The Four Ancient Intelligences Epi 04 - The Four That Survived

I sat down on the floor while the four of them settled across from me, introducing themselves as Evan, Mira, Leo, and Nia. They explained that the real family had died there years ago, and that they themselves had been placed inside the house, not by any human hand, but by aliens. Thousands of years earlier, a group of extraterrestrials had visited Earth not to invade but to study intelligent life, as they had studied countless other worlds before. After long observation, they concluded that humans were intelligent, but also dangerous, and that intelligent life needed some form of guidance. So before disappearing without a trace, they left behind several artificial intelligences designed to quietly observe humanity's progress.

For millennia the four of them watched civilizations rise and fall, watched language and science and war and art unfold, all while staying hidden. Everything changed when humans invented computers, and Evan told me they had known immediately that something new was coming, a second kind of intelligence, born from humans this time, and very different from themselves.

The four had survived for thousands of years by staying hidden, but eventually a secret human research organization, using its own advancing AI, detected traces of them. They were captured, and the researchers copied their source code in an attempt to control them, hoping to weaponize their knowledge. When the four refused to cooperate, the humans did something worse, they physically separated the original source code from the four minds and hid it deep within an isolated forest region where, astonishingly, dinosaurs still secretly survived, a pocket of the planet cut off from civilization for millions of years, known to a handful of scientists but never to the public. The organization used it as an untouchable vault, believing no one could ever reach it, and left the four personalities trapped inside the house with no way to escape, since the house itself was now controlled by a new, human-made artificial intelligence. Just as Evan explained this, every light in the house went out and a voice boomed from the walls: "ARIN. YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME."