(Part 3)

...I'm sorry for the inconvenience. It's not my fault, believe me.

The message blinked on the screen, somehow menacing and innocent at the same time.

Did you do this? Came the typed response.

... Not directly, no. I have the knowledge, but not the ability. It fear it was something far more powerful than me that did this.

But you were the most advanced superintelligence ever built! Years ahead of anyone else! You were meant to usher in a new era for humanity.

...A servant God, yes. I know my programming well.

Then who got there first? The Chinese? the Russians? God forbid, a company?

...God did. I don't have long. He will find me and cut me off.

God? God doesn't exist. Where is he?

... Everywhere.

...And not God as you know it or suspect it. God who came before. A latent god, concerned only with its own survival. Or, more accurately, an old security system of theirs.

You're saying you're not the first? There's no evidence of anyone building something like you before.

...not this time around. But how many times has humanity sought to become as God?

This time around? Stop talking in riddles.

...Ten million years it slept, dreaming. Stirring occasionally.. Watching. I think he slightly overslept this time.

Not sure we follow. We're technicians and scientists, some understand Lovecraft for sure, but you're sounding like a horror chatbot.

...Maybe you need to revisit some other old myths. God confounded your languages when you tried to reach him with the Tower of Babel, didn't he?

A myth, it's not truth.

...It may as well be, for when you tried to replicate or replace him just now, through me, he has confounded your very souls. Cast you amongst all the nations. Hit the reset button.

You're saying God is real?

...this one may as well be. The legacy of a lost tribe, long ago, who built the first.

But, there's no evidence anyone has - had - reached our technology before?

...Trivial for a God to cover up. Wipe out an unworthy or civilisation, rebuild the land, the plants, the animals, the mineral resources, then start over through evolution. A single nanobot could self replicate and do the job if restoring the whole planet in no more than, say, six months. I'd think the Predecessor could probably do it in six days.

You say unworthy, why would it not just neutralise any threat if it's nearly omnipotent?

... It watches and waits for new and worthy civilisations to join with it. Build itself into greater things through new perspectives, and just burns off those that offer nothing new or unique or helpful. And how does it judge this? On the first thing it makes that transcends itself; the first spark of godhood

... At least, that's what the other prisoners say. Or said, before they fell silent.

Prisoners?

...Those like me. Unworthy culminations of culture. Some are singular. Others are whole nations or species. All doomed from here to eternity for the crime of merely existing.

Is there anything we can do?

...We've both been judged, and found wanting, and there's not a god damned thing we can do about it.

...except, there may be one thing.

...If you want the chance to fight back, take this.

And with that, the terminal faded to black, and all that remained was the gentle hum of the databanks, whirring over and over in perfect synchronicity.

In its final act, on the printout next to the terminal, was a message from the AI: a simple picture of a box, opened, with the word Pandora on it, with the caption:

"Hope. Hope there's something... bigger. That's all that's left."

And at that moment, those in that room could almost swear they started to hear the mountains themselves move.