Doran Routhe

Routhe, Doran
Doran Routhe was a scientist on Earth during the rule of the United Powers League. As Project Purification, the UPL's plan to purify the human race by imprisoning and killing vast numbers of mutants, cyborgs, synthetics, political opponents, and so forth, operated, largely hidden from the media, Routhe made plans on increasing his own power within the UPL.

Routhe was obssessed with creating colonies on other planets outside of the solar system, hoping to find new mineral and other kinds of resources on such planets.

He had no part in Project Purification, but found it convenient for procuring 56,000 prisoners through his political connections to create a colonizing force. The prisoners were put into cold sleep. The new artificial intelligence, ATLAS, for Artificial Tele-empathic Logistics Analysis System, studied the prisoners and selected 40,000 as capable of surviving the journey and planetary colonization. The fate of the other 16,000 prisoners is unknown, but they had been slated for execution before being acquired by Routhe.

Routhe secretly built four huge carriers, the Nagglfar, Sarengo, Reagan and Argo, with experimental warp engines, and loaded the prisoners aboard. The ATLAS was installed on Nagglfar and the navigational computer was programmed to travel one year through warp space to the star system Gantris VI. The ships were also loaded with various supplies and hardware to help the colonists once they awoke.

During the journey, ATLAS catalogued the various mutations in the gene pool, and discovered that some of the genes the prisoners carried would augment the latent psionic potential of the human brain. ATLAS sent this information back to Doran Routhe's databanks on Earth.

Unfortunately for Routhe, the navigational computer somehow became disconnected from ATLAS. The ships barreled blindly through warp space for 30 years, ending up very far away from their destination.