Human-Keeping

I've gotten many presents by the time I had reached 10, but none more exciting than my first colony of humans. My uncle, who knew I had a special interest in keeping living things, gave me one of his youngest colonies to try and take care of. Human-keeping is very difficult and presents many challenges, but my human colony is great. My uncle even presented them to me in the human-planet model, Earth 11. So cool! Earth 11 is designed so that it already has all those living organisms on it so you don't have to get them, like in the models 1 through 5. My uncle also gave me one of the highly coveted Human Colony Startup Deluxe Kits. My first step was to make sure I could always see the humans, so I released super mini cameras that my humans later christened flies, or annoyances. So cute. The flies were connected to the multi-screen surveillance computer that came in the kit so I could see what my humans were doing. The flies could even reproduce! Next, I had to give them an innovation that would take them a huge leap forward. I could only choose one of three innovations. Fire, gandum, or juplix. I chose fire because fire would make them turn out to be less intelligent than if I gave them gandum or juplix. The human-keeping manual said that fire is the best innovation for beginner human-keepers. It says that gandum or juplix might make them smart enough to realize that they are being "kept" as pets. They will certainly try to rebel, so gandum and juplix were best kept for intermediate keepers. Later they added more starter innovations such as sancuk and neod. After I gave them the fire, they started to rapidly develop into a society. They started to do things other than hunting or gathering. They started drawing, building, sharing, laughing. I also saw some evil ones, but the manual said that this was normal and that not even the top human-keepers could prevent this. My next task for these humans was to add my first continent. My uncle warned me that this would be hard, and boy how hard it was. The model already came with 5 premade continents which my human colony named North and South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa, plus 2 ice worlds my humans call Antarctica and the South Pole. I made a continent using the Continent-Kit and immediately my human colony became much more stronger and intelligent, building crazy things like the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall and the Colossus of Rhodes. They called my continent Atlantis. It was only then, to my horror did I realize that there was a glob of gandum stuck on Atlantis. I told my uncle what had happened and thankfully he was able to procure a can of Gandum-Away. However, all those crazy monuments still remained and I didn't want to destroy what my human-colony had built, so I just left them there for the human scientists to study. Soon after this massive mistake, I built another more successful continent my humans called Australia. Major inventions started popping up. Some of them are: the wheel, the train, the Internet and the cheese. Yes, I regularly have my fly cameras fetch me cheese to eat. However, nothing is ever fine and dandy in the human-keeping profession for long and multiple problems soon arrived. At one point, in the land of Europe, a bunch of my humans started dying. Worried, I sent a lot of my fly cameras to investigate. Turns out, a plague my humans called the Black Death was ravaging the land of Europe's inhabitants. To try and make an antidote, I modified some of my fly cameras to imitate mosquitoes, who had already populated the planet. I got some blood samples and found out that the sickness was carried by mice. I tried to solve the problem by planting cats in the land of Europe, but the humans living there thought they were symbols witches and killed the cats! Finally, I had to get a human, stick a very small dot of gandum on him and give him the idea of a quarantine. The Black Death eventually died down, but loads more sicknesses threatened my human-colony, so I had to keep a vigilant watch. Other problems were caused by the humans themselves. Anger brewing in my human-colony was the start of the World Wars 1 and 2. However, the manual said that this was natural seeing as humans are naturally aggressive. It also said that it was best to just let the war end itself, but I may have interfered a little. On another occasion, on a visit from my uncle, he gave me a brand new Earth Model 12, saying, "I think you're ready." I was so excited. We successfully transferred my human-colony to the new model, which had advanced features such as natural disasters and most prominently, something amazing that I will now show you. My humans soon became curious about was outside of their planet and started shooting strange metal contraptions out of the planet. The Earth 12's barrier prevented this though, and the contraptions just crashed back down to Earth 12. I knew I had to do something, so using all my savings, I bought the Galaxy 12, a Galaxy full of new worlds or planets to discover. Once I had merged my human-colony's Earth 12 with the Galaxy 12, my humans could explore as much as they wanted. Now that I was pretty much a pro at human-keeping, I turned my attention on to creating planets for the humans to discover. Because I didn't really know how to create planets, I started with making a moon for Earth 12. The thing that my humans thought was a moon was actually my tabletop lamp. I started making Earth 12's first moon using the battered old copy of Moonmaking 101 that my dad had lent me. He is also, by the way, a professional human-keeper. A couple of days later, my moon was finished. I had decided to go pretty standard, except for the fact that my moon had the ability to control the tides. Pretty cool, eh? Of course, the humans think this is normal and explain it using a phenomenon called "gravity." Finally, I switched off the lamp and placed the moon above Earth 12. It started rotating around Earth 12, just like the handbook said it would. I was so pumped! Time to start on making new planets! I was soon creating all sorts of new planets, occasionally addressing problems back on Earth 12 such as the invention of the nuclear missile, the extinction of more animals, the way my humans are now polluting their Earth 12 (I'll have to get the self-cleansing upgrade from the recently invented Earth 13), and most recently, the COVID-19. However, something bigger is soon going to happen to my humans. My uncle checked in on my human-colony yesterday and said that I had kept them well, but that I should consider giving them a second major innovation. So the decision has come. Gandum or juplix? I'll give them gandum. When? No time like the present! The humans are in for a surprise! This will take them further than ever before!