Ever since the Knowledgeable made their offer, a little over a year ago, I've been considering accepting it. Well, at this point, the only real problem is a matter of trust. Willingly walking into a facility and disappearing for the foreseeable future. At least a year sleeping in a pod. That's always going to sound kind of fishy right ? No matter how enlightened and moral our Overseers are. The thing is, I think it’s the best option I have.

Perhaps I should go one more time over what’s been happening during the past two years.

There isn't all that much I know – in a certain way, the Knowledgeable have remained surprisingly hands off with us regular humans ever since they arrived. – I can't say if the date is significant, but it was over a year ago now : June 21st 2034.

It started that morning with public announcements of politicians unexpectedly resigning.

And then, their first transmission, around lunchtime. I don't think anyone forgot about that.

-

"Your government has been evaluated as incompetent, we are taking over.

Panic is unnecessary. Maintaining normal citizen activity is expected.

More information will eventually follow.

Best regards,

the Knowledgeable"

-

So yeah, just a couple simple phrases with no ambiguity.

And some panic.

Interestingly, as far as I know, those crafty bastards somehow managed to send it to everybody on earth, in whatever the receiver's mother tongue is. Oh yeah, and it was sent via some kind of psychic transmission that made the message sit in the front of my mind for at least a couple hours. Sudden, unexpected, invasive and disturbing.

We got used to those over time of course, but that was a big first.

Somehow, people would receive the message in a safe situation, and then it would stay so it could really sink in. I'm not really sure what our dear government officials got. Knowing how the Knowledgeable operate, I wouldn't be surprised if they received the complete list of all their failures. The results were apparent enough : not a single one of them even made a token effort at keeping their post. The entire evening and night were filled with the tail end of the public resignations and announcements of sweeping changes everywhere.

Changes were swift after that first contact. Even more so than announced, actually. A few weeks went past as the short-lived wave of initial chaos settled down into speedy progress. A lot of it happened thanks to the same mental messages as the first transmission. People would get a notification that their employment was terminated and replaced by something more fitting for them. Robots received massive upgrades as foreign knowledge and methods broke through existing roadblocks.

Suddenly, low-level labor didn't need to be done by humans anymore.

What we now call the Robotics came a bit later. They were capable of replacing medium and even some high-level work. On average, the work time for humans went down to a couple hours a day at most. My own job maintaining databases was terminated. Pretty sure the whole company got terminated, actually. We used to make parts for low-cost cars. Dirt-cheap, but in all honesty, kind of shitty. And well, everything below outstanding quality standards was swept away by the Knowledgeable. Instead, I got tasked with supervising a construction project close to my apartment. Sounded scary and impressive until I realized all I had to do was to check in on the construction site every few hours to check on the three Robotics and their little army of lesser machines. Just to make sure nothing was going haywire. On that first project, it happened only once : one of thee Robotics just wasn't moving anymore, so I gave it the good old shutdown and restart treatment – with great success! I did get a formation to address more complicated issues, but those never cropped up.

On a wider scale, as far as I know, the Knowledgeable showed perfect competence in uplifting human society.

They crushed hostile nationalism while promoting pride in the simple fact of being humans. The administration of hostile governments were pushed into peacemaking, propaganda efforts were reversed and armies were disarmed of their heaviest weaponry. Meanwhile, the competence and discipline of military and intelligence services, along with the vast resources spent there, were turned to better goals.

They solved our energy problems by clearing up the last issues we had with nuclear fusion. I bet they also know about more esoteric energy production, but fusion is a good starting point.

They also initiated a full transformation of food production. Turns out, mono-culture is bad and there are workable solutions that were being silenced by food industry lobbyists, who would have guessed?

Health care and research in the field got a ton of funding to methodically find permanent and efficient solutions to all sorts of diseases and health conditions. Crazy the stuff you can do when you're overwhelming, right?

I'd say it took the Knowledgeable about eight months to rework human society worldwide into… basically what could pass for a utopia where everybody has a decent place to live, healthy food, low environmental impact, and 7-hour workweeks. Criminality disappeared, and the very concept of jail vanished. The ‘bad apples’ identified before they could rot and helped by social insertion specialists. Money finally became completely dematerialized, physical shops didn’t really make the cut and massively moved online, while coffees and restaurants grew and took over some of their place in the urban landscape.

Most religions were allowed to stay, but it was made clear they would be purged like some sects or extremist factions were, if even the slightest hint of corruption could be found, if they started advocating for violence or created divides in society.

Sounds great? Well, to be fair, I think a lot of it is good. But ever since their first message, we never got a single peek at any of the Knowledgeable, whoever – or whatever – they are. And worryingly, we have no idea what happened to the criminals who didn’t take their raise to power as a chance to turn clean. Oh, and did I say that any research related to space was more or less canceled? And that while education was reworked with a focus on practical knowledge, it also includes just a gentle touch of brainwashing in favor of our lovely overlords? I'm not saying they’re evil, but my gut feeling is that Earth became the most beautifully gilded cage humans ever saw. Its a big and nice one, sure. But being in a cage just doesn't sit well with me.

About eight months in, I was growing quite antsy in spite of everything, feeling both powerless and trapped, doing my part, trying to enjoy the good things. But always with this background of unease whenever I stopped to think about it.

That's when The Offer was made, and suddenly, there was the outline of something. Something that might just be a door.