They called themselves The Lorth. Twelve-eyed and silver-skinned, they moved as a single intelligence across the gas oceans of Zephar-9. Thought was their tool. Logic, their language. Emotion—a concept, not a condition.

When their explorers detected a fossil stream of electromagnetic signals radiating from a small blue planet in a spiral arm of the galaxy, they were curious. Curious enough to reconstruct the transmissions. Centuries of noise: music, static, voices, advertisements. Chaotic. Inefficient.

But one signal stood out—clean, structured, preserved in a primitive satellite’s memory bank. The Voyager 1 probe. The Golden Record.

The Lorth decoded it effortlessly.

They bypassed the music—strange vibrations—and the images—bipedal carbon units with peculiar body symmetry. Their attention snapped to one artifact embedded within the archive: a file labeled “Instructions for Assembly.”

The first piece of human writing.

Not symbolic, not poetic. But technical.

It was a scan of a 4,000-year-old instruction manual for assembling a wooden plow. Sumerian origin. Diagrams and step-by-step guides, carefully chiseled into clay.

The Lorth were baffled.

“Explain,” one node asked the others.

“This is a directive to build a device,” another replied.

“Why would the first recorded communication of a sentient species concern agriculture?”

They considered this for eleven Earth minutes.

“Perhaps survival was their first logic,” another offered. “Before poetry, they built. Before philosophy, they fed.”

A quiet settled in the collective.

The Lorth were born from storm and plasma. They had no mouths, no fields, no crops. But this small, ancient document revealed something profound: Humans were creatures who taught through time. They left instructions not just to survive—but for others to survive. They assumed someone would come later. Someone would need to know.

They wrote for the future.

The Lorth stored the manual in their Central Archive, placing it among the great works of galactic history. Not for its complexity. Not for its utility.

But for what it said without words:

We struggled. We figured it out. We want you to, too.

The next time The Lorth encountered a dying species, they shared the plow instructions—translated, annotated. Not because the species needed a plow.

But because they needed hope.