Project Talos

Project Talos is secret military program under the perview of the Solarian Imperial Army tasked with the development of psionic human military combatants capable of combatting assymetric psionic threats, such as those posed by the Ceteri. Under the leadership of Colonel Lidia Conti Adepti, the project has recently begun to produce successes that exceed all original expectations. The third Imperial program working toward producing viable human psionics, Project Talos stands on shoulders of the Haphaestus Project and the Operation Pygmalion and is currently drawing near its conclusion with the development of reliable procedures for augmenting humans with psionic powers.

History

Project Talos began 3442.03.24 with the purpose of carrying forward the work of the Haphaestus Project, which had recently succeeded in creating a safe procedure for implanting Ceteri tissue in human volunteers for the purpose of creating psychic humans. The work of Project Talos initially revolved around creating standardized procedures for implantation. This work took three years and roughly seven hundred participants to complete. The second phase of Project Talos, which is now drawing to a successful close, is the exploration of the extent of powers produced in humans and establishment training protocols for drawing out and controlling these powers in the newly implanted. While this has proven the more difficult task, recent breakthroughs have suggested that initial requirements will be met and validated with the next year. A third phase of Project Talos is planned by recent talks suggest it may be spun off into its own program to further protect Imperial progress from increased enemy intelligence efforts. This phase, if it remains under the umbrella of Project Talos, will seek to explore and demonstrate future capabilities. This largely entails finding ways to increase the potency of known powers and to find new ones that may prove useful to Imperial needs.

Subjects

To date, Project Talos has created and trained some three thousand psoinic warriors , and recent classes have been unmitigated successes, exceeding the program's original requirements. Of these subjects, all have been volunteers drawn from elite units. While this is known to produce biassed experimental results, this practice coincides with the intended purposes of this program - to create elite psionic warfighters. Initial concerns surrounding how to find volunteers willing to desecrate their bodies with the presence of alien matter proved unfounded once the proposition was recast as recieving the holy blessing of Her Divinity, the Imperatrix Dei. While some have questioned the ethics of such a deception, others have been quick to point out that Imperatrix Livia Gaëlle did sanction this program, and in doing so has bestowed the gift of psychic powers on those chosen to participate.

Powers

The primary focus of Project Talos is combat ability. To that end, all powers extensively developed have some direct combat application - be it heightened battlefield awareness, increased communication capabilities, defensive psychokinetics, or telekinetic blasts. Some less obvious talents have also been explored to further augment covert activities like defeating security systems and sentry removal. To date, Psychokinesis and Telekinesis have been the primary subjects of research, with Extrasensory Perception a decided runner up. Apportation remains the holy grail of Imperial psionics.

Ethics & Morality

In the initial phases of Project Talos, questions were raised by the Astrians involved regarding the morality of fundamentally altering human beings. They decried it as sacrilage of the flesh that produced something inhuman and unnatural. Similar cries of heresy were raised by some of the Solarians, as well. In the end, the Imperatrix Dei herself issued an edict declaring that those chosen for the procedure were chosen by Her Divinity for a higher existence - one that shares in some of her own divinity. With this blessing, all Solarian and most Astrian discent evaporated, and those Astrians who could not acquiesce transferred to other positions.