Oracle Program

The Oracle Program was a secret EarthGov operation devoted, in its own words, to retrieval and secrecy, and it was implied to have been created to assess the threat of the Necromorphs. Its agents, the Oracles, moved in white-clad pairs armed with Stasis rings and laser weapons, and they appeared wherever the Markers and the contagion they spread reached, from the derelict USG Ishimura to the falling Sprawl.

Purpose and methods#

The Oracle Program was described as a secret government program designed for exactly the kind of catastrophe that the Markers and the Necromorphs brought about, and EarthGov was understood to have dispatched its agents specifically to deal with that threat. The Oracles themselves were defined by two priorities, retrieval and secrecy, and they stressed that secrecy mattered most of all. They were not authorized to interfere with civilian or military operations unless a situation directly concerned those priorities.

They worked in two-man teams, always dressed in white, and carried unusual laser weapons that they used to drive off the Necromorphs rather than to kill them. Each also wore a finger ring with Stasis abilities, and the same rings could be used to kill: a single touch left a victim dead and bleeding from the nose. A later record written in Marker script, recovered as a poem about the Oracles, cast them as figures who walked in white untouched by red, ordered the living, shepherded the dead, and were sent as the answer to humanity's fate, alluding both to their rings and to the threat of the Brethren Moons they were meant to assess.

The recovery of the Ishimura#

The Oracles first surfaced in a meeting with EarthGov Defense Secretary David Chang, informing him of their involvement in the retrieval of the USG Ishimura. One of them implied that the authority of their superiors went beyond the Secretary's own. Later, when Julia Copland betrayed the Magpie salvagers and contacted EarthGov to trade the Marker 3A shard she had stolen, the Oracles were brought in to interrogate her. After learning all they could, one thanked her, and when she asked for a reward he merely took her hand; the ring on his finger glowed with blue light and she fell dead moments later.

Using Copland's information, the Oracles located the Ishimura and boarded it, noting that reanimation had already started and showing their familiarity with the contagion. They searched the ship for the Marker, using their laser weapons to dispatch several Necromorphs and even a Hive Mind, and eventually confronted the salvager Stefan Schneider. When he asked why they had chased him rather than simply seize the Marker shards, they told him they needed to know what he knew and what he had seen, and that he did not possess the language to tell them. They called the outbreak an unfortunate side effect of the Marker. After a brief struggle Schneider escaped in the Oracles' own stealth ship, leaving the two agents to be killed by the Necromorphs.

Titan Station#

During the outbreak on Titan Station, two Oracles arrived in search of Lexine Weller, a subject of the program's study for her apparent immunity to the influence of the Marker signal. They displayed the same mannerisms as their counterparts aboard the Ishimura, and Lexine described them to Gabe Weller only as strange men dressed in white. They searched the Psych Ward of the Titan Memorial Medical Center for her throughout Gabe's journey across the station.

When Lexine was captured by Colonel Victor Bartlett, he demanded to know why the agents were following him and tried to invoke the orders of Director Hans Tiedemann to eliminate the key subjects. Their answer made clear that they answered to authority higher than Tiedemann's, and they used their Stasis rings to subdue him. They took Lexine to the hospital shuttle bay, but before they could board their gunship the two Oracles were killed by a pair of Infectors, which transformed their bodies into Twitchers.