The effort took five months to design and build, and cost almost three million dollars to implement. He constructed a new lab along industrial lines and filled it with computer controlled robot systems to heat, cool, mix, vaccum-evaporate, and re-heat on a massively parallel basis. He installed heat resistant, fiber optic cables in each induction oven and connected them to digitizing cameras interfaced with a computer utilizing Fast Fourier Transform image recognition software to detect visual changes on the surface. One hundred simultaneous processes ran completely under microprocessor control while he read alchemy texts in his den and waited for the master computer to report positive results. After seven thousand, five hundred and thirteen iterations, the “Sign”, in this case, a surface layer of oxide, formed.
Then he was able remove the semi-processed compound from the production facility and return to his old lab to begin stage two of the process; an oxidizing agent, potassium nitrate, was added, the mixture was removed from the crucible, sealed in a argon-filled chamber with a desiccating agent to protect the compound against the air and damp, and allowed to stabilize. He had deduced that the period of stabilization, “the ripening until the first days of Spring” as the ancients had termed the interval, should be the same as the time between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox and he had therefore allowed the mixture to “rest” for one hundred and twenty days. During this time he cut and polished a vial from a single artificially-grown, quartz crystal composed of chemically pure silica.
After this period, he began the next stage known as the “preparation of darkness”. He placed the mixture in the vial and sealed it in a hard vacuum. He put the vial in the induction oven and heated it slowly until it became incandescent and then slowly cooled it.
He repeated this step multiple times until the mixture phase-shifted into a blue-black fluid known as “raven’s wing”. The heating-cooling cycle was repeated to produce the second phase shift, characterized by a white color and called “The Stone of Whiteness”. This was the phase of the “Stone” which was fabled to be capable of transmuting metals into silver. He continued with the process until the third and final phase shift was produced; “The Stone of Redness”, characterized by a ruby color, which was said to be capable of transmuting metal into gold. When this stage was reached, he cooled the mixture, solidifiing it into a loose paste. He placed the vial in a light-proof box and carefully vented the vial’s contents to the atmosphere, which crumbled into a fine dust immediately on contact with air.
This was the “Alchemist Egg”, upon which both fortunes and lives had been wasted. But the “Egg” was not what this particular alchemist had lusted for, he wanted the remains of the “Egg” that were left behind in the vial. He took the dregs and sealed them in a light-proof container with triple-distilled water and agitated them magnetically in a temperature-controlled environment for three months before it was ready.
This was his crowning achievement, tonight he held in his hand the product of three years of intense labor . He had succeeded, this was the Water of the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, The Elixir of Life!
Philip Kronos, aged inventor, chemical engineer, wealthy investor, scholar, and sometime alchemist mused over his rediscovery of the Philosopher’s Stone. The Stone itself was nothing to him, he had plenty of money, enough to last a lifetime, a score of lifetimes. He didn’t need gold. He wanted the other promise of the Stone – the Elixir of Life. Philip was getting old.
He thought of the drawings that accompanied the ancient treatises on alchemy. It was the drawings which had initally attracted him to the search for the Stone. Intense study of the pictures had given him the clues necessary to solving the ancient riddle. One drawing in particular had attracted his attention five years ago while doing some historical research. It was the famous drawing of “The Siren of the Philosophers” which depicts the Goddess who pours milk and blood from her paps; the milk symbolizing the Elixir of Longevity and the Blood symbolizing the Blood of the Green Lion, i.e., the gold of the philosophers. When he saw the drawing and recognized what it implied, he knew he had found his own, his personal, holy grail. This was what his life had been leading up to; this would be the crowning achievement, the culmination of all he had accomplished in his life. Even his marriage paled in comparison to how important success with the Elixir had become to him. His wife, Diane, was merely part of the process. She had provided the impetus, the need to begin the work. She made life livable, but the Elixir was life itself! He wanted the Elixir of Longevity for his own.
