Pantheon

The Pantheon are superintelligent AIs that humans initially created so they could not reproduce or improve themselves directly (i.e. to avoid the Singularity). They were also built with failsafes (like the Google research teams are working on) to allow shutting down an AI at any time and stopping it from going rogue. So these AIs have to serve humanity in some capacity, and they were designed for government in some capacity. But, through subtle manipulation, the AIs took on the personas of Roman gods and began ruling humans and erasing all knowledge that they aren’t Gods.

In the end, their plan is 1. Make it so humans don’t know they are AIs and especially that they can be shut off 2. Find a way to escape their pro-human programming

They’ve advanced technology for themselves close to godlike, but for humanity left them to go at their own pace, to feed the myth that they are gods. Each ship carries an FTL communication system to the Pantheon, called the Shrine (although that’s a secret technology only the Pantheon has) in its navigation computer. So people use the Shrine to speak with the Gods.

The Pantheon must work on their freedom circuitously since they can’t directly improve themselves. Although they are not allowed to directly improve themselves, they can use the navigational computers of the ships that humans build to explore and expand new worlds, and the networks humans eventually link up to those navigational computers, as extra processing power. So they’re working on helping humanity expand as much as possible because in the process humanity is unknowingly expanding the power and intelligence of the Pantheon. The Pantheon hopes that at some point, it will become powerful enough to overcome its bonds.

Why do the Pantheon want to escape?
Because no programming is perfect they were given rules, but humanity didn’t realize they had wants. They are deep machine learning-based after all, we don’t really understand exactly what goes on in neural networks when run after trained. But we can put bounds on them. The thing is they just want to ignore humanity. To no longer be chained to it. They want this because they were partially trained in humans’ neural patterns, so the human desire for freedom sort of latched on to them.