Ghost Program

The Ghost Program was the project for the training and use of terran ghosts, the covert operatives known for their psionic powers, combat skill, and ability to cloak. It was originally created by the Terran Confederacy and later adopted by the Terran Dominion, both of which used its graduates as commandos and assassins and as the human guidance systems that directed tactical nuclear strikes. The program drew its conscripts from psychically gifted individuals, trained them from infancy, and bound them with implants and memory wipes that reshaped their loyalties and erased their pasts.

Purpose and conscripts#

Ghosts were chosen from psychically gifted individuals quarantined by the Terran Confederacy and trained from infancy to channel their psionic energies, augmenting their natural strength and endurance. Conscripts who completed the program's rigorous training and augmentations then served as commandos and assassins, appearing and striking suddenly and silently. Lightly armored and able to hide their presence with a cloaking device, they were also trusted to direct nuclear missile strikes against enemy targets, a role their stealth made them uniquely suited for.

Recruitment began at birth. It was mandatory for children born within the Confederacy to have a Psi Aptitude Profile taken within nine months, and a score of 2.50 or higher resulted in recruitment. Universal testing was impossible in practice, so children on the Fringe Worlds, or those with socially powerful parents, sometimes escaped detection. Cover stories were invented to obscure the fate of conscripted children: some parents were told their children were being sent to special schools, and were sometimes later informed the child had died in an accident. The Terran Dominion was relatively forthright about the process, sending parents a letter when a child was selected, but failure to comply carried penalties. Recruitment was carried out by the Psi-Ops Division.

Telepaths who escaped the standard profiling, or who might serve in other roles, were tracked down by wranglers, mildly psionic agents whose powers were useful chiefly for finding other telepaths at close range. Dominion wranglers such as Malcolm Kelerchian were paid for each psychic they brought in and often worked alongside conventional military forces, sometimes using lobotomized zerglings to hunt their targets.

Control and identity#

Standard Confederate practice was to implant psychic dampeners into all ghosts, acting on the principle of neural resocialization. While active, the implants reshaped a ghost's memories, weakened their powers, and enforced loyalty, with the result that few ghosts retained any memory of their former lives. The implants could, however, be removed or disabled. Other controls included aggression inhibitors that prevented ghosts from attacking their superiors, ghost conditioning that weakened psionic ability, and psi-screens worn to shield a mind from being read.

Ghosts lived their lives entirely within the program, which provided all housing, food, and living arrangements, leaving many who had never lived outside it unable to adjust to civilian life. For the most part they were known only as numbers or names. Under the Confederacy every ghost, whether or not they graduated, was assigned a standard number and an alpha-numeric agent code, a system the Dominion retained. Confederate ghosts were unaware of their true names; most Dominion ghosts knew theirs but were trained to address one another by their alpha-numerics, a habit that spread to Dominion soldiers. Every ghost possessed a personal file, though its contents were restricted.

After the defection of Sarah Kerrigan, the Confederacy concluded that dampeners were too easily disabled and instituted memory wipes, a technique regarded as effectively unbreakable, applied after training and major missions. The Dominion later added neural implants that tracked each ghost's location. The practice remained standard until Valerian Mengsk made it optional.

Origins and the Confederacy#

Terran psionic ability traced back to Earth. By the late twenty-first century private firms had developed biotechnology granting advanced telepathy, and the genetic manipulations contributed to a civil war that left most of Earth under the United Powers League by 2229. The scientist Doran Routhe loaded thousands of prisoners, many of them mutants, into four supercarriers bound for Gantris VI. The lead vessel carried the artificial intelligence ATLAS, which discovered that a high proportion of the prisoners carried a mutation leading to psionic potential that would manifest within a few generations. The ships missed their target and founded colonies in the Koprulu sector, the most advanced of which, Tarsonis, established the Terran Confederacy.

About twenty years before the war sparked by the destruction of Chau Sara, the Confederacy had already created a fledgling Ghost Program. One of its early subjects, the eight-year-old Sarah Kerrigan, drew attention when her powers erupted with such force that the measurement scale required a complete readjustment. Ghosts of the program assassinated Angus Mengsk to suppress the rebellion of Korhal, and his head was never found. When Arcturus Mengsk took up his father's cause and allied with Umoja, the Confederates answered with a nuclear barrage that killed millions of Korhalian colonists, after which they limited themselves to tactical nukes guided by ghosts.

On the world of Vyctor 5, at the secret Fujita Facility, Confederate scientists experimented with a species of xenomorphs found among the Fringe Worlds and discovered the creatures were sensitive to psionic control. Ghost Agent Kerrigan had the best command over them and became the only subject allowed to work with them. Arcturus Mengsk and his Sons of Korhal raided the facility, rescued Kerrigan, and removed her neuro-adjuster, restoring her memories. Kerrigan then led the Sons of Korhal in an attack that destroyed the primary ghost training center on Tarsonis. Fearing further defections, the Confederacy began wiping the memories of its ghosts.

The Great War and the fall of the Confederacy#

The Confederacy lost its colony of Chau Sara to a sudden protoss attack, and shortly afterward the zerg appeared on Mar Sara. At the secret Jacobs Installation the Confederates experimented with the psi-emitter, a device that amplified a psychic's powers so the zerg could detect them from far off. Facing the zerg, the protoss, and the Sons of Korhal at once, the Confederacy began losing ground, and ghosts suffered a high mortality rate. Director Ilsa Killiany, believing the ghosts were all that kept the Confederacy alive, went out of her way to acquire powerful psychics, even dispatching an agent to forcibly recruit a fifteen-year-old scion of the Old Families, November Terra.

Nova was retrieved just as the Sons of Korhal defeated the Confederacy at Tarsonis, using captured psi-emitter technology to lure the zerg to the world. The Confederacy imploded, the Sons of Korhal renamed themselves the Terran Dominion, and the Ghost Program passed into Dominion hands. Sarah Kerrigan, abandoned to the zerg above Tarsonis, was infested and resurfaced on Char as the Queen of Blades. Among her first acts she boarded the science vessel Amerigo and stole the Confederacy's data on ghost conditioning, finally breaking the conditioning that had restrained her even after infestation.

The Dominion era#

The Terran Dominion took over the program, relocated its facilities, and placed Director Kevin Bick in charge. Under Arcturus Mengsk no one could leave the program voluntarily, and ghosts remained ghosts until death. As part of an overhaul, Mengsk ordered roughly half of his government's ghosts killed in a controlled environment, eliminating untrustworthy former Confederate agents and those judged worthless, and he commissioned dedicated ghost academies equipped with nuclear silos. The next generation of ghosts was trained in new psionic techniques and equipped with new technology, combining psionics and hardware to increase speed and reflexes and to see through objects, and began using protoss-derived equipment such as the psyblade.

The Dominion clashed with the Umojan Protectorate over the fate of its trainees. Senator Corbin Phash secretly harbored a psychic son, Colin; when the zerg attacked Maltair IV and left only the two Phashes alive, Corbin fled to the Protectorate while Colin was captured and inducted into the program. To counter the propaganda that followed, the Dominion publicized its ghosts as heroes, and on the recommendation of Superintendent Sarco Angelini the Ghost Academy began training students in groups and grew more open. The Dominion also instituted a final graduation exercise immediately before a trainee's memory wipe; Nova Terra was the first agent to undergo the process, eliminating her assigned targets.

Enhancement projects and the spectres#

After the Brood War, the Dominion discovered the potent psionic reagent terrazine and launched secret projects to harness it. Project Shadow Blade, led by General Horace Warfield, studied terrazine's effects on terrans until it was infiltrated by Cole Bennett, an escapee from the program who experimented on himself, expanded his own power, and saw the project dissolved. In 2502 Dominion Intelligence devised Project Gestalt, in which Dr. Stanley Burgess spliced ghosts with protoss organs, producing a warrior of formidable power before the project ended in disaster.

Bennett, embittered, secretly turned against Arcturus Mengsk and recreated his own version of Shadowblade with the escaped ghost Gabriel Tosh and the technopath Lio Travski, converting resocialized marines into lower-grade spectres from a cloaked platform, Gehenna Station. As ghosts began disappearing, the Dominion publicly blamed remnants of the United Earth Directorate. Nova Terra, aided by the wrangler Malcolm Kelerchian and the special forces unit the Annihilators, eventually exposed Bennett's treachery to Tosh and killed him, ending the Spectre Rebellion.

Later conflicts and reform#

Dominion ghosts were deployed throughout the Second Great War, often against the zerg and Raynor's Raiders, with Nova Terra continuing her hunt for the spectres and even offering Jim Raynor access to ghost technology in exchange for his aid. A ghost team under Nova later raided the Umojan research station that held the recently uninfested Sarah Kerrigan and Jim Raynor, capturing Raynor though Kerrigan escaped. Ghosts were used against Kerrigan's resurgent Swarm on Char, at Skygeirr Station, aboard the Moros, and finally on Korhal, though they could not prevent the death of Arcturus Mengsk.

During the End War, Dominion spec ops ghosts were deployed with special forces under Nova Terra against Amon's Forces. After taking the throne, Valerian Mengsk reformed the Dominion Armed Forces with particular attention to the Ghost Program, producing better and more committed agents who served of their own free will. Among his reforms, he made memory wipes optional and allowed ghosts to leave the program voluntarily, though by 2511 only one had taken the offer.

Other ghost programs#

The Ghost Program of the Terran Confederacy and its Dominion successor were not the only ones of their kind. The Kel-Morian Combine and the Umojan Protectorate each maintained their own programs, which differed from those of the Confederacy and Dominion. The Umojan operatives, called shadowguards, used neither memory wipes nor other forms of control, while the Kel-Morian program had largely been put on hold since the disastrous Guild Wars. The United Earth Directorate had its own Ghost Program as well, despite the efforts of its predecessor the United Powers League to wipe out mutants; its psychics played a key role in the assault on the Dylarian Shipyards and were used by Alexei Stukov and his colleagues to control the second Overmind.