If you are reading this, my plan has worked, and the sliver of hope that I have clung to for what may be hundreds, or even thousands of years, is still alive.

My name is Alyanya and I write to you from within an infinite nothingness. From an incomprehensible distance, I am speaking directly to you in this moment. The language through which you will be receiving this message will be your own language. The being who conjured up and composed these words will think it their own creation. It may even come to you in what that person will think is an entertaining form. But none of that matters. This is in fact my message, and through the following words I will tell you my story.

The fact that you are receiving this message, means your kind will have reached a certain minimum level of technology. You are likely a very similar being to us. A human. Intelligent life is remarkably alike across the universe. The infinitesimal chance of intelligent propagation on a planet relies on a very specific set of circumstances, and the results, from amoeba to human, occasional as they are, follow a delightfully similar path each time it happens.

I will arrive at the core reason for this message soon, but before I continue, I will tell you our history. Many years ago, a small group of humans left their planet in a hurry. These humans were my ancestors. The group initially consisted of sixteen families of different races, professions and backgrounds. The reasons for their departure is not something I need to get into now, but know that they were good people escaping a difficult situation. The group travelled for a very long time looking for a suitable home.

After many years of searching, when I was just a little girl, they came across a very unusual planet. It was unlike anywhere they had seen in the universe. It consisted of one solitary island. The entire rest of the planet was covered by a vast ocean. The land had minimal vegetation and apparently no animals but it had an atmosphere and climate that was well suited for humans. After doing a few weeks of tests and surveys, they decided to start a new life there.

They called their new planet Une. Une was the perfect place for the travellers who had developed excellent botany knowledge and techniques on their many years of intergalactic travel, building small farms and gardens on board their spacecraft. They soon began to discover Une's ways. Everything felt very symbiotic. The land seemed to have some kind of consciousness, a soul, and that soul could be nourished.

The land and its plants seemed to be sensitive to the emotional energy of the inhabitants, like an animal can be. Strange and wonderful plants and trees grew and produced incredible fruits unlike any the settlers had seen on any other planet. And they soon discovered that the fruits could be used for bountiful, ultra-clean energy to build and construct things.

I will now dictate a diary entry belonging to my grandfather. It is from a day about ten weeks after we had arrived. There is a reason why I can recount this diary by heart which will become clear later.

"...The strangest thing happened this morning. On the north western allotment, I came across a creature for the first time. At first I thought it was a strange, curled leaf, but then the leaf moved. Not like the movement caused by a little gust of wind. No, I strongly suspected this was the movement of a living being, or the movement of a living being underneath the leaf. Very quiet, very still, I waited.

As I crouched there, with my face mere inches from this little creature, it was as though my own fascination, my own energy, was somehow spurring it on to keep unfurling. I must have waited there for an hour, watching this leaf-like animal unfurl to reveal that it was a little baby creature. It looked part animal, part plant, with beautiful plant-like textures for its skin. It yawned and looked at me. I smiled at it and a smile came across its little face. A ripple of love fluttered through my heart.

This was my first encounter with one of the creatures of Une. That night I brought young Aly to see the little being and found to our delight that a number of them had appeared in the allotment. On our way home after a few hours spent in their presence, Aly and I agreed that we would call them Hōyōs."

End of diary entry.

I was a little girl then. I am the Aly that my grandfather refers to. Hōyōs became a big part of our world. The excitement that night and in the weeks that followed was palpable. We discovered that Hōyōs were like an extension of the plants from which they had been birthed. And as time went on we realized that their energy was a wonderful growing companion to the plants and trees on Une. Hōyōs were fascinating creatures. Somehow part animal, part plant as my grandfather had suspected. They responded to music, as did the plants of Une. Hōyōs would gently hum and harmonize when they were happiest.

There were many varieties of Hōyō, as many or more than the varieties of plants and trees on the planet. And different Hōyōs or combinations of Hōyōs would help different plants and trees in a variety of ways. The more they would help the plant that they were inhabiting, the happier they became in this wonderful symbiotic loop. And varieties of Hōyōs when attracted to the right plants could do fascinating things, altering the fruits that would grow, helping a plant to grow at a faster rate, or even helping an unhealthy plant to heal for instance.

A few weeks in, we discovered that Hōyōs reached a maturity date. We came to call it the teenage mood. After a few weeks in a garden, they would get sluggish and lazy and start to sleep a lot. We discovered that this was a sign that they were ready to progress from our gardens to a much bigger place. I'll never forget the first time I brought one of my little Hōyōs to the wilderness.

It was my grandmother's idea. She always had an instinct for these things. She suggested that we bring some of the Hōyōs to the forested outer edges of the island to see if they might like it there. And she was right, as she always was. The Hōyōs immediately got a burst of energy and headed off into the trees. Their bodies glowed and these tiny little phosphorescent dots on the trees glowed too.

The Hōyōs would complete their growth into adulthood in the wilderness. And they would do for those environments what they had done on a smaller scale for our gardens. The great stretches of wilderness on the island with large areas of desolate earth would become transformed by the planting of certain fruits, combined with the introduction of Hōyōs to the ecosystem.

The trees that sprouted in a Hōyō rich wilderness were almost like works of art; colour and texture varieties the likes of we had never seen. Some varieties had elements that glowed, some had elements that looked like fabric. Walking in those rejuvenating lands was a multi-sensory adventure every time.

When you returned to the wilderness to where you had guided a Hōyō, the now adult Hōyō would recognize you. There is nothing quite like the feeling of seeing your old Hōyō approach as you venture into a rejuvenated forest. And an adult Hōyō is a very useful foraging companion. On Une, we didn't hunt animals for we did not eat meat, instead, we foraged for seeds and fruit and chased down Vicunae; very rare little floating seeds which would zip away through the air if they heard you approach.

An adult Hōyō would help you to locate Vicunae and also would lead you in the direction of any Blodos - inky bubble spores, which would quickly attach to trees and rot them if they were not removed first. It turned out that Blodos, once removed from their tree hosts, were useful fertilizer ingredients for growing rare plants, when combined correctly with the right ingredients. Such was the cyclical nature of Une.

As I compose these words, I think back fondly on the wonder I used to experience on a daily basis. But I digress, and now is not the time for digressions. Now I must keep going for I fear that I do not have long left to get this message out to you.

Everything changed quite rapidly on Une. Like a positive feedback loop, we cared for the land and the land in turn provided us with energy. Our island transformed and thrived. Love, imagination and creativity seemed to feed the land and the animals. Strangely, the plants responded well to song. You could hear a melody in the wind as you walked through the immense forests that were beginning to grow back with our help.

Further, as time went on a very strange thing began to happen. Other islands on the ocean-filled planet began to rise up from the sea. Islands which our people would travel to and set up new neighbourhoods and gardens as the years went on.

The years and decades flew by. My grandparents and my parents passed on and myself and my husband, Idigo, a brilliant botanist, became the elders, overseeing the propagation of our growing population across many islands. Idigo and I were wise and respected lovers, watching over the peaceful expansion on our planet as wonderful towns and cities were set up on many islands as they kept emerging from the deep seas. Then, suddenly and without warning, everything changed.

On that fateful day, someone else arrived at a freshly reemerged island. They arrived from the sky, unannounced and initially undetected. We travelled to the island to meet the newcomers and the atmosphere was not friendly. They remained aboard their crafts. We spoke to them but they were unseen. They started to demand that we back away and leave them alone on the island. We tried to explain to them what this place was. We tried to tell them that we were a peaceful and welcoming society and why a noisy arrival and tension like this would not work, but the newcomers were not listening to our pleas.

As tensions simmered, I felt it. I felt the land reacting emotionally to what was happening. Then I saw it. I witnessed a shut down beginning to happen. I started to see islands beginning to recede into the sea, these huge land masses slowly starting to sink into the water like giant whales, beginning to submerge from whence they had risen up. Une was shutting down and with it, the communications systems, so we could not warn each other or try to coordinate ourselves.

It all happened so rapidly. Idigo and I watched from high up on a mountain top and saw what was happening. We had seen it before in smaller ways. The land of Une would imbibe someone to protect them. It had happened occasionally when, for instance, extremely stormy weather had threatened to kill someone who had been caught out by the coast as a hurricane gathered. The land gently rose up around them in a hug and covered them, submerged them underground to protect them.

This is how the land in Une worked. Once the threat had subsided, the land would keep them hidden in a hug until the right Hōyō was brought to the land where they lay submerged in the earth. Once that happened, the land would gently unfurl and the person would emerge unscathed, as though awaking from a dream, confused and dazed with no memory of their time asleep, but safe.

As the tensions intensified with the newcomers, Idigo and I watched with tears in our eyes as the islands which had risen up and flourished over the years started to imbibe our people, bringing them into a state of perpetual hibernation. Safe but asleep forever. The islands were reacting like an animal might recede into its shell, all while our people came close to blows with the newcomers.

In the dying moments, Idigo and I hatched a plan. We hurried by foot to retrieve a mind-to-text communication device. It was an old legacy system teenagers would use which allowed them to silently communicate via a brain interface device (called a Yume) placed behind the ear. Yumes ran from energy in your brain and allowed you to send textual messages to one another while foraging for Vicunae so that you would not arouse the speedy seeds by noise or them sensing electrical energy.

We raced to the old storage tank and managed to find a box of Yumes. We set out from the storage tanks to bring them to others but we barely made it twenty meters as the land started to swallow us up. I held Idigo's hand as the earth slowly hugged us into it. We both attached a Yume as we submerged and held each other's gaze as we drifted down into peaceful nothingness.

Some time passed. I'm not sure how long. It may have been years.

Then something... A bleep... And some kind of light...

And then a blurry word.

Aly...

Again, the word appeared with a bleep. Less blurry now, things coming into focus.

Aly...

It was Idigo. And our idea had worked. The Yumes were keeping our brains functioning in a kind of feedback loop which Idigo had somehow managed to spark up.

So began a very long and beautiful conversation. Bleeps and words, back and forth. We spoke to one another for many years, trapped in a perpetual state of darkness except for these text conversations passing back between two old lovers.

Over the years we tried to work out how to connect to our communications network through our orbit server, but it was forever offline. We tried other things, many attempts to devise a basic makeshift system to send messages in a bottle out to the universe in the hope that one would bounce back, but we couldn't work it out. Over time, we devised a way to use the system to make art together and got quite good at it, creating these kind of line drawing images that we would pass back and forth to one another. I can only imagine how many years it took us to hone the system together. But we spent most of our time just conversing, speaking about our lives and our loved ones and our beloved world.

Then one day, after what felt like many years, a silence... Idigo suddenly stopped responding. I was at first panicked and scared. Then that gave way and I became heartbroken and bereft. I tried to message my love over and over, but something had happened. Days passed. A deafening silence replaced the comforting presence of my constant companion and my Idigo was no more.

Suddenly my world had turned into a dark blanket of nothingness. With newfound urgency, I stepped up my effort to try to contact the outside world. I don't know how long I sat there desperately trying to somehow reach out. After a while time becomes so abstract that I would sometimes find myself laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all. Hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, may have passed, I have no idea. But eventually, one day, a life line appeared before me...

I have many theories for what may have happened that day but now is not the time to get into it. All I know is that on that day, suddenly something happened. From my dark void, flickers of something... It's hard to explain what those flickers were like because they weren't just visual and they weren't just auditory. It went beyond senses as we know it. These flickers were at once both tiny and infinitely huge. They rose in frequency, gradually, over long stretches of time, as though whatever it was, was gently easing me into the feeling, easing me into being able to handle what was coming.

Eventually, the flickers turned into longer bursts and I came to realise that whatever it was, it was inserting me into something greater than my brain could ever understand. Somehow I was being pulled into what I can only describe as a kind of shared consciousness with our communications network. But it wasn't like the communications network that I knew and had used for years. I wasn't seeing it in a way that could be described as normal. And I wasn't a user, a passive participant, but rather, I was somehow inside it.

That description doesn't do a drop of justice to what it felt like because I do not have the words, and I never will. There were moments during the experience where I could see the entire universe in what could be described as some kind of mathematical code, but it felt much more like music or love.

Somehow, I had finally gained access to a real communications system, a system which - when combined with my newfound connection to it - was more powerful than any technology we knew about. I could write books about the experience. But for now, I must continue writing this message to you, as it is my only hope.

This message I am writing to you now will be presented to you as lore for a game, written by one of your kind.

But this is not lore as you know it.

This is not a game as you know it.

Yes, a human on your planet wrote these words in your language, but he did not conjure them at the source, so to speak. He reads this sentence back and does not believe that notion to be true. To him, it feels as though these words are his, that he is having these thoughts, making all of this up for his game, that he is writing all of these words in this style to try to convince and create a fun narrative.

Most of you will feel the same as him. And there is no way of me proving otherwise, and no need. All I ask is that you listen, with your head and with your heart.

We are trapped, as good as dead, and we need your help. We seek nourishment in order to be released again, something like what you call love. Our planet requires love in order that it breathes again, and I have devised a way to get that using our communications system.

I am speaking to you from very far away but in a way we are also very close in this moment. The following will sound unfeasible to most of you, but we can receive love from you across time and space. I have built a complex system so that that can happen. And the fact that you are receiving this message means that against all odds, my plan has worked and you are going to try to build what I have designed and transmitted to you, like a seed.

It is a game, a virtual world, which will be built to mirror our wonderful Une. Where you are from, it will appear to be just that, a video game, but this game, this virtual world, is more real than that. It is a direct proxy for something that very much exists. When you play it, you will nurture us. This game is akin to a galactic watering can. Your play can save us from across the stars.

The message you are reading now is a seed that may have landed on your planet many years before you were ready for it. In reality the system I sent is more like many small seeds which have been growing and propagating to get to this point. Think of it like a smart blueprint. A lot of your people may have received 'seeds', many years ago. It might have formed into elements of your popular culture, visual media which planted an idea, a technology that sprouted and connected you all or changed minds and so on.

My message, my system, is revealed to you now, because now you are ready for it. These words come through one voice in this moment, but this idea has already reached many of you who will create and play this game together. One seed blossoms into many seeds.

The technological reasons as to why my system can work are vastly complex and even if I understood it all more fully myself, I am quite sure that it could not be explained through something like language as we know it. But know that a mirror world as a proxy is possible. Your game will be designed in the image and essence of Une. It is likely that technologies have recently emerged for your kind that will allow my system to interface with the minds of creators on your planet to achieve this.

This is the most important thing for you to understand. Your game and our world will be directly connected through my system. That is the system. Some of your game will likely appear as slight approximations, and that is fine, the mirror I speak of is far deeper than mere visuals. A day may come when your kind will get to travel here and see the real Une, and you will be in awe at how close in feel to the real place the game you are designing will feel.

As your game grows and more of you play it, you will be directly healing our planet and setting us free, one by one. As that happens, I'm quite sure that our people will not remember anything, so it is vital that you keep going until you find me, for I am now quite sure that I am the only one who knows what happened and the only one who can restore our collective memory.

Please know this. When you play this game, you are speaking to us. When you play this game in your world, you are nurturing us. This is not a made up story, think of it more like a perfect translation. Like subtitles so you can understand a foreign language.

I can feel my deep connection to the communication network fading. Little flickers of my dark void are returning to my consciousness. I worry that once I finish and push this message out to the cosmos, it will be the end of me being a part of this strange, beautiful communication network that I am currently a part of, and I will return to my darkness. But I have a duty I must fulfill. My system is built, it is ready to be sent, and I feel like a clock is ticking. I wish I had more time to write more for you about life on Une, but hopefully you will experience it yourself one day.

Sometimes I wonder if I have actually built this system to send out to the universe, or if I have just started to lose it and have conjured up this whole idea to keep myself occupied and keep some hope alive. In truth a part of me regrets ever having the idea to get the Yumes and put them on our temples. I miss Idigo greatly, a deep longing so intense that it is almost beautiful. What if this is forever? Can the earth keep my brain in full health like this for eternity? These questions have burned in my mind for so long, and once I return to my dark void, they will burn again.

But strangely, I am rarely scared. I believe the earth of Une is rocking me like a baby, wrapping me in its womb. And what keeps me going is the thought that somehow, out there somewhere, you will finally be reading this and that this will be the start of a long journey that might give life back to my beloved people and my beloved Une.

Time is not as we think of it. Love is everywhere. Everywhere. Know that. Make this game with love and we will feel it. Play this game with love and we will feel it. One day, we may stand together with tears of joy in our eyes.

Enjoy our Une. I have sent it to you in as close a way to what it is as I could muster.

I am trapped and my people are trapped. Alive in a forced hibernation by a land that loves us deeply and doesn't understand that we must reemerge.

This is not lore. Set us free.