They had arrived one day with little fanfare and just took over. Mankind had tried to mount a defense, but after a year of fighting, they had won. And life returned to an uneasy state of what it had been before. The new overlords made the rules now, of course.

Many had been asking what the aliens had wanted, why they didn't communicate, and what their overall goal was now. They did not come to earth for its minerals or water. They did not come to turn humans into work slaves or food or computers. They did not even force their way of life onto humanity. They had built their palaces everywhere on earth and they were flying in and out of them regularly. Some people were selected to enter, but they usually didn't come back out. Usually, because some did. Most that got out were just let go, others appeared to have escaped. But through those few, mankind finally learned what the overlords saw in them in humans as a whole.

To them, humans were some higher animals. Yes, they acknowledged that we weren't just like any animals, they saw mankind's empathy, compassion, and creativity. But to them, humans still didn't appear fully sentient. Something they thought humans were lacking. And so, the entirety of earth had become a resort for them, with humans as the main attraction. For that, they repaired the damages of war and global warming. They had given humans knowledge. Of better medicine and means to produce near-limitless amounts of power through fusion. But they didn't change human society. And so they watched as humans did as humans do, while from time to time taking people into their places as pets.

In the decades to come, every once in a while some movement would form to finally uplift humans or to let them have sovereignty over their world again, but it was always shut down. Humans lacked Keeneeta, they would always lack Keeneeta and they could never be uplifted. And left alone, because of their lack of Keeneeta, they would eventually destroy themselves, as many other forms of higher animals in the cosmos did before the conservation program had been created. And because the conservation of an entire species of essentially dumb animals was hard and costly, of course, said species would have to pay for this great gift with an eternity of servitude. If one could call it that.

The fact that humans could grasp most of the concepts of their overlord's society and technology, to the point where the overlords had to implement rules and humans and alien enforcers to keep humanity from progressing too fast and too far, just meant to them that it was paramount that humans were not allowed to eradicate themselves with wars and the destruction of the global climate. Life in the universe was mostly comprised of stupid things, that mindlessly fed on even more stupid things. Humans were so close to being actually sentient, from the overlord's perspective, that they could not be allowed to not exist.

Much later, a slightly more docile humanity learned, through unclear circumstances, that Keeneeta was of course a made-up concept, that the intergalactic community had outlawed centuries ago, but the solar system was just too far out of reach of any authority that it didn't change anything. And so their overlords had claimed the milky way and just enslaved every species they could find and turned their home worlds into giant zoos. And most of them regressed, falling into a state of decay until they were just mere animals, much to the overlord's great entertainment. But humans proved to be different enough. Mankind adapted and endured. Waiting for their turn.