were straining, weather patterns twisted out of their
‘natural’ shape, ocean currents flowed somewhat out of their ‘normal’
course and intensities. The ongoing warfare made matters worse, as
all factions used Flux power to attack each other and defend
themselves.
The Watcher observed through its own senses and the knowledge
Zadatharion gained for it as the vast magma chambers beneath the
island of Atlantis ‘vibrated’, shaken by the accumulating stresses and
strains that the war and the accompanying manipulations of natural
forces were producing. Volcanoes had erupted in Atlantis that had
been quietly dormant since before human settlement of the Island,
thousands of years before, some of the eruptions of spectacular
force. Earthquakes had become a semi-regular event in Atlantis as
well, even the capitol city, heavily warded by complex Flux
manifestations, was not exempt.
Ocean currents had been partly redirected by mass efforts of fluxons
to manipulate weather, this was now having global side-effects.
At the same time, human society was collapsing into semi-chaos, and
the moral/social structure that bound Atlantean and Atlantean-derived
society was decayed and in many cases deeply corrupt, as an effect of
the Unity’s ‘rationalization program’, which was now feeding on itself
in ways the Unity had never planned. The Watcher, as an Eldren, had
only a limited grasp of the issues of this, but oddly it perceived
them better than the human-derived collective entity did. Several
thousand years of working ‘through’ a near-human Avatar had enabled
the Watcher to gain a certain amount of the human perspective, albeit
imperfectly. It would be far too much to say that the Watcher had
been humanized...but it had come to perceive something of them, to
understand their perspective...a little.
The Watcher and the other Familiar Eldren certainly understood that
Homosentients (like the Helians before them) were self-aware beings
apart from themselves. It was be far too much to say that the
Familiar Eldren were solipsistic, individually or as a species, they
understood that other beings were real, and perceived the difference
between sapient beings like Homosentients and Helians and other forms
of life.
They found such creatures fascinating...but at the same time the
_scale_ of existence between the Eldren and the mortal species made
for a certain unconscious, uncomprehending callousness. The Watcher
was over a billion years old as of 4752 B.C. The other Familiar
Eldren were younger, but even the youngest was millions of years old.
The Rival was older than the Watcher, the Rival’s followers were on
the average a bit older than the Watcher’s followers. Neither the
Watcher nor the Rival was considered particularly old as Eldren went,
the great Celestial Eldren were older than the oldest star.
Nearly indestructible, able to survive cosmic events that would have
left Earth or Helius barren and dead, utterly exempt from degenerative
aging, possessed of power and perception beyond the comprehension of
any Homosentient or Helian, it was difficult for such beings to
perceive _species_ has anything but ephemeral, individuals were less
to them than insects are to a typical human.
Now, though, reduced to a state of near-helplessness like nothing in
its billions of years of experience, the Watcher, forced to live and
perceive through the senses of a very exceptional Homosentient, was
learning something new to it. [1] was learning what it was like to be
mortal, albeit indirectly and at third hand, and in the process of
learning this new perspective the ancient creature was learning to
grasp the value of an individual, at a level it could not previously
even imagine.
MORE LATER.
[1] By human standards, Zadatharion was a superbeing. From the
perspective of an Eldren, Zadatharion was simply a mortal with an
infinitesimally greater level of knowledge and power.
Johnny1a
imperatives, as the situation threatened to spiral beyond the control
of even the vast resources and powers of the collective entity.
On the one hand, to use the individual metaphor, its ongoing war
against ProtoAthens was going as well as could be expected under the
circumstances. With Ahkrinor leading the cities of the Great River
out of the old federation, ProtoAthens was reduced to a rump state, a
collection of allied cities and settlements in what would one day be
known as the Greek peninsula, the islands associated with that, and
bits and pieces of the surrounding land. Pressed hard by the Unity’s
immense (albeit widely varied) forces from the north on land and west
and south at sea, ProtoAthens was fighting for its survival and hope
was fading. With the fading of hope often went morale and effort as
well, though in some cases opposite occurred, determination hardening
as hope vanished. The Unity found this later reaction utterly beyond
rational comprehension.
Yet it happened, often enough to permit the remnant of ProtoAthens to
fight on when all logic suggested that surrender was the only option.
The Unity was too inhuman to quite grasp the subtleties of human
emotion that drove resistance in the absence of hope, or why the
remaining combatants might consider surrender to the Unity, now that
they grasped its nature, to be a fate worse than fighting to the
bitter end.
To the Unity, victory against this last organized state-level foe was
greatly to be desired. With the fall of ProtoAthens, the Unity would
be in a position of nearly uncontested mastery of the planet. It
would be too much to say that the Unity would _control_ the Earth
after victory against ProtoAthens, the world was falling into social,
political, moral, religious, and economic chaos as a result of the
culminating machinations of the Unity and the other mortal and
‘immortal’ players, no one entity had the power or the perception or
the resources to control the world under such conditions.
Rather, the final collapse of ProtoAthens would leave the Unity as the
largest single military and economic force on the planet, if it lacked
real control it would be true to say that it also lacked any
significant challenge to its power. It would be unable to oppose
everyone at once, but such a combination would have been quite
impossible under the circumstances, and it certainly could have
defeated any other specific force, if only it could finish off
ProtoAthens. If only...and yet ProtoAthens fought on, and on, and on,
against the dictates of logic which advised that defeat was
inevitable, still they fought on.
The Unity was puzzled, because military logic suggested that its
vastly superior forces should have been able to overwhelm the besieged
ProtoAthenians. Outnumbered, overmatched in resources, cut off from
assistance, abandoned by their southern allies, by all the logic the
Unity knew the ProtoAthenians should not have been -_able_ to resist
as they were. Yet time after time, the ProtoAthenians managed to
secure desperate upset victories against superior forces, holding off
the enemies by dint of incredibly risky strategies and tactics and
sacrifices by soldier and civilian that the Unity had difficulty
comprehending.
Yet the end was in sight. The ProtoAthenians’ backs were to the wall,
the Unity could better afford to sacrifice a flotilla than ProtoAthens
could to lose a single ship, the Unity could come back from losing ten
battles more readily than the ProtoAthenians could endure a single
defeat.
To the east, the ProtoAthenians were not pressed _quite_ so hard, but
the Unity had managed to place some of its forces in that direction as
well, though they could more easily resist the pressure from that
direction, there was no easy way for the ProtoAthenians to break out
in that direction. Thought they fought with a ferociousness and
determination that the Unity could not fully comprehend, the fact
remained that the Unity was slowly but steadily drawing the noose
tighter.
The Unity decided to mass its forces, and to destroy the ProtoAthenian
capitol city, which lay on a site not so very far from the far-future
site of the city of Athens. [1]
This was more complex that it sounded, because ProtoAthens’ federation
still consisted of dozens of cities on and around the someday Greek
peninsula, all still resisting, punching through the defenses to the
capitol was still a major undertaking. It required drawing some
forces off from the siege elsewhere, with the necessary cost of
relieving some of the pressure on those cities, while at the same time
leaving enough force in place to prevent local breakouts and
assistance to the center.
With the Unity’s complex, variegated, and often purely mercenary
forces, such calculations were even more complex. Still, the Unity was
ready for the war to be over, so it could turn its attention to the
Great Project and its own planned ascent to a near-godlike status.
It was March of 4751 B.C. that saw the Unity’s forces assembling for
what it hoped would be the last great campaign of the war, and that
campaign began in the first week of April. The first stages went
well, as great assaults by the Unity’s tame fluxons turned natural
forces against the defenders, earthquakes rocked the cities, send
landslides into their farms, twisted roads and broke tunnels and
killed tens of thousands. Immense storms battered coastal cities,
flooded interior valleys, and ripped through defensive installations.
The ProtoAthenians were not helpless in this area, though. Their own
flux defenses mostly held, and they were able to hit back in places,
even destroying some of the assembled Unity forces as they did.
Side effects of these exchanges were not long in coming, the ground
shook to a lesser degree all across the Mediterranean Sea region for
months afterward, as the strained crust sought a new equilibrium along
the plate boundary. Volcanoes erupted in primary fury, creating new
disruptions and pumping ash and sulfur into the upper atmosphere. The
weather disruptions spread outward like the flapping wings of a
maddened butterfly, twisting the climate over thousands of miles.
Much of the remaining organized agricultural activity of the region
was badly disrupted by quake and volcano and storm.
Meanwhile, the capitol city of the remnant of the ProtoAthenian
Alliance was pushed into its tightest straits as the Unity’s great
assault invested it and pressed it toward destruction.
MORE LATER.
[1] In this, Plato’s story was pretty close to the truth, though
‘ProtoAthens’ was certainly very little like Athens in most respects.
Johnny1a
What followed was not quite what _anybody_ involved really expected.
The Unity's attack on the capitol of ProtoAthens was initially a
successful move, the huge forces the Unity assembled broke through the
ProtoAthenian defenses and invested the city itself, laying a tight
siege, but it was no siege of attrition, instead, a constant onslaught
battered the city, the bloodshed was steady and the butchery
horrific. Through April and May of 4751 B.C. the battle went on,
turning the central plain of what would one day be called Attica into
a vast theatre of death.
The defenders were outnumbered seven to three in the air, five to one
at sea, and eight to one on land, and the attackers were better
equipped, fresher, and solid reliably supply lines. The only
advantages of the defending forces was superior leadership and
organization, and sheer determination as they fought to defend their
home city and the center of the entire defense of their nation.
In the first week of June of 4751 B.C., the defenders inflicted a
shattering defeat on the attackers.
It was a combination of luck, good planning, and an effort of
determination with few parallels in Earth’s history before or after.
The defenders managed to hold back the superior forces of the
attackers day after day, week after week, inflicting losses on the
attackers out of all proportion to the defenders’ numbers. In the
meantime the ProtoAthenians managed to sneak small forces out of the
other besieged cities, in a prodigious effort of deception and
misdirection, assembling these forces into a relief force that caught
the attackers by surprise in a pincer movement. [1]
Even with this surprise move, the attackers still enormously
outnumbered the defenders, but the Unity’s forces were caught totally
by surprise by the new forces, and in the confusion of the moment the
ProtoAthenians managed to destroy the attackers’ command and control,
reducing the vast forces they fought to a state of partial chaos and
confusion. In the ensuing battle, which lasted for over seventy hours
of constant, bloody, close-at-hand butchery, the ProtoAthenians
shattered the Unity’s attack force, the surviving forces of which
eventually broke apart and fled, some managing a fighting retreat,
some merely trying to flee the combat zone without order or
discipline.
So total was the victory, against such odds, that the shocked Unity
missed the immediate chance to turn the situation around. The
ProtoAthenians could not pursue or destroy the fleeing forces, once
they fled the region, they lacked the personnel and resources, and
were just as exhausted as the fleeing forces. The Unity _still_ had
enough power in reserve that it could probably have overwhelmed and
destroyed the capitol if it had moved swiftly...but it did not. It
was too surprised by the defeat, still trying to comprehend in its
alien way how such an improbable thing could even _happen_, and so it
missed its great chance.
The ProtoAthenians were just as stunned as the Unity, they had thought
their end was at hand right up to the final stages of the battle, and
seeing the overwhelmingly superior attacking forces break and flee had
seemed like an impossible miracle. The leadership of the
ProtoAthenians recovered from their shock more swiftly, however, and
took advantage of the confusion and shock among the forces of the
Unity. As news of the rout spread, the ProtoAthenians took heart and
the attackers morale plummeted, and the death or capture of much of
the attacking leadership in the surprise rout left the attackers in
confusion. The hugely variegated attacking force was vulnerable and
the ProtoAthenians pressed their unexpected sudden edge.
The Unity’s forces, hamstrung by the interference from the Static that
made long-range telepathy all but impossible, and in shock at the loss
of their leadership, was not able to react swiftly to the coordinated
attacks now launched by the heartened ProtoAthenians. Chaos and
confusion neutralized the otherwise huge advantages the Unity’s forces
enjoyed, indeed in the confusion of the time it was not unknown for
the Unity’s forces to find themselves fighting each other, simply by
mistake. The ProtoAthenians, with their mysterious and limited but
effective means of coordination and communication, totally unaffected
by the Static, actually managed to drive the Unity’s vast forces out
of their heartland by the end of October.
The ProtoAthenians now controlled what we would call the Greek
peninsula, most of the associated large and small islands, and the
remnants of their navy commanded what would one day be known as the
Adriatic and Ionian Seas. The ProtoAthenian air forces had
essentially been annihilated, but the Unity’s forces were in too much
disarray to make any effective use of this otherwise dire
vulnerability.
The Unity was in as close to a state of shock as it could come. The
odds against these developments had been so long as to be effectively
certain. The Unity estimated that the chance of such a reversal,
given the situation as the start, had been less than one in five
hundred...and it had happened. To the (usually) calm, rationalistic,
statistical mind of the Unity, these developments seemed almost
uncanny.
The Unity’s forces, much of them motivated by pay only, others
consisting of different and often naturally conflicting groups welded
together by persuasion, intimidation, or deception, were far more
damaged by their sudden reversal than a unified, professional force
would have been. Some of the more professional parts of the Unity’s
forces, both mercenary and otherwise, did hold their discipline and
cohesion, but much of the vast army simply dissipated in the face of
such a rout.
Given time, the Unity could rebuild, but it had taken a tremendous
defeat, and a concomitant loss of that elusive but vital quality of
‘face’. It had spent huge resources of money and personnel on an
operation that had ended, not merely in failure, but in total
disaster.
In the south, Ahkrinor found that its behind-the-scenes control of the
Great River cities was now threatened, as many of the traditionally
ProtoAthenian cities were still highly sympathetic to their cousins to
the north, and resentful of the decision to abandon them.
And in Atlantis, just as the Unity was beginning the laborious and
frustrating task of reassembling its own military forces for another
try at destroying ProtoAthens, it found its efforts disrupted by the
sudden and totally unexpected eruption of a volcano long thought
safely dormant.
MORE LATER.
[1] The defenders’ use of very crude radio communication was one huge
advantage, because the attackers had no idea of exactly how this
worked or how to intercept or interfere with it. It was as mysterious
and strange to them as telepathy would be to a 20th century army.
Johnny1a
It was December of 4751 B.C. when it happened. Given the scientific
knowledge available to the Atlanteans, it really should not have come
as a surprise. The Atlantean understanding of geology and the
structure of the Earth, including the dynamics of volcanism, was in
fact _superior_ to that of the early 21st century West, they had the
signal advantage of their paraphysical senses to enable to directly
'see' what was happening below the surface. While their understanding
of the _chemistry_ of geology and volcanism was inferior to ours,
their grasp of the mechanics and large-scale structure of such
phenomena was somewhat greater.
There was considerable warning, magmatic quakes shook the region for
weeks ahead of the event, the winter cold on the mountain slopes was
relieved in places by streamers of hot water flowing from springs,
plant life was dying all over the slopes as gas emission rose. There
were most certainly sages with the requisite knowledge to interpret
these signs, but they were occupied elsewhere. The breakdown of
Atlantean civil society and the collapse of its government had left
many vital matters unattended, unless the Unity was ‘personally’
interested in such, and the Unity was sparing no attention for geology
just then.
On December 9th, 5751 B.C., the summit crater of the volcano in
question began to emit a column of ash and dust and gas which rapidly
took on the shape of an evergreen tree. This was widely noticed by
the locals, who knew all too well what it meant. Over late, a
confused, chaotic attempt at an evacuation was begun, but there was
little in the way of functioning public authority by this point, and
the Unity was only interested in moving its own vital people and
materiel out of the path of the coming volcanic event.
The mountain in question was in the northern part of the Island, near
the high peaks of the North Country. It had been quiet for millennia,
indeed most of the volcanoes of the central ‘spine’ that ran the
length of the Island had been quiet ever since Man had come to
Atlantis, in the long gone northern summer of 9453 B.C. Some sages
were not clear, in fact, why these old volcanoes were so calm, their
theoretical understanding of the processes at work suggested that they
should been at least as active as the volcanoes of the Northern Isle,
to which they appeared to be related. [1]
Of course the volcanoes were different, in ways that the sages of
Atlantis did not fully understand. Or rather, they could perceive
_how_ Atlantis was different than the Northern Isle, but they did not
fully comprehend _why_ these differences were so. They knew perfectly
well that the great crustal crack that ran the length of the floor of
the Atlantic Ocean ran through both their own Island and the Northern
Isle. This gap in the ocean floor, where new crustal matter slowly
welled up, came to the surface in both Atlantis and the Northern Isle,
but it behaved ‘strangely’ in Atlantis, whereas they could mostly
grasp the ‘whys’ of how it operated in the Northern Isle. [2]
In the Northern Isle, the volcanoes tended to open along fissures,
erupting more in great sheets of lava than in localized spot sites.
In Atlantis, there was evidence of ancient eruptions along those
lines, but in current times a great chain of strato-volcanoes,
seemingly more akin to those found on continental margins, ran up and
down the length of the island, which snaked along the general path of
the central fissure. Likewise, the sages knew that under the Island
lay immense magma chambers far larger than anything to be found under
the Northern Isle. These two seemed more akin, in some ways, to
continental collapse caldera than anything else...even though their
theoretical grasp of such phenomena suggested that such things should
_only_ be found under continents...and instead of collapse caldera
there were stratovolcanoes overhead.
Even so, there were some active volcanoes in Atlantis, indeed to the
south some peaks rumbled steadily, and eruptions were a familiar
feature of Atlantean history. This particular peak, though, had been
quiet throughout the recorded history of the island, until now.
The evacuation was not half completed when the time ran out. The
entire side of the mountain was blasted out in the largest single
eruption event in the history of the island, covering much of the
North Country in ash or pumice, and destroying several population
centers with pyroclastic clouds. This was not the end, however,
because the northern eruption seemed to trigger some sort of chain
reaction.
Within days of the primary eruption event in the North Country, peaks
that had been similarly quiescent for ages began to show signs of
activity, and between December of 4751 and February of 4750 B.C., a
chain of violent eruptions moved down the central spine, heading
steadily southward and gaining in ferocious intensity as they
happened, it was the greatest natural disaster in the history of
Atlantis. Great clouds of ash and dust were hurled into the upper
atmosphere, chilling the entire planet, and agriculture was disrupted
throughout the Island, as entire farms and fields were buried under
layers of pumice and rubble. Rivers were choked with mud and dust,
and entire cities had to be abandoned, sending floods of refugees
toward the coasts of the Island and the remaining operational cities.
The economy, already reeling, now slid into something like a death
spiral. One thing rapidly became apparent to those ‘in the know’:
the crops in 4750 were never going to be sufficient to feed all the
mouths in Atlantis, no matter what. Too much land had been made
unusable, too much disruption had occurred, irrigation systems were
destroyed, labor supplies cut off, Atlantis would have to import
staple food on a large scale for the first time in its history. [3]
This would have been a challenge even before society had fallen apart
over the previous fifteen years, not it was an utter impossibility.
There just was not sufficient shipping available, by sea or air, to
even make a credible attempt at such a thing, even if peace had been
breaking out around the world, which it most certainly was not.
The Unity was callous beyond the comprehension of most humans, it
cared nothing at all for the loss of life or the suffering that the
Great Eruption of 4751 had brought, but it cared a great deal that its
efforts to put its military machine back together had been disrupted.
The task of reassembling its forces after the debacle in ProtoAthens
had been a challenge even before, now it was all but inconceivable
that such an effort could succeed in any time scale short enough to
matter. Atlantis would need decades to recover from the disaster,
even using a very constricted definition of ‘recover’.
The Unity was now facing a variety of bad choices, and it assessed
these choices with an icy logic. The Unity was an intellect ‘vast,
cool, and unsympathetic’, and such a mind, while calm and with an eye
for the main chance under most circumstances, can suddenly and
unexpectedly display the behavior of the most reckless gambler when it
assesses the odds as offering nothing better.
The Unity now assessed its choices and calmly, rationally concluded
that it was time to gamble.
MORE LATER.
[1] Recall that this was their term for what we call Iceland.
[2] We call this feature the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
[3] The Atlanteans had long imported luxury foods, they were avid
consumers of tropical fruit, tea, coffee, and chocolate, etc. But the
Island had always been self-sufficient in basic food.
Johnny1a
The Unity was frustrated, of course, that its plans had been so
disrupted, by so many different factors over the course of years. Its
war against ProtoAthens had been waged because it wanted to be able to
focus all its resources on the Great Project, but that war had gone
badly, and now with the damage from the Great Eruption on top of this,
any chance of completing the Great Project in reasonable time was
lost. The Unity could easily calculate that by the time it could
finally get the Great Project on line, its enemies would have so
recovered as to be able to destroy it before the Project was ready.
Furthermore, if it diverted enough of its precious resources to
protect against this eventuality, the completion date for the Great
Project receded beyond the horizon of meaningful utility.
With society collapsing into chaos, for reasons the Unity did not
fully grasp (even though it had been the largest single contributor
over the long term), the necessary industrial, organizational, and
financial resources the Unity needed for its work were also
collapsing. It now knew that there was no workable way to make the
Great Project viable on its original plan. There was, however, a
fallback possibility.
The second option had been visible from the start. It was, very
definitely, a ‘second best’ option, compared to the advantages that
completing the Great Project would have offered it was a shadow. Now,
though, it offered one huge advantage: as far as the Unity could
determine, this second-best option was still viable.
It was possible, in theory, to activate a stripped-down, bare-bones
version of the Great Project. Instead of hundreds of operating sites
spread around the planet, there would be only a few dozen, the minimum
that the math indicated could serve the purpose. Instead of a vast
instrument, both powerful and subtle, the resulting interlocked system
would be weaker, more clumsy, less stable. It could, however, work,
at least in theory, and though it would be immensely less convenient,
this minimalist version could later be expanded to full scale. It
would be far more work and cost for more in resources and time to do
so than the original plan would have required, but the end result
could still eventually be achieved.
Additionally, this second option offered another advantage: it could
link the Unity directly to the Matrix/Flux just as the full version
would have done...save of course that the connection would be far less
stable and flexible. Even so, by most human standards, it would grant
the Unity nearly god-like power...assuming it worked at all. The
risks were multifold and not inconsiderable.
On the other hand, the Unity had a new problem: the Static was
becoming an existential threat to its being.
The Static, which had started as a barely detectable interference with
fine-grained efforts to look forward in Time, over fifty years before,
had grown and grown, sometimes smoothly, sometimes in sudden jumps,
until it had clouded telepathy and ESP on the most basic levels, only
the most powerful psions were now able to 'shout’ at the top of their
mind and still be ‘heard’ only a few tens of meters away. Telepathy
now required physical contact to work without interference, even for
potent psions. The Great Eruption, for whatever reasons (the Unity
had no time to spare to study the issue) appeared to have increased
the Static.
The Unity was a collective being spread across multiple hundreds of
physical human beings, their brains in a nearly perfect state of super-
communion sustained by telepathy of awesome complexity. So efficient
was this process that the Static had only begun to interfere with the
Unity’s own existence in the last couple of years, long after all
other uses of telepathy were heavily interfered with. Now, though,
the Unity found itself forced to ‘spend’ more and more of its own
internal psychic resources simply to sustain its existence.
As if this was not enough...the Static continued to grow worse.
Thus the Unity, concluding that it had little to lose and much to
gain, began work on the ‘second version’ of the Great Project, and it
poured all its efforts into this, abandoning the military effort
against the ProtoAthenians. It could, after all, afford to deal with
them _after_ it succeeded in this risky gambit, if it did manage to
succeed. If not...then the Unity suspected the issue would be moot,
as it would eventually find itself unable to sustain itself against
the pressure of the Static.
The Unity was utterly ruthless in this last gambit, selecting the
sites it _had_ to have for the minimalist version of the Great
Project, and doing whatever was necessary to seize and control those
sites. To the great satisfaction of the Unity, it discovered that
none of the indispensable sites were in ProtoAthenian territory, as
they remained the only force able to balk the Unity on any serious
scale.
The Unity murdered entire communities when necessary to gain control
of these sites, moving in a tremendous hurry, and since it lacked
enough of the special paralenses necessary for even this lesser work,
it began applying the process of using stolen life-essences as a short-
cut to construct the devices swiftly. To do so required the deaths of
hundreds of people at a time, in rapid succession. Fortunately for
the Unity, with Atlantis overrun with refugees and all authority gone,
it was not difficult to find victims in sufficient numbers. Only in a
handful of cities did some semblance of ordered life and civilization
remain, and even there the corruption that the Unity had spent so many
centuries blindly cultivating was firmly in place.
Very few people understood what was happening. The ProtoAthenians,
still digesting their miraculous victory, were digging in, preparing
for a follow-up assault that was not, in fact, coming. The remaining
members of the Rhaemyi were scattered, trying desperately to
reconnect. Zadatharion and Aradel led what was probably the last
significant ‘cell’ of the Rhaemyi, from their hidden redoubt in the
now-ravaged lands of the North Country of Atlantis. It was here the
Vylyrades was putting together the pieces of the puzzle.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The last fully functional 'cell' of the Rhaemyi, made up of about two
hundred people, was now based out of a fortress in the North Country
of Atlantis. There were certainly still other members of the society
that were 'loyal' and active, but with the breakdown of order and
communication in the chaos of the previous two decades, and even more
so the utter disruption caused by the Great Eruption, those others
were scattered and unable to communicate or coordinate.
The fortress had been an ancient citadel, built over two thousand
years before, in an age when swords were the physical weapon of choice
and nobody yet dreamed of paraphysical powers beyond personal
psionics. It had been surrounded by a pleasant woodland of fir and
pine, near a small picturesque river flowing down from the higher
elevations, toward the coast some twenty miles away.
Now, the fortress still stood, a testament to the skill of the long-
dead artisans who had constructed it. The woodlands were gone,
replaced by a desolate expanse of pumice and burnt trunks, the nearby
river turned from a glistening stream into a brackish lake, dammed by
rubble and broken trees. Only in a nearby glen, sheltered by the
terrain from the effects of the Great Eruption, was there still to be
found viable croplands.
But the fortress survived the Eruption, being positioned just far
enough away from the main event to do so, partly sheltered by the
local terrain and perhaps also luckier than might be expected. It
still served the last nucleus of the Rhaemyi as a base and
headquarters, drawing on huge stocks of supplies long cached there
against some such dark day.
Here also, Vylyrades struggled to understand what was happening.
Their sources of knowledge were far less than they once been, with the
breakdown of communication and travel so also had broken down most
channels of intelligence. Paraphysical means of exploration were
utterly useless, fogged and clouded by the omnipresence Static. Only
a few intelligence channels still sent in periodic reports, but
Vylyrades had managed to put together some idea of what was happening,
with the help of Zadatharion, who found that he now sometimes ‘knew’
things without knowing how he knew them. He knew they were true,
beyond any doubt, but how he knew he did not know.
The real reason for this, of course, was that along with the powerful
and capable ‘human’ mind that was Zadatharion the Avatar, there was
another awareness that looked out, sporadically, through his eyes and
listened to the world, now and then, through his ears. This entity
was incomparably older and more powerful than any human, normal or
Avatar, but was only barely aware. It was, of course, the Watcher.
The Watcher was only sporadically aware, barely able to focus enough
to stay ‘awake’, but it had been getting closer under the pressure of
events, and the Watcher perceived things that no mortal could know by
any channel or source available to them. Some of these things passed
from the Watcher’s awareness to that of Zadatharion, though of course
Zadatharion did not really know about the Watcher in any conscious
way.
It was less difficult for Vylyrades to credit Zadatharion’s ‘hunches’
or rather his ‘certainties’ than might be expected. Zadatharion was,
after all, of the same ilk as the Eldest, and every Atlantean knew
that in his time, the Eldest could do much the same thing.
Adding to this knowledge was that Vylyrades had assembled over
decades, and that available from his own tools. Though he did not
have access to the Great Focus now, Vylyrades still had his lesser
devices, and he was almost surely the greatest genius of his age. It
was Vylyrades, aided by knowledge very indirectly derived from the
Watcher, who first realized what had underlain the Great Eruption, and
that understanding was absolutely terrifying.
The problem was in fact ‘man made’. The constant stress and strain of
the Flux-based manipulations of the Earth’s crust in the course of the
wars of the previous twenty years had not been without side effect.
The magma chambers under Atlantis were saturated with gas, and now the
stresses and strains inflicted by Man had cracked the bedrock under
Atlantis, permitting small amounts of that pressure to be released,
driving the volcanic eruptions that had devastated Atlantis. Only a
tiny fraction of that pressure had been released, compared to what
could, in theory, be released if the magma chambers ever fractured in
earnest, the damage done during the Great Eruption was trivial.
Vylyrades also was the first to realize something just as terrifying:
the Unity was on the edge of managing its long-sought goal of linking
itself directly to the Flux, gaining almost unimaginable power in so
doing. It was the end of March when Vylyrades deduced what was
happening, and realized that come Hell or high water, the collective
had to be stopped. [1]
In order to do that, Vylyrades knew he needed his Great Focus, it was
the only tool that would give him even a ghost of a chance to prevent
what was coming. He had an approximate idea where the device was, his
own tools enabled him to trace his greatest creation, but with the
chaos in the world actually getting there to retrieve it was a non-
trivial project.
Still, it was not impossible to steal a sea ship, and in the first
week of May, accompanied by Aradel and a small group of Rhaemyi as
guards and assistants, Vylyrades set out on a mission to retrieve his
creation.
MORE LATER.
[1] Of course, he didn’t express or conceptualize that thought that
way, he used an Atlantean phrase that captured much the same meaning.
Johnny1a
The time has now come for us to take a closer look at the players in
our tale. As we have done before in this look back at the
Antediluvian, we must take a few liberties with their discussion, so
as to render it in a form we can easily read, assuming both that they
were speaking English and that the telepathic element of their
conversation was verbal. Yet now the later consideration matters
rather less, because by May of 4750 B.C. telepathy was playing a
smaller role in the individual conversation between the Atlanteans and
their kin, the Static had grown so overwhelmingly strong as to make it
difficult to converse telepathically, even in close proximity, only
physical contact permitted untrammeled telepathic conversation now.
Our time is the first week of May in the year we would call 4750 B.C.,
the place is a tiny harbor in a remote part of northeastern Atlantis.
Here shortly before dawn we find a small ship, stolen from the Unity’s
slowly recovering naval forces. It is a small ship, with modest
engines and little in the way of weaponry, and it has a crew of only
thirty, and it is moored on one side of a long dock. On the opposite
side is a smaller ship, with the masts of a sailing ship and with a
tiny crew scrambling to make it ready to put to sea.
Standing on the long wood and iron dock structure are three people,
quietly conversing in the pre-dawn darkness, as the busy noise of
preparation for departure continues in the two small ships on either
side. Two of them were adults, one was a sleeping little boy in a
bundle of covers on the dock beside them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Vyl, I still don’t like this,” Crynaria said. “Why do we have to
take separate ships...and why do you want us to go to Shindaria?” [1]
“I told you, I don’t trust your and Gerodacles’ safety here,”
Vylyrades said. “Once the Unity, or any of its minions, realize what
I’m trying to do, they may well come after you and him.”
“Oh, of course,” Crynaria said, slightly sarcastically. “But that’s
nothing new, there’s more to this, Vyl. I’m not stupid and I’d
appreciate it if you didn’t treat me as such!”
Vylyrades sighed. It was not that he thought his wife was stupid, and
he wasn’t _intentionally_ patronizing her, but somehow the tension
between them never seemed to entirely fade. His long fixation with
the creation of the Focus had contributed to an estrangement between
that time, and the surprise birth of their youngest son Gerodacles,
had only soothed, it had never fully faded.
‘Of course,’ Vylyrades thought to himself for a moment before
answering her, ‘here I am setting out to go retrieve that same Focus,
that’s probably not helping her mood any.’
“You’re right, and I ask your pardon, my love,” Vylyrades said softly
in the darkness. He glanced to the east, there was a hint of a glow
on the horizon, a shimmer of light presaging the coming dawn.
“I honestly, truthfully, don’t entirely know what it is I fear,”
Vylyrades continued. “But something is coming, Cryn. I can’t give
you a rational reason for it, but I can almost _feel_ it in the air,
or in the intelligence reports, or the ebb and flow of the Flux. I
want you, and Gerodacles, as far from here as can be for a while,
because I think whatever is coming is going to be right here in
Atlantis...and it won’t be good.”
“Vyl, are you -_listening-_ to yourself?” Crynaria asked, worry in her
eyes. “You sound like an obsessive nattering away in a cell,
muttering his own paranoia back at himself!”
“Maybe so,” Vylyrades said, nodding in agreement with her assessment.
“I can’t deny that my feeling is irrational...or maybe just
arational. It doesn’t make me any easier in my mind, though. I’m
very glad and grateful that you agreed to take Gerodacles to
Shindaria.”
“I didn’t exactly agree,” Crynaria pointed out, rebelliously.
“Zadatharion specifically _ordered_ that I be on the message sloop for
Shindaria...at your request, in case you think I don’t realize that.”
“Then I’m grateful you didn’t fight the order,” Vylyrades said. “I’ll
sleep better for it while we’re apart.”
Crynaria sighed and said, “I still don’t see why we _need_ to be
apart, Vyl. Why can’t Gerodacles and I come with you? You’re not
planning anything all that dangerous...are you? Something besides
what you said in the planning meeting?”
“Not if all goes as we hope,” Vylyrades said. “But you know we can’t
count on that, my love.”
The darkness was suddenly broken as the upper arc of the Sun rose
above the distant horizon, casting a faint but golden light across the
ocean and directly onto the east-facing small bay. The tone of the
voices on the ships changed, the rising of the Sun brought a sense of
time pressing.
“It’s almost time to get on board,” Crynaria said. “Vyl, I want you
to know that I think this is completely unnecessary and more than
slightly patronizing and paranoid. I’ll go along with it...but I
won’t soon forget it, either.”
Vylyrades bit back a sharp rejoinder, there was little point in
parting in an argument. “I understand.”
Husband and wife looked at each other in silence, both frustrated by a
gap that lay between them that neither quite knew how to bridge, and
each both wanted to cross and preferred to remain in place. Love and
anger twined between the pair like some inseparable knot of tangled
thread that both bound them together and held them apart.
Then Vylyrades knelt down and awakened his son.
“Hi, Dad,” the boy said softly, as he sat up. “Is it time to go yet?”
“Almost, my son,” Vylyrades said to the six year old. “It’s almost
time to board the ships, but I wanted to say good bye to you now, it
may be some time before we are together again.”
The boy was used to one parent or the other coming and going at odd
times and intervals, but the look in his eyes was sad and Vylyrades
wished desperately that he could go with them. As he took his leave
of his wife and son, embracing the latter with an unmixed love that he
wished with all his heart that he could still share with Crynaria,
Vylyrades struggled to convince himself that his premonition of loss
was irrational.
A few minutes later, Vylyrades watched as Crynaria and his son walked
up the boarding ramp to the sailing ship, and the ramp was drawn up.
The ship was actually equipped with a small steam engine, but it was
mostly powered by sail because that enabled it to operate easily
without refueling. It was often used for secret envoys and the like,
and Vylyrades suspected it would reach Shindaria safely, if that was
possible.
Then it was time for the fluxon to board his own transportation, and
as he did he looked back toward the shore and up toward the now
scarred and twisted peaks of the distant volcanic chain that formed
the central spine of the Island. As his eyes fell onto those distant
peaks, dimly visible by the early light of morning, his sense of
impending disaster intensified in ways he could not explain.
‘I hope she’s right,’ Vylyrades thought to himself. ‘I hope I am
getting paranoid in my old age, maybe even going mad. But...I just
can’t shake it.’
Vylyrades turned on his heel and went below decks, suddenly unable to
stand the sight of those distant peaks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] ‘Shindaria’ is an Atlantean term for a small city in what we would
call northern Europe.
Johnny1a
It took about three weeks for the ship carrying Vylyrades, Aradel, and
their small party to reach their destination, partly because their
goal was somewhat out of the usual lanes of travel, partly because
their craft was not the fleetest vessel on the seas at that time, and
partly because they were obliged to take in indirect route in hopes of
avoiding notice by others. The oceans were ungoverned territory in
4750, the great empires were in chaos and while there were many armed
ships on the waters, there was little in the way of authority
governing them. Even the relatively civilized ProtoAthenian fleets
were armed to the teeth and looking for trouble, still preparing for
the next attack from the Unity, little realizing that as far as the
Unity was concerned that war was over. All in all, the little group
felt it best to avoid any contact with any other ships if they could
manage this, which meant going well out of their most natural way.
Vylyrades had traced the location of his Great Focus to a small area
around the former Great Project site of Shimaris. Indeed, the Focus
still remained there, buried in the rubble of Ahkrinor the man's
disastrously failed bid for immortality. Vylyrades and his comrades
had been put ashore along the northern coast of what we now call
Africa in the later part of May of 4750 B.C., and begun their cross-
country trek through a region of near-wilderness. In the meantime,
Ahkrinor had also begun its efforts to regain the Great Focus, the two
parties were now converging on the site, each blissfully ignorant of
the presence of the other.
Ahkrinor had lost much precious time due to a misapprehension of the
world situation. The Unity had in fact abandoned most of its interest
in Shimaris, and many of the other sites it had formerly guarded with
ferocious intensity, in favor of focusing on its short-term mini-
version of the Great Work. By the time Ahkrinor perceived that
Shimaris had in fact been abandoned, it had lost months of time in
which it could very likely have retrieved the Great Focus with a
minimum of difficulty and risk. Now it was leading its own expedition
toward the site from the east even as Vylyrades and Aradel approached
from the north.
Ahkrinor had been to the site previously, as both man and monster, and
knew the way, and was using a route of approach superior in terrain
and safety. Vylyrades and Aradel were approaching from the north,
through narrow hilly paths, dodging or sometimes fighting bandits and
worse, their overall land trek was shorter but more difficult. As it
happened, Vylyrades and Aradel and their small party (about twenty men
besides the two leaders) arrived at Shimaris on what we would call
June 18th, shortly after local dawn. [1]
They had not been sure what they would find, none of them had any idea
of how the Focus had come to rest in such a place, they knew it had
been stolen but not by who, or for what purpose. In the event,
finding the rubble, half-molten and half-shredded, that had formerly
been the Shimaris node of the Great Project, was not altogether
enlightening. That close, Vylyrades could readily ‘sense’ the precise
location of his greatest creation...buried beneath literally hundreds
of tons of metal and other artificial materials, the whole in turn
buried beneath thousands of tons of fallen stone from the surrounding
mountainsides.
They spent most of the next two days exploring the site, still trying
to figure out what had happened. The Static made such techniques as
retrocognition and Matrix perception useless, and the clues on-sight
were hardly such as to make purely cognitive approaches viable. They
had little time to waste on answering the question, though, they were
there on a specific errand, and faced considerable difficulties in
fulfilling it, even though they now knew exactly where their goal was
located.
Even with the vast power Vylyrades and Aradel possessed, penetrating
through thousands of tons of rock and metal and rubble was no small
matter, especially if the matter was to be done with some delicacy,
and the more so because such use of paraphysical power on that scale
could easily have revealed their presence. They had to move with both
caution and speed, two qualities are do not often complement each
other.
So the excavation began, using psionic and Flux power on a modest
scale, and conventional tools as well. The expedition did plenty of
digging with shovels and moved many a rock or piece of rubble with
levers and ropes. Bit by bit they worked their way down through the
rubble toward the Great Focus.
Ahkrinor and his party of over fifty members arrived in the late
afternoon of June 21st. The monster was not pleased to find another
party on-site doing excavations, less pleased yet to recognize (from a
distance) both Aradel and Vylyrades. Ahkrinor had lost none of the
former human intelligence with which the man had been gifted, the
monster was all too well aware of the sheer power possessed by those
two individuals.
On the other hand, Ahkrinor the man had been a megalomanic, who hid it
well. This quality had been passed on to Ahkrinor the monster, and it
was a fact that the monster possessed vast Flux power. Ahkrinor
considered itself competent to take on even such powerful beings as
Aradel and Vylyrades, provided proper preparation was observed. It
struck the monster that it would be efficient to permit Vylyrades to
find and excavate the Great Focus, since Ahkrinor could easily deduce
that the other fluxon would likely to be able to sense its exact
location, saving the monster potentially weeks of searching. [2]
So Ahkrinor and its followers quietly, in secrecy, took up positions
around the site, watching from a distance and waiting, striving to
remain hidden from the expedition on-site. This would not normally
have been possible, given Aradel’s ESPer senses, but by this point the
Static had grown so intense as to render even such basic applications
of ESP as ‘danger sense’ utterly useless. This made the sort of thing
Ahkrinor and his men were attempting potentially viable.
Aradel and Vylyrades certainly had scouts on the lookout, but they had
a smaller party, and had to have enough muscles at work to continue
the excavation. This put them at a serious double disadvantage when
it came to the issue of detecting the presence of others who could
focus all their effort on hiding.
Bit by bit Aradel and Vylyrades and their men (Aradel was the only
female present in either party) worked their way down toward the Great
Focus. Finally, after two weeks of work, they came within a day or so
of reaching it, and Ahkrinor, watching from a distance, could
calculate that they were getting close as well. Knowing that once
they had the Focus in hand either Aradel or Vylyrades would find her
or his power multiplied by many times, Ahkrinor decided that the time
had come to strike, before that could come to pass.
MORE LATER.
[1] Both parties travelled by land, on foot, both for secrecy and
because few aeremes were still flying and most if not all of those
were in the hands of various military forces.
[2] It was true, of course, that Ahkrinor the monster had first gained
consciousness under the very rubble that now hid the Focus, but its
memory of that moment was still foggy and confused. It did not
remember _exactly_ where it had awakened in the vast piles of rubble,
or precisely where the Focus was to be found.
Johnny1a
Now we must leave Shimaris for a moment, though we shall return. To
understand what is happening, and to prepare ourselves to understand
what is yet to come, we should turn out attention away from
northwestern Africa and back to Atlantis, to the great capitol city of
Atlantica, and we must look back in time slightly, to March of 4750
B.C. If we turn our omniscient vision to the great city at about dawn
on a particular day in the first week of what we would call March, we
will see a ship leaving port, sailing down the flooded underground
tunnel that connects the outermost of the famous circular harbors to
the Atlantic.
The tunnel is centuries old by this point, but until very recently it
was maintained in perfect condition, it was a great point of pride for
the Atlanteans, one of the great civil works, the more so because it
was done using only psionic power, the tunnel had been completed long
before the Flux was discovered to exist. Now, though, in the chaos of
the time and the corruption of the Atlantean culture, much is
changed. The tunnel is not perfectly maintained, in places the air
and light shafts are either clogged with debris or have been allowed
to erode wider, and the half-flooded tunnel is no longer properly lit
or dredged.
Still, it is a wonder of the age.
We would see the ship travel down the tunnel like so many previous
vessels, military ships, commercial ships, exploration ships, ships
propelled by psi and sail and later ships propelled by psi and steam
and still later ships propelled by the Flux and steam. This ship is
one of this last group, relatively new, built at great expense by the
Unity’s engineers and shipwrights, it is a cargo vessel carrying arms
for defense. It is hardly a warship, but it is not entirely
helpless. In this time when pirates roam the oceans and even the very
coasts of Atlantis are no longer safe, such precautions are necessary
when moving valuable cargo.
As the ship finally emerges from the long tunnel into the daylight, it
turns southward, sailing along the east coast of Atlantis, joined
periodically by other ships, none as large as the cargo vessel from
Atlantica, all of them armed at least to some degree. By the time the
small flotilla reaches the southern end of the serpentine Great Isle,
it has grown to seven ships.
From the southern waters of Atlantis, warm and clement, the tiny
flotilla now turns south, sailing down across the equator, making
their way into the southern Atlantic, stopping briefly at a coastal
city in what will one day be known as Brazil, to restock their
supplies, purchasing the goods with false names, the flotilla moves in
secrecy, careful to avoid revealing their true errand and nature.
Even the apparent commander of this tiny fleet is in fact merely an
imposter, the true leader remains always out of sight when outsiders
are nearby.
This leader is a woman we have met before, and her name is Sharondra.
As she was when last we saw her close at hand, she is the leader of
the Unity’s forces, its primary servant, or its primary slave, as one
might wish to consider the matter. Her service to the Unity is
entirely self-interested, and entirely voluntary, she is one of the
most powerful ‘singular’ humans in the world. She is eighty-six years
old as she leads the flotilla southward, early middle age by the
standards of the time and her Atlantean race, and so much psychic and
Flux power is available to her to forestall aging that in both
appearance and effective age, she has changed little since her twenty-
fifth year. [1]
The ships sailed steadily southward, though not directly, they
deliberately took a somewhat indirect route for the sake of secrecy.
Still they were careful to spend no more than the necessary time on
such delays, and in late June of 4750 they were arriving in extreme
southern waters, approaching the great Land of Ice that surrounded the
south pole of the world.
It was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, not the best time to travel
to that land someday to be known as Antarctica. The ships they were
using were specially constructed for this purpose, but even so a great
deal of psionic and Flux power was needed for the ships to
successfully reach their goal, a hidden dock on the coast of the Land
of Ice. Much time was required for the ships to smash their way
through the thick pack ice around the continent, and of the seven
ships that set out, only four survived to reach the hidden harbor. In
the process of reaching this harbor, eleven of the seventy-four people
in the expedition died.
The harbor in question was very small, a tiny crevice in a spit of ice-
free rock, but not snow-free in the constant darkness and wind and
searing cold of the Antarctic winter. The harbor provided some
shelter from the wind, and shelter was available in a cave that had
been delved in the solid rock of the tiny peninsula. Though they had
reached Antarctica they were still far from their ultimate
destination.
They remained in the caves, shivering in the cold in spite of
technological and paraphysical protections, for only two days, then
the incredibly difficult and dangerous overland journey began, a
journey that would leave another ten of the sixty-three remaining
members of the expedition dead and eleven wounded in a more than
serious way. Even with careful preparation, the best equipment, and
their paraphysical resources, Antarctica in winter was a challenge to
be respected. [2]
At last, though, they arrived in that hidden redoubt that we have
been calling the Antarctic Enclave, the hidden base and bolt-hole of
the Unity, delved into a mountain-side in the ice-bound southern
continent.
Were we to turn our omniscient gaze to this place, in the later part
of August, we would see them arrive, and see Sharondra supervise the
transfer of the cargo and materiel she transported from Atlantis, and
we would see the surviving members of the expedition settle in to wait
out the remainder of the winter in a place where they finally have the
resources to endure in a state of mere misery rather than deadly
danger.
Regarding what they transported to this incredibly remote place, and
why...
MORE LATER.
[1] The psionic skill of Life Extension, and its Flux-based
counterpart, worked spectacularly well for her because she had access
to vast psi power from the Unity, high Flux skills, and the Unity’s
vast supply of paralenses and other tools of Flux work. At the age of
86, she had the health and appearance of a woman in excellent health
in her mid-twenties, this exceptional even by the standards of
Atlantis.
[2] In their case, the best equipment was high-quality TL5 gear.
Johnny1a
Recall that Sharondra was the Unity's chief 'individual' lieutenant,
its primary human pawn, the ruler of its empire on a day-to-day
basis. Now, though, the Unity was playing for extreme stakes in a
very high-tension game, and the deck was not only stacked, but loaded
in multiple ways by each player. The enclave in Antarctica had been
delved and completed almost three decades before as a refuge and
emergency 'bolt-hole', and now the Unity was nervous enough to put it
to use.
If the Unity’s stripped-down, ‘minimalist’ version of the Great
Project worked, the precautions would most probably be needless.
Probably. The problem was that the minimalist version was not as
extensive and perfectly balanced as the larger original Great Project
had been, that original version would have provided protection from
countless low-probability but real risks that the minimalist version
could not provide.
That was if the minimalist version _operated_ as the Unity planned.
The Unity calculated that _if_ everything went precisely as it hoped,
the minimalist version had approximately an eighty percent chance of
success, and ‘success’ would necessarily be imperfect. Even success
might potentially leave the Unit with a temporary need for a fallback
position.
If the minimalist version failed, the potential failure modes were
diverse and ranged from moderately bad (from the point of view of the
Unity) to catastrophic (from any point of view). The Unity was all
too aware that it could not even be sure it had calculated all the
possible failure modes or the consequences thereof, it was a classic
case of the ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’.
Further, both sets of calculations assumed that the Unity was able to
shepherd everything it was trying to do to the planned conclusion,
against the active resistance of any number of powerful enemies and
rivals. The world had collapsed into chaos over the previous decade,
the variable at play were beyond even the Unity’s ability to calculate
with any useful accuracy.
And so the Unity had sent its most capable servant to prepare its
Enclave for emergency use, and to stock it with tools, equipment, and
artifacts potentially useful for an emergency situation. They stocked
the enclave with food, weapons conventional and paraphysical, records
and data on a variety of subjects, and by far the most significant,
they brought with them one of the Great Paralenses designed and built
for the Great Work.
The Great Paralenses were the one hundred meter long versions of the
modest ‘golden egg’ paralenses, and
they performed a basically similar function. They also had features
that the smaller units did not, features designed into them in secret
by the fluxons who knew the _real_ purpose of the Great Project from
the start of the work. They incorporated enough orichalcum that the
cost of just one could have shattered the budget of a small
government, and they required incredible amounts of delicate work to
complete.
It was this cost in time and effort that led to the use of the
infamous ‘shortcut’ of using living human life essences to create the
paralenses faster, both small and great, for the needs of the
Project. This shortcut _seemed_ to work, but introduced any number of
problems into the finished paralenses. [1]
The Unity _knew_ the problems existed, but it would be safe to say
that the collective being, occupied on so many levels at the time,
failed to grasp the full implications of them, or their exact nature.
If the Unity had really understood the nature and seriousness of the
problem with the shortcut, it would not have opted to send a Great
Paralens to the enclave that was created using the shortcut, or that
had been used as a ‘template’ for the creation of similar shortcut
lenses.
In a later age, those in the know would call the paralenses created by
this shortcut ‘tainted’. They would have good reason to use such a
word.
The paralens was secured in the fortress, to await use if need be
later, and Sharondra and the surviving members of the expedition
settled in, to await the arrival of reinforcements the Unity was
planning to send south. They had no way of knowing that these people
were never going to arrive.
MORE LATER.
[1] As Ahkrinor discovered, see the relevant threads.
Johnny1a
our omniscient vision back and forth across the planet Earth and even
beyond to understand them all. Little more an an overview is
possible, but let us see what we can see of this strange and eventful
time.
The Unity was preparing to try and execute its 'minimalist' version of
the Great Project, but even this much was a huge undertaking, for a
variety of reasons, not the least of which was the global chaos that
had emerged since the truth of the secret wars and conspiracies had
been revealed in 4758 B.C. What had been a global empire, intricate,
carefully balanced, wealthy and powerful was now a war-torn chaos.
What order remained on Atlantis itself came now either from the Unity
and its personal forces and troops, who controlled the majority of the
island, or from local potentates, lords, and groups able to control
local sites, cities, or fortresses. The Great Eruption had devastated
much of central Atlantis, but the Isle was still the wealthiest and
most advanced land in the world, and even in the chaos, recovery was
proceeding, albeit in a patchwork, incomplete, stop-and-start way.
Even those parts of Atlantean society still function did so in the
corrupt, twisted way that had come to seem ‘normal’ after centuries of
the Unity’s ‘rationalization’. In the capitol city, the Unity’s
private troops kept order, and most of the population either worked
for the Unity’s projects in some way, or supported those so working,
or had no employment or task, and passed the time with a variety of
entertainments of varying degrees of psychological and moral health.
Even as society broke down and the Unity pressed its work forward at
the point of a gun, the Games and the blood sports with which the
commons and nobles of Atlantis were fixated continued, on a scale to
match anything in their previous history, and with growing degrees of
decadence as the aficionados became ever the more jaded.
The rest of the world was divided into former territories of the
empire, in which conditions were more or less like that of the Isle,
other than of course ProtoAthens, which retained a ghost of the former
moral and social order that had once made Atlantis the most advanced
society on Earth. The conditions in the independent territories
varied widely in detail, but collapse was underway everywhere. In
many regions, famine and disease stalked the Earth in a way that had
seemed permanently defeated only decades before.
The original Great Project had been a world-wide, coordinated
megaproject, involving complicated and highly technical work performed
on every continent but Antarctica. It had involved hundreds of
thousands of skilled laborers, planners, and specialists, backed by
millions of supporting personnel world-wide. Compared to that plan,
the minimalist version the Unity now strove to complete was a pale
shadow, but under the conditions of 4750 even such a reduced version
was a huge challenge.
Work on every continent was still necessary, though far fewer sites
were involved. Thousands of highly skilled personnel were still
indispensably necessary, including powerful fluxons. These last
individuals were both potent and touchy, coordinating them at the best
of times was akin to trying to herd cats, a concept the Unity would
have understood perfectly after its difficulties in this matter. Bit
by painstaking, difficult, and excruciatingly slow and expensive bit,
however, the project was moving forward.
The minimalist version required a central node, a cross-connecting
site where the delicately balanced forces would come together and be
controlled when the time came. There were a mere handful of suitable
sites in the world for this, using the minimalist plan. (The original
plan would not have needed such a central node, this was one of the
limitations of the simplified version.)
Of the possible sites, it was probably inevitable that the Unity would
select the only one to be found in Atlantis proper, for reasons of
convenience, security, and time.
This site was to be found in the south of Atlantis, not that far from
the southernmost part of the Isle, and it was nothing special in
appearance. It was significant only because that particular
_location_ was so placed as to be suitable for the central node. The
Unity moved to secure and fortify the site, removing entire villages
that had stood near it for over two thousand years, and then
construction began, racing against the clock to complete the central
node in the fastest possible time.
The work was made the harder, and often set back, but the earthquakes
which continued to rock the Isle, and especially its southern reaches,
with disturbing frequency. Widely supposed to be after-effects of the
Great Eruption which had devastated much of the Isle at the turn of
the new year, these quakes ranged from small tremors to monstrous
shakings that could level entire structures, trigger massive
landslides, and even destroy cities and ports with tsunami effect
waves at times.
The small quakes were occurring on an almost daily basis in Atlantis,
the largest ones coming more rarely but all too often. The chain of
no-longer-dormant volcanoes that ran up and down the ‘spine’ of the
Isle were now regularly erupting, though usually in modest events,
spewing ash, pumice, pyroclastics, and very occasionally small amounts
of liquid lava. Since the area around the central spine was already
devastated and mostly empty of people by this point, the damage from
these events was less than one might suppose.
As the Project, even in its minimalist incarnation, continued to
proceed, the quakes seemed to grow in both number and intensity.
Publicly this was widely dismissed, but in practice the Unity knew
there was indeed a very real, and highly disturbing, connection
between the two things.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The connection known to the Unity was based on the Unity's enormously
greater knowledge of the geological nature of the Great Isle. In
recent decades, the Unity had been using its all but matchless psionic
senses to probe deep into the interior of the local planetary crust,
drawing upon but soon far surpassing the already impressive geological
understanding of the Atlanteans. The Unity knew about the vast magma
pool, trapped in its freakish upper-mantle chamber, directly below the
Isle. It understood that this magma pool, under tremendous pressure,
was part of why the crust was swollen in the region, a swelling that
was part of what held the Great Isle above the level of the waves.
The Unity grasped that the Isle was built around volcanoes, as was
widely understood by the Atlanteans, but it also knew that those
volcanoes were but tiny pin-pricks, something most Atlantean sages
only dimly suspected.
The Unity understood better than any other conscious entity on the
planet, save perhaps the drowsing Eldren, how the extensive use of the
Flux as a weapon of war in recent centuries had upset natural balances
that had been stable, or nearly so, for at least a million years. The
Flux had empowered the people of that long-gone age to raise the
elements against each other as weapons, but this was not without costs
both subtle and gross. Enormous amounts of energy had been poured
into the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the lithosphere, in highly
unusual forms and places and times, and the conservation laws had by
no means been suspended, all that energy had to find equilibrium, the
system was constantly trying to reach a stable state, but year after
year, decade after decade, new stresses were applied by the warring
Atlanteans and their rivals both within and without.
Additionally, carelessly applied industrial uses of the Flux had
contributed to the problem, as had various large projects of the
government, large guilds, and the Unity itself. The Great Eruption,
which had seemed a catastrophe unrivaled in the history of the
Atlantean state, had been but a side-effect of all this, the result of
the foundation-rock of the Great Isle being stretched and compressed
artificially, carelessly, in ways that opened tiny channels through
which the heat and ultra-high-pressure magma below the Isle could
press its way up, forcing open ancient, long-quite internal plumbing
of the volcanic spine of Atlantis.
The very atmosphere had been distorted by both the use of weather as a
weapon, and by sporadic and all but completely uncoordinated efforts
to apply control to local weather for use in commerce, industry, and
recreation. The cumulative results of decades and centuries of such
manipulations were now becoming clear, as drought stalked regions long
well-watered, heat waves accelerated the steady melting of ice that
had been going on throughout the recorded history of the Antediluvian
Age, and every sort of storm and inclement weather battered cities and
countryside around the world in out-of-pattern events. Snow was known
to be accumulating in areas that should have been temperature or
subtropical, even as shirt-sleeves weather was happening ever-more-
often along the nearer reaches of the ancient Arctic and Antarctic.
Fish catches were down around the globe, as ocean currents flowed in
new places, moved by the changes in temperature and pressure produced
by artificial manipulations. Tropical cyclones battered latitudes
normally too far north or south to be in any danger, and the tropical
waters seemed to be heating, and heating, and heating, as the planet’s
strained natural balances tried to reach a new equilibrium.
The Unity, of all the entities in the world at that time, understood
all this with the immediacy of direct perception. It also understood
that the Flux itself was unsteady, strained by overuse and careless
misuse, even an individual fluxon had to be cautious about his or her
use of it at the best of times, now centuries of such action had made
the Flux unstable, the local cosmic Matrix was ‘irritated’ for lack of
any better term. The Unity could not, of course, perceive _that_
directly, as its tame fluxons could, but it had a theoretical
understanding of the matter to match any individual human, and it had
an immortal perspective to grasp the unfolding of events over time,
and to comprehend the ‘big picture’, as it were.
This was leading in its turn to various occurrences that had little
precedent in Atlantean history. The Flux was producing semi-random
events, ‘spontaneous manifestations’ in the technical jargon of a much
later age, shaped in part by past intentional controlled
manifestations, in part by the thoughts and emotions of ordinary
humans of the time, in part of events and impulses far beyond the
bounds of human demesnes, and in part on simple random impulses. For
the most part these random manifestations were small and local, though
ever-more-frequent. Some, however, were of terrifying scale,
complexity, and intensity.
It was, for example, quite bad enough when storm surges, driven by the
ferocious winds of the incredible storms of the age, flooded a coastal
city. It was altogether more disturbing when such a surge would come
suddenly and without any warning roaring up out of a calm sea on a
clear, windless day, moving as if driven by hurricane-force winds when
in fact no wind blew. This happened on multiple occasions in 4750,
and if few had any idea of what was happening, the Unity was one of
those few.
The Unity calculated that its minimalist version of the Great Project,
once ‘operational’ had a better than seventy percent chance of
restoring calm to the Flux itself, and using the additional power it
would gain over the Flux, bringing Earth’s damaged state back to some
semblance of calm would be relatively easy. On the other hand, the
possibility of failure was significant, the roughly thirty percent
chance of failure included failure modes in which the Flux would be so
affected as to have the potential for utter catastrophe.
The Unity, of course, had no interest in any welfare but its
collective own.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The Unity knew more about the geological underpinnings of Atlantis
than most Atlanteans, but even it did not recognize a subtle truth
about the many crustal oddities that made the Great Isle a reality:
it was not natural, as that word was and is generally understood. In
the natural course of geological events, the Great Isle would never
even have come to exist. The origins of Atlantis, as an island, lay
far back in the depths of the Tertiary Period, as observed here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/msg/7f321f3a9274cac9
The Eldren had modified the geology of the region in such a way that a
huge 'lens' of partial melt existed in the upper mantle beneath what
grew to be Atlantis. It would not be _exactly_ correct to call this
magma, though it was far from solid and much hotter than the
surrounding upper mantle. The crust bulged above it, stretching the
already strained region of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, permitting greater
volcanic activity both from the natural spreading zone and from rock
melted by the heat of the great subcrustal zone of melt.
The combination of the greater volcanic activity atop the already
bulging crust was the source of the Great Isle, and the reason for
many of its extensive geological peculiarities. The deep melt zone
produced vast amounts of heat, which in turn created ‘secondary’ magma
pools in the lower crust, hot and saturated with gas in a manner
reminiscent of continental ‘supervolcanoes’, something normally unseen
in the thin basaltic crust of the oceans. Atlantis, geologically
strange, was a strange hybrid of continent and ocean floor, and
geology did things there that occurred no where else on the planet
then or now. Among the other oddities of Atlantis this produced was
the high concentration of orichalcum in the Great Isle.
The actual changes the Eldren had made to the geology of the region
included what amounted to a ‘controlled manifestation’ of the Flux.
For the Eldren, psionics, Flux power, and other abilities were all
one, they themselves could be looked at from one point of view as
sapient local manifestations of the Matrix, and though ‘material’
tools were alien to them, subtle Flux manipulations were instinctive.
Deep below Atlantis, a Flux manifestation kept a very small and weak
mantle plume from _quite_ reaching the surface. In a physical sense,
it acted as a ‘cap’, a force-barrier within the crustal structure,
sustaining itself on a scale of megayears and under most circumstances
utterly stable. Below this strange Flux-baffle, the vast oblong
‘lens’ swirled and boiled under fantastic pressure, enriched with
sufficient orichalcum to satisfy every need of the human/near-human
civilization above, but far beyond the reach of their TL5/6 technology
and paraphysical sciences.
Periodically, the Eldren Flux-baffle released tiny amounts of melt
into the magma chambers above, as a way of keeping the pressure
balanced and contained. It was this process that had enriched the
Isle above with the meta-metal, and which fueled (along with the
natural crustal spreading of the region) the volcanic activity that
periodically broke out in Atlantis (much like its natural cousin to
the north). Oddly enough, for all the vast volcanic power under the
Great Isle, the Flux-baffle kept it ‘calmer’ geologically than the
Northern Isle (Iceland) to the north...most of the time.
Now, though, circumstances were changing. The Flux-baffle, calculated
and designed to maintain a stable containment under normal conditions,
had never been designed to deal with the rapid, sudden, individually
minor but collectively significant perturbations caused by the human
Flux warfare. The stresses and strains of the local crust were
forcing the Flux-baffle to adjust and shift faster than it had been
designed to do and in ways it had never been calculated to support.
To make matters worse, along with these _indirect_ insults, the Flux-
baffle was now being affected _directly_ , albeit unintentionally, by
human Flux activities.
This took many forms, but two were particularly harmful. One was the
transspatial, transtemporal interference that was clouding human
ESPers and fluxons from looking across space and time, and by now even
interfering with ordinary Telepathy, that phenomenon we have called
the Static. Boiling out of the potential futures, the Static made it
impossible to ‘look’ forward across the potential timelines. The Flux
baffle operated, in part, by a self-correction loop involving
information out of the potential futures used to adjust the Baffle in
the present, a self-sustaining feedback loop that was now broken.
This had the effect of sharply reducing the stability of the Flux-
baffle.
The other major problem was that the Flux, ‘irritated’ and strained by
endless and complex and conflicting human importunings over the course
of a mere few centuries, was becoming ‘shaky’. Phenomena normally
stable and sustained were shifting, becoming unstable and uncertain.
Even the great Eldren Flux-baffle was subject to this, it had never
been designed to deal with anything quite like what was happening.
As the Unity pressed its minimalist version of the Great Project
forward, intending to link its own collective consciousness to the
Flux, it proceeded in blissful ignorance of the nature what has just
been revealed.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
On the site of the central node in southern Atlantis was now rising a
complex set of constructions. The Unity had a veritable army of
skilled laborers on the site, incentivized by a combination of
extremely high pay, and threats and coercion. The Unity even resorted
to the dangerous tactic of telepathic compulsions, which could work
but which drained the Unity’s psionic strength at a great rate, and
which reduced the functional utility of the dominated workers.
Along with the skilled laborers were a large pool of what amounted to
slaves, driven to exhaustion as the Unity drove the effort through day
and night, clear weather and foul weather, heat and cold. The death
rate among the exhausted slaves was high, and those physically unable
to work were used to create new paralenses using the process of
siphoning life-essence. The utter ruthlessness that was one of the
core traits of the Unity was now on brutal display as the collective
raced against time.
At the center of the new complex was the largest paralens that would
ever be constructed in the history of the Antediluvian Age. Already
the Great Paralenses used on Project sites around the planet were
roughly three hundred feet on the long axis, this one was triple that,
supported by a vast frame of high-quality metal alloy, the supporting
frame _alone_ was one of the most expensive metallurgical creations in
the history of Atlantis, and it was only a tiny pittance compared to
the price of the orichalcum in the Ultimate Paralens.
The Ultimate Paralens, as we shall call it for the sake of simplicity,
incorporated over a _ton_ of utterly precious orichalcum, the economic
value represented by that concentration of the substance is difficult
to express in modern terms. To call it something like a ‘king’s
ransom’ is pitifully inadequate, a ton of orichalcum at that late date
could have purchased entire realms with value to spare. This Ultimate
Paralens was only the central components, hundreds of the smaller
Great Paralenses occupied the central node as well, together with
thousands of the ‘conventional’ golden eggs, the six-foot-axis
devices. There was more processed orichalcum in that one site than
had been gathered in one place in all the history of the world.
So much wealth concentrated in one place made defenses a necessity.
Even as the construction continued, attacks came against the site,
seeking to gain control of this unprecedented concentration of wealth
and potential psionic, Flux-based, and social and political power.
The Unity kept what amounted to a small but viciously well-armed army
on-site to guard the facilities, and they were repeatedly tested by
escalating attacks both by those hungry to gain control of the wealth
and those hostile to the Unity’s Great Project.
Vicious battles were fought, with thousands of deaths, and comparable
numbers of wounded. The Unity was relentlessly efficient, captured
prisoners from the attack forces were interrogated with telepathy and
torture for whatever useful information might be obtained, then the
able-bodied were put to work and the rest drained of life-essence for
construction and activation of the Ultimate Paralens.
Normally, creating and activating such an immense paralens would have
required utterly unworkable amounts of time and orichalcum, but the
shortcut process the Unity and its tame fluxons had developed changed
that, all that was required to bring the necessary resources of time
and materiel down to a workable level was life-essence. A great deal
of life-essence, the living energies of _thousands_ of humans and near-
humans, siphoned and redirected, could make the Ultimate Paralens a
practical reality. Of course, even more lives had to be sacrificed to
bring the other paralenses to readiness as well. Altogether, in order
to make this central node a work reality, the Unity calculated it
would need to drain the life essence out of somewhere between twenty
and thirty thousand living people.
The Unity had no hesitation and no qualms about mass murder on such an
industrial scale. It used captured enemies and exhausted slaves where
possible, when the numbers of such were insufficient it resorted to
purchases on the slave markets and abduction where necessary and
workable. It moved carefully in this last to avoid widespread
awareness of its actions, knowing that it could easily goad still-
powerful local warlords and groups into launching attacks on it, if
only out of preemptive self-defense. It had to strain its resources
to capture or purchase enough victims to keep the construction on
schedule, but it managed.
It was in April of 4750 B.C. that the Unity finally completed the
Ultimate Paralens, and brought it to ready condition, in a last surge
of siphoned life-essence that cost the lives of over one thousand men,
women, and children in a single moment. The newly activated device
worked flawlessly, amplifying the power of the Unity’s servitor
fluxons and enabling the rest of the blood-soaked construction to move
more swiftly.
The Unity also observed, as did its psionic and Flux-based servants,
that the Static jumped in intensity the moment the Ultimate Paralens
was activated, they took note of the fact but regarded it as no more
than a curiosity, of scientific interest perhaps, to be investigated
in detail at a later date.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Now we must turn our attention to where we left Aradel, Vylyrades, and
their party as they sought to retrieve the Great Focus, and Ahkrinor’s
effort to do the same in their despite.
It was in the dim hours before dawn of the day we would call July 5th,
4750, that the excavations finally came within a short distance of the
Great Focus. Only a matter of some hours of physical labor lay
between the excavation crew and their goal, and they had worked
through the night in their haste to reach their goal. It was in this
time that Ahkrinor launched his surprise attack on the expedition led
by Aradel and Vylyrades.
The first warning the Atlantean party had was when a sudden volley of
gunfire from all directions in the surrounding hills cut through their
camp, the defenders lost six people in that first exchange and only
the luck of a slight error on the part of the attackers saved them
from worse: one flank of the attacking force opened fire a few
moments too soon, ahead of the others, giving some warning to those
not under their immediate range of fire. Aradel and Vylyrades, in the
excavations, emerged just in time to find that the battle had been
joined, the attackers had come in fast and the combat was swirling on
all sides.
Aradel joined the battle immediately, her vast psionic powers rapidly
turning the tide against the attackers. The attackers and defenders
were all either Atlantean or of Atlantean extraction, so they
possessed psi powers of their own, but Aradel wielded power on the
same scale as that of the Eldest, the attackers were simply up against
a being of power out of their scale. The battle swiftly turned
against the attackers.
In the meantime, suspecting that the attack was a distraction, Aradel
and Vylyrades had agreed that he should remain near the dig site where
they were only a short distance from reaching the Focus. Thus is was
that when Ahkrinor itself arrived to seize the Great Focus, it found
Vylyrades waiting.
What Ahkrinor saw was a man of late middle age, by the standards of
his people and his time, with thick gray hair, a tired expression, and
armed with a heavy double-barreled firearm. What Vylyrades saw at
first was a human figure clad entirely in robes that concealed his
form, and a hood that concealed his face.
Vylyrades barely had a chance to begin to utter a challenge when
Ahkrinor attacked, using a classic ‘Flux bolt’ attack, but at an
intensity Vylyrades had never encountered in all his years, an
intensity great enough that even most master fluxons could not have
hoped to generate such an effect. The flickering blast of energy that
leapt from Ahkrinor’s outstretched hand ripped through the walls of
the cut, tearing aside or simple shattering stone and metal, hurling
rubble into the air, but the complex wards Vylyrades maintained around
himself proved fully equal to the challenge, the Flux-bolt merely
flowed across the surface of his body and passed onward, doing no
meaningful harm.
Needing no further indication of hostility, Vylyrades opened fire with
his weapon (an Atlantean firearm that might be loosely called a
shotgun, but with some differences) and reposted with a Flux-vortex of
his own that formed around his target even as the attacker was
repelling the rain of shot with a Flux-repulsion.
The distraction provided by the firearm gave the Flux-vortex time to
form...and Vylyrades was the most potent fluxon of the Antediluvian
Age. His Flux-vortex was correspondingly potent, and Ahkrinor was
nearly overwhelmed by the swirling, contracting three-dimensional
vortex of telekinetic pressure, heat and cold, and vibration.
Ahkrinor possessed Flux-abilities not far short of those of Vylyrades,
and a preternatural toughness derived from his state of undeath.
His ‘skin’ was tougher than leather, and more resistant to both heat
and cold than the living epidermis of a human being. Additionally, he
wore a layer of protective garments under his robes that gave him
precious seconds to disrupt the Flux-vortex with a counter-
manifestation of his own. Even as he was doing so he was attacking
Vylyrades, forcing the other fluxon to defend himself rather than
focus all his skills on the attack.
In the course of about sixty seconds, the living and undead fluxons
hurled multiple attacks against each other, subtle and gross.
Vylyrades, along with his Flux skills, had the normal psionic gifts of
pure-blood Atlantean, Ahkrinor no longer possessed the later but was
tougher and stronger than any normal human by virtue of his unnatural
‘metabolism’ and bodily structure. The two of them quickly proved to
be a relatively even match, neither able to fully repel the other’s
attacks nor fully overcome the other’s defenses.
It was true that material weapons could sometimes prevail where psi
and Flux failed, but Vylyrades had no moment of calm, no respite, with
which to reload his weapon, and Ahkrinor was not armed with a ranged
weapon. About one minute into the struggle, the deep, narrow
excavation in which they fought gave way and collapsed, only for the
rubble to scatter in all directions amid the contesting psychokinetic
energies.
However, Ahkrinor knew that time was not on its side, it could be only
a matter of a short time before Aradel overcame its human servants,
Ahkrinor had always considered them to be expendable assets, anyway,
it had known their chances of overcoming such a being as Aradel to be
trivially low. Ahkrinor had merely hoped that they could keep her
busy long enough for it to overcome Vylyrades...and now time was
racing and the monster realized that its plan was not working as it
had hoped.
Knowing that if Aradel arrived to support Vylyrades, the battle would
rapidly turn fatally against it, the undead fluxon fell back on its
second plan, invoking a prepared Flux Manifestation that blasted the
rock and soil all around the battling fluxons into rubble and hurled
it upward all around them, and as Ahkrinor had intended, among the
shards of rock and clouds of sand was a sparkling, glittering object:
the Great Focus.
Caught by surprise by this maneuver, Vylyrades was sent flying across
the ground, battered by falling bits of gravel and rocks, forced to
concentrate on protecting his eyes from the flying sand. Ahkrinor,
physically tougher, had less to fear from the side-effects of his
latent manifestation, and even as the cloud of flying rubble rose the
monster had spotted the Great Focus glittering in the early-morning
sunlight, and was making its way across the rubble toward it by the
time Vylyrades was able to dare open his eyes.
It was almost a miracle Vylyrades was not more seriously hurt then he
was, even allowing for his own Flux wardings, but as it happened he
was merely bleeding from many minor cuts and scrapes, parts of his
skin scraped raw, and one finger broken. It was agonizing, but not
crippling, he could still think and concentrate well enough to
function, and as he saw the robed, hooded figure making toward his
long-absent Focus, Vylyrades reached out with his own telepathy power
to touch the Focus he had created, lying just a few tens of meters
away.
The moment his mind touched it, the Focus responded, all of all the
minds in the world it responded most naturally and easily to
Vylyrades. Projecting his will through the Focus, he hurled Ahkrinor
back from the device with a telekinetic blast, as the device amplified
both his Flux and psi abilities. Ahkrinor had prepared well, however,
and its own Flux ability enabled it to continue advancing, slowly,
toward the Great Focus.
Vylyrades, had his mind been at his best, would have been able to use
his connection to the Great Focus to destroy Ahkrinor, but he was in
pain, tired, and his mind kept drifting from the peak of concentration
that a fluxon needed to properly make use of his abilities. Ahkrinor,
recognizing this, choose that moment to cast aside his hood and cloak,
letting Vylyrades see him in the clear light of morning.
Vylyrades saw that what he had taken to be a man in a hooded robe
was...something else. The fluxon saw a face out of nightmare, skin
shriveled into a leathery hide, the mouth drawn back from the teeth in
a rictus that suggested agony and lust in equal measure, the dried
integument clinging to the skull far more tightly than even the most
starved of living men. Lank, dried, crackling remnants of hair
shrouded the horrifying visage, the eyes, oh-so-human looking save for
their utter lack of moisture, stared at Vylyrades with an eerie
intensity.
The sheer horror of what he saw broke Vylyrades’ already shaky
concentration, for just a moment...and that moment was more than
enough.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
In his momentary horrified distraction, Vylyrades was vulnerable, and
Ahkrinor wasted no time in taking advantage, striking at him with
blast after prepared blast of energy, even as the inhumanly durable
and energetic monster staggered forward to lay its shriveled, bony
hand on the glittering device, invading it and struggling to wrest
control from its distracted master.
Vylyrades was a strong-willed and courageous man, and his horror
rapidly gave way to determination as he struggled to hold on to
control of his greatest creation. It was ‘pre-attuned’ to him, he had
created it and its workings ‘fit’ most naturally with his own mind out
of all the sapients in Creation, but he was tired, wounded, and
distracted, and Ahkrinor was in physical contact with the Great Focus,
and motivated with a driving hate that a sane mind such as that of
Vylyrades could not fully comprehend.
After a silent, invisible struggle that lasted no more than a few
seconds and which left both the man and the monster exhausted, the
outcome was something of a draw. Ahkrinor broke Vylyrades’ connection
to the Great Focus, but was not able in the short time available to it
and in its current state to establish a new link of its own, leaving
the Focus without a master, but in the physical possession of the
monster.
Ahkrinor had every intention of slaying Vylyrades on the spot, and
removing this threat to its own vaulting ambitions, but even as it
prepared to do so, Aradel and the surviving members of their party
arrived, and Ahkrinor had to choose between slaying Vylyrades and
surviving, and it chose the later. Unleashing a last powerful Flux
manifestation, prepared beforehand, to cover its escape, it raised a
local sandstorm and earthquake that kept Aradel busy long enough for
the monster to make its getaway.
Aradel, forced to remain in place to shield Vylyrades and the
survivors from the howling wind and scouring sand and shaking sliding
ground, was left cursing but powerless to stop the monster. The
manifestation was a modest one, and though the effects were intense
they were also quite local and lasted only a few minutes. Aradel was
able to protect the survivors telekinetically, but by the time she
could divert attention to other matters, the monster was gone from the
scene...with the Great Focus.
There was little to be done, the wounded had to be treated, and when
that was completed there was little reason to linger in that desolate
place. The humans who had arrived with Ahkrinor were dead or fled,
there was no reason for Vylyrades, Aradel, or the survivors of their
party to waste time there.
By the time the Sun had set on that same day, Aradel and Vylyrades and
the survivors of their party had set out in pursuit of Ahkrinor, using
the instruments Vylyrades had devised to track the Focus. No one in
the party had any idea what sort of creature it was they had
encountered, it was quite outside any of their experiences, even the
millennia-old Aradel. The trail of the creature, as indicated by the
instruments, led north and east, toward the northern coast of Africa,
and they set out in pursuit.
It was on July 5th that Ahkrinor defeated Vylyrades and made its
escape with the Great Focus, and it was the better part of two weeks
later that Aradel and Vylyrades and their men reached the south coast
of the Mediterranean Sea, having trailed Ahkrinor that far, only to
find that it had fled on by sea, having a ship waiting for it. It was
not yet beyond the range of Vylyrades’ tracking devices, however,
which showed that the creature was making for what we would take call
the Straits of Gibraltar.
There was little time to waste, but at the same time there was nothing
to do but move along the coast as swiftly as possible to where their
own ship lay waiting for them. A sense of desperate urgency now drove
Vylyrades, he was not quite sure what he feared, but on some
subconscious level his brilliant intellect was assembling the bits and
pieces of a vast, dark puzzle, and the emerging shape was frightening
him.
We would call the day Vylyrades and Aradel reached the coast July
15th, and it was July 17th, late in the day, when they reached the
sight of their own waiting vessel and set out in pursuit of Ahkrinor,
who had a three day lead on them. To their good fortune, though they
did not know this, Ahkrinor had not had everything its own way, it had
been forced to go well out of its preferred way to avoid ProtoAthenian
warships patrolling the Mediterranean in search of Atlantean ships for
the attack they still feared, but which the Unity had ceased to care
about.
This delay bought the pursuers a day, meaning that they passed through
the Straits of Gibraltar only two days behind Ahkrinor, and then both
vessels were delayed by the passage of a hurricane, forced to go well
out of their way yet again to avoid a massive storm blown out of the
Caribbean toward Europe. It was well into middle August before either
ship began to draw near the waters around Atlantis. [1]
MORE LATER.
[1] The weather was still wildly out-of-pattern because of the massive
manipulations of the atmosphere and hydrosphere over the previous
decades, one side-effect of this was that it had become fairly common
for early-season Atlantic hurricanes to turn sharply eastward and to
gather strength as they did.
Johnny1a
Even as Ahkrinor raced toward Atlantis, straining the engines of his
small craft and adding speed by manipulating wind and current using
its Flux abilities, and even as Ahkrinor and Aradel were pursuing it,
gaining bit by bit on their quarry (their vessel had larger and more
powerful engines, and a more skilled crew), events were accelerating
elsewhere.
Let us turn our attention outward, not just away from Atlantis but
away from the planet Earth, and indeed outward from the warm inner
reaches of the Solar System. Outward in the approximate direction of
the constellation Sagittarius, outward past the asteroids, outward
past the orbits of the immense gas giants, past the iceteroids that
would one day be called the Kuiper Belt, outward to such distances
that the might Sun seems no more than a brilliant pinpoint. Outward
further, outward to such distances that even a photon would require
over a year to cover the distance, a year and nearly six months more,
in fact.
Here we find something that no human of Earth suspected existed, a
vast globe of gas and dust, not so much larger in volume than the
great gas giants of the outer Solar System, but _much_ more massive.
In fact, this object would be called, by the scientists of a later
Age, a ‘brown dwarf’. Swinging in a vast orbit around distant Sol,
this tiny near-star is even circled by its own small retinue of three
planets, the largest of which is about three thousand miles in
diameter, the smallest about fifteen hundred miles across. All three
are cold and desolate, the largest covered in a layer of far-from-pure
methane ice.
Along with the three modest planets is a ‘rubble belt’ of small
asteroids, iceteroids, and assorted bits of cosmic detritus. If we
were to look closer on one such speck of matter, a ball of stony
nickel-iron about twenty-five miles in diameter, in this August of
4750 B.C., we would see a rather odd sight: flashing back and forth
around and above the surface of this object are tiny specks of light,
almost infinitesimally tiny but intense, radiating a shifting spray of
colors across the entire visible spectrum. Indeed, the frequencies of
light radiating from these shifting, dancing points of radiance range
from beyond the narrow band of frequencies ‘visible’ to human eyes.
As we look closer we see that there are _hundreds_ of them, flashing
back and forth across the surface of the tiny asteroid, sometimes
pausing near each other, sometimes moving back and forth faster than
any human eye could follow, sometimes on distinctively patterned
source of light will vanish entirely only to reappear on the far side
of the rock in that same split-second.
These are Eldren. Indeed, these are those Familiar Eldren who were
not caught, in that last catastrophic moment when the Watcher and the
Rival and some of their fellows were trapped in near-stasis on Earth
(or in a few cases elsewhere in the Solar System). Forbidden by
higher authority to approach Earth, or indeed any Solarigen planet,
closer than a distance of approximate five light-days, they are
gathered here far outside that boundary, and yet relatively close, in
cosmic terms, to Earth.
As the Eldren measure time, it has been but a short, short blink of
time since the edict came down, less than seventy thousand Terran
years.
Now, the free Familiar Eldren have gathered because they have received
a summons, of sorts, from their leader on Earth. A summons
transmitted at great effort of will, of concentration, to overcome the
lassitude of the trap, a message that the Watcher could only have
managed in an extreme of doubt and fear. A summons that called upon
the Familiar Eldren to relay a further message from the Watcher to the
particular Adult who had laid down the edict a few tens of thousands
of years previous.
This had been done, nearly a year earlier, and now the Familiar Eldren
waited for the response. A response upon which would potentially hang
the fate of the planet Earth and the richest and oldest Solarigen
biosphere in the known universe, a response upon which hung the fate
of the human race on Earth.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
> LATER.
>
> Even as Ahkrinor raced toward Atlantis, straining the engines of his
> small craft and adding speed by manipulating wind and current using
> its Flux abilities, and even as Ahkrinor and Aradel were pursuing it,
> gaining bit by bit on their quarry (their vessel had larger and more
> powerful engines, and a more skilled crew), events were accelerating
> elsewhere.
>
ERRATA: It should be Vylyrades and Aradel pursuring. Sorry, typo.
Johnny1a
Back on Earth, it was now August 12th, and both the fleeing Ahkrinor
and the pursuing ship were finally drawing close to Atlantis proper.
Delayed by potentially dangerous ships and the weather, Ahkrinor was
forced to turn away from his preferred goal yet again as he drew near
Atlantis. His goal was the great central nexus of the Unity’s
simplified Great Work, in the far south of Atlantis, but the Unity had
too many ships watching the seas around the southern reaches of the
Great Isle. There was no way Ahkrinor could hope to approach that
region by sea without being detected, and the undead entity quickly
perceived this.
Ahkrinor turned northward, sailing along the serpentine east coast of
the Isle, until at last it drew close to the great city that had until
very recently been the capitol of the largest empire in the world.
Atlantica was still a spectacular city, though it was no longer the
center of political power on the planet Earth, it was still fabulously
wealthy, endowed with the heritage of thousands of years of
engineering and art, still home to the richest and most militarily
powerful aristocrats in the Great Isle. If Atlantica was no longer as
well maintained as it had been, no longer the center of trade and
commerce that it had been, it was easy to ignore these facts in the
spectacular environs of what was still the greatest city on the
planet.
Indeed, why would it _not_ be so? It had only been a mere _eight
years_ since the revelation of the truth about the Unity and the
ongoing secret wars, on top of centuries of slow poison from the
Unity’s ‘rationalization effort’ had finally sent Atlantean society
sliding over the edge into a cascade of social catastrophe, civil war,
and civilizational breakdown. Less than a decade before, Atlantica
had been the capitol of an empire spanning six continents, countless
oceanic islands, and wielding military and economic power without peer
in their Age. Now the writ of Atlantica’s rulers barely reached a few
miles beyond the outermost walls of the city, and the internal
politics of the great metropolis had devolved into a barely contained
pool of poison, but eight years was a short time to coast on the
heritage of six thousand years.
Still, the differences could not be denied by any who had known the
city a few centuries earlier and now. Along with the technological
and paratechnological advances that were so visible everywhere was the
clear and present evidence of social decay. Where once Atlantean
aristocrats had prided themselves on following a code of honor, now
their descendents joked about honor, rolling their eyes at the very
idea. Where once codes of behavior had restrained excess so
effectively as to be barely noticeable, now slaves fought to the death
for the entertainment of jaded aristocrats and debased commoners, in
ever more elaborate exhibitions of perverse ingenuity and pain.
Even as the ship bearing Ahkrinor came up the great underground tunnel
connecting the outermost of the circular harbors with the sea, the
savage and barbaric Games continued, on the very day that Ahkrinor,
its undead nature concealed by the flowing robes it wore and an ‘honor
guard’ of living men, set foot back in Atlantis for the first time
since its transformation, over a thousand men, women, and children
were slaughtered in a mass exhibition of torture and violence in the
largest arena in the city of Atlantica.
Ahkrinor did not care, it did not even intend to linger long in the
great city. Ahkrinor, as a living man, had been to Atlantis on many
occasions, sometimes in secret. The monster who had taken the place
of the man had little interest in the pleasures and enticements of the
city that had so appealed to the man.
The day after arriving in Atlantica, Ahkrinor left on land, travelling
south with a small body of loyalists, moving as swiftly as was
practicable in secret. The monster still had the Great Focus in its
possession, and as it traveled south it gathered a few other useful
items.
On August 16th, Vylyrades and Aradel arrived in Atlantica, four days
behind their quarry, and they lost two more days in meeting with
agents of the Rhaemyi and arranging to send messages overland to
Zadatharion, who was himself ‘in the field’ somewhere in Atlantis. [1]
Then transportation had to be arranged, and so it was that by the time
Aradel, Vylyrades, and a handful of men finally set out to pursue
Ahkrinor, they were six days behind the monster, travelling through an
Isle that was wracked by ongoing civil warfare, brigandage, and
heading into territory ruled by the Unity. It was not a hopeful
situation, and only the fact that Vylyrades could track the Great
Focus with instruments of his own provided them with any real hope of
finding or catching up to their quarry.
MORE LATER.
[1] Under ‘normal’ conditions, Aradel could have easily reached
Zadatharion telepathically, their race had more than sufficient
telepathic range for that, but just then the Static was making
telepathy a difficult proposition over much more than the distance
ordinary conversation could achieve.
Johnny1a
Ahkrinor, for its part, was making southward along what would today be
called 'back roads', rather than the major thoroughfares that ran up
and down the east and west coasts of Atlantis. Even the main roads,
built with all the skill of Atlantean stonemasons at the height of
their skill, were not safe to travel in 4750 B.C., the breakdown of
social order had led inevitably to a breakdown of large-scale
policing. Hunger, disease, and thirst stalked the Great Isle on a
scale unseen in thousands of years.
The ‘back roads’ by which Ahkrinor now traveled were far poorer in
quality, and some of them were just as dangerous as the main highways,
but others were sufficiently remote and little enough traveled that
they were actually fairly safe to traverse. The ‘interior’ of the
Great Isle, as one moved into the foothills of the central mountain
spine, had always been more lightly inhabited than the more fertile
and clement coasts, and in the aftermath of the Great Eruption these
inner lands were emptier than they had been in millennia.
Indeed, many of the volcanoes of the central spine were still
smoldering away, periodic small outbursts were still happening. Lava
flows remained hot and dangerous in many places, the passing months
having only placed a thin crust across some of the larger flows.
Quakes continued to periodically rock the region, it remained a very
dangerous place. The roads Ahkrinor was now following took him ever
deeper into this devastated central region as he moved south.
As he went, the roads became less and less useful, until after several
days of travel in a slow but very sturdy steam autocarriage, Ahkrinor
reached regions where the roads were essentially gone, destroyed by
the violence of the Great Eruption months earlier. The autocarriage
could carry them no further, now the monster and its human servitors
had to travel on foot, still making closer and closer to the central
spine of mountains and still moving further south (overall, allowing
for the east-west twists of the Great Isle) as they did.
In the meantime, Aradel and Vylyrades had been making faster progress,
Aradel’s vast psionic ability was very useful in such matters, but
they made a mistake. They started out six days behind, but gained
rapidly in the chase at first. Unfortunately, they expected Ahkrinor
to travel southward by means of the main roads, given how much power
the creature possessed it had little to fear from brigands and outlaws
and desperate refugees. So strongly did the expect this that when
Vylyrades’ instruments tracked the Great Focus moving inland, they
assumed it was an error and lost some of the time they had gained
going down the coast, it was the middle of the second day after this
mistake that they realized that Ahkrinor really was moving toward the
central mountains.
Realizing this, they were forced to cut cross-country to try and make
up lost time, which ate into their speed advantage. They were forced
to engage in combat several times with various groups, ranging from
the desperate to the ruthless, but eventually they did reach the road
Ahkrinor had been using, and regained the chase, gaining as they went,
but Ahkrinor now had a very large lead.
Eventually, the trail led directly up into the central mountain chain,
through a little used pass, in an area that had been sparsely
inhabited even before the Great Eruption. The pass led up into the
central mountains but dead-ended, so it had never been one of the
regularly-used routes across the mountains.
Eventually, Aradel and Vylyrades reached the upper part of the cul-de-
sac in the heart of the mountains, and there they found, near the
terminus of the pass in a narrow ravine, a small opening that proved
to open into a veritable maze of caverns and passages in the hard
basalt. The trail was easy enough to follow, the trail _out_, that
is. There were marks in the ravine of _hundreds_ of...something,
marching or moving in a mass down the pass and turning southward
again.
The cave itself was odd, because caves, as a general thing, are far
more common in sedimentary rock than in igneous stone such as the
walls of that ravine. It took only a modest amount of examination to
reveal to Aradel and Vylyrades that the ‘cave’ was in fact artificial,
someone or something had _cut_ a maze of caves and passages in
extremely hard rock, using what looked from the marks to have been
hand tools. The amount of sheer labor involved was awesome to think
about, but they had little time to waste pondering it.
They had no idea of just what it was Ahkrinor had found in those
caves, but it was clear that the monster had gone there expecting to
find it. The marks leading _out_ from the caves and down toward the
roads again were numerous, and seemed to be marks of some sort of
animal, but nothing even the millennia old Aradel could put a name
to. She did have a suspicion, though.
Her mind went back to the strange monsters who had ambushed her and
Zadatharion after the Great Raid nearly two years before. Those
strange, eight-limbed creatures remained a complete mystery, but from
what Aradel had seen of their limbs, the marks on the softer parts of
the trail seemed close to what one might expect from such creatures.
If it was so, however, then there were _hundreds_ of them in this
group, at least hundreds, perhaps more. At the base of the ravine,
the trail turned south again, matching the indications Vylyrades was
getting from his tracking instruments.
As they continued their pursuit, it was August 24th, and they were
about two days behind Ahkrinor.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
On the same day that Vylyrades and Aradel emerged from the cul-de-sac
pass and resumed their southward pursuit, Ahkrinor was drawing close
to his destination: the southern reaches of the Great Isle, where the
Unity's forces were in complete control and the central node of the
smaller version of the Great Project was coming together and nearing
completion. The Ultimate Paralens had been operational since April,
though it was not yet _doing_ anything because the rest of the vast
complex was still under construction. As August of 4750 B.C. drew to
a close, however, the central control complex was very nearly ready.
The components of the Unity, normally spread out all over Atlantis and
much of the rest of the world, were now gathering together near the
central control site. This was necessary for the next stage of the
project, though the Unity’s components were all one, for some purposes
physical proximity was necessary. [1]
As of that time, the Unity had about 350 surviving components. The
attrition rate in the last few years had been ferocious, but there was
enough of them left to sustain the Unity. Now, for the first time in
centuries, _all_ the components of the Unity were gathering in one
place. From every continent but Antarctica, from all over Atlantis,
the pieces of the collective were assembling.
The defenses around the central control site were heavy, layered, and
carefully planned by very competent minds. Armies of heavily armed
mercenaries and fanatic servitors were interspersed with war machines,
revenants, fluxoids, and monsters such as dragons. Aeremes watched
the skies, every approach was guarded, anyone caught inside a secure
zone approximately twenty miles wide without permission was executed
on the spot without trial or appeal.
Ahkrinor was now leading a force of creatures unlike anything else in
Atlantis toward this site. [2] These creatures, armed with Atlantean
weapons by Ahkrinor, were ferocious, tough, individually more than a
match for most human warriors. Ahkrinor had only about two hundred of
them, however, set against the forces of the Unity which numbered well
over one hundred thousand, on their home ground and better armed and
equipped and supplied than Ahkrinor’s forces could possibly hope to
match.
Ahkrinor, however, had the advantage that he knew more about what the
Unity was doing than anyone else outside the Unity’s own structures,
and even as a man he had been laying some plans for this moment, plans
the monster could still draw upon. There were prepared caches of
weaponry and supplies hidden within the region, as well as prepared
hiding places. Ahkrinor knew that timing would be critical for what
it intended to do, and the monster also knew that only days remained
before the crucial moment.
In the meantime, Aradel and Vylyrades were approaching from the
northeast, and though they did not know it, Zadatharion and a force of
Rhaemyi were approaching from the northwest on the opposite side of
the central mountain chain.
Zadatharion had already been leading a force of over three hundred
Rhaemyi and new recruits, mostly from the North Country of Atlantis,
when the messages from Aradel and Vylyrades reached him. He had been
leading a force southward in a desperate attempt to stop the
activities of the Unity before they reached the culmination that
Zadatharion could sense was close, without knowing how he knew.
The ‘how he knew’, of course, was the fragment of the vast
consciousness of the Watcher that dwelled within him. Though the
Watcher, still trapped in stasis, could only barely be said to be
awake most of the time, a sense of impending urgency had given the
trapped Eldren the will to focus somewhat, even to the point of being
able to call out to its free brethren, who were gathered and waiting
as we saw earlier. Even as Zadatharion led his force southeast, the
Watcher-mind within him was still waiting for some response from on
high to its desperate appeal.
What none of these players knew was that yet another force was
approaching, this one coming in by sea from the east. The
ProtoAthenians, still expecting imminent attack from Atlantis
(wrongly, as it happened, but they had no way to know that) had sent a
force of their best remaining ships and men to scout out the situation
near Atlantis, and some of their spies had led them to believe (this
time more or less accurately) that the only really important military
activity of the Unity just then was in the south of the Great Isle.
By the first day of what we would September of 4750 B.C., all these
forces were converging on the site of the Unity’s central control
nexus, which was itself only days from being ready to activate.
Ahkrinor and his force of mystery-monsters arrived first, on August
24th, as we have noted, and between that day and the first of
September, carefully began moving small parties of his monsters into
staging positions, moving very cautiously for the sake of secrecy.
Only the tremendous Flux power Ahkrinor wielded enabled him to keep
his forces from discovery, there were many, many close-run moments,
but the monster managed to move his creatures.
Aradel and Vylyrades and their small party reached the edge of the
Unity’s zone of control on August the 27th, just before local dawn.
With no idea of what Ahkrinor was trying to do and no plan to deal
with what they found, they pulled back to consider their next move.
Zadatharion and his forces, approaching from the northwest, reached
the edge of the Unity’s control zone on August the 29th, and began
scouting the area to prepare for their strike.
On September the 2nd, the ProtoAthenian expeditionary force put ashore
northeast of the control zone, and began to establish a base camp in
secret.
The ProtoAthenians, for their part, were expecting almost anything but
the chaos and disorder that greeted them when they reached Atlantis.
Expecting to find an organized and hostile mother-state waiting for
them, they instead found a Great Isle torn by internecine combat,
stalked by famine and disaster, and no sign of any kind of defensive
patrol of the seas around the Island except for the extreme southern
reach. It had already become clear to the expedition’s leaders that
the Atlantean follow-up attack they had been fearing was not an
imminent threat.
As they landed and made a base camp, they prepared for a ‘reconnoiter-
in-force’, surprised by the total lack of organized resistance they
encountered, and simultaneously pleased and disturbed by it.
MORE LATER.
[1] Though the Static made most telepathic communication unworkable by
that point, it left the links between the Unity components
unaffected. This was both a huge advantage for the Unity in terms of
its ability to communicate long distance, and a puzzle that would not
be solved for thousands of years.
[2] They were, of course, Beasties. How a force of Beasties came to
be in Atlantis, how Ahkrinor came to control them, and how they came
to be reduced to a tech level lower than that of Atlantis, will be
revealed in due time.
Johnny1a
As Ahkrinor spread its forces out into the pre-chosen hiding places/
staging areas, it was well-hidden from the Unity, but Vylyrades could
and did track, not the monster, but the Great Focus. Ahkrinor, as his
pursuers more than expected, kept the Focus on its person at all
times, it was just too valuable to risk doing anything else. This
gave Vylyrades the ability to track Ahkrinor, and when Ahkrinor
settled into its own specific hiding place to await the critical
moment, Vylyrades began to steadily narrow down the exact site of the
creature’s hiding place.
Vylyrades finally managed to pin down the exact location of his now-
motionless Focus, on September 5th. In the meantime, Ahkrinor was
making its own preparations to be ready for the coming key moment.
Preparation for Ahkrinor personally most consisted of ongoing attempts
to ‘master’ the Great Focus, something that had been made harder by
the inhuman nature of Ahkrinor’s undead mind, and by defenses
Vylyrades had just barely had time to mentally ‘install’ in the Focus
during their battle in Africa. Bit by bit the Focus was giving ground
to Ahkrinor’s will, but it was slow going and time was rapidly running
out.
What was this moment that the undead horror awaited?
The Unity was only days away from being ready to activate its minimal
version of the Great Project. From the very beginning the Great
Project had been something of a blind or a distraction, though all the
formal and admitted purposes of the Project were real enough, hidden
within it was a more dangerous and subtle goal, to enable the Unity,
as a collective entity, to tap into and use the vast power of the Flux
in the same way that the mortal fluxons did. Given the vast intellect
of the Unity and the scale and intensity of the connection it hoped to
establish, this would make the Unity awesomely powerful. The scaled-
down version of the Project still held out that hope to the entity,
though with higher risk, greater difficulty, and more possible side-
effects. The moment it hoped to achieve this power was now almost at
hand.
What Ahkrinor hoped to do was to use the Great Focus, a Flux tool of
unparalleled potentials, to step in at that precise moment, preventing
the Unity from achieving this power and gaining a level of influence
over the Flux no other mortal (defining that loosely in the case of
Ahkrinor) had ever come close to managing. While it was certainly in
the interest of the mortal human race that the Unity be stopped,
whether the undead monster called Ahkrinor would be any improvement is
another question. Still, both inhuman entities were on a collision
course, preparing to contest (unknown to the Unity) for the same vast
prize.
To achieve its goal, however, the undead horror would need essentially
perfect control over the Focus, and this was what it now strove,
through constant meditation, study, and effort, to achieve. From its
carefully hidden, carefully protected hiding place, an excavated
underground chamber prepared by hand labor of its servitors long
since, Ahkrinor waited, only a few miles from the center of the vast
control complex, making preparations and racing against the rapidly-
passing hours.
In the meantime, the ProtoAthenian expeditionary force had established
their preliminary base camp and were assembling for their reconnoiter-
in-force. They had been ashore for four days, hiding behind their own
carefully maintained psionic and Flux-based concealments, when scouts
in the service of the Unity happened to discover them directly on a
regular patrol, and managed to pass a warning (by messenger) to the
Unity and its forces before the ProtoAthenians wiped them out.
The ProtoAthenians, all hope of secrecy lost, proceeded to a direct
heavy-reconnaissance mission, and since there were over two thousand
of them, with more on the way, they felt they could take the risk.
Thus they began a march to the south, forcing the Unity to divert
security personnel to meet them, which was why Zadatharion and his
forces coming in from the northwest found the defensive lines on the
that side to be remarkably thin and vulnerable.
Zadatharion himself spearheaded the attack, using his own vast psychic
powers and Flux skills, and he was backed by over two hundred of the
toughest, most experienced veteran fighters of the Rhaemyi, superbly
well armed and highly motivated. The combination of these advantages
enabled Zadatharion and his strike force to punch through the thinned
northwestern perimeter, and to launch an attack on the command complex
on September 7th.
The Unity now found itself facing attacks by a small but dangerously
powerful force from the northwest and a larger military force coming
in from the northeast. The Unity had long been paranoid about the
danger Zadatharion represented, and was not entirely shocked to have
danger manifest from that direction, but the arrival of the
ProtoAthenians caught the collective by surprise. Then it had given
up on its effort to wipe out ProtoAthens, the Unity had made a strange
and fateful oversight, it had simply dismissed them out from its mind,
neglecting the possibility that they might yet represent a threat on
their own part. Now it was paying the price for this overconfidence.
The Unity still had a huge numerical advantage in its defense forces,
though they were individually mostly inferior to the attackers. It
also had the advantage of long preparation and ‘home advantage’.
Still, it’s always harder to defend on two fronts at once, even
against intrinsically weaker opponents. To make matters worse the
Unity was now alarmed enough that it dared not move all its forces to
meet the attackers for fear of exposing yet more flanks to yet other
potential surprise attackers. On the edge of ultimate success, the
coldly brilliant collective mind was having what might be called an
‘attack of nerves’.
To make matters still more complex, the elements of nature seemed to
be in an obstreperous mood. The local earthquake rate was rising,
mostly small tremors, but occasionally stronger shocks went through
the area, enough to damage to complex and force constant work to
maintain the vastly complex machinery. This ate up still more of the
Unity’s available manpower, at times even the components themselves
had to join with their slaves and servants to maintain the complex.
As if the entire situation were not complex enough, on September 9th,
yet another massive hurricane came spinning out of the overheated
waters of the Caribbean, raising winds and waves to troublesome
levels, and by the late afternoon of September 10th, the hurricane was
coming ashore in southern Atlantis.
Preparing for the onset of the storm, which was what we today would
call a Category Four, and making sure damage was repaired as swiftly
as it was inflicted, consumed yet more of the Unity’s manpower.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The storm arrived with relatively little warning.
This was inevitable, because even at its height, the Antediluvian Age
had a much less effective world-wide communication system than our
world has boasted for many years. The advanced Atlantean culture had
sophisticated telepathy, and thus very little motive to develop or to
perfect long-range ‘conventional’ communications, even such ‘low-tech’
expedients as heliographs and their cousins. The fallen Goravian
society had developed a crude form of radio, and the ProtoAthenians
had retrieved it, but it was still very primitive and certainly not
yet suitable for large-scale global use. Even though the
ProtoAthenians had the radio technology, it was so crude that they
could not use it communicate much beyond the Mediterranean.
This was important in several ways, not least because it prevented the
ProtoAthenian expeditionary mission from sending back word to
ProtoAthens of Atlantis’ weakness.
Also, until the last few years, the Atlanteans and their colony-states
possessed ESP so well-developed and sophisticated that their
development of fine-quality scientific instruments was more than
somewhat retarded, again for lack of _need_. Though ESP could not
perform all the functions that advanced instrumentation and sensors
could perform, it could and did take the place of most of the features
of the various cruder instruments that are necessary to achieve the
most advanced devices.
Then came the Static, and gradually but inexorably it had interfered
with the use of psionics and the Flux , the problem growing steadily
worse until, by the mid-4700s B.C,, telepathy and ESP were all but
useless. Telepathy was reduced, even among the mightiest psions, to
such a degree that it was barely useful for more than a face-to-face
exchange, and ESP was even more completely blocked.
Thus it was that though Atlantis was nominally a TL5 culture, it
lacked anything even approximating the telegraph, or any kind of large
weather service. In the chaos of the time, long-distance messages
were rare, which meant that the first warning of a coming storm such
as the hurricane bearing down on southern Atlantis was the evidence of
the physical senses.
The first sign of the coming storm was lookouts on the southwest coast
observing the distinctive ‘fan’ of high-altitude ice crystals above
the hurricane’s central updraft. Such storms had been coming up from
the Caribbean often enough that this sign appearing on the horizon,
and the pattern of the rising waves, told their tale, but they gave
only a brief warning and even then sometimes the storm missed. This
time, though, the warning was all too accurate and the huge storm
continued to bear down on Atlantis.
Though the storm was bad news for the Unity, it was little if any more
welcome to the Unity’s attackers, in the face of nature’s fury none of
the combatants could do anything but cower. As the winds whipped
across the land and the rain turned freshets into torrents and
torrents into floods, all forces found such shelter as they could and
dug in to wait out the terrible storm. The ProtoAthenian force dug in
and encamped in a sheltered mountain valley some miles to the
northeast of the initial combat zone, Zadatharion and his Rhaemyi were
more exposed but hanging on in ravines on the opposite side of the
southern foothills, and the Unity was struggling to contain the damage
to the central control complex.
As far as the geography went, the site was ‘so-so’, not totally
exposed but also not as sheltered as the Unity might surely have
wished. The wind howled throughout the later part of the day on
September 10th, and gained speed as the Sun set and the main part of
the storm came ashore, and the Unity was forced to draw upon drugged
and half-mindless servants to dare the wrath of the storm to protect
the complex. The worst part for the Unity was not the wind, however,
but the water. There was a shallow, wide river flowing toward the sea
not far from the site, and not this became a channel up which the
storm surge came flowing, to flood much of the land around the control
complex.
It was well into September 11th before the slow-moving storm swept
entirely passed Atlantis, have spread floods and destruction across
much of the southern Isle. The Unity was continuing to struggle to
contain and repair the damage to its constructions, amid the still-
heavy rain trailing behind the great storm. The collective considered
it likely that it would be at least a few days before the attackers
could again mount a serious threat, in this it grievously misjudged
the matter, because Zadatharion and his highly-motivated Rhaemyi had
endured the storm and had recognized that Unity’s distraction.
It was a gamble, but Zadatharion and his men were reinforced by
additional troops who came in shortly after the storm passed,
surprising even them. With the extra men, they decided to make the
gamble and launched another attack on the northwest perimeter and this
time, almost as much to their own surprise as the Unity’s, they broke
through the thinned lines and attacked the central complex directly.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Zadatharion immediately began doing the only thing he could reasonably
do under the circumstances to hinder the Unity, i.e. destroy
everything within reach. Normally the oldest of the Avatars used his
vast psionic strength with considerable restraint, out of both policy
and natural inclination, now he unleashed at full power in a veritable
whirlwind of destruction, which his soldiers engaged the enemy
Zadatharion proceeded to strike at the key components and systems of
the vast complex, freezing, melting, shredding delicate apparatus in
vast sweeps of his psychic power.
The Unity rapidly moved to stop him, dozens of collective-components
engaging him with the Unity's own vast power, while the Unity recalled
combat personnel to deal with this invasion of its central complex.
Zadatharion knew he did not have much time, and he used what time he
had with devastating effect, spies had long identified key sites in
the complex, and Zadatharion was sufficiently skilled in the sciences
of the Flux to recognize other vulnerable points once he was actually
inside the central complex.
In the meantime, the Unity realized that the situation had become too
fluid. The control complex was not yet truly ‘ready’, but it _could_
be activated. If it tried and succeeded, the power it would gain
would enable it to immediately crush its foes, if it tried and failed
the consequences could be extensively negative, but from the point of
view of the Unity the temptation had become too much. The Unity was a
calm, cool entity, its vast intellect rarely troubled by anything that
might be called passion, but it was not without its own analogues to
individual human emotions. Now the emotional temptation of the power
it so craved proved sufficient to overcome the ‘better judgement’ of
the collective.
For that reason, in the early afternoon of September 12th, 4750, the
Unity activated its central complex, and began to bring the other
distant sites of its globe-girdling mechanism ‘on line’.
As the Unity recalled its perimeter forces to deal with the
penetration of the core complex, some of these suddenly moved units
almost literally stumbled across the hidden teams of the strange
creatures that Ahkrinor had brought into the area in secret. Fighting
broke out, and Ahkrinor, recognizing that its hope of secrecy was now
destroyed, and more importantly sensing the activation of the Great
Project, realized that it was ‘now or never’ and immediately gave the
order to launch its own attack on the Unity.
Suddenly the Unity found itself facing attack by creatures it had
never imagined before, nothing in its centuries of experience matched
up to these strange, multilimbed living fighting machines. Between
the battle within its own corridors and structures against Zadatharion
and the Rhaemyi penetration team, and the sudden eruption of combat
all over the area nearby against these new creatures, the Unity found
itself with much of its combat power occupied near-at-hand and the
rest cut off, for the moment, from response.
The fighting went on throughout the remainder of the cloudy, rainy day
of what we would call September 12th of 4750, and continued into the
night. Though the Unity had more than sufficient armed force at hand
in theory to contain the situation, communications had been totally
disrupted. Some of the Unity’s large armed forces continued to keep
watch on the sea approaches twenty miles from the battle zone,
blissfully unaware of what was happening until overland messengers
finally reached them with news hours out of date by the time they
received it. Attempts to respond were confused, slow, Unity forces
encountered each other in the dark and fratricide arose from the
confusion.
In the early dawn hours of September 13th, 4750, the ProtoAthenian
force entered the chaotic fray, emerging from their valley where they
had sheltered from the hurricane. They had fresher troops, of higher
discipline and training than many of the Unity’s forces, and in the
chaos they made themselves felt through their careful discipline and
their use of (locally) effective non-paraphysical means of
communication. [1]
Amid all this chaos, Aradel and Vylyrades tracked Ahkrinor, who still
carried the barely-mastered Great Focus. As Ahkrinor moved toward the
central complex in cautious but high-risk movements from hiding place
to hiding place, Vylyrades tracked the entity from just a few miles
behind. Both Ahkrinor and its pursuers were hindered by the chaotic,
shifting lines of combat around them, but as Ahkrinor moved closer and
closer to its goal, Aradel and Vylyrades and their tiny force were
slowly but steadily gaining ground.
They were able to gain ground in part because of Aradel’s vast power
added to Vylyrades’ own Flux strength, and in part because they had a
more direct goal than Ahkrinor. The later was trying to sneak into
the central complex while avoiding being caught up in the insanely
fluid combat, it had to balance secrecy against speed, conserve its
strength against the moment when it would challenge the Unity
directly, and at the same time keep track of its own scattered forces
as best it could.
Aradel and Vylyrades and their team, for their part, were merely
trying to survive and close in on Ahkrinor. This meant they could
move more swiftly, ignore some of the considerations slowly Ahkrinor
down, and because of the instruments Vylyrades used to track the
Focus, they always knew where their quarry was to be found at any
given moment, while Ahkrinor continually had to reevaluate its
physical route.
All the while, a faint hum of tingling energy was filling the air, as
the Great Project began to actually run.
MORE LATER.
[1] From years of experience in war against fellow Atlantean-
descended people, the ProtoAthenians had mastered any number of
‘conventional’ means of local communication useful in battle, from
flashing mirrors to hand signals to drum codes to trained fast-
riders. It was a key advantage in the chaos of that particular battle
zone.
Johnny1a
It was well past sunset on September 12th when Ahkrinor, accompanied
by a handful of his creatures and shrouded by one of the most complex
Flux-illusions ever woven, reached the outer wall around the central
complex. By this point, even totally untrained non-psionic amateurs
could feel the tingling hint of power in the environment around them,
to the highly tuned and trained senses of those of Atlantean descent,
the 'feel' of gathering potential was unmistakable. To Ahkrinor,
still highly attuned to the Flux even if its ESP was lost to it, the
sense of the power of the Great Project was utterly clear.
It took Ahkrinor several hours of delicate, careful work to get past
the carefully warded wall, which run well below the ground level and
rose fully fifty meters above. It would have been trivial to cross
the wall itself, of course, but to do so _secretly_ under those
conditions was far more challenging. Ahkrinor, as a human, had long
planned for such moments as this while he was part of the Unity’s
empire, and his own loyalists had constructed hidden ‘back doors’ into
most of the Unity’s facilities as they were first created. Even the
central complex of the Great Project was not an exception to this.
It was almost dawn by the time Ahkrinor had located the entrance it
wanted and managed to get inside, still hidden from the perceptions of
the Unity and the physical observation of the Unity’s servants.
Though Ahkrinor did not realize this, the time had enabled Aradel and
Vylyrades to close the gap, they reached the same entrance and used it
to pass inside only an hour past local dawn, less than ninety minutes
behind their quarry. Though the pursuers had been hindered many times
by combat or by the need to avoid combat, they were still steadily
gaining on their would-be target.
In the meantime, Zadatharion was still within the complex as well.
His initial orgy of destruction could not last long, of course, but he
had done a great deal of damage in a very short time during it, and as
soon as the pressure became too great, Zadatharion and his surviving
Rhaemyi had scattered, and what amounted to a miniature combination
intruder hunt and guerrilla battle had begun that was still raging.
The central complex was the size of a small city, and had countless
places where one man or a handful could hide, and the Rhaemyi were
_good_ at this sort of work. As for Zadatharion, he was all by
himself more than a match for platoons of ordinary soldiers, and he
was fighting with ruthless determination. Even as they evaded the
Unity’s search parties, Zadatharion and the Rhaemyi were also engaging
in acts of sabotage and destruction whenever an opportunity became
available.
They had not yet managed to disable the complex, but it was taking
all the Unity’s attention to keep the Project coming ‘on-line’ and at
the same time deal with the steady sabotage. There was nothing left
over for other priorities, which was part of why the battles outside
continued to rage unchecked.
Through it all the goal of Zadatharion and his Rhaemyi was the great
Ultimate Paralens near the center of the huge control complex.
Towering three hundred meters above the surrounding terrain, this
great golden object was visible in all directions for miles, and
represented the most important single piece of equipment in the entire
complex. Should it be destroyed, or even moderately damaged, the
entire complex would be rendered useless until the damage was
repaired. Knowing this, Zadatharion and his men made attempt after
attempt to get close enough to do some harm to the glisteningly
beautiful device, with little success. Every layer of security in the
entire complex was calculated to make this point the most secure in
the facility.
The Ultimate Paralens itself was suspended by a vast and intricate
‘gantry’ or ‘frame’ of high-quality metal, towering even higher than
the Paralens itself and suspending the device above the ground in such
a way that that bottom of the ovoid Paralens was suspended about
twenty meters above the actual ground level. Here, in an open space
directly below the Ultimate Paralens, the surviving components of the
Unity were now assembling, ready to complete the process toward which
they/it had been work for so many centuries.
Along with the few hundred remaining components (save those the Unity
was forced to deploy to combat Zadatharion and the Rhaemyi) with
mortal fluxons, ready to help establish the connection between the
Unity and the Flux, in the fast-approaching moment of activation for
the Great Project. Surrounding the components and the fluxons were a
circle of heavily armed guards, the last line of defense around the
center of the complex and the key site of the entire Great Project.
As the hours passed, Ahkrinor passed through the maze of the complex,
accompanied by several of his strange creatures, and they left a chain
of dead guards and Rhaemyi behind them as they went. Though Ahkrinor
had no wish to engage in combat, when it came across either a Rhaemyi
or a defending unit, it rapidly slew them to avoid giving any sort of
alarm, leaving the bodies (those his creatures did not consume) hidden
as well as could be managed in a short time.
All the while, Aradel and Vylyrades and their tiny group was following
the trail of the entity, gaining on it bit by bit as they approached
the center of the control complex.
The Sun was setting on September 13th by the time Ahkrinor drew close
enough to the center of the central site to perceive the guards and
the Unity components with its own physical senses, and though Ahkrinor
had no idea of this, by this point Aradel and Vylyrades were only a
few minutes behind it. Now Ahkrinor had to prepare for the coming
critical component, and from a hidden niche about two hundred meters
from the outer ring of guards, the creature began preparing.
(Normally, there would have been no chance of hiding so close to the
Unity’s massed components, or the fluxons and psions in its service,
but at that moment they were fully occupied with other matters.)
Just as the Unity and its supporters and slaves had no idea of the
presence of Ahkrinor and a handful of his pet creatures just a tiny
distance away watching them, Ahkrinor in turn had no idea that Aradel
and Vylyrades and three other men were hiding a tiny distance further
away, watching Ahkrinor and the Unity as well, and trying to ascertain
what their next move should be, even as the sense of Flux power
concentrating now filled the air with a tingle of energy and an
audible hum of vibration.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The evening of September 13th and early hours of September 14th were
long and slow for Aradel and Vylyrades and their three surviving
companions. They had left some of their companions at the outer wall,
with orders to make their way out of the battle zone as best they
could, since they knew that only a handful of people could hope to
maintain secrecy as they crossed the central complex. Even with just
the five of them there had been many close calls as they tracked
Ahkrinor across the facility.
It was a long night because of the danger, at any moment they could be
discovered, and they knew it, and it was a long night because of the
fear of both discovery and of whatever waited when the Unity was
finally ready to use its Great Project. It was a long night because
there were nothing to do but wait, wait for the moment when they could
act, a moment that could only be recognized when it came, not
predicted.
Though they had no way to know it, outside the battle was turning
against the distracted Unity. Though the battle started out with an
overwhelming numerical advantage, circumstances had made it impossible
for the Unity to apply those forces usefully, and the opposition was
skilled, disciplined, and highly motivated. Many of the Unity’s
forces were low-quality mercenaries or half-trained conscripts, and
some of them, as it became clear that the battle was going against
them, broke and ran or simply abandoned the field.
That still left the defending forces with a numerical superiority of
skilled, motivated troops, but not by so huge a margin, and in the
chaos and confusion of the time there was little proper application.
Bit by bit, the ProtoAthenians were mastering the field, and this was
becoming clear to everyone. The Unity, however, was now fully
occupied with its own work and could not take the time to do anything
about the matter.
When the Sun finally rose, it caught the attention of those with
enough freedom to notice on both sides, because it rose in a red blaze
as if the eastern horizon was aflame. Clouds had come in during the
night, a cold front was sweeping in and the rising sun was light them
in a crimson glory as it rose.
It was shortly after sunrise on September the 14th that the Unity
finally reached the point it had been striving for since the middle of
September 12th, the Great Project, albeit the minimal version it had
constructed, was finally ready to activate! Vylyrades sensed this the
moment it happened, nobody in that time and place was as tightly
attuned to the Flux as he was. Aradel sensed it as well moments
later, and of course so did Ahkrinor, who immediately began executing
its own plan.
The hundreds of individual components of the Unity, assembled under
the lower pole of the Ultimate Paralens, made a strange and eerie
sight. Males and females, of every physical description, ranging in
physical age from extremely elderly to barely toddlers, but all
equally part and parcel of a single mind, stood in motionless trance
under the Paralens as the Flux was concentrated into their physical
environs and their servitor fluxons began to process of ‘connecting’
the Unity to the Great Project.
Almost in that moment, as the components went into their trance and
the fluxons and other technicians were fully committed to their work,
Ahkrinor used a weapon it had brought, a gas weapon that rapidly
disabled many of the armed guards and left others retching and nearly
helpless. He unleashed his creatures on those still able to fight,
having armed them with more of the gas weapons and other high-power
devices, and then the living corpse-thing lifted itself with a Flux
manifestation into the supporting beams around the Ultimate Paralens,
making its way directly toward the actual surface of the Paralens.
Aradel and Vylyrades would now have pursued immediately, except that
at that moment some more of the strange creatures, having followed
their master’s path into the complex, arrived, forcing them to divide
their attention. A moment of discussion left them with the reluctant
conclusion that Aradel would have to stand the ground against their
attackers, since Vylyrades of the two of them had by far the best
chance to do something about Ahkrinor’s ‘hold’ on the Great Focus.
Even as this was happening, additional combatants arrived, Zadatharion
and a number of his Rhaemyi, already engaged in a running battle with
forces of the Unity, came smashing into the ‘central square’, and
Aradel and Zadatharion met again for the first time in months. There
was little time for greetings or any comparison of notes, however, as
the combat was rapidly escalating with more combatants arriving on all
three sides even as Aradel and Zadatharion met each other in the
middle of the chaos.
In the meantime, Vylyrades was pursuing Ahkrinor through the complex
of beams and girders overhead.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Let us look at the events that followed in this strange and fateful
moment a little more closely, through the point of view of some of our
key players themselves. As before, we can assume that the words and
thoughts of these people are in English, when of course they were not,
and we can render whatever conversation might happen by telepathic
means as if it happened in words, but the meaning comes to us even so
Let us look closely:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vylyrades...
--------------------
‘Damn,’ Vylyrades thought to himself in a mixture of anger, fear, and
resignation, ‘cliched as it is, I’m getting too old for this!’
At the age of one hundred and twenty-five years, Vylyrades was by now
indeed in very late middle age by the standards of his people, and
though he remained in excellent physical condition, already he was
feeling the strain of climbing up to the higher levels of the vast
frame, to say nothing of the constant fear of being picked off by a
stray shot from the battle below. Resolutely he put that thought out
of his mind, it was not a very likely eventuality and if it happened
he was in no position to do anything about it anyway.
Vylyrades was not particularly afraid of heights...but he was walking,
or balancing, his way along a metal bar barely half a meter wide fully
twenty meters above ground level. He had to do this while at the same
time keeping track of his quarry up ahead and the situation around
him, and it was nerve-wracking, even the slightest mistake would be
lethal under these conditions.
Vylyrades spared a glance at the immense curving glassine surface of
the Ultimate Paralens, and the tiny speck of darkness near it on the
supporting frame that he knew represented Ahkrinor. Nervously
Vylyrades double-checked the Flux illusion he was using to protect
himself from being noticed by his quarry, at best it was far from a
sure thing that Ahkrinor would not see through it as he drew near, and
at worst...well, no point in dwelling on that, either.
Vylyrades drew a deep breath, and let it out with a sigh of relief as
he reached a place where a vertical cross-bar met the girder on which
he walked, giving him something to grasp for security for a moment.
It also provided ‘cover’ both from the combat occurring below and the
direction of his quarry, it was a momentary shelter that came as a
desperate relief.
He stayed in place, letting his racing heart slow down, but he dared
not linger, because he knew that the longer he remained in that point
of relative safety, the harder it would be to start again...and time
was most certainly of the essence. Whatever was going to happen would
happen in the immediate future, there was little or no time to waste
on such trivia as hammering hearts or hyperventilation from fear.
Gathering his courage, Vylyrades made himself step out of his
momentary shelter, and as he had more than expected the first step was
the hardest, once he was out it was easier to keep going.
There was no direct connection between where he was and where Ahkrinor
was working, Vylyrades saw that he would have to work his way around
the maze of girders and beams, past vertiginous drops and all the
while making sure his protective Flux-illusion remained in place. It
promised to be a signal challenge, and of course even if he succeeded
the hard part would come afterward. Still...bit by bit, the greatest
fluxon of his Age worked his cautious way through the maze of girders,
intent on recovering his greatest creation before it could be misused
any further.
Below, the battle was getting louder, but Vylyrades could spare no
attention from his own problems for that, either things were going
well for his allies or they were not. Either way, he had his own job
to do.
It took him several heart-stopping zig-zags through the vast metal
web, with some desperately close calls to falling, to reach the
Ultimate Paralens. The entire frame was vibrating in tune with the
vibrations coming off the Paralens and from the surrounding acres of
machinery and equipment, and every so often an explosion or other side-
effect of the battle below would shake the framework, giving him a
heart-stopping moment of vertigo and nearly pitching him off of his
precarious balance!
When he finally did reached the Ultimate Paralens, Vylyrades gasped
with sheer relief, a metallic taste in his mouth from the terror of
the crossing. Now, though, he was standing on one of the circular
walkways that surrounded the gigantic object, more than a meter wide
and with a blessed _railing_!
Pausing the gasp for breath, Vylyrades was now face-to-face with the
fact that what he had just done had been the _easy_ part. Now came
the really difficult part...facing down Ahkrinor again.
Vylyrades still hoped to catch the...whatever it was he faced...by
surprise, just as Ahkrinor had done to him back in North Africa. As
far as Vylyrades could discern, his protective illusion was still in
place, as he made his slow, careful away around the immense curve of
the Paralens, toward where he knew the creature was lurking, preparing
for whatever it was it intended to actually do.
Eventually, Vylyrades came around the curving edge of the immense
golden Paralens to see the hooded form of Ahkrinor sitting cross-
legged on the railing, the Great Focus grasped between its withered
hands, glowing with a soft, pulsing red and yellow light. Once look
told Vylyrades that the Focus was being used in a way not in
accordance with its design parameters, his mind could _sense_ the
warning signals the Focus was emitting, but it _was_ operating,
whatever Ahkrinor was doing was going forward.
Ahkrinor made no sign of being aware of his presence, and Vylyrades
paused. He had a gun on him, and he had no moral qualms whatever
about attacking by surprise. His only hesitation was doubt about
whether shooting this..._thing_...would even accomplish anything. Was
it even alive? Could it feel pain? He had four shells, would that be
enough to take down this incredible...entity?
On balance, he decided it would be best to strike with something more
intense, and with that, he raised his hand, focused his mind on the
Flux, and hurled a Flux-bolt intense enough to simultaneously shred
and melt steel plate at his enemy. It struck the creature full on,
but Ahkrinor was heavily ‘warded’ and the bolt disrupted on contact
with its body, but it was driven backward and its physical grip on the
Great Focus was broken. Vylyrades launched another attack at
Ahkrinor, and another, and another, giving it no time to do anything
but defend itself, driving it back toward the vertiginous drop behind
it.
With last huge Flux-bolt, hotter and more intense than anything any
other fluxon of the age could have produced, Vylyrades drove his foe
to the railing with enough force to break the railing, the _thing_
fell backward, dropping ten meters to the walkway below, and catching
itself desperately with a one-handed grip. Ahkrinor was left hanging
by its shriveled fingers from the walkway below.
Vylyrades hesitated for an instant, he knew he might be able to finish
off his opponent if he struck swiftly, he still had some Flux-bolts
‘stored’, but at the same time he knew that connection between his
Great Focus and his opponent remained even absent physical contact,
whatever the creature had been trying to do was still going on and the
Focus was still making the enemy much more powerful than it already
was. A moment later Vylyrades reached the conclusion that the Focus
was the more important matter, and he grabbed for it, and the moment
his hand touched its cool crystalline surface his mind began to
reassert control over his greatest creation.
It had been some years since Vylyrades had last been in physical
possession of his Focus, and in that amount of time Ahkrinor had done
much work to assert control. Any other fluxon would have had great
difficulty in reasserting control after such a gap, but Vylyrades was
who he was, and he had _created_ this device, and it was only a matter
of moments before he was beginning to regain control of the Focus.
Unfortunately, in that moment his opponent arrived, having managed to
get back up from where it had fallen, and its clawed, shriveled hand
grasped the Focus and both minds met in the depths of its paraphysical
structure, and it was then that Vylyrades finally perceived exactly
what was happening.
Vylyrades perceived the web of Flux-flows stretching from the
mechanisms all around him, to the Unity components below, to the Great
Focus and through it to his opponent. He perceived the pattern of
what was happening, his brilliant mind recognized that his opponent
was trying to seize control of the process the Unity was executing, to
make _itself_ the recipient of that fantastic power rather than the
Unity. He also saw this the plan could work, if executed with
sufficient skill and precision of timing.
Both Vylyrades and Ahkrinor were not motionless, their bodies frozen
just as the components of the Unity below were frozen, their various
mentalities entirely absorbed in the cross-connecting flows of the
Flux. A physical struggle between man and monster was now
meaningless, the battle was on a more rarified plane, and consisted as
much of choices _as_ weapons as it did anything else.
Vylyrades felt his perception flash outward, as the all-engulfing
Static that had blocked all forms of paraphysical communication and
perception for years simply fell away. Indeed, after years of mental
near-blindness, Vylyrades now found himself with a depth of
perception, both of his ESP and his abilities in Matrix Perception,
greater than anything he had ever possessed in the past. It was as if
he had come to the very ‘eye of the storm’ of the Static and from
there rather than blocking vision, the Static expanded it.
As Vylyrades surveyed the vistas opening before him, he was torn
between an elevating wonder and a horror beyond anything in his
experience.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Vylyrades 'looked' with his expanded vision at his immediate opponent,
and at the Unity, and at the vast warp and weave of the Great Project,
and at the ebb and flow of the Flux itself, so familiar to him after
an adult lifetime of studying and interacting with this cosmic
phenomenon. He was able to perceive all this in a single 'glance',
the interactions and shadings suddenly clear to him.
In that timeless moment, Vylyrades comprehended more about the
_nature_ of the Unity, how its components were linked together, why
the internal psychic linkages that bound the collective together were
so resistant to the Static compared to other forms of telepathy, he
understood why the Unity thought the way it did, his own power of
telepathy amplified by the situation to the point that he was able to
read much of the thought and more importantly, the warp and weave of
the collective mind doing that thinking.
Vylyrades also perceived the true nature of Ahkrinor, grasping in a
flash of insight and comprehension just what the corpse-like thing
was, what enabled a creature that was in many ways _dead_ to operate
as if it was alive, and why it was the way it was. Vylyrades
perceived the ‘hybrid’ nature of the two different entities that made
up Ahkrinor, and his perception flashed out along the weave of the
Flux outward from that fact to perceive the nature of the ‘tainted’
paralenses, and what they implied.
Vylyrades found that his ability at Matrix perception now also reached
outward in both space and time, amplified a hundredfold, a
thousandfold, and not requiring the usual effort and concentration, he
perceived the local environment, and knew where every soldier on the
battlefield was, on both sides, and who they were, and he could
perceive beyond that, he recognized suddenly the nature of the
Avatars, his friends Zadatharion and Aradel, and when his perception
flashed outward from _that_ starting point he recoiled in awe and fear
from the scale of what was implied and what he perceived.
His mind simultaneously flashed across the physical world, he saw the
Great Isle as a whole, he perceived the great capitol city of
Atlantica, the feuding principalities, despotisms, and other
microstates that had emerged from the breakdown of Atlantean society.
He perceived babies being born and old men dying, and his mind still
flashed outward. Then he perceived something else, his half-
estranged, half-reconciled wife Crynaria, and their young son
Gerodacles, far away in Europe, he _knew_ that they were dwelling in a
small residence in the city to which he’d sent them many months
earlier, he _perceived_ that even in that moment that he stood there
mindbound to Ahkrinor and the Unity, that they were eating a meal in
what seemed to them an ordinary moment of an ordinary day.
While part of his soul ached to join them, most of his awareness
continued to expand, processing floods of information at a rate he
would normally never have been able to achieve even had he the senses
to perceive at such a rate. In some dim part of his mind he knew that
this would rapidly kill him if he kept it up, it was beyond his
physical capacity to keep up the rate of thinking he was engaging in.
That same dim part of him knew that less than one second had passed.
Most of his mind was barely aware of that in that instant of
perception, as his awareness took in the Earth as a planet, and then
his mind perceived something else: directly below the Great Isle, he
perceived the great single Flux-manifestation in his experience. It
was the great ‘seal’ that the Familiar Eldren had used to wall off a
mantle-plume millions of years previously, and thus purely as a side-
effect created the Island of Atlantis. Vylyrades was well-educated
and knew very roughly what a mantle-plume was, though he from an Earth-
sage. Now his supercharged awareness _perceived_ a mantle plume in
all its scale, power, and slowness, following it down into the depths
of the seething, frothing liquid outer core of the planet. He
perceived how the very crust of the Earth was straining under the
stress that was being applied to the Flux, and he perceived how the
magma in the vast chamber below strained against the ‘seal’.
Vylyrades the fluxon also perceived how unstable and shaky that ‘seal’
had become, though in scale the seal was impossibly beyond anything
Vylyrades could ever have created, in principle it was not beyond his
comprehension, he could _perceive_ how shaky it had become, and why,
and now he could perceive that the activation of the Great Project was
straining it as nothing ever had in its previous existence.
Vylyrades also looked ‘forward’ and ‘backward’, not so much out of
desire as simply a consequence of his incredibly, impossibly expanded
perceptions. He surveyed various potential pasts and futures, and in
so doing gained a first-hand understanding of the nature of time,
space, and causality that would not be matched by any Homosentient
again in thousands of years. He also perceived that what would
normally be a vista of nearly endless possible lines of events,
spreading outward from the probability-structure that was the present,
had contracted, compressed, most of the formerly possible future time-
lines were closed now, cut off, in that strange moment only a few
lines of progression into the Future were still possible. Indeed,
this was itself a key part of what enabled this incredible perception.
As he looked ‘backward’, perceiving the intricate, complex chains of
ever-shifting contingency that had led to his moment, Vylyrades wanted
to weep, at the vista of missed opportunities, closed chances, errors
and mistakes and malice that had led to this strange moment.
Vylyrades could now perceive a nearly endless range of possible
alternatives that would have enabled this moment to be avoided, over
the course of many long centuries, all of them now far too late.
Looking ‘forward’, Vylyrades perceived that Ahkrinor and the Unity
were locked together, wrestling for control of the new connection to
the Flux that the Great Project had finally established, the greater
power and ability of the Unity counter-balanced by the ‘leverage’
Ahkrinor gained by its perfect timing, careful preparations, and
possession of the Great Focus to amplify its Flux abilities. In a
matter of seconds, one entity or the other would emerge victorious and
destroy the other, and assume total control of the awesome power that
had been made available by the success of the Great Project.
When Vylyrades ‘gazed’ into the times lines expanding out from that
moment of balance, he would have wept and screamed had he the physical
ability to do so.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Vylyrades peered along the lines of events from the victory of either
contestant, a task made the more complex by the fact that each initial
branching represented, now a single contrasting line of future events,
but expanding contradictory lines of contingent futures, spreading
outward from each of the two possible victories. Each possibility led
to more possibilities which in turn opened an ever-expanding chain of
possible futures spreading out toward infinity.
Vylyrades, however, could perceive all too clearly what almost every
contingency represented in common. Should the Unity win, its psionic
potential, already vast, would be fused with its newborn Flux
abilities, each potentiating the other. The Unity would gain an
approximation of something it had long sought, the ability to expand
itself almost without limit. It would be able to ‘impose’ itself onto
the forming mentalities of unborn children in the wombs of women who
were _not_ part of the Unity, which was the only way it could ‘grow’
up until that time.
Vylyrades ‘saw’ the Unity’s ‘membership’ expand by one, two, three,
four orders of magnitude, over the course of a few coming
generations. As the number of ‘components’ grew so would the power
and intellect and scale of ability of the Unity, in a feedback loop
that would elevate the Flux-active Unity to s scale of power that
would give it world-shaking power, almost _literally_ world-shaking
power. Vylyrades also saw that not every baby would be born into the
Unity’s collective, many would remain ‘single’ humans, but _every_
man, woman, and child in that coming range of futures expanding
outward from the moment of Unity victory would spend his or her entire
life, from before birth until the moment of death, with the Unity
watching them through ESP and Matrix Perception, even the privacy of
their very thoughts open to the Unity’s unblinking, inhuman mental
gaze. No individual would be _permitted_ to grow and learn to the
point that he or she might be able to defy the Unity’s power, such
individuals would be prevented from coming to pass to begin with.
The Unity was already near enough to immortal, now it would be all but
indestructible, and all existence for those humans who remained human,
into the indefinite future, would be an endless existence as helpless
pawns of an inhuman power, reduced to no more than intelligent cattle,
bred for the purposes of their master, with no realistic hope of ever
escaping short of death.
Along the contingent futures emerging from the victory of Ahkrinor, an
entity Vylyrades now completely understood, knowing its past, how it
came to be what it was, even much of its mundane secrets, was a
different fate. The first action of Ahkrinor upon victory would be to
annihilate the Unity, a trivial matter once it was possessed of such
power. Then it would begin ‘breeding’ the intangible entities such as
the one with which it was fused, and it would become the undefeatable
tyrant of a world enslaved, every human being living his or her entire
life as a slave of a master no more human or humane than the Unity,
with no more sympathy, pity, or love than the collective, and given
the nature of the creature and what it hoped to do, and what it would
_able_ to do with access to such Flux power, it was a slavery from
which not even death would necessarily represent escape.
Though both ‘options’ represented an endlessly expanding range of
possibilities, nowhere along that vista out to the limits of
Vylyrades’ perceptions, tens or hundreds of thousands of years into
the Future, did any significant sign of hope or escape appear.
Instead, almost every future line either terminated in catastrophic
disaster or in what appeared to be an ever-worsening waking
nightmare. The sheer scale of suffering Vylyrades perceived in the
futures he ‘gazed’ upon was almost enough to overwhelm him...and he
knew all too well that his offspring and descendants would be _living_
in one of those contingent futures.
In all this moment of near-transcendent perception, Vylyrades was
aware on some level that less than one second had passed since the
Focus had linked himself, Ahkrinor, and the Unity together. It would
be a matter only of seconds more before the contention between the
Unity and Ahkrinor would be settled in victory for one inhuman entity
or the other, but in that moment their influence was checkmated each
by the other, leaving a limited possibility for Vylyrades to
intervene...but his options were limited. He knew he could not hope
to seize full _control_ of the awesome Flux connection the Great
Project had established, he lacked Ahkrinor’s long preparation and had
only a half-grasp on his Great Focus anyway.
Vylyrades, though, was probably the most brilliant mind of his age,
and as he cast his expanded awareness around, he perceived a third
path into the Future leading away from that convergence-point. It
offered at least the possibility of an existence for future humans as
something other than slaves or worse, but the cost of that path was so
high that it left Vylyrades’ soul numb to contemplate it. It was not
a sure thing, by any means...but it was a possibility, and as his cast
his supercharged awareness along that set of contingent sequences, he
saw other possibilities, if success was not a sure thing neither would
be failure. Then his brilliant intellect saw another potential,
another possible option, if he could make it happen...and with the
awareness of time running out, as they entered the third second of
their trance, Vylyrades reached out with his own psionic power of
telepathy, amplified by the preternatural clarity of the moment and
the vast waves of psychic energy pouring through the local volume of
hyperspace.
He cast his mind toward his friend, companion, and ally of many years,
Zadatharion, but it was not the mind of Zadatharion the Avatar he
sought to contact, but something he had perceived _within_
Zadatharion, something vastly older, stronger, greater...and far,
_far_ less human. Normally this effort would have been hopeless, but
that moment and those circumstances were the least _normal_ in
recorded history up until that very moment.
The same conflux of events that Vylyrades had perceived had also
roused the already-nervous and worried Watcher to a level of
consciousness it had not achieved in all the tens of millennia since
the Rival’s trap had engulfed it. Further, millennia of ‘observing’
the human race from within Zadatharion had given the Watcher a certain
perception and recognition of _individual_ humans that the other
Eldren lacked. These two facts made it possible for Vylyrades to
catch the ‘notice’ of the Watcher, just a little, and for Vylyrades to
inform the Watcher of what he intended to do.
It was not a two-way link, Vylyrades asked no permission and sought no
response, but he did point out what he was about to do and what would
likely happen...and then he broke the connection and reached out with
his mind, and with the greatest Flux skills of his generation and his
Age, and grabbed the balanced web of Flux strains that the Unity and
Ahkrinor wrestled for control of, and seized his Focus with an effort
of will greater than anything he had ever exerted in his life before
that moment.
So great was his motivation that he was able to gain control of his
Great Focus, and using it as his tool he did something he could not
have done without it: he reached through the Flux and _intentionally_
disrupted the ‘seal’ below, removing the restraint on the awesome
pressure boiling away below Atlantis.
The effects were immediate...and spectacular.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
It took only an instant to actually _do_ what he did, and as soon as
he did Vylyrades, through his vastly amplified perceptions, 'saw' the
gas-charged, high-pressure magma blast up against the 'roof' of the
magma chamber, the impact of that _alone_ shook the entire Island of
Atlantis, from the North Country to the Hidden Bay in the south. The
earthquake that resulted fractured the rock of the island and the
magma came rushing upward through the cracks, amplifying the quakes
and the cracking process.
Vylyrades perceived buildings falling in every city in Atlantis, he
saw waves beginning to form in the seas around the Island, and he saw
that the process was only going to accelerate. A strange calm came
upon him as he perceived this, however. Having just condemned
millions upon millions of people he had never met and who knew nothing
of him or his causes to death, some part of him found it hard to be
overly concerned with the fact that he himself was very shortly going
to be dead.
In the moments left to him, it occurred to Vylyrades to do a few last
things to, and with, his Great Focus, not firmly in his control.
Ahkrinor and the Unity, who had barely been aware of Vylyrades’
presence in their shared connection, had been so caught by surprise
when Vylyrades acted that Ahkrinor had lost its grip on the Focus, and
it had been the effort of an instant for Vylyrades to hurl Ahkrinor
from their perch with a Flux-bolt. Now, he felt oddly detached from
events as he completed his last work with the Focus.
Aradel...
--------------------
As Aradel fought the eight-limbed monsters and the Unity's guards in
the fluid, three-cornered struggle, part of her mind was on
Zadatharion, as the two Avatars coordinated their forces, but another
part of her mind was on the constantly-mounting Flux stress from the
Great Project, and part of her mind was on Vylyrades, working his way
through the web of girders overhead toward Ahkrinor. She managed to
spare a very occasional glance his way as he made his way toward the
quarry they had pursued for so long, but most of her mind was on
keeping her troops alive in the swirl of battle.
When the ground began to shake, suddenly and abruptly, it cause her
just as much by surprise as it did everyone else, including even
Zadatharion, usually an earthquake set off her innate danger sense at
least some minutes before it began, but this caught her completely by
surprise. The ground rocked and shifted, and a strange, eerie sound
filled the air, a sound unlike anything Aradel had ever heard before
even though she had lived through any number of earthquakes during her
millennia in Atlantis.
The sound was indescribable, it was a sound so low-pitched that the
ear could barely make it out, and yet so loud that it made one’s very
bones vibrate in sympathy. It was a sound of rock sliding against
rock, of stone giving way under pressures beyond anything any stone
could endure, it was a sound of the very ground groaning as if in
terrible pain. The earthquake did not stop, it did not slow, it went
on, and on, and on, as seconds turned into minutes, the ground
continued to shake, and the strange sound filled the air.
It was then that the Ultimate Paralens began to flash and glow in a
way no paralens ever should, and then the immense glassine structure
simply exploded with staggering force, filling the air with countless
tiny shards of broken, shattered golden glass!
As one, Aradel and Zadatharion raised their psychokinetic shields,
protecting themselves and those within their reach against the shower
of shattered glass, even as it flayed the very flesh off the bones of
most of the living things in the area. Most of the Rhaemyi and
Aradel’s little band of companions were within the zone of protection,
but the eight-limbed monsters were slain instantly, as were the
Unity’s guards, its fluxons caught up in the explosion...and the
components of the Unity themselves.
Aradel turned her head just in time to see it happen: hundreds of
Unity components, all assembled in one place as they had not done in
centuries, caught by an explosion and a hurricane of broken glass and
psychokinetic force that mowed most of them down in an instant, many
of them reduced to piles of mangled, broken meat by the impact of
razor-sharp shards moving at near-sonic velocities. In one moment of
broken time, Aradel felt the psychic ‘pressure’ of the Unity’s
presence evaporate away to nothing.
So loud had the explosion been that Aradel’s head was still ringing,
even her protected hearing was somewhat affected by the noise. She
rubbed her eyes, keeping her shield up against the presence of glass
dust in the air, even as she looked frantically around for some escape
route, as the ground continued to shake and rock with a longevity no
normal earthquake had ever possessed.
The Watcher...
--------------------
When the Watcher realized what the human was about to do, it came as
close to panic as it was capable of doing. It was not its own
survival that the Eldren feared for, nothing involved in any of this
was potent enough to harm an Eldren in any significant way. What the
Watcher feared, in much, was a repeat of what had happened not even
seventy million planetary orbits previous, when the Earth, the most
fecund, vibrant, and fascinating of the Solarigen biospheres, the
primary source from which the Familiar Eldren had seeded all their
other experimental Solarigen biospheres, had been utterly devastated.
Along with this frustrated fear was another concern, one that would
have been quite foreign to the Watcher even a few thousand orbits
previous, the Watcher was now much more aware of the perspective of
the tiny tool-using beings of the planet, though it and its fellows
had found such beings fascinating, in both their Helian and Solarigen
manifestations, for half a billion years, it was only in the last few
thousands years that the Watcher had given them much thought as
_individuals_, and with that thought had come a certain distant
empathy. In a way it could not have comprehended only fifty thousand
orbits previous, the Watcher wanted to prevent the loss of the lives
of as many of these beings as it could.
Already the Watcher had managed, by great effort of its drowsy will,
to send a summons to its followers, and to have them pass on a request
from the Watcher to the vastly older Eldren who had laid down the
edict of non-intervention over sixty thousand planetary orbits
previous. Now it reached out again, and with its new driving urgency
it touched the awareness of its waking, free followers and through
them, reached out to the Celestial in question, and they made contact,
though the Celestial was not in any great hurry to consider the
matter. Now the Watcher made what in a Homosentient would be called
an impassioned appeal, nearly a pleading, for a release from the
edict, or at least for a dispensation. It was a torment for the
Watcher, because the Celestial saw no urgency and was in no hurry
whatever. Accustomed to thinking on a scale of billions of Earth
orbits, the Adult’s idea of ‘hurry’ might be measured in geological
periods.
The Watcher, however, once accustomed to the same scale of perception,
was now acutely conscious of the passing _seconds_, the window of
opportunity to salvage something from this situation was not long and
might be no more than a few minutes. Even as the Watcher made its
desperate plea, it felt Vylyrades do exactly what he had said he would
do, and through the physical senses of its Avatar, Zadatharion, the
Watcher felt the inevitable consequences begin to unfold, as the
ground began to shake from the released pressures in the vast magmatic
furnace below.
As the precious seconds ticked by, the Watcher waited...
The NEMESIS base...
--------------------
Still safely concealed in a trench off the eastern coast of Atlantis,
not that far from the inlet that led to the Great Tunnel from the
ocean to Atlantica, the hidden mobile base NEMESIS had established
still remained, doing relatively little, but gathering information
from hither and yon constantly for regular reports to its distant
master. Infiltrator robots in various guises watched Atlantis and the
other continents as well, rarely _doing_ anything but constantly
accumulating information.
Indeed, the nemetic brain had not actually _done_ much to intervene in
Atlantean affairs since the murder of the Eldest. Instead it had
waited and watched, observing the complicated consequences of that one
act, and making regular reports to NEMESIS by careful, safe,
clandestine, but all-too-slow methods. The most recent report had
been sent off and new instructions and updates received by floating
laser-buoy to and from a hidden transceiver in space some five decades
previous, and another was not due for about that length of time.
NEMESIS, and its ‘offshoots’, were nothing if not endlessly patient.
When the seafloor nearby began to tremble, the nemetic brain made a
note of it and otherwise ignored it, such things were routine. When
the faint trembling rose into a full seaquake moments later, the
nemetic brain took notice, put its systems on survival alert, and
braced itself for whatever would befall before the quake came to an
end. As the quake went from seconds to over a minute and continued,
the nemetic brain raised its alert status to the highest level,
cranked up its sensors, and tried to ascertain what might be going
on. It was still in the process of this when a massive landslide came
pouring down the underwater ravine, burying the machine in moments,
and fracturing the temperature-sealed container within which the
cryogenically-cold nemetic brain lived. The entity was granted no
more time to realize its time of existence was over than the Eldest
had received, centuries before.
All over Atlantis, various robotic spies suddenly stopped, their
telemetric control interrupted, and began implementing contingency
programming. Though this might have caused some humans to observe
some very peculiar behavior in certain people and animals, few had
time just then to think about such things.
Nalissaar...
--------------------
Nalisaar was bored. Though she had always loved the Games, ever since
her mother had first taken her to watch them when she was nine years
old, today they seemed dreary. She was not quite sure why, perhaps it
was simply that the slaves fighting today were inept, or unmotivated,
they seemed tired, anyway. With things the way they were, it was hard
to get fresh, healthy slaves for the Games on a regular basis, but
still, that was hardly an excuse for putting on a bad show, and if she
lost money on the wagers again, she was not going to be a cheerful
person to deal with.
Her birthday was approaching, she would be thirty-two, and she was not
sure she wanted to spend it with her current mate. On the other hand,
he might not react well if he found out she was already grooming his
replacement...still, it made life interesting.
Nalisaar looked up, there was a strange sound in the air of Atlantica,
something that she could hear, or almost _feel_, even over the roar of
the crowd in the great Games Arena. It was a sound unlike anything
she was familiar with, and she was still straining to discern it even
as the ground began to shake.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Nalisaar rose to her feet, looking around for one of her family's
slave-messengers. For what must have been the ten thousandth time,
she cursed the strange Static that made it necessary to send a
messenger even to send a message across the stadium. She sighed in
memory of the time, not too many years before, when telepathy worked
so easily. Just as she reached her feet, however, that same Static
suddenly came pouring into her mind, intensifying so much that it
longer merely blocked active use of telepathy and ESP but pressed
itself in upon the living mind, so intensely that Nalisaar had to
close every mental sense, block her entire mind, merely to be able to
think and make the agony stop.
She caught her breath, head still ringing, looking around to see that
the entire audience looked dazed, confused, upset. Only the slaves
fighting on the ground level of the arena seemed unaffected, looking
around at their vast audience in puzzlement. They did not seem to
have been affected at all, but the entire audience, nobles, commoners,
servants and guards, everyone of Atlantean blood, clearly had felt the
sudden surge of Static. Nalisaar realized in confusion that she was
actually not as affected as some other others, many people were now
unconscious, and a few looked as if they might be worse than
unconscious.
Nalisaar was suddenly feeling very afraid, the physical noise remained
in the air and the ground shaking, though not as severe as it had been
moments before, continued, the enormous stadium was well-made but it
was now beginning to come apart, and almost without consciously
deciding to do it Nalisaar found herself running as part of a vast
panicked crowed toward the exits of the huge Great Stadium.
Even as the walls were crumbling around them, the crowd raced for the
exits, anyone falling was trampled, there was no rhyme, no reason,
just the desperate urge to get _out_, their personal psionic and Flux
powers had become useless in the intensity of the Static, they were,
for the first time in their memory, no more powerful than the lesser
peoples they ruled, possessed of no power or perception beyond those
of all humans, which fueled the panic and the chaos.
Nalisaar pushed and shoved with an unaristocratic, unladylike
desperation, and managed to drive her way past a crumbling rampart
into the streets of the Third Circle of the City, mostly by dint of
the fact that her seat had been in an area reserved for high nobles,
near the exits, she emerged before the main press of the crowd
arrived, only to see a sight that caused her to stop dead in wonder
and horror as she emerged into the open. She dimly felt a scream
trying to break out of her heaving chest, but most of her mind was
focused in uncomprehending wonder at the sight she saw once she
emerged from the crumbling Arena.
The city was collapsing around her, even though the ground shaking had
slowed slightly, the buildings had never been designed or constructed
with an earthquake that went on for _minutes_ in mind, but her eyes
were drawn upward to the collapsing sides of the ring of mountains
around the plain, and even more to the sight of the waters of the
Circular Lakes rising, pouring into the streets of the City.
Nalisaar turned to run, but there was nowhere to go, everywhere the
waters were rising, pouring through the Great Tunnel, the sea gates of
which were jammed, broken, useless, the Circular Harbors were turning
into channels for the ocean to pour into the city.
Perhaps it was a mercy that Nalisaar was slain by a slab of falling
masonry before the rising waters finally trapped her atop some last
high point in a drowning city.
The ProtoAthenian Base Camp...
--------------------
The skeleton crews on the ships that had brought the expeditionary
force to Atlantis were too busy keeping their vessels under control to
spare any attention for anything else, a handful of survivors from the
shore encampment had managed to reach one of the ships and get aboard
but none of the vessels had enough control to perform any intentional
rescue work, the ocean was churning and the waters were threatening to
capsize even the largest and best ships ProtoAthens had been able to
put to sea.
It had come suddenly, without any warning, one moment all was quiet
and the next waves of groundshock had begun to wipe out the shore
camps, the ground almost writhing as the conflicting earthquake waves
had arrived, and then the ocean had seemed to come rushing shoreward,
as the local terrain suddenly _sank_.
Twenty-seven ships had been anchored in the sheltered cove near the
base camp, over half of them had been destroyed swiftly, the others,
more fortuitously positioned and with crews who reacted more swiftly,
had managed to cut anchor and start their engines, using psychokinesis
and the Flux as well to drive their ships back from the approaching
sinking shore, at least until the sudden burst of Static had rendered
all paranormal abilities useless. Now, though, some of those ships
had managed their engines up, having been maintaining a head of steam
in the engines as a precaution, and were able to drive outward
sufficiently to enable them to avoid immediate destruction.
Unfortunately, even as the surviving ships struggled to endure, the
world around them appeared to be going utterly mad.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Along with the earthquake and the sinking coastline, the burst of
Static had rendered every paranormal ability useless, only by
completely shutting their minds could any psion function, and attempts
to tap the Flux were futile. Yet the very air tingled with psychic
power, clouds overhead flowed _against the wind_, driven by the Flux
in accordance with impulses no mortal could contain, the waters
twisted and jumped not just from the physical impetus of land and air
but also from less definable but potent sources of force, the Flux
seemed to be running mad.
Even as the surviving ships struggled, unable to aid either the
handful of surviving companions still in the water or each other, one
of them was suddenly shattered into several pieces, by no visible
force.
Southern Atlantis...
--------------------
The battle was over. None of the surviving forces on the field around
the crumbled walls of the what had until a few minutes before been the
central control node of the Great Project were still fighting, though
some still lived. The central facility was now totally undefended,
and none of the former combatants had time to care, all were too busy
merely trying to survive from moment to moment.
Many had been killed by the initial earthquake, and then had come the
blasts of psychokinetic energy as the Ultimate Paralens and then the
lesser paralenses of the central facility had begun to explode, and
then a gale-force wind had risen for no obvious reason, seeming to
come from nowhere and blowing _against_ the direction of motion of the
thickening clouds above, and then the river which flowed through the
area, already swollen with rain from the hurricane, had suddenly
reversed direction as the ocean began to pour up the river, using it
as route to penetrate the southern lowlands. The former field of
battle was now flooding, shallow yet but still coming, and panic had
set in among all the combatants.
The Watcher...
--------------------
The Watcher, more nearly ‘awake’ than at any time in thousands of
years, observed in horror as the sequence of events continued to
unfold, precisely as it had feared, the pressure of the magma below
and the incredible strain on the Flux already conspiring to produce
catastrophe. The Watcher observed volcanic eruptions beginning to
occur along the central spine, spreading southward just as the Great
Eruption of months before had done. Indeed, the pattern was repeating
_because_ the previous Great Eruption had left a particular pattern of
crustal weakness behind, now faced with far greater pressure.
The east coast of Atlantis had subsided slightly in the initial
reaction, the subsidence had paused, though tsunamis were certainly in
motion already, and the Watcher knew that the catastrophe was only
starting, by any measure. Every second that passed was begrudged by
the ancient being now, as it waited impatiently for a decision from on
high.
Zadatharion...
--------------------
Zadatharion’s memories went back over ten thousand years, and never in
all that time could the Avatar remember feeling as utterly, completely
helpless as he did in that moment.
He, Aradel, and those of the Rhaemyi assault force who still lived
were gathered atop a hill of rubble and broken metal and junk, along
with a smattering of the Unity’s forces and ProtoAthenian
expeditionary men, all former quarrels forgotten for the moment as
they sheltered behind the combined psychokinetic shields of Aradel and
Zadatharion. The burst of Static that had stripped everyone else of
their psionic power had left the Avatars able to function, albeit
painfully, the Static continued to ‘roar’ silently, but the Avatars
had enough discipline, experience, and native power to function in
spite of it...for a little while yet, anyway.
It was only a matter of time, though, because the Static was weakening
the two Avatars and the forces they were defending against were only
mounting up. The ground continued to shake periodically with varying
force, making the unstable hillock of shattered rubble shift under
their feet, weakening their concentration, and the waters around the
rubble pile were rising. Both the river flowing down from the
foothills and the ocean waters coming up the riverbed were meeting in
this lowland area, and the situation looked grim.
The North Country...
--------------------
The volcano had been quiet for months, since the Great Eruption had
calmed, now it had burst forth anew, great pyroclastic clouds rolling
down its flanks, larger and more deadly even than the ones from the
previous year, and now the entire western side of the mountain began
to slide, as if some great force had broken the mountain in twain, and
from its exposed interior came an eruption of such force that
everything for twenty-five miles to the west was leveled in a matter
of minutes. Entire towns, that had survived the previous year’s
activity by a hair, were wiped away, blasted down to their
foundations, by the force of the eruption, rivers that had managed to
begin to flow again clogged new, tens of thousands of people lost
their lives in a few minutes.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
To the east, the few remaining operational ports in the North Country
offered no escape, because even as the first explosions were tearing
out the side of the northernmost volcano of the Central Spine, the
tsunami from the coastal subsidence to the south came rushing in,
turning the harbors into death traps and destroying or occasionally
beaching the very few available ships. Only those aeremes able to get
into the air before the eruption were still in motion, and the
constantly shifting, changing gale-force winds and mounting storms hat
seemed to boiling out of nowhere threatened the survival or those from
moment to moment.
Atlantica...
--------------------
A handful of people watched, unable to do anything else, from the
paradoxical safety of an inhabited mountain ledge far above the level
of the central plain. The great ring of mountains had long been
marked by a handful of level areas overlooking the central plain,
inhabited by hardy souls who cherished a certain amount of isolation.
Most of those ledges were gone now, having slid tumbling down to the
valley floor during the incredible earthquake and subsidence, but a
few remained, and on one, still perched precariously over five hundred
meters above the valley floor, a handful of inhabitants looked down at
an amazing sight.
The ocean had come pouring into the city through the Great Tunnel, and
from their high vantage they could see as the collapsing, wrecked city
began to turn into a single great lake, and in the distance beyond,
where the valley opened onto the coast, the ocean had extended a great
tongue above ground as well, spilling into the circular irrigation
canal that encircled the rich farmland of the central plain, which was
now half-flooded. More imposing even than that, however, was the red-
white glow that marked the appearance of lava in the collapsing, flood
city of Atlantica.
There was really no way to flee from their high ledge, the old road
that descended to the valley floor was long gone, and with the
continuing quakes, either staying or going seemed to offer the same
chances. Still, human nature is what it is, and those who could tear
their eyes from the spectacle below were trying to climb down to the
remaining remnants of the road. There was a kind of person who never
stopped trying as long as a breath remained in their bodies.
Base camp...
--------------------
Three ships remained intact and under some measure of control, and
they were steaming outward, away from Atlantis as hard as their
laboring engines could manage. Miraculously, a handful of survivors
from the other ships and the shore had managed to get aboard the
escaping ships, but only a handful. There was nothing the surviving
ships could do for their fellows, it was by no means clear that they
would survive themselves, but there was nothing to be done but try.
The Watcher...
--------------------
The Watcher was beginning to wonder if the Celestial had completely
forgotten the request, seconds had turned into minutes and now into
hours, and the disaster was beginning to unfold in earnest. When the
response finally came, it had a tone of ‘oh all right’, and a distinct
edge of impatience to it, but the Adult _had_ authorized action, and
the moment the word came, the Watcher gave the order to its followers
assembled and waiting.
An asteroidal body circling Sol b...
--------------------
The Familiar Eldren had been assembled, waiting, near their chosen
asteroid, itself orbiting the brown dwarf that was Sol’s dark,
miniature companion in the galactic night. They had been assembled
and waiting for some Earth years now, waiting on the off-chance that
permission might be granted to assist the Watcher. Few of them really
believed this permission was going to come, and when it did the
assembled Eldren were actually caught by surprise, they lost almost
ten seconds before they realized that assent had been given. Once
they realized that they were free to act, at least for the moment,
however, they wasted no more time, and the trip from Sol b to Earth
took them no more than the blink of a Homosentient eye!
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The Familiar Eldren arrived on Earth, allowed to approach so close for
the first time in close to seven millennia, to find that their
primary, original Solarigen biosphere was on the verge of a total,
complete disaster on a scale not to be matched since the end of the
Cretaceous Period. The several hundred Eldren immediately set to work
trying to prevent the situation from escalating any further out of
control, a task which was made the more complex by the extreme
_delicacy_ at issue.
The last time the biosphere of the planet Earth was so threatened,
immediately after the impact of the Dinosaur Killer sent by their
unknown opponent, they arrived slightly too late to prevent most of
the damage, they could only try to clean up the mess. This time,
though, they arrived at the _beginning_ of the mass extinction event,
which meant they had a chance to prevent the worst of the damage, _if_
they could balance the necessary factors of speed, decisiveness, and
delicacy.
The Watcher...
--------------------
The Watcher was helpless to lead the Familiar Eldren, as it normally
would have done. Still trapped in near-somnolescence by the Rival’s
misfired trap, the Watcher had expended most of its current ability to
focus is making its appeal to the Celestials and then in directly its
followers into action. Now, it could only issue a last few general
instructions to them, and then trust to the skill and judgement of its
lieutenants to carry them out, and hope for the best.
In the meantime, with the last of its fading consciousness and will,
the Watcher turned its attention to a matter it _could_ still do
something about, the issue of its Avatar. The Watcher had used many
such synthetically-formed biological beings as its ‘eyes and hands’
since the Rival had trapped it, but it had grown rather fond of this
one, and it would be a great deal of work to create a new one...and of
late, it had begun to develop a certain empathy for these tiny,
ephemeral beings, a certain level of sympathy. The Watcher felt it
ought to at least make an effort, before it was forced back to sleep.
Aradel...
--------------------
The water was almost up to the level of their feet, and Aradel herself
was on her hands and knees from sheer exhaustion. The Static simply
continued to intensify, almost as if it were rising toward infinity,
and her powers were fading, exhaustion pushing, and her fellow Avatar,
toward a state of final exhaustion. She was aware that she could not
keep up her part of the protective barrier more than a few more
minutes, and she was sure that her fellow Avatar was in little better
straits. When that shield failed...Aradel knew none of them could
last more than a few seconds under these insane conditions.
The winds were howling with hurricane force now, and changing
direction at random every few moments, driven by the Flux as it
spasmed and shook in reaction to the impossibly complex phenomena now
interacting under, over, and around the Island of Atlantis. Rain
dropped from the clouds in vertical floods, adding to the flow from
the river and the ocean. The ground no longer shook so much as
rocked, rolled, twisted, what psychokinetic power she and Zadatharion
had to spare from their shield was being used up keeping their
unstable mound of rubble from collapsing out from under them, and
still the water rose. To make matters worse, if the Static continued
to intensify, soon their very minds would begin to collapse under the
force of it, as surely as if they had been struck by some overwhelming
telepathic attack.
The Sun had probably set some time before, Aradel thought dazedly,
though there was no way to be sure with the thick cloud cover, it
would have seemed just as dark whether the Sun shone above or not.
They were in utter, pitch darkness, or would have been save that there
was lightning. Lightning! Sheets of lightning, rivers of electrical
fury pouring across the sky with a brilliance such as Aradel had never
seen in thousands of years of memory, cascading blazes of lightning
that turned impenetrable darkness into a scene lit like a nightmare by
blue-white blasts of radiance coming so quickly as to be almost
constant.
When a bolt of that lightning rippled from sky to ground, it blasted
out _craters_ in whatever solid ground it touched, or generated great
clouds of steam when it struck water. Aradel knew that even one
direct or near hit by such lightning, in those sodden conditions,
would instantly overwhelm their shield and kill them all in a blink of
an eye. Under such conditions, exhausted as they were, she knew she
and Zadatharion could not hope to repel such a torrent of energy.
The noise? How to describe such noise? It was a banshee wail of
every hurricane ever to blow, a grinding rumble of every earthquake
ever to shake the land, it was a roar the filled not just the air but
the water and the land and that made every solid object vibrate, it
was a sound that actually made thinking, feeling, even breathing
difficult, a sound that would _itself_ have been dangerous if not for
their fading protective shield.
Then, in the distance to what she suspected dimly was the North, came
another light, dim at first, but growing brighter. It was a red-white
light, a hot glow that she took several moments to place in her foggy
exhaustion. It was the peculiar sort of light that marked the
emergence of lava. The volcanoes to the north were erupting, not with
great pyroclastic surges as they had done a year before, but with
rivers of lava.
‘If this is the end of the world,’ Aradel thought blearily, ‘at least
it’s putting on a show for us as it does!’
Then she actually giggled, drawing incredulous looks from the
terrified people around her, at her own inane, if not indeed insane,
thought. Idly a part of her wondered if she _was_ going insane,
certainly this was the appropriate time, if there had ever been such a
thing. She gasped for air after her giggle, the effort of that little
sound had taken a great deal of what remained of her strength.
“Zad,” she said, “h-how long do you think we have left?”
Her compatriot, who had been sitting back-to-back with her, bracing
their shield with her, made no answer, in fact, he seemed to have
stopped moving entirely, sitting there still as a statue.
“Zad?” Aradel asked again, raising her voice as much as her remaining
strength would permit, which brought it up to barely more than a
whisper. “You still with me?”
She knew he had to be, because their shield was still, just barely,
holding. Without his help, it would be gone, and with it them.
Still, he was not responding to her words or motions. At all.
“Come on, Zad,” Aradel managed to get out over the howl of the wind
and the rain and the lightning, “if this is our last few moments, at
least talk to me!”
For a moment she thought he was not going to respond, and began to
wonder if even he had lost it, his mind broken, a thought she found
scarcely credible. She had known him for centuries, and she was quite
sure that anything that could break him would break her first. In
fact, she had never met _anyone_ she believed had as much sheer will
as Zadatharion. Still, his did seem to have gone catatonic, if not
for the fact that he was still holding up his part of their combined
shield, she would have been sure of it.
Then, suddenly, Zadatharion did speak, but when he did his voice
sounded strange, it was his voice, all right, but at the same time it
was somehow indefinably _different_, calmer, even colder, perfectly
inflected without a hint of feeling or imprecision. It was also
_stronger_ than Zadatharion’s voice had been in hours, without a trace
of fear, anxiety, or nervousness.
“Everyone get ready,” he intoned, “in a few moments a psi-gate is
going to open, and if you want to live, you _have_ to get through it,
it’ll only be open for a few moments and then it’ll be gone and if
you’re still on this side when it does you are _dead_.”
Aradel gasped, and gaped in shock and disbelief. Perhaps he _had_
gone mad!
Then, to her stunned amazement, the darkness was broken, not by the
blue-white flame of the impossibly great lightning flashes and not by
the hot glow of some new tongue of lava, but instead by a cool sparkle
of polochromatic light, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand brilliant
pinpoints of rainbow color, emerging from a single point in the midst
of the tiny group and expanding into a swirling circle of light, and
within that ring of light appeared a dimly-lit forest of fir trees!
She gaped for an instant, before the realization penetrated her nearly-
numb brain that Zadatharion had been right, and she screamed, “GO!
Get through it before it closes!”
The survivors staggered toward the circle, stumbling through it,
running through it, a couple had to be dragged through it, Aradel
wanted to cross it herself so badly she hurt with it, but she made
herself wait, until the less physically-capable were through it, and
then she headed for it, and in the moment of passing through it she
fell to the ground in exhaustion, amid the water that came through the
gate after her, and finally, last of all, even as the gate was
beginning to collapse, Zadatharion stepped calmly through as if
nothing of any significance were occurring.
The gate collapsed almost the moment Zadatharion was through it...and
he immediately passed out on the ground, utterly and completely
unconscious.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Aradel was not in much better shape, she lay on the sodden ground,
gasping for air, her head aching and every muscle hot with pain from
exhaustion, in order to cross the psi-gate she and Zadatharion had
been force to release their protective psychokinetic shield, and in
the couple of seconds of exposure to the insane elements in southern
Atlantis she had been battered by hail, soaked by nearly solid rain,
and forced to use what tiny bit of psychokinetic power she had left
just to make the few steps to the gate. Now, as she lay in the calm
damp air of a coniferous forest, the dim light of early day filtering
down, she was unable even to focus her eyes as the world spun around
her.
The Familiar Eldren...
--------------------
The Familiar Eldren faced an _enormous_ challenge, what had the real
potential to be a full-bore mass extinction event had already _begun_,
and it involved multiple cross-connecting factors. The first and
simplest aspect of the matter was that the geological foundations of a
small island-continent had been destabilized, promising an imminent
geological disaster on a global scale. At the same time, the Flux was
running insane above, on, and within the planet Earth, centuries of
conflicting strains now being reacted to after the triggering event of
the release of the ‘seal’ on the sub-Atlantean magma chamber.
Like a chain of falling dominoes, each new event triggered additional
events, and the rate of activity was climbing exponentially. The
Eldren could not repeal conservation of energy, the energy that had
been and was continuing to be released into the Earth’s geophysical
system _had_ to reach some kind of equilibrium, all they could hope to
do was distribute the problem in such a way as to reduce the impact.
Even as the Familiar Eldren were assessing the global situation and
putting together their plan, a task that took them only a few seconds
of intense telepathic, photonic, and other exchanges, the terrible
final act of Atlantean Civilization was being written. The wildly
churning Flux was raising two huge ‘storm surges’, driven not by wind
but by psychokinetic force, one coming in from the east and one from
the west, converging on the Island with unstoppable power.
What happened as these terrible waves of water and psychic force
converged was one of the most complex paranormal events in history, it
would literally be thousands of years before another convergence, this
one of mundane and paranormal physics, psychology, physiology,
neurology, and many other disciplines would even begin to be able to
describe what happened in Atlantis on that nightmarish day.
From the point of view of the surviving inhabitants of the Great Isle,
the dynamics of the matter were of no importance, what mattered was
the physical manifestation of the phenomena: two great waves, rising
out of the Atlantic on either side of the Isle, and driving inward,
ever inward, to distances that friction should have made impossible,
driven forward by the Flux, more and ever more water coming from
behind the front of the wave, until at last the front washed against
the lower foothills of the central spine of the Island.
Then the great waves retreated, the ocean dropping back as the power
of the Flux withdrew from it, leaving behind incomprehensible
devastation, an Island nearly scoured clean of life. Over seventy-
five million people died that day, as the Island that was the very
center of Antediluvian Civilization drowned.
Yet these were very special people in their way, compared to the
peoples of the other lands. The product of thousands of years of semi-
intentional selective breeding for psionic ability, growing up in a
culture in which psionics were as natural as breathing, where toddlers
learned telepathy and psychokinesis at the same time they learned to
walk, when forming telepathic gestalts was routine for ten year olds,
there were potentials here that existed nowhere else in the world.
In the chaos, fear, terror, and unique physical and paraphysical
conditions of that time, the Atlantean population, already half-linked
by centuries of forming and joining gestalts and routine telepathic
communication, did something unique: they formed a subconscious but
nearly universe telepathic gestalt. In terms of their survival this
mattered little, not even their combined psychokinetic power could
have matched the needs of the moment, the forces at play were far
beyond even their abilities. Still, various interesting things did
happen as a result of this fusion of minds, which we shall see.
In the moment, though, the population of Atlantis had been wiped out,
drowned, battered, swept into the ocean by the Flux-driven super-
waves. Only a tiny fraction of a percent of the population, in the
highlands of the eruption volcanic spine, endured the flooding of
Atlantis, above the level reached by the waves. These few were
contending with hurricane-force winds, sudden volcanic eruptions on a
scale and intensity never seen before in the history of the Island,
earthquakes, and strange paraphysical phenomena. Still, of the
handful of survivors who escaped from the Island on their own,
paradoxically more of them survived from the mountains than the
coasts.
Still, less than twenty-four hours after the beginning of the whole
chain of events, Atlantis was dead.
The Familiar Eldren...
--------------------
One team of Eldren descended into the Earth, teleporting themselves
directly into the gargantuan magma chamber that was the foundation of
the Island of Atlantis. There, they began working to restrain the
pressure, cooling the rock, dissipating the heat, but they had to send
the thermal energy and pressure somewhere else. They distributed the
energy along the network of plate boundaries around the planet, where
other Eldren waited, aiding the effort, and they radiated some of the
energy into space, and some into the seas, and some into the
atmosphere, spreading it out so that instead of a single biosphere-
devastating explosive energy release, instead the energy was spread
out across the world more gently.
Another group of Eldren ignored the physical effects and focused on
calming the roiling Flux, reducing the wild, random psychokinetic
manifestations that were wracking the world. As they worked, the
effects calmed, and again, were spread out, so that many small effects
manifested around the planet rather than a few gigantic ones. As the
Flux calmed, more and more of this group joined their fellows working
to restrain the physical disaster from becoming a mass extinction
event.
As the Eldren worked, the entire world felt the effects of the altered
disaster. Volcanoes erupted all over the world, every major fault-
line shook, huge chunks of ice broke free from the polar caps, larger
than than they are now. The magnetic field of the Earth was affected,
and aurorae exploded through the skies of the entire planet, the
northern and southern lights spectacularly visible from the tropic
zone, where thick clouds and mad weather permitted the skies to be
seen at all.
The energy pumped into the atmosphere and hydrosphere had its effects,
the weather rose world-wide with insane fury. Even though the Eldren,
under the Watcher’s order, worked to minimize the effects where they
could, the coasts were still battered by the greatest tsunamis the
world had known in recorded history.
In North America, a vast volcanic mountain that had been quiet for
ages exploded with enough force to shower the entire region with ash,
leaving a huge caldera in its place. In a later age, this mountain
would be known as ‘Mazama’. To the east, a vast lake, trapped by an
ice dam, was released when the constant quakes and the other forces in
play released the dam, sending a flood racing westward that would
carve grooves and channels in the land that would be a wonder to
geologists in a later age.
In Europe, the vast swamps and marshes that stretched from the chalk
cliffs of what would one day be England and the fertile lands of what
would eventually be France had long been a source of a living for
locals, rich with wildlife and useful plants. Now the ocean came
rushing in, creating what a later age would call the North Sea and the
English Channel. In what would one day be Italy, eruptions tore
entire volcanic mountains asunder, Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli, and
others blasted immense clouds of ash and dust into the atmosphere over
the course of a few weeks.
In Antarctica, several volcanoes erupted beneath the ice, some
blasting through to the surface, some melting out under-surface
bubbles of water.
Volcanoes rumbled and exploded across the vast chain of islands that
would someday be Indonesia, entire islands were devastated, still more
tsunamis swept outward across both the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Hour after hour, day after day, it went on and on and on, as the
Familiar Eldren struggled to restrain the expanding disaster, and in
the end, after tremendous efforts, the Familiar Eldren
succeeded...from their point of view. They managed to transform what
would have been the greatest mass extinction since the end-Cretaceous
into a ‘mere’ world-wide supercatastrophe by human standards.
The actual Cataclysm lasted, from the beginning when Vylyrades
intentionally triggered it until the time when the oceans were again
calm, the skies clearing, the winds and rain reduced to normal levels,
the ground no long quaking, he volcanoes quieting, the worst of the
paranormal manifestations ceasing, just about fourteen days. When the
Familiar Eldren finished, the Earth was again relatively calm, though
it would be centuries before a real equilibrium finally settled in.
In the midst of the Atlantic Ocean, the Island still existed...in a
manner of speaking.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
To say that the Cataclysm was over is slightly misleading, however.
From the point of view of the Eldren, the primary threat of mass
extinction was over after fourteen days, but to the surviving humans
the nightmare continued. Vast reaches of the world were devastated,
on every continent. Atlantis itself was now totally uninhabited,
scoured down to bedrock, and still slowly sinking as the Eldren
drained the vast magma chamber below the Island. Elsewhere, rivers
were swollen to many times their natural size, or else drying out as
their water was removed. Lakes had drained and new ones formed, and
the very climate was different now, alternating between immoderate
cold and searing heat, flooding rains and killing drought.
The Familiar Eldren had not been given permission to act freely. They
had only a few hundred orbits of the planet Earth around its primary
before the edict of nonintervention was restored. In that time,
guided by the will of the barely-awake Watcher, the Eldren had to
restore Earth’s balance sufficiently that it would remain on track
once they were out of the equation once again.
In truth, by the previous standards of the Familiar Eldren, the only
thing that _had_ to be done to put the mostly intact Terran biosphere
into a ‘safe zone’ was the removal of the sealed mantle-plume that lay
under Atlantis. As such things went, this one was _tiny_, without
previous Eldren intervention it would have created, at most, a tiny
island smaller than Iceland. Now, the Familiar Eldren worked deep
within the Earth, rerouting this plume, drawing its heat away from the
surface and dissipating it throughout the immense mass of the Earth.
As this happened, the bulge of crust which had held Atlantis above the
surface of the sea began to subside, and the waters slowly engulfed
the Island, which the Eldren proceeded to ‘dismantle’ as part of their
plan to reroute the ocean currents and to rebalance the distribution
of mass on the Earth’s crust to help suppress the remaining after-
effects of the Cataclysm.
Five centuries after the Cataclysm, Atlantis, as a land mass, had
ceased to exist. The Familiar Eldren restored the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
to an approximation of the state it would have held had they never
intervened in its substructure to begin with. They proceeded with
care to make sure their impact on the shaky climate and ocean-state
was minimal, though some side-effects along the coasts were
inevitable. [1]
The rest of what the Familiar Eldren did was mostly because of the
Watcher’s newfound, if very distant, empathy for mortal humanity.
During their period of activity on Earth, the Familiar Eldren ‘cleaned
up’ much of the aftermath of the Cataclysm. The damage done by
volcanic activity, superstorms, earthquakes and superfloods and the
other damage of the Cataclysm was in much reversed, the healing of the
biosphere that would normally have taken tens or hundreds of thousands
of years was reduced to a few centuries.
By the time the Edict was restored and the Familiar Eldren had to
retreat back to the perimeter, Earth was in many ways healed from the
damage through their intervention. Many scars remained, but they were
such that natural processes could repair much of it in a relatively
few more centuries.
For the humans, though, the centuries after the Great Cataclysm were a
horrific time even so. A global population of well over a billion had
been reduced, first by the Cataclysm and then by the aftermath, to
several tens of millions. A civilization had perished, the energies
released into the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere had
destroyed entire cities so completely that there was _nothing_ left
recognizable as the work of Man in some places, and in other places
the Flux had, during its strange rampage, focused on population
centers more than wilderness and rural areas.
The survivors of the Cataclysm and the period of starvation, thirst,
predation, disease, and chaos found themselves without tools,
equipment, or knowledge, in a hostile world, still filled with the
after-effects, physical and paraphysical, of the Cataclysm. Life in
those centuries was one long, unending struggle to survive, just
survive, and almost the entire multi-millennia legacy of the
Antediluvian Age was forgotten, save for some confused legends and
stories that rapidly degenerated into pure myth and folk tale.
But about that, and the other after-effects of the Cataclysm (of which
there were many), are the subject of another coming thread.
The END (of this thread)
[1] That the Eldren could do such a thing is one indication of just
how powerful they are.