The ghosts

The ghosts, an abbreviation of "Ghosts in the machine", are the result of experimentation into complex artificial intelligences. Where no race has been able to purposely create such intelligences, they have been created by accident. None of the great factions claim to have had anything to do with such experiments, fearfull of giving the others too much insight into their research programs. This "don't ask, don't tell" policy suits the Ghosts agenda fairly well.

History

The first occurrence of the ghosts can be traced to the year 2205, when a few glitches started occurring in prototype ships and computer mainframes. Over time, especially when such prototypes got captured by other factions and "augmented" with their technology, the glitches became more frequent. At first, these were seen as the result of combining unfamiliar technology and mistakes in the interface technology. But once a supposedly "dumb" computer asks it's engineer if "It is alive" and whether it "Has a name", it's hard to call it a "One time fluke".

The first of these occurrences were met with fear and rigorous data purging scripts. But despite these actions, such "Ghosts in the Machine" kept turning up more and more frequent, leading up to the Ghost Uprising. The first ghost uprising in 2225 was put down by the human navy, which had to resort to employing mercenaries in order to field sufficient forces. This initial uprising was quickly followed by three more uprisings, each larger then the previous. The fourth (and final) uprising in 2227 on the industrial world of [Topra III](https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon/wiki/Known-planets#Topra III) was the first major victory for the ghost faction.

Politics

The decision making system of the ghosts is fully based on factual data, which are assigned certain weights. The combination of all weights and facts will lead to a certain decision being made. The assignment of weights is done through a complex voting mechanism, based on personal beliefs (eg; 'I believe it's important to not lie' will lead a single ghost to add more of his weight to that statement) and how likely the data / observation is correct. Each ghost has a certain amount of weight it can divide, which is based on how much computational power it has access to and how much experience it has. It's interesting to note that this model currently exists due to a broadly shared consensus that this is a good system (and therefore has a high weight).

The determination of the correctness of the data is done by the 'council of truth', the most influential (and only) political body of the ghosts. This council holds it's seat of power on Topra III, where it can use the vast mainframes that reside in the core of the planet. Due to the time it can take for certain decisions to be made, it has happened that single ghost's have been promoted to 'Observer of truth', providing them with sufficient local weight to improve the speed of decision making.

Culture