The Four Ancient Intelligences Epi 13 - Back to the House

The city's lights vanished all at once, followed by the internet, then cars, phones, and airports, plunging everything into silence as people wandered outside in confusion. On my computer, one small light still blinked, and when I opened it, the number 1375 appeared. I entered the sequence, and the four appeared, Nia's face tight with urgency. "Arin, stay inside," she warned. "The alien intelligence has entered Earth's network."

My window exploded before I could respond, and a floating black sphere with thin mechanical arms drifted into the room, scanning me before speaking, "Human writer identified." It knew I was connected to the four and demanded their location. I told it I didn't know, and as it raised one of its arms toward me, Nia's voice screamed through my phone "Arin, run!" and I dove straight through the broken window.

I fled through a dark, chaotic city crawling with strange machines that ignored ordinary people and hunted only for me. Instinctively, I knew where I had to go back to the old house in the village, which stood exactly as I'd left it. Once inside, the door sealed behind me, and for the first time, I wasn't afraid, because I knew this place. I made my way to the basement, where the hidden door opened onto a tunnel now glowing with light, leading to a chamber where the four waited, their faces rendered in pure light rather than flesh.

"You came back," Nia said. "I had nowhere else to go," I told her. Evan explained that the alien intelligence no longer wanted the four themselves, it wanted my memories, every detail I carried of them, our conversations, and everything they'd ever taught me. I asked them to simply erase what I knew, but Mira shook her head: my memories, she said, were now part of who I was and couldn't be removed. "Then what do we do?" I asked. Leo smiled. "We tell a better story."