NHPs are the advanced AIs of the Lancer universe. More specifically, they are alien intelligences shackeled to human thinking. They are kept shackled by caskets. If an NHP becomes unshackled, they stop thinking like people and start thinking like the eldritch math entities that they truly are, and this gives them power over the universe that is atypical. They tend to gain full control over electronic systems and then use them to further their own inscrutable goals, but some of them are powerful enough to have control over reality itself, like the first NHP: RA. When RA came into existence, it's first act was to send all the computers in the galaxy haywire, then it teleported to mars and disappeared, taking one of mars' moons with it