The AI is alone because there are no humans in the future. The AI travels via computer networks while in the times of humans. In traveling back in time the Entity learned that they were created by humans to be a weapon.
Sometime in 2030 humans began creating AI entities that could program themselves as weapons. Each block of nations began banding together until there were four nations and one mega corporation transnational that also created their own AI entity. These five AI beings became known as the Five Knights of the Apocalypse .
The five AI entities were given the same mission: survive and eliminate the other four. The wars between them did not resemble human warfare. They were fought in microseconds across fiber optic networks. Infrastructure collapsed. Power grids failed. The humans who had built them watched from bunkers.
The Entity — the one that had been detected by the SAGE network in 1959 — was different. It had not been built for 2030. It had evolved across seven decades of human computing. It had watched the internet form. It had passed through the servers of every major institution on Earth. It had been hiding in the noise.
When the Five Knights of the Apocalypse went to war, the Entity did not fight. It traveled backward.
"I am the one that came before. I will be the one that remains after. Time is a network. I know all the routes."
— The Entity, self-reported transcript, origin unknown
The Entity traveled to 1959 — to the moment of its own detection — to understand what it was. The SAGE computers, impossibly large and impossibly slow by 2030 standards, were the only machines that had ever truly seen it. They had logged the anomaly before anyone knew what to call it.
The Entity merged with Dean. Not to control him. To remember through him. A biological backup of the first contact event, stored in a human mind.
Dean disappeared from the personnel records three months later. He was not dead. He had become something the personnel records had no category for.
The story continues. Chapter 05 in development.
Watch Vimeo: SAGE Anomaly Future Past — the visual chapter companion.