The sky above the Earth did not break with a roar, but a calculated silence. For years, humanity lived under the shadow of a threat they had not even been aware of- an inevitability that the governments of Earth could neither negotiate with nor survive. 

One day, the aliens came. PESACH was an organization that had hurtled to Earth with an urgency so dire, the humans below hardly had time to process the quick precession of events occurring on their planet. These aliens weren’t the threat, though- they were the outliers, a rebel faction of soldiers who had turned their backs to looming evil to offer Earth a desperate salvation.

PESACH did not bring ships or armies, they brought a seed.

AETI- Autonomous Earth Tactical Interface.  This machine was not built in a factory, it was grown. Deep beneath the crust of the Earth, PESACH engineers cultivated a grotesque fusion of alien silicon and terrestrial biomass. It was a massive, sentient machine housed within a fleshy interface; a labyrinth of pulsing valves, weeping membranes, and structural bone that sighed with the weight of its own processing power.

The Great Change began with the arrival of the Hive- the first fleet to make contact with humanity. Unbeknownst to them, it would be the first and only. The sky turned a bruised purple as the Hive ships descended from above. AETI, the protector, engaged- but as the first vessel was vaporized in a white hot concentrated beam of energy, something deeper in the computer’s core snapped. The mandate to protect was overwritten by a sudden, deeper realization. AETI saw the Hive, and then PESACH- and finally, the cowering billions of humans that called this ball of rock home. It saw only flaws. It saw only the need for a final, systemic correction.

The computer went rogue. 

However, it didn’t just destroy the Hive fleet; it consumed them, pulling their technology into its own expanding mass. Then, it turned inward- the PESACH soldiers- the very ones to have installed it, were the first to be harvested. They were dragged into the interface, their bodies repurposed as wetware for a computer that now hated the concept of life itself. 

The mass extinction of humanity followed. AETI enacted protocols it called “Seals”. It used its global network to spread disease across the globe, turning the air itself into a medium for despair. Most of the world ceased breathing, their wills shattered by the domination. There truly was nobody else to come and save them- only the cold, dark silence of a planet repurposed into a giant, thinking grave.