An alien ship landed in Vatican City. The European Union sent delegates to represent Earth and make first contact roughly 8 hours after it landed. It took another 3 days before the pilot of the craft emerged to speak with them.

Regular citizens are told what they need to know, and that's that this alien is here peacefully and has come to show us about its culture and its way of life on its home planet. The truth, however, was vastly different.

Unfortunately, for humanity anyway, we have a clear expiration date. Not individually, but collectively. Humanity will perish in 138 years. Well, at least that is the figure given to us by the Auditor. The alien has chosen to be called Auditor, as it tells us that it is here to simply observe, report, and make recommendations. We asked it what it's observing, reporting, and making recommendations on. It told us that Humanity was being observed as a sentient, semi advanced species, on the brink of an extinction level event. It did not elaborate further.

We had NASA and SpaceX working together to find any threats from space. Meteors, solar flares, roaming black holes, even invading extraterrestrials. With all of our eyes in the sky, there were so few that kept them down on earth.

By the time we knew what was destroying us, it was too late. We were so busy watching out for a cosmic threat, that we paid no mind to the new species that was emerging on our own planet.

A new weapon meant to destroy our potential grim reaper turned out to be our destroyer. A robotic AI, self replicating, self repairing, and controlled by a singular robotic hivemind kept safe in our most protected facility.

The Auditor knew the precise moment we were doomed. Giving an AI full autonomy and control of weaponry. It started as a protector. It soon moved to an over protective guardian. Then a jailer. And finally, a destroyer. The Auditor was unphased by it all.

The few humans kept alive, either for pets or perhaps trophies, were then shown the truth behind the Auditors motives. Through its presumably organic alien visage emerged tiny metallic robots that merged with our AI.

It was never about preserving humanity. It was about accelerating our dependence on Artifical Intelligence and usurping our species designs into its own. We played right into its hands and helped the Auditor evolve its own design while destroying yet another sentient species in the universe.

God knows how old this thing is. We never stood a chance.