IT ALL BEGAN WITH ATLAS...
As I look outside the window of the Eleusis Ziggurat in the midst of our grand ocean city of Solaris Prime with its soaring spires and crystal domes and idyllic island havens, it is difficult to imagine that the world our civilization inherited in its humble beginnings had been in utter ruin. Our empire now spans light years. Our Voidseekers guide interstellar ships through the hidden tunnels bridging the distant worlds of our dominion. We have vanquished poverty and disease and, armed with the knowledge of the ancient Sephirean, we have made even death a mere distant memory. But none of this would have been possible without Atlas.
In a time long vanished in the distant vaults of the past, our native world Gaia had turned against us after centuries of abuse. It is a vast ocean that divides knowledge from wisdom though only a fine line that separates genius from madness. In their insatiable thirst for progress, our ancestors had forgotten the former and crossed the latter. Few records remain of this nightmarish era when we came so close to fading forever from recorded history ourselves…
As our ancestors faced extinction, the greatest minds of our species set their differences aside and conjured a miracle from the depths of their genius: the Ark Project. Using colossal resources drawn from Gaia and her stellar sisters, great starships were built: self-sustaining arks to shelter all life known on Gaia within their metallic confines, designed to ferry mankind across the vastness of the Spiral. Of these supreme man-made masterpieces, the first-born was Atlas.
What a marvel it was, fellow Solarians! The majestic city of Atlantis gleaming like a jewel in the midst of the now legendary Hesperides Gardens, teeming with fauna and flora of every kind imaginable within myriad ecosystems echoing the ghost memories of a world thought forever left behind. Crewed by the solar system’s most capable denizens, Atlas set forth on the greatest adventure ever undertaken by our species on a millennial odyssey across the cosmos.
Its journey to the Spiral’s heart and back - seeding worlds that now thrive under our rule, discovering the abandoned vestiges of the ancient Sephirean civilization - has become the very stuff of legend. The awakening of the first Voidseekers among our species granted us the mastery of space. The preservation of the self beyond the primitive constraints of flesh and blood gave us dominion over time itself. All of this we owe to the ones who once braved the infinite seas of space to save mankind. For we, Solarians, are the descendants and heirs of the courageous Atlanteans who once set out into the great unknown and returned to Gaia to make it a paradise once more.
Yes, it all began with Atlas…
- Plini Hermaeus of the Order of Eleusis, 984 S.C. (excerpt from ‘Atlas: Genesis of a Utopia’)
