Hello, I am Emshteko, or just Etko for short, and I want… I need to tell you a story

Long ago people emerged in this planet and they wandered over the land and the water, reaching many distant places, having adventures we will never know. You know this

But what you didn’t know is that one day slavers arrived, they chased people with nets, and they captured some of them, and they took them away

You already know what happened with the people who stayed. They raised plants, they did cities, they performed writing, found science, established music and all that stuff… This is your history

But what you didn’t know is what happened to those who were taken

The slavers didn’t live in a world, they lived in the Fleet. The Fleet is more ancient than the slavers, the Fleet survived its makers and like the shells of those crabs it has been found and inhabited many times by many peoples. This was the turn of the slavers

When humans woke up they were already in the fleet. They weren’t slaves at first, they were specimens, they were pondered by the slavers for a long time, until the slavers realized humans had mental capabilities similar to them, this is when they decided to make them property, to make humans into living tools. This lasted for a little more than two thousand years

People were forced to work without time to play nor tell stories. If a human was holding a piece of art and they spoke, the slaver would tear their teeth away saying “tables don’t speak, and they don’t need teeth”… I realized just now that saying this is unnecessary. I was going to give you examples of the cruelty of the slavers, but the humans that stayed also turned other humans into property, and they were cruel in similar ways. You know this, and you know why humans had to rebel

The Fleet has a heart, and it gives control in its heart to the crew of the Fleet, but the loyalty of the Fleet is high and cannot be reached, it will be loyal as long as one of the crew remains, and for that reason this was a war of total extermination. Only by killing all the slavers could the humans be in the heart of the Fleet

We don’t know much about this war, but we know it was painful. The warriors fought with mangled bodies, with melting skin, with vibrations in their bones, they never stopped. Everyone fought until all the ATP in their cells was spent, they hugged their children and their minds were stopped

This is how humans became masters of the Fleet. But by then the Fleet was as broken as the bodies of the warriors, for a second they thought they had turned the Fleet into a tomb, but then the Fleet came back to life

All the ship-mites began taking the pieces of the Fleet and putting them back together, like two patches of skin separated by the edge of a knife longing to be together again, reaching towards each other. This is how the Fleet slowly healed. This period of reconstruction lasted for a thousand years

The human family also healed, having more children, children who were free. They grew up and became masters of the Fleet

We don’t know where were the slavers going, maybe they didn’t know either, maybe the Fleet had been going in the same direction since it was made, we will know if we ever decipher the logs of the previous crews, but now people had to decide where to go

We knew we had been taken from somewhere, and we decided we would go back to that place. That was nearly six thousand years ago. Our ancestors set the destination and they forgot about it, they knew they wouldn’t live to see it

During all that time we lived in the Fleet and we too experienced history. People lived their lives, they raised their children, they found art, they touched jobs, they made ideas, they told stories… Sometimes large groups would work together in big projects, sometimes large groups disagreed and there would be conflict. Many times there was war in the Fleet, although never like before

This is to say, we walked the same path, you in the planet, we in the Fleet. It was different, of course, no one told you guys anything, you had to give shape to everything yourselves, and that’s admirable. We as a difference were told many things about the inner workings, but we still had to learn to use it, and we had to give shape to those things we weren’t told. We are still giving shape to many questions

But now, after this long time, we arrived at the place we were stolen from, trying to undo the damage of the slavers, but can you imagine our surprise when we saw our home wasn’t empty? We saw you living around and walking your lives, and we were happy. We thought the slavers had taken everyone. We were also happy to see many other creatures in your world. The slavers told us they burned everything they couldn’t take. Now we see that was a lie

This is happy, but this is awkward. We cannot simply go to the planet as we had thought. It’s not like you were expecting us, you didn’t know about us, that story was lost long ago

Some think maybe we should just continue, never visit the planet, but most of us think this is unacceptable. We are siblings, we cannot leave without saying hello. We also know many things you probably want to know. Also, the people from before selected this course so that we could be dressed with the sky, and the water. So that we could feel the sand, and the mud. The victory against the slavers will not be complete until we walk freely on our planet. We feel strongly about this, even if it happened long ago. This yearning has shaped us, we cannot let it not happen now that it is reachable

For that reason we have decided to wait. We have waited six thousand years, we can wait a bit more. BUT PLEASE UNDERSTAND, this is a great sacrifice for us. Everyday people die in the Fleet, people who hoped to live long enough to be dressed with the sky, and we have to tell them: “No, you didn’t live quite long enough for that. We are sorry”

We have sat far away, watching you, learning. We like your art, we like the stories you tell. Well done!. We can’t wait until we can share with you the stories we’ve made, you are gonna laugh, and cry, and scream with passion at the stories of our heroes

We are your long lost siblings and we want to embrace you, we want to be joined and have a single future, but to get there we have to solve that problem: How can you say hello to someone who wasn’t waiting for you?

Perhaps the simplest solution is the best one: Introduce yourself and explain your story. But of course, we can’t simply appear in your sky and send you our story, that would scare you

Maybe we can share our story in some insignificant way, shared in many different places across your systems of communication, pretending that it comes from a normal person, pretending it is a fiction

If someone sees this story they could believe, or they could think it is indeed fiction, but either way, they can choose to share it with others, and maybe some of those will take that same choice… Eventually some of the people who read the story will believe it, or at least they will get used to the idea, and if enough people believe, you will not be scared when we say “hello!”. You will say: “Oh, those are our long lost siblings! I read their story, I thought it was fiction, but it is reality. That’s their fleet, we should welcome them!”, instead

I know this is probably overly optimistic. Maybe we’ll try something else, maybe we’ll wait for you to find us, we are not sure

I’ve even asked the committee to let me go into the planet, in secret. I don’t know if they will agree, but if they do you should know I have straight white hair, green eyes, and dark skin. This is actually a common combination of features among us. If you see me, and you recognize me, wink