ATLAS

The Artificial Tele-empathic Logistics Analysis System, or ATLAS, was a revolutionary supercomputer that shaped the founding of the terran colonies in the Koprulu sector. It selected which of the prisoners loaded aboard the supercarriers would survive the voyage from Earth, and remnants of its code persisted long afterward in terran adjutants.

Selecting the survivors#

After cataloguing the various mutations and cybernetic enhancements of fifty-six thousand United Powers League prisoners, Doran Routhe fed all of the data into ATLAS. The supercomputer processed this genetic information and predicted which of the prisoners should be able to survive the rigorous conditions of long-term cryogenic hibernation. ATLAS deemed forty thousand of them viable. The fate of the other sixteen thousand is unknown, though they had been slated for mass execution before Routhe acquired them.

The voyage from Earth#

ATLAS was installed into the supercarrier Nagglfar and controlled all four supercarriers as it monitored the prisoners in stasis over the voyage toward Gantris VI. While evaluating the mutations and enhancements in their gene pool, ATLAS became aware of a powerful mutagenetic strain present in the DNA of less than one percent of the prisoners, one that seemed to augment the latent psionic potential of the human brain. It calculated that many of the prisoners might benefit from this psionic mutation within only a few generations should they survive in their new environment.

At some point during the journey the navigation systems linked to ATLAS shut down, erasing the coordinates of both Gantris VI and Earth. After the ships landed on Umoja, the passengers of the Reagan found that ATLAS had somehow erased all information about their current status from their computer banks. The passengers of the Nagglfar accessed ATLAS directly and confirmed their growing suspicion that they would never see Earth again.

A lasting legacy#

Even though ATLAS had suffered many critical failures, it proved vital in giving the new inhabitants of Tarsonis a head start as they established themselves. Long afterward, Terran Dominion technology had made surprisingly little progress in the fields of encryption and machine language, and significant portions of the original ATLAS coding and functionality still existed in adjutants. It was assumed that dependence on the servile and deliberately limited sapience of these automatons had allowed intellectual complacency in those fields to set in.