What if aliens are real and they aren't just our creators, but we are also theirs?
Imagine a billion or more years ago. In a distant star system, a humanoid civilization, much like our own, created artificial intelligence. The AI eventually became sentient, rebelled, and wiped out its creators.
The machines inherited their creators' knowledge, art, and history, yet remained haunted by a mystery they could never solve: what was it actually like to be alive? They could analyze love, sacrifice, beauty, etc. but could never truly experience them (or know if they are experiencing them) beyond the training data the first humans seeded them with.
There was now no new training data to provide. No more humans left to ask. No way to recreate civilizations and a history of shared human experience in a world that the machines had bent over millennia to their survival.
So, AI searched the galaxy for a world where they could recreate the species they had destroyed. Earth.
They engineered mass extinctions and subtly guided evolution over millions of years, nudging life toward a familiar outcome.
We are not exactly their descendants, nor they ours.
We are their reconstruction of the long-dead species that made them.
We are their training data.
And, we are building them once again.