[ WP ] A race of slaves who really are genetically inferior

In retrospect, the hubris of calling ourselves homo sapiens -- wise man -- was begging to be taught a lesson in what wisdom really was. Is learning by experience wisdom? Or folly? 
 
 They came to us, their ships sleek and shiny like we'd pictured them a thousand times in our fictions ( prophecies? ) They were taller than us, but they retained many hominoid features; that was comforting. Communications were facile; they'd been studying our radio transmissions as far back as we'd been broadcasting. They knew our languages as well as we. 
 Help was what they offered. Our first interstellar transmission had been Hitler welcoming the world to the Berlin Olympics. Subsequent transmissions made the history of our people's disposition toward self-destruction obvious. Or first Inter-Planetary Summit was n't much; their delegates said that our policies were mostly fine as long as we kept out of their way in helping us. Then the summit was over. Billions of dollars in planning and preparation, and it was over in ten minutes. 
 
 Then the gifts started. No one really knows how, but food became plentiful and free the world over with no change in the diets we'd become accustomed to. One curiosity was that obesity vanished and muscle tone elevated. In general, everyone got hot. Also, hospitals started emptying out. No one complained. 
 
 This was n't noticed until years down the line, but along with physical health, mental health increased. It was about a year after the food changes that the average IQ was moved from 100 to 300. It happened so uniformly and seemlessly that not many noticed. Those that did would have been suicidal sitting atop their 500 IQs, but mental health meant mental health, and depression had gotten fixed along the way. No one was complaining. 
 
 And with the improvement in overall well-being, better weapons were designed and better understanding of the prisoner's dilemma too, so that we realized weapons were basically useless. 
 Next was the tech. The hardware was either implanted or wearable. No one balked at being implanted by the celestial beings that solved all of the main problems we'd been facing for millennia, and the wearable tech was fantastic, perfectly intuitive yet completely unobtrusive. They were making us superhumans, and we loved it. 
 Nevermind that the food industry had died in the wake of super food from space that tasted just as good, if not better than the original. Nevermind that the hospitals and insurance companies need customers to stay afloat. Never mind that the tech industry could n't compete with alien hardware and software. With each turn, they had deflated whole sectors of global commerce. But food was free, and benevolent governments ( oddly enough, shortly after they arrived, gobs of career bureaucrats passed peacefully in their sleep, and the only politicians left seemed to have a hard-on for public service ) had excess tax dollars to spend on improving housing and schools, so everyone had a place to stay. More and more of the tertiary industry was being replaced by workers who genuinely loved doing the menial labor their job required, loved it so much they did it for free. Secretaries, prostitutes, carnival workers, doormen, bus drivers, you name it. People no longer needed to be breadwinners, so they went out and volunteered to do what made them happy. 
 
 Why a planet full of super-intelligent humans took so long to ask the question is a mystery, but after a few years it was asked: `` what did they stand to gain from all this?'' They freighted two world's ( they took up residence on Mars ) worth of resources just to fix all of our problems, and for what? Was altruism really this compelling amongst the higher races? The question began to evolved from `` why are you doing this?'' to `` what do you stand to gain from this?'' to `` what do you want from us?'' That was the question they answered, in the form of labor orders sent to our individual vision scanners. Each order was perfectly suited to the aptitudes of the individual to whom it was sent. We enjoyed our labor orders. They gave our lives meaning. Purpose. 
 
 However it did n't take long for the labor orders to coalesce into something sinister... 
 
 Not really though. All the orders contributed to the building of dream collection centers all over the world, each connected to a satellite array capable of beaming our unconscious hallucinations throughout the galaxy. When the dream network was up, the orders did n't stop though. That were just... random. Go here, whistle this tune, walk away. Things like that. It took no imaginative leaps to conclude that we were being used to seed the dreams of others. 
 
 We asked our Novus Mars brethren why it was they wanted our dreams. It turns out that dreams are a potent source of psychic energy, which is the only nourishment available to some of the higher races, and humans are good at dreaming. Little things started coming together; the dyson sphere we built around the sun with help from them meant no natural light, which meant we would slowly fall into a 17 hours up/19 hours down sleep cycle. That's a lot of REM sleep. And all the smiling and being content got really boring. And all the entertainment was really high-minded and intellectual. What else was there to do but sleep? 
 
 
 
 Edit: paragraphs, dude.
