Third Era: Creating human workers

The Anu’s ship was fully self-sufficient, it did not need outside resources to function. However, with all their technology they could not find a way to stop the disastrous effects the local energies were having on their sanity.

After several cycles had passed, they learned that certain metals, like gold, helped to diffuse the incoming energies at least to some extent. They found areas with conductive metals, and began to extract them. Had they been healthy, they would not have gone even this far.

Their initial landing was under water. The Anu created several bases here, from which they could interact more easily with the surface. The location they selected was the area we know as the Mediterranean.

The metals needed to diffuse the energies of magic that were driving the Anu mad, were located deep underground. Even though they had advanced machinery and dug out great caverns, it took a lot of effort to mine and process enough of these metals to make a difference.

There were only a few hundred Anu, and most of them were scientists, not people who were used to getting their hands dirty. Being underground, surrounded by mining and noise, wasn’t appealing to them.

The first time the Anu started changing the genetic code of humanity, they did it to speed up the development of sentience. The native species they had come to study, Homo erectus, was slowly developing intelligence and more advanced communication, but it would take many thousands of years for the species to evolve into something useful to the Anu.

The ones in charge decided they did not want to wait for humans to slowly evolve. So what they decided to do, in their increasing lack of sanity and conscience, was to order their geneticist Ninhursag to re-engineer the resident monkey race on the planet, the one they had been studying, to force sentience to happen faster.

The Anu are a people of the mind. For hundreds of their long-lasting generations, they have been focussed on the study of sentience. They celebrate the intellect and reason, much more than soft-sciences like mythology and the ways of emotions. In fact, they worked hard to repress this side of themselves.

Given their cultural background, the Anu did not have any way of understanding the energies of magic around this planet, and they did not understand the deep spiritual connection early humans had to their world and to each other. As they manipulated the genetics of early Homo erectus, humans lost their connection to their world, to each other … to their very soul.

In times when the energies of magic faded, the Anu interacted actively with their humans on Earth. During the Golden Ages, however, when the energies were strong, they would retreat into hibernation. Especially during those times, control of their human workforce became very important.

The easiest way to control an entire population, was to introduce the idea of religion. The Anu set themselves up as Gods, and encouraged humanity to worship them. This was easy to do, with their long lifespans and advanced technology. The military leader Enlil was worshipped in the sky, while the scientist leader Enki was worshipped in his “house of the waters”. Primitive humans, unfamiliar with rank, thought of them as parents with children.

Once they had instituted religion and set up their workforce, the new humans had to be educated to speak the language of the Anu, to understand their wishes, and to live in a way that the Anu approved of. However, the Anu did not want to spend time teaching them.

They provided their humans with small devices that worked as supercomputers – throughout history often called the Me (mɛ). This was technology the Anu themselves used to store and teach knowledge as well.

The Me could be used by sufficiently intelligent humans, who managed to learn the Anu language, to advance various aspects of society, such as farming, government, communication, technology, and many others.

The first time the Anu manipulated human DNA, they intended primarily to speed up the development of sentience. But the humans turned out to be very smart and breed very fast, and even though the Anu could put leaders in charge, there was a chance that the humans would rebel.

Increasingly paranoid, the Anu went back and re-engineered humanity using a method somewhat similar to a retrovirus, this time without Ninhursag, who was horrified at the results of the first manipulation and refused to be part of this. They re-coded human DNA to shorten their lifespan, to lower their intelligence, to make them more sexually obsessed, more violent and more submissive.

These new humans could be much more easily controlled.

In the earliest days of the Third Era, when many of the Anu lived among humans as Gods, they kept humans as pets.

Rather than interact with the workmen themselves, they set up their favourite humans to rule over the others. What made a human a favourite was rather random: they might be pretty, or skillful at something of value, or possess a trait that entertained the Gods.

Generally, pets were treated well and kept close to the Gods as their servants or given responsibility over others.

The humans who were not a favourite of the Gods – which was most of them – were treated as slaves, to do the work the Anu were not able or willing to do themselves. They worked in the mines, as servants in the palaces of the Gods, or as farmers providing resources for those working for the Anu. This lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Anu had expanded from the Mediterranean to bases all over the planet by this time, including Africa where much gold was to be found. Around these bases, cities and city states formed.

Humans were considered inferior, and a human life meant little to the Anu. People were often treated only as well as was practical to keep them in good working shape.

As the cycles of energy came and went, the Anu found ways to make use of the energies that were driving them mad. While they themselves were unable to process the energies, the humans were capable of doing so.

In laboratories, they siphoned the energies off humans and tried to use them to replenish their own dwindling inner resources.