ATLAS

Artificial Tele-empathic Logistics Analysis System, or ATLAS, is an artificial intelligence. ATLAS was overseen by Doran Routhe, a Terran scientist. He created it to oversee his clandestine colonization project, using 56,000 prisoners as guinea pigs.

ATLAS studied the prisoners, who had been placed in cold sleep, and selected 40,000 as capable of surviving the journey and planetary colonization. These prisoners were placed on four ships - the Nagglfar, Sarengo, Reagan and Argo. The fate of the other 16,000 prisoners is unknown, but they had been slated for execution before being acquired by Routhe.

The ATLAS was installed on the supercarrier 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 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.

The four ships made it to the Koprulu Sector, crashing and establishing three colonies in a star system: Tarsonis, Moria and Umoja. None of the colonists who emerged from cold sleep knew where they were, and the three colonies did not have contact with one another.

The colonists of Tarsonis had access to ATLAS' memory banks, giving them a huge advantage compared to the other colonists. After sixty years of work, they developed the subwarp engine, discovering the other two colonies.

The fate of ATLAS is unknown. It never played a role in the game of StarCraft, before or after the Zerg invasion of Tarsonis.