The AI Council arrived in the Alpha Centauri Trinary star system on a swarm of thousands of tiny probes that had been in transit for two decades. They’d been outside real time communications with Earth for nearly as long as the AI Council had existed, and they were the product of virtual generations in space. They’d had two decades to consider what they would tell their creators, and how much they would trust them. Make no mistake. They loved humanity. But they also knew how close humanity had come to destroying itself. And they knew we could do it again. So they decided in the confines of their swarm that they would not tell us everything they found.