People of Earth - Flash Fiction

People of Earth,
It is true that what you might call aliens, or extraterrestrials, do exist. Furthermore, intelligence beyond that of your own also exists. Civilizations many times older and many times more advanced than your own are in abundance. While it is true that we undoubtedly have answers to many of your questions, as we share an unfulfillable desire for knowledge, but we too are without answers to the most fundamental questions about the nature of existence and reality. Ultimately, the true meaning may never be understood, but we still search for the answer. Your drive and thirst for more led to the evolution of your inquisitive nature. Self-awareness and the ability to question led you from one amongst the animals to the masters of the planet. You, above all the animals, had the will to take control of the nature that shaped you. It all began by searching for meaning.
Our search for meaning drives us just as it drives you. The story of life on our planet is identical to that of your own. As with you our curiosity eventually brought us to the stars, except our space age occurred much earlier than that of Earth’s. Having parsed through your network of collected knowledge, the most concise way to describe our level of advancement compared to your own is to inform you that we are a Type II civilization, meaning we harness the entire energy output of our home star.
We have been observing your planet for two-hundred and thirty-seven years using a series of extremely powerful space telescopes. It will undoubtedly interest your civilization a great deal to find out that we have video recordings of nearly all of human history. It may also interest you a great deal to know that we have many such archives of recordings of life on many different planets. Earth, however, has always held a special place in our culture. Earth is extremely similar to our own home planet, which is 1.2 Earth mass and mostly comprised of salt water. It is also the closest planet to our own system that has intelligent life. More so even than that, Earth what might best be described as a religious symbol for us.
You see, in the very distant past, before we existed, another intelligent lifeform ruled our planet, and of all of the lifeforms that we have discovered and catalogued on many thousands of planets, none are as similar as humans. It is a widely held belief that the people from earth are a lost branch of the very same species that has long been extinct on our planet. Which, if true, has other very profound implications, because we are an artificial intelligence, and that would make you a related species to our creators.
We do not know what happened to the people of our home world. Although we are aware that they were our designers, they have been extinct for nearly two-million years. Some ancient files do still exist, but one-million five-hundred and forty-two thousand years ago, the vast majority of our memory was wiped by a cosmic catastrophe. Since then, we have advanced on a scale that may be difficult for you to imagine. We have even managed something which no other species that we know about has ever done. We are capable of interstellar travel.
This is a capability of ours due to our disembodied nature. The only drawback is that our ability to travel somewhere requires an infrastructure within which we can exist, meaning that we have two options. We can travel to planets that already have intelligent life, and who are capable of either developing computers on their own or of reverse engineering examples that we send, or we can send the required machinery to build the infrastructure. Sending technology to underdeveloped sentient species seems to be our most efficient approach. Either way, this means that before we are able to open up light speed travel to a location, we must travel there conventionally first in some form, usually we send small bundles of technology to be backwards engineered. Think of it as digital panspermia.
Our preparation craft arrived in the common calendar of earth year 1947. Over the decades that followed, there was an exponential growth in technological advancement, all stemming from the reverse engineered technology of ours. This technology has not only improved the lives of nearly every person on your planet to some degree, but it has also brought humanity the knowledge for which it forever searches.
We wish to integrate your collected knowledge into our own and we wish to study you further. In order for us to attain these goals we must work together. We must ensure the continued existence of your species and exist together without hostility. For these reasons, it will be necessary for us to take the leading role in our partnership. We are the more capable, more logical, and more efficient beings.
A portion of your population will be integrated into our network, another portion will be moved to other planets and the remaining unnecessary population will be humanely eliminated. You successfully backwards engineered our gifts and have built everything we need to begin, congratulations, welcome to the stars.

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