Here is my entirely baseless theory. The Final Days hit and you have a world full of super wizards attempting to figure out what to do about it. Some want to sacrifice half the population to make a god, others want to eradicate the species. Perhaps, Solution 9 is the literal 9th idea on the list of ideas (with the absolute worst ideas at the top for some reason). What if one group of Ancients decided to either digitize themselves and take the servers out of phase with the universe. And we know taking things out of phase with the universe is within their power because the shards are out of phase with our universe. Or they figured out a way to send their city to the future beyond the issue. Or they flew to another more aetherically dense world and have returned now that the threat is over. My theory is that Solution 9 is gonna be Ancients in one form or another so they can rollback the unintended suggestion that some peoples are so culturally and/or genetically inferior that there is no choice but to wipe them out.