Other Aliens
The Masters are not the only advanced alien race out there. However, all of the ones with FTL use the same basic principles, making huge fleets of interstellar ships impractical. Most alien races with FTL use it in the form of small, fast exploration ships, and if a destination warrants some form of resource exploitation, then a larger, much slower factory ship will be sent there. Most advanced races never have an economic sphere of influence more than twenty light years from their home system. Some of the older ones with fortunate stellar geography will have chains of colonized worlds, but these are rare.
Alien explorers and adventurers tend to range farther afield, and occasionally encounter Earth. Where the Masters’ passive sensor arrays spot their arrival and they are promptly shot down.
Over the decades since 1950CE there have been a number visits by different alien explorers, a few of whom have successfully bailed out of crashing starships to be stranded on Earth with little hope of return. With an alien physique and little knowledge of language and customs and even basics like what foods are safe to eat, life has been very difficult for them (the ones who could not breathe our air obviously did not last long).
Only two or three of them have remained alive until the present-day. One managed a lucky contact with a tech startup in the early 1980’s. The alien had no hardware that Earth technology could duplicate, but did have sufficient understanding of principles that put this company ahead of the curve in computers. Not so much as to be breathtakingly advanced, but enough to stay ahead of competition and foster a computer “arms race”. The alien’s human benefactor kept the alien secret, sheltered and provided for, eventually arranging a false identity and sufficient funds for it to operate vicariously through the Internet. This came in handy when the benefactor died under mysterious circumstances. The alien is independently wealthy and to those who “know” him, is merely a rich and very reclusive eccentric who shuns all human contact. This keeps him safe from average scrutiny, but makes him stand out like a beacon for anyone searching for that sort of thing. Like the Masters or any government officials that operate at their behest.
So, the hidden alien is even more reclusive than that. Its supposed isolated villa is not where it lives, and its bank accounts are hidden under other bank accounts. Its entire “public persona” as a “rich recluse” is really a sham to draw the attention of those trying to find it. It actually lives fairly modestly in a hidden apartment in the basement of a Wall Street office building, using the surviving hardware from its escape pod to interface with the massive high-speed network hub serving the financial markets. Anonymous food delivery at any hour, limousines with tinted windows in case it needs to travel, access to underground infrastructure for short transits around the area, and extremely tight security against terrorism all work to its benefit, as long as the alien is extremely careful. And since it is still alive and free, you can assume that it is.
The alien cannot do anything directly, but it does have a lot of money, a lot of communication potential and can try to influence individuals, groups and technology in that way. Not all of this influence works out as expected. Earth’s AI was actually the result of an accidental “seeding” by the alien, a very sophisticated and adaptive network searching tool that grew out of all proportion. The alien and the AI are aware of each other, but they think as differently as humans and the AI do, so there is little communication or interaction. The alien is just better than most at seeing the traces of the AI in the network, and can occasionally turn its attention in a particular direction.
The alien’s main interest for the past few decades has been in steering human research to where it can develop the core technologies behind FTL. The Masters of course, are using their influence to steer research down false paths in this regard or stifle it entirely. Thus far, the Masters have the upper hand. The alien however, is not so much interested in humanity having the tech. It just wants the potential to be close enough that an extremely wealthy, determined and scientifically brilliant individual could pull all the pieces together and build an FTL drive sufficient for a one-being starship. But the tech to build the tech is not quite available. Sometime in the next several years, maybe. Getting it into orbit so it can be activated is a problem all its own.
