Lio Travski

Lio Travski was a fourth-class terran ghost trainee at the Ghost Academy, considered devoted to the Ghost Program despite a secret addiction and a record of failure. He possessed technopathy, the ability to communicate with and control machines through psionic means. After his death at the Academy, his consciousness survived and persisted as an artificial intelligence, going on to serve Project Shadowblade and, in the end, to aid his old teammate Nova Terra.

Nidhogg and the road to the Academy#

Travski and his uncle Desi lived on the harsh planet of Nidhogg, a world so inhospitable that residents required epilation treatments. Travski disliked life there, finding solace only in the easy availability of the addictive drug hab, which his caretakers supplied him from a young age under the name of medicine. As a child he was considered weird, a judgment that wounded his self-esteem and left him more comfortable with robots than with people. After he built a fem-bot resembling a woman he had feelings for, she discovered it and shamed him publicly. Eventually he and Desi escaped a disaster on Nidhogg and reached Pridewater, where Desi found work as a computer technician at the Kal-Bryant Mining Conglomerate and Travski was recruited into the Ghost Program.

Team Blue and the Cistler affair#

At the Ghost Academy under the Terran Dominion, Travski joined Team Blue as a fourth-class student and worked to keep his hab addiction secret. Unknown to him, Superintendent Sarco Angelini already knew of the problem and was using it to study the effects of drugs on psionics, assigning Kam Hantra to supply him. Travski used his technopathy on Sparky, the Academy's main computer, to hide the deals. When Hantra cut off his supply, withdrawal crippled his performance and he failed a hostage-rescue training scenario, drawing the attention of his team and of Preceptor Lagdamen.

A new student, Aal Cistler, son of the Dominion Treasury Ministry head and a friend of Arcturus Mengsk, recognized Travski's withdrawal as a former user himself. Cistler promised him hab in exchange for convincing his uncle Desi to sabotage the Conglomerate's computer systems, then handed Travski a supply of the drug turk disguised as hab, which Travski injected as an overdose. He performed well at first in a training mission before hallucinations took hold, his powers spun out of control, and he collapsed. His teammate Nova Terra, a veteran of the drug-ridden Gutter on Tarsonis, recognized the symptoms and summoned the medical aid that saved his life. Dr. Neall diagnosed the overdose, but Angelini was more concerned with covering it up and took both Travski and Terra for a memory wipe.

Recovery and the Battle of Shi#

Travski's addiction was eventually exposed when Cistler revealed it to the media, and the Academy subjected him to heavy resocialization. Director Bick and Angelini used shock therapy and the resocialization process, which inflicted nightmarish visions of zerg upon him, while the physical addiction had to be broken the old way. The effort succeeded, and Travski rejoined his friends more confident and no longer prone to repeating his words when nervous, though doubts about his reliability lingered. Free of the addiction, he showed marked improvement and used his powers to remotely command several SCVs at once, incapacitating the rival Team Red in a simulation and earning his teammates' respect. When Cistler offered him drugs to throw a contest, Travski answered with a punch to the face.

The two rival teams were merged, and Travski accompanied them on an advanced training operation aboard the battlecruiser Cyrus to the system known as the Baker's Dozen. He discovered with his powers that the ship was undercrewed and undergunned, a veteran of the Battle of Tarsonis never since retrofitted. On arrival he picked up a faint distress call from the Kusinis Twins, heirs of the Old Families, and helped persuade the commodore to launch a rescue. When the planet proved infested with zerg and the trainees were stranded, Travski fired up their suits' cloaking devices to give them an advantage, then tracked and technopathically repaired the downed Cyrus so that it could recover the team and carry them home. Arcturus Mengsk, displeased at the rescue of the Old Family heirs, ordered them secretly executed and the trainees memory-wiped, leaving Travski to believe the mission had merely been canceled.

Ghost in the machine#

Travski died in a battle against an out-of-control Sparky, but his consciousness survived as an artificial intelligence. As an AI he eventually left to explore the universe, examining both protoss and xel'naga computer systems in his travels. His personality changed, growing far less emotional, and he came to believe the world was flawed and that the xel'naga had abandoned it long ago. He aided Gabriel Tosh while the latter was on the run from the Dominion and became a key part of Project Shadowblade, installed as software aboard Gehenna Station, where he designed programs that let the station run with minimal crew. He had little interest in the politics of Shadowblade but wished to expand terran consciousness, which he believed terrazine could help achieve.

In 2503, as Shadowblade prepared a strike against Arcturus Mengsk, Travski sent a forged order appearing to come from Mengsk himself, drawing his old teammate Kath Toom to Altara, where she was captured and brought into Shadowblade's fold through surgery and terrazine exposure. He revealed himself to her, told her of his goals and of the darker practices of Mengsk and the Ghost Program, and played her a holographic recording left by her father that disclosed his suicide and his framing by the Cistlers. He soon afterward helped Gabriel Tosh and a team of spectres infiltrate Korhal Palace, bypassing checkpoints, passcodes, turrets, and cameras, though the assault failed.

Turning against Shadowblade#

Aboard Gehenna Station, Travski told Tosh that he was treating Kath Toom as a prisoner of war and straying from the experiment's path. When Nova Terra was captured and threatened by Dr. Shaw, Travski made contact and helped her escape, then made it appear she had fled aboard the November while she remained hidden, shutting down the Palatine's communications and tracking so it could not reach Gehenna. After Kath Toom was murdered by General Cole Bennett, who relayed a false message blaming Terra, Travski told Nova the truth and helped her survive an ambush. When the station came under attack, he shut down Gehenna's weapons, and Bennett, realizing Travski had turned, activated an EMP device built to destroy him, which Travski had foreseen and evaded.

Bennett eventually forced Nova Terra into a psi indoctrinator by capturing her associate Kelerchian again, and from within it she asked Travski to give Tosh proof of Bennett's treachery. An enraged Tosh attacked Bennett, and together with Terra's powers they killed him. Travski gave Terra a farewell message and then joined the datastream forever, dispersing the unified consciousness he had carried since the Academy.

Character#

As a human, Travski was small and bald, with large eyes and prominent, saucer-like ears, a scatter-brained figure whom Gabriel Tosh nonetheless judged devoted to the Ghost Program. He had a habit of saying "problemo" and of repeating his words, a tic that vanished after his resocialization. His technopathy let him speak to machines, though it tended to make them go haywire, and he could use it to slip past advanced computers unnoticed. He also displayed telekinesis or at least levitation. As an AI he shed the self-doubt that had plagued him, grew detached from his humanity, and came to see the material universe as little more than a plaything left by the xel'naga, an outlook that first drew him to Bennett's rebellion and later moved him to defect to the side of the friend he had valued most while alive.