User:Voldemore/Luther Arkwright

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An overview of the Arkwright cosmology

"There is not one infinite universe, instead there are an infinite number of universes: a multiverse."

Those were Karl Marx's first words to the Scientific Assembly of Munich in 1882. I think that the media described the implications as "far-reaching".

My father told me that some people panicked, thinking that we were about to be invaded at any moment. On the whole, the entire world was stunned. I don't think that many people had more than a shakey idea of what Marx meant by "probability valency", "shell perception" and all the rest. There was a lot of speculation and debate. I remember my grandmother insisting that it was all a hoax, especially after what Orson Welles did...

Mind you, that all changed when the final proofs came through. By the end of 1888, at the World Fair in Paris, we all had to accept that ours was but one of an infinity of Earths.

Yet what did they hold? What were they like? Were there Earths where the dinosaurs still ruled, where the Holy Roman Empire still held sway? Others where life had never evolved?

The truth of it, when we were at last able to perceive it, was beyond out wildest imaginings and our darkest nightmares.

The myriad parallel Earths are separated from each other not by space or time, but by a dimension the Karl Marx of ZeroZero termed "probability valency".

These Earths are all the echoes of the same basic blueprint. Each co-exists in time. Most co-exist in space; some occupy slightly different orbits, or are at a different point in their orbit. The latter two classes of Earth are extremely rare, most share identical astronomical features, or Core Position as it is termed on ZeroZero.

Each Earth is different in some fashion from the rest. There are some that have never known Humankind, and where this is the case there has never risen another lifeform of comparable intelligence to Humanity. This was a fact of considerable annoyance to a number of ZeroZero's evolutionary theorists.

Across the parallels inhabited by Humankind there are many variations of history. Almost all share the Eastern or Euro-Asian continent as the cradle of whatever civilisation they have. Beyond this, the variation in culture, language, social development and human psychology is too slight, within the massive breadth of probabilities, to be entirely coincidental.

The Earth known as ZeroZero developed along one of the five standard historical templates. Rising to a Middle Ages which saw the rapid growth of the Holy Roman Empire, the Germanic states were strongly united in an unusually coherent and effective alliance. Their rulers, and later the World Emperors, maintained a continuity of lineage and policy for nearly five centuries. Dominated by this Empire neither England, Spain or France developed into major powers. The Ottoman Empire briefly opposed the Holy Roman Empire; the resulting Thirty Years' War served only to sharpen the technological revolution begun by Gutenberg and the medieval alchemists. Through a lengthy process of war and diplomacy the Empire rose to world domination. By the end of the seventeenth century the "Boy Emperor", Frederick X, the puppet of a decadent and glittering court, held sway over the entire globe.

There had, during the Empire's long climb towards misrule, been another power rising. Science had been slowly assimilated, over the last two centuries, as the religion of the masses. The Futurist Renaissance with its new ideals, its reappraisal of the world in the light of scientific thought, and its contempt for the old doctrine and dogma (in which the rule of the Emperor was enshrined) was the movement of the people. And, more importantly, that of the military as well.

The world-wide military coup, the execution of Frederick and his court, followed by the establishment of a dictatorship based on the principles of the Advancement of Science was inevitable, merciless, and brief. "I am the Son of Scientific Thought", declared the first World Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, when the world was finally brought under the Futurists' rule in 1802.

The science of this Earth grew by leaps and bounds, unfettered by the socio-religious prejudice usual on other parallels. By 1800 John Dalton had perfected his Theory of Relativity. By 1820 a man and woman had set foot upon the Moon. In 1850 world poverty and famine had been abolished.

And, working quietly in London, the mathematical genius Karl Marx was progressing towards a discovery which would change his world. He was constructing a mathematical model, at first of the universe, then of the "multiverse" his equations predicted. In 1881 he had his proof. Later, he proposed the annotation system still used on ZeroZero to designate different continua. His own Earth was taken as a norm, thus 00-00-00 for ZeroZero; so 00-01-00 and 00-00-01 would be flanking parallels, one unit of "probability valency" removed, and so forth.

Marx announced his discovery to an Earth much changed from the Iron Rule of Science. Over the last century, the dictatorship had mellowed into benevolent rule. In 1900, this dictatorship and the powers of the World Consul were dissolved by the Athens accord and the World Government was established. ZeroZero had become the first technologically advanced Earth to live in harmony with itself, freed from cultural and religious dogma.

One of the first acts of this new administration was to initiate the "Valhalla Programme" to monitor parallel worlds and observe the predicted fluctuation of historical trends. London was chosen to be the site of the giant "Valhalla Nova" complex, built to house the most advanced technology of the time and the specialists the project required. The hyper-computer W.O.T.A.N. was an integral part of the structure. W.O.T.A.N. was designed to scan the continua, to correlate, analyse and display information on the status of the parallel worlds.

That ZeroZero had the technology to do this is unsurprising. The means of reaching other parallels lay in the careful nurturing of psychic and paranormal research; seen and developed as a true science on ZeroZero since the 1830s. By the early 1900s on ZeroZero the ability of certain human minds to hook into and use psionic energy was a well established fact. Furthermore, methods of developing and enhancing psi abilities had been carefully nurtured. One of the most astonishing finds was the discovery of the "empathic link". Psychics with this talent could, through various techniques, monitor and on rare occasions communicate with their "alternative selves" on other parallels. Other psychics could use psychometric techniques to scan other parallels; techniques which were at first augmented by W.O.T.A.N. and then duplicated by the hyper-computer.

In the long, hot summer of 1905 the Valhalla Nova complex became fully operational. The surrounding parallels were scanned; the information received was split into basic social and cultural indices. These were then compared to the sample indices generated by W.O.T.A.N.'s predictions.

The results came nowhere near what was expected.

Previous theory had concluded that the variation across Human- inhabited parallels would be enormous. Instead, W.O.T.A.N. demonstrated that socio-historical variation fell within 30% on the Marx-Oppenheimer index of ZeroZero's history across a set of one thousand "neighbouring" parallels.

This was, of course, improbable in the extreme. For example, the odds against the simultaneous adoption of the Gregorian calendar, across these sample parallels, was calculated at approximately 735 000 to 1 against. Yet only five parallels were not using the Gregorian calendar by whatever name it was known. There had to be an outside force acting on the parallels. W.O.T.A.N. chose to fall the effects of this force "Disruption", and before long had proved to its satisfaction (95.5% probability) the existence of the "Disruptors".

Initially it seemed that every parallel exhibited some shade of Disruptor activity; even ZeroZero. The considerable panic this engendered was used to justify the the expansion and rebudgeting of the Valhalla Nova complex. Fortunately the continued research demonstrated that this "shadow" of Disruptor activity was exactly that, for it emerged that there were parallels occupying "probability foci" (also termed "psi-matrix nodes") and that any disturbance on these focal points was echoed by similar disturbances on the "shadowed" parallels.

Two things were swiftly demonstrated by this new information. First, Disruptor activity had been and was being co-ordinated across these focal parallels. Second, ZeroZero occupied a strangely stable position in the Multiverse.

The first period of research into other parallels (1905 to 1928) ended when the psi-section was brought fully onto stream with the rest of Valhalla Nova. The next few years saw the difficult work of setting up "field operations" on those parallels that could be reached via the empathic link. By 1930 Valhalla Nova had four hundred and sixty-two psychics with the empathic link, each in contact with between three to twenty alternative selves. The taxing work of achieving full communication, then persuading what was very often a most frightened individual to work for ZeroZero could take years. The first "field agent" was Margaret Bondfield of 28-00-35, a citizen of the French Imperial Estates-General, recruited in 1924. Other Margaret Bondfields followed on other parallels until, by 1930, there were fourteen active Bondfields; two of whom succeeded to government in a ministerial or consular capacity on their respective (British Empire and Roman Republic) parallels.

By this time a considerable body of information on Disruptor activity had been assimilated. ZeroZero now had the insights into the respective histories, modes, and means of Disruptor campaigns across a huge number of parallels. Unfortunately, a goodly amount of this information was highly speculative; furthermore the patterns of Disruptor activity often seemed contradictory.

Analysis of the few thousand parallels available to ZeroZero through the empathic link showed numerous patterns of common historical perception. Whereas psychometric scans of certain parallels revealed that their history, usually up to the sixth through to the eighth centuries, had been manifestly different, it soon appeared that the Disruptors had rewritten, or grafted on, the history of the parallels at least twice in recent centuries. The first and greatest remoulding of the "perception of the past" had taken place between 550 and 700AD. The second was during the years 1500 to 1800AD, centuries that saw a rapid turn around from the period of the "witch-hunting craze" (common to most parallels) to a period of scientific discovery and enlightenment on some parallels but of philosophical and scientific repression on others. Whatever they were doing, for whatever reason, it was certain that the Disruptors had engineered wars, coups d'etat, plagues, peace treaties, scientific discoveries, industrial and philosophical revolutions, assassinations, autocracies, alliances, reformation, decline and renaissance for over a thousand years. Some theorists argued that their influence could stretch back all the way to the beginning of human society. The majority, however, settled on the fourth and fifth centuries as those in which the Disruptors became established.

ZeroZero came to recognise most of the Disruptors' work carried out by indigenous agents. Of these, the key agents usually occupied positions of power on their native parallel, typically as heads of state or religion, or as "powers behind the throne". They received their instructions through either empathic link, or, increasingly since the end of the nineteenth century, through sophisticated communications terminals.

Rather to ZeroZero's surprise, it emerged that most of these agents were dupes. The Disruptors would deliberately manipulate their agents' perceptions, so that only a few knew of the existence of other Earths. Moreover, the they represented themselves in several different lights, so that their exact nature was still a matter for conjecture. The Disruptors' influence on these native agents (called "Bishops" by ZeroZero) could often be traced back over several centuries.

A technique of Disruptor "first contact" emerged. The Disruptors would begin by representing themselves as a powerful, though secret, organisation sympathetic to their chosen agent's cause, convictions or ambition. Where the agent's social or personal background made it possible this would be couched in quasi- religious or mystical terms, where scope exists for extensive psychic manipulation.

The newly recruited Bishop would then be aided in the establishment of a much-expanded power-base. Where possible, existing social groups were used as fronts, be they political, religious, corporate or criminal. ZeroZero agents often had the frustrating task of trying to locate which secret society, out of several "native" ones, a Disruptor Lodge was hidden in.

The Bishop would first recruit further agents to work for the Disruptors. These would be formed into an Inner Council, the only Lodge members aware of the Disruptors' existence. Immediately below that, an Elite was organised, who believed the Bishop and the Inner Council to be the masters of the Lodge. Finally, there was usually a rank and file, controlled by the elite or members of the Council. These "ordinary" members made up the largest proportion of most lodges; their exact organisation and knowledge about the Lodge layout varied form parallel to parallel.

Once a Bishop's power-base, together with its dependence on and loyalty to the Disruptors, had been firmly established (usually within the passage of a generation) the Disruptors would begin to use their puppet for their own inscrutable aims. By this time the Bishop, or their heir, normally accepted these "world-shaking" plans as perfectly justifiable or sensible.

The inducements offered by the Disruptors were considerable. Their strongest card was knowledge. Many parallels fell to Disruptor- controlled minorities using sophisticated weapons and tactics beyond the norm of that Earth. Brutal and direct support in armed conflict was provided by the Rooks. These were cybernetically advanced humans, far stronger than a normal person, with an arsenal of highly advanced weapons at their disposal. At first, they were thought to have been entirely robotic in nature, but a ZeroZero agent who managed to disable and briefly examine one during the Battle of Brussels in 1930, on Para 34-00-08, reported it as being about 30% machine and 70% human/organic. Unsurprisingly, it was also heavily shielded against psionics.

Far more subtle and dangerous than the Rooks are the Disruptor Knights, whose existence was only positively proved by ZeroZero several years after that of the Rooks. These human agents were invariably psychic and able to travel between parallels (as did the Rooks) by use of "Trans-Parallel Vehicles" (TPVs). The Knights functioned as in-situ advisors to the Bishops; on rare occasions they took command of a Lodge to deal with a critical problem, but thereafter moved on to another parallel, another job. In all the years of the Trans-Parallel War, not one Disruptor Knight was captured alive.

It was not until 1958, when a ZeroZero team captured a Disruptor Lodge in Venice, para 00-71-87, that a significant piece of Disruptor technology was acquired and exploited by Valhalla Nova. The team prevented the Bishop from destroying the Lodge's Trans- Parallel Communicator (TPC). Working via empathic link and psychometry the ZeroZero scientists examined the TPC and later that year the first ZeroZero TPC went into operation. The Trans- Parallel War saw a sudden escalation as a result, and for the first time the section leaders of Valhalla Nova began to feel that they might defeat the Disruptors.

By 1960, ZeroZero had firmly established how the Disruptors manipulated the parallels. Who they used on any given parallel could now be predicted, with reasonable accuracy, by W.O.T.A.N. Rooks and Knights had been observed in operation several times. A vast library of information on Disruptor activity, both past and present, had been accumulated. Yet the section leaders of Valhalla Nova still had no idea of what exactly the Disruptors were, nor of their eventual aim. How, they asked themselves and W.O.T.A.N., could the organisation striving so frantically for world peace on para 12-45-06 be the same callous manipulators of numerous Thousand Year Reichs? Why would one Earth be encouraged to achieve multilateral nuclear disarmament, whilst another was being kept teetering on the brink of annihilation? For what reason was racial hatred encouraged here, quashed there? Why had women on most parallels been oppressed since the 1600s and yet on a select few parallels elevated into matriarchal governments?

The answer lay in the aeons before Humankind arose, and there was war in heaven.

It is now known that the Disruptors were the remnants of FireFrost's creators. Their full history is lost; there was only one amongst them who knew the whole truth. The following has been evaluated by W.O.T.A.N. as being on the order of 95.7 (+/-1.2)% correct.

When FireFrost was originally activated the psychic, humanoid race responsible for its construction had taken the best measures it could to protect itself (or rather its ruling elite) from the Entropy Effect. The government was secretly moved to intergalactic space, the vessels containing it joining with the small fleet of scientific craft stationed there to observe the mother galaxy. The scientists were of the opinion that FireFrost would cause Entropic Chaos across their galaxy and its parallels, but that this would have a finite limit when a certain percentage of the "psi-matrix" was in flux. When this point was reached, they believed, FireFrost would split and the galaxy would stabilise. All they had to do then was begin the task of rebuilding. They were wrong.

Once the terrible truth emerged there was chaos aboard the vessels. The crew of several military craft mutinied and attacked the government and scientific vessels; many simply committed suicide or went insane. Eventually, the surviving Elite and scientists regained control. They decided to follow FireFrost: the remaining debris of their mother galaxy could not sustain them. Its psi-matrix had been so damaged by FireFrost that to remain would have meant the slow decay of their minds and will, and finally death.

The damaged fleet was clustered together and linked into a single, massive ark. Suspension chambers were cannibalised from other equipment, or constructed from scratch using makeshift tools. The various ships' drives and power sources were integrated into one. Of the thousands still living, hundreds died in this labour. At length the ark was ready. The crew went down into a sleep of aeons, and the vessel's computers guided it along FireFrost's Magnospheric trail.

It was a voyage and a dreaming many would not awaken from. For as they entered the galaxy into which FireFrost had been spewed, its psi-matrix, so alien to the one they had known, intruded on their minds. Hundreds had nightmares so terrible they died. Wild telekinetic forces generated by the nightmares wreaked havoc with the ark's systems. The sensitive array tracking FireFrost was destroyed, and a sudden convulsion of power wrenched the ark through the parallels. Brought out of hibernation by the vessel's emergency programs, the surviving aliens, now numbering less than a thousand, retook control. Sufficient data had been retained by the computers to predict the star system into which FireFrost had fallen, even to predict the planet onto which it had plummeted at the end of its long voyage.

They reached Earth an aeon after FireFrost. Their chase had been a long one; the ark could not match the preternatural velocity of the galaxy destroyer. They hoped to find a primitive planet on their arrival, a young world to shape into an oasis of peace in a hostile galaxy. Instead, they found a hell. THe planet seemed incredibly alike to their home world, yet it was violently psychically hostile to them. Worse, they could find no trace of FireFrost.

The latter problem they soon solved, when they surrounded the surrounding psi-matrix: the ark had been shifted to another parallel. The former they realised was FireFrost's doing. Created to destroy their galaxy of origin FireFrost had, on breaking in two on its arrival, released a ripple of psychic energy that had fundamentally altered this galaxy's structure and that of its parallels; an alteration with its focus on the planet where FireFrost had landed and its parallels. This ripple had been imprinted with the psychic resonance of FireFrost's mother galaxy. Consequently it had twisted the atoms of the primordial soup into configurations from which had arisen lifeforms mockingly similar to those the voyagers had known; both plant and animal.

Most of the remaining voyagers went insane as the psi-matrix of the new world overwhelmed them, destroying or possessing them. For a time they became as gods, roaming Earth and its parallels in terrible shapes. Before they fled from their kin they came close to destroying the ark, wrenching it through the parallels once more.

Only the greatest minds among the aliens could shield themselves from the ravages of the psi-matrix. These were the strongest psychics of their race, the scientific elite, FireFrost's creators. Eventually they formulated a solution. A machine must be made, similar to the one in which they passed the long voyage. A cryogenic chamber in which they would lie dreaming, and into their dreams would pass a controlled trickle of the reality beyond; of the galaxy and its parallels in which they would have to live when they returned to waking life. Given the proper suggestions and fed the correct diet of drugs, their minds and bodies would adapt.

Yet to build this machine, their City of Dreams, was too great a task for them alone. They needed servants to toil for them, so they shaped them from the shambling forms that aped their own and were already struggling towards intelligence. Out of the picanthrepan clay the aliens moulded Humanity after their own image.

A work of centuries began. When it was done there were less than a hundred of the aliens left. As they made ready for their second sleep they debated what to do with their servants. Some urged that they be destroyed, their usefulness over. Others spoke against this, counselling that on awakening, they would have need of servants again. So Humanity was scattered across the parallels, seeded for the aliens' future needs.

The voyagers entered their city and laid themselves down to sleep. As they dreamt, the machines tended them, feeding a steadily growing ration of psychic reality into their minds. A handful broke, died. Outside the city, massive robot tenders roamed the continents and oceans, guiding the tectonic plates, nursing the still young world to geological calmness, moulding the weather so that no storm ever troubled the air above the city.

In Earth orbit and from the Moon, machines kept vigil over the heavens, destroying any approaching fragments of space debris. Then came the Leviathan; a comet of huge size trailed by a host of smaller bodies. When the defences had done their best there remained one great spinning fragment that fell to Earth far from the city. It was enough, though: the planet tenders could not contain the following earthquakes and the Earth's crust began to break apart. The emergency programs came into effect and the city broke loose from the ruined Earth to float alone in orbit around the sun. Though it had survived, the city was damaged in a vital place, and the Dreamers would sleep for far longer than they had planned.

As their sleep lengthened into millenia, Humanity was changing. Abandoned by its creators, bereft of their guidance, they were found by the Changelings; those aliens which had surrendered to the psi-matrix. Together they made the Age of Wonder, a time of happenings that have come down across the millenia as legends of gods and heroes. Their minds unfettered, Humanity developed psychic powers, aided or thwarted by the Changelings at it took their unfathomable fancy.

Eventually, the Age came to an end. The Changelings could not sustain themselves forever against the erosion of the hostile psychic environment. They dwindled and perished, their passing hastened by the venting across the parallels of psychic waste from the City of Dreams. Humanity inherited the continua: the barbarians took up residence in the courts of the old lords. On the parallel of FireFrost's arrival the psychic priest-kings of the Egyptian Kingdom discovered the Opal. Terrified of it, they sought the advice of Gilgamesh, the greatest psychic of the age. After long deliberation, FireFrost was sealed beneath the Great Pyramid.

At last the Sleepers awoke, ending their millenia-long dream with a burst of psychic energy that sent a shockwave across the parallels. It came upon the psychic adepts of Humanity as a consuming fire in which they perished like moths in a candle's flame. It was a reflex on the aliens' part; a psychic hammerblow to shatter those native minds attuned to the psi-matrix and working in harmony with it. The existence of such minds was anathema to them, engendering a psychic malaise that would kill them: their wholesale slaughter took the Disruptors no more thought than one would use to kill a wasp.

Now the aliens desperately journeyed across the parallels, searching with blind instinct for FireFrost. As they travelled, they changed the parallels they touched. Their ancient works they found ruined or buried, beyond salvage. Their was despair, confusion, and finally a murderous civil war amongst the remaining hundred, from which there emerged a single victor: the scientist who had conceived of FireFrost, in a time so long ago that it seemed, even to him, almost a dream.

During the second sleep, he had been inspired; to him alone had revelation been granted. As FireFrost had altered this galaxy, this Earth, and their parallels to a twisted doppelganger of its galaxy of origin, it could also be used to tear apart the fabric of this galaxy and weave it anew into a true recreation of the mother galaxy. To achieve this, the psi-matrix of the parallels would have to be manipulated into a particular configuration, then at a critical moment FireFrost would have to be activated to alter the configuration, to rearrange reality. To warp, twist, and hammer the raw ore of psychic energy there was only one tool available. Humanity. The surviving alien, who now called himself the "Bringer of Light", would have to play Humanity like a vast musical instrument across the parallels of Earth, until the day FireFrost could be used to strike the final chord.

The Bringer of Light's first imperative was to construct a base from which the millenia-long plan could be directed. To this end he returned to the City of Dreams, taking with him a small corps of human servants. From these he would breed the "technos", who would expand the city into the far larger complex required for the co-ordination of the Grand Design. To fulfil the need for a less specialised labourer, and that of soldiers for his armies, the Bringer of Light turned to an offshoot of the hominid from which Humanity had been created. Australopithecus robustus provided the genetic foundation on which the Rooks were built.

Early in the program, the Bringer of Light retired to a psychically shielded cocoon, about which the technos constructed the Disruptor hive. Here he could wait out the years, gradually surrendering to an increasingly more vital life support system.

The directives issued to his minions consisted of a "cosmic blueprint" towards which the multiverse must be nursed, kicked, and cajoled. With it he provided the basic logistical approach the technos would use to manipulate the psi-matrix, as well as a number of other objectives. These included the location and destruction of any remaining Elders (be they Changelings or survivors of the War) and the further reduction of Humanity's psychic potential by at least two-thirds. First there was a Grand Survey of the Multiverse to be made. This Survey began in 1901BC, and was principally concerned with the creation of a master "atlas" of the psi-matrix of the focal parallels. It was at this point that the beings known as the Five intruded on the Grand Design.

Three of the Five were aliens that were refugees from their peers' civil war, who had fled the fighting almost as it began. They were dismayed by what had happened: their own answer to the inevitable was to urge an acceptance of their fate, and that Humanity should be nurtured as the inheritors of their knowledge and wisdom. In their haphazard flight they passed through a parallel under the rule of two Changelings, who in the past had acted against the Elders to preserve their realm. The Changelings snared the interlopers and intended to kill them, but fortunately they allowed their captives to speak. What they heard led them to join forces with the Elders: the Five were born.

They returned to the War, hoping to prevent the Bringer of Light's victory. At the last, however, they had to withdraw, feigning a fatal retreat. They now knew the Enemy's final goal, declared over the withered husks of his vanquished kin, and armed with this knowledge they could speculate with great accuracy on how he would go about achieving it. They knew they had to stop him: the problem was how. The Bringer of Light was a stronger psionic than they were, even combined. In addition, he had the legacy of the Elder technology. Faced with an immensely powerful and able foe the Five could only hope to stop him by going with the Grand Design. They would break in the storm, but they would not break, and in time they would find a way to defeat the Enemy.

By the time the Grand Survey began, they had formulated a strategy. As the use of Humanity was integral to the design, the Five would find a way to turn Humanity against it. The first gambit they played was to hide a single focal parallel from the Grand Survey. Unfortunately, shielding what was to become ZeroZero was to take most of their Psychic energy form then until the end of the trans-parallel war. On completion of the survey, the technos set the next element of the plan into motion. Obvious surviving Elders and Changelings were hunted down and destroyed. On parallels where the Changelings had interbred with Humanity (creating the races preserved in the racial consciousness as Elves, Dwarves, Satyrs, Centaurs, Vampires, Lycanthropes and others of this supposedly mythological catalogue) the Disruptors instituted a battery of genocidal culls between 1800 to 1100BC.

The latter years of this stage saw the initial "disruption" of Humanity's values and perceptions. The most notable shifts in this era are the shifts in religious and philosophical attitudes. For example, the merging of the Olympian gods with a plethora of "old deities", the consolidation of the religion of Yahweh by the Hebrews, or the subtle turnings taken by Chinese philosophers. With broad, almost casual brushstrokes the old histories were suppressed and rewritten across the parallels. The Disruptors also spread across the parallels the method of improving the quality of wrought iron; as iron acts as a damper of psi-fields, this was a valuable asset in the suppressions of Humanity's psychic abilities.

It took until 1500BC for the Disruptors to perfect the methods required for the trans-parallel manipulation programme. The continua were divided into five groups, each to be manipulated in a different fashion according to the prerequisites of the Grand Design.

The first group consisted of the Controls. These were a narrow range of parallels, with only five foci, over which the Disruptors would exert no direct influence. They would only be affected by the ripple or shadow happenings passing through the psi-matrix from the surrounding parallels. One of the parallels in this group was ZeroZero (though not, of course, intentionally).

The second group, Primitives, were parallels where technology was restricted to levels equal to or below that of pre-industry. Disruptor practice on such planets embodied the creation of a ruling oligarchy, typically a priest/priestesshood, which would very often embellish its rule with psionic techniques. Careful nurturing of the native psychics on these parallels furnished the gene pool from which the Disruptor Knights were drawn.

The third and largest group was the Technicals. On these parallels the development of technology was guided at first in tandem with the primitives, then beyond, through a gamut of "industrial revolutions". These were usually linked with or consequential to warfare, which escalated to global warfare across over 70% of the group during the final period of the Grand Design.

The fourth set of parallels were the Secures. As with the Controls, this was a very narrow range, but essential to the Disruptors. These were parallels so firmly under their control that their societies could be swiftly reorganised to damp down psychic resonances, occurring on other parallels, that were harmful to the programme. Due to the activities of ZeroZero, the various World War II scenarios were designed to greatly expand the number of Secure parallels.

The final group was known as the Bleaks; parallels on which the Earth had passed beyond usefulness to the Grand Design. This was normally due to that Earth being destroyed in warfare or ecologically. The only use to which they were put by the Disruptors was for the establishment of training bases for their Knights and other psychics.

Over the centuries, the Disruptors consolidated their position and refined their techniques. They began to shape the parallels into the alignments and configurations required by the Grand Design. The Five bided their time, waiting until the Enemy was fully committed: they needed to find some point in the Disruptors' plans where any chance would cause them difficulties.

That chance came with the "Messiah-vessels"; a single native on each focal and second-order parallel who had been prepared by the Disruptors to deliver the ethical and moral foundation that would lead to their power being almost absolute across the parallels. It was a massive operation, stretching the Disruptors to their limit. At the height of the operation the Five reached out and gave each Messiah what the Disruptors had so carefully excised from their psyches: free will. Consequently, the myriad Ashokas, Amaterasuses, Yeshuas and their contemporaries did far more than the Disruptors had intended: yet, with the players primed and the stage set they were powerless to rescind what they had set in motion. Frantically a counter-programme was set up to neutralise or subvert the Messiahs' teachings, the running of which occupied the Disruptors' faculties until the early 1500s AD.

With the Enemy distracted, the Five next set about the long work of selectively breeding Humanity back towards greater psychic and physical potential. They worked broadly across the parallels, hastening the process in the 1100s and 1200s AD. Great care was taken to have this appear as natural to the Disruptors. Carefully manipulated field agents sent back doctored reports. From these it was concluded by them that the social and religious manipulation the Messiahs' incident had necessitated, had resulted in a natural gene drift towards enhanced psionic abilities in Humanity, particularly the female of the species.

It took the Bringer of Light and his minions nearly two centuries to formulate a solution; the socio-psychological trauma of the "witch-hunt craze". This acted to suppress psionics, together with a package of genetically engineered plagues, foremost of which was the Black Death: its variants included factors specifically aimed at psionics. Some would cause gross disfigurement of the psychics or their offspring, others would cause only a blemish; the so- called "witch's mark".

The Five withdrew their manipulation, saving the best of the gene pool. The various tales of disappearing people and tribes give a distant echo of such an event; the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin being perhaps the best-known.

The next three centuries passed calmly enough for the Disruptors. To all appearances, the Grand Design was proceeding well: the lines of probability were converging towards the nexus from which the New Order would rise. Almost it seemed that the psi-matrix was reduced to a tame animal, obeying the Disruptors' every command. The Five, however, had been far from idle. The scattered descendants of the psychic humans were drawn slowly into a breeding programme across the parallels. The Five took great care to shield their childrens' potential, grafting a distortion into the twenty-third chromosome pair. This effectively crippled the psionic potential of their thoroughbreds. On countless parallels the protection failed and the psychic abilities surfaced: the Five had to watch the Disruptors move in, either to recruit or kill.

On ZeroZero put the Disruptors' own techniques to use. They consolidated the power of the Holy Roman Empire during its early years. A tradition of scientific tolerance and curiosity was fostered within the Court; the power of the Church was weakened. Science was primed to take the place of religion, and through it, control of the military government. To the minds of ZeroZero's Boyle, Malpighi, Wren, Huygens, Hooke and Newton came the guiding inspirations that would culminate in Marx's "incredible vision, like music, a symphony of the spheres, quite incredible, so very beautiful."

In the early twentieth century, as the Disruptors accelerated the final stages of the Grand Design, the Five began the unshackling of their DNA-warrior. At Ypres, on Para. 00-30-22, they telekinetically nudged a grenade in flight. Arkwright's grandfather died, his psychic scream all but killing the Disruptor Knight in the opposing German lines. Such power could not go uninvestigated: the shockingly powerful, but strangely and mercifully unable, psychic family was examined and watched.

The son of the dead English Guardsman had a psi-strength far beyond the Human norm, but an ironic twist of his genetic makeup kept his potential power locked beyond the reach of his conscious mind. Even so, his intuition, coordination and endurance were extraordinary. The Disruptors reached a decision. A suitable wife was found for Captain Gavin Arkwright; a Disruptor Knight whose memories had been adjusted and falsified. On the 15th February 1950, the Rooks were summoned by the observing Disruptor Knights, and the Disruptors acquired what they hoped to make into the perfect Knight, the Champion of the Grand Design's last hour. Instead, they nursed a viper. The plans of both the Disruptors and the Five were approaching fruition; the Adventures of Luther Arkwright were about to begin.