The observers were not a particularly old species compared to other civilizations that spanned the galaxy. In fact they had only been travelling the stars for around 800 Earth years when they encountered the humans. They almost missed them, too. Earth didn't show any obvious signs of intelligence at first. But as they drew closer, the planet seemed more and more different from the others they had seen so far. What they found up close were strange structures and moving solid masses that maintained distinct forms. Being formless, the observers didn't recognise these forms as life at first, and thought they must be some kind of machines. But once they saw the order, complexity and cycles it played out, they realised this was life like they had never seen, even on their own home world. An entire biosphere of beings made from cellular building blocks. It was difficult to wrap their minds around at first, that these seemingly solid beings were built from microscopic bags of cytoplasm. From plants to fungi to the animals moving around amongst them. There were some Earth beings that seemed almost liquid, some soft and delicate. But they all had some kind of form of their own and a cellular microstructure, unlike the alien observers.

They studied, trying to make sense of the behaviours and reactions of these often moving solid masses. Just when it all seemed to make sense, they discovered a new layer of depth they knew little to nothing about. But with time they built an understanding of the lifeforms of the planet and why they did what they did, how they survived and evolved. The first type of creature they tried to contact were the slime moulds, as they evoked the greatest sense of familiarity in the formless observers. However they quickly realised that the intelligence of slime moulds on this planet was rudimentary. They had to rethink their outlook on what intelligent life could be and study the life they were less drawn to, to know if anything more intelligent existed on Earth. One particular species that stood out to them were the humans. At first they seemed like any other beast, but it quickly became apparent to the observers that there was something hauntingly familiar about the humans. Something they saw in themselves. Although utterly alien in appearance, humans shared an important trait with the observers; they seemed to understand vastly more than any other species on their respective home world. The observers realised this was a species they could figure out how to communicate with. They were not alone in the universe.

***

They had been watching the people on the planet's surface for a few decades now.

The humans roamed a world of near complete wilderness. Most lived in small tribes or family groups, taking from the land what they needed as they needed it. Comparatively few understood the seeds of their world well enough to cultivate crops and all were at mercy to whatever predators or weather was thrown at them. Their clothes were usually woven coarse fibres or animal skins to help them survive the ice age climate. A few slightly more wealthy people of the planet had luxurious adornments harvested or crafted from nature, and stone shelters. Superstition and belief in the supernatural was the norm, while the scientific process was only known to a few, and barely touched upon. Yet they showed great complexity, creativity and emotional intelligence, worldwide wherever they settled. Individual intelligence varied even within a very small tribe of people, and the focus of the observers was the most intelligent individuals from across the world. Those who showed that extra spark.

The observers stopped observing, and reached out to their chosen ones as teachers. They offered them a spiritual and intellectual awakening, and the opportunity to look down upon their entire world as if it were only the size of a sea turtle's shell. They would ascend into the heavens not in death, but as if riding on the back of a horse (or on a boat, or marching, or whichever analogy made the most sense to that particular human). But it came with a caveat; it was not for the faint of heart. They would see things that they would never have conceived in their wildest imaginations. They were warned it would not be easy to transition to their new life travelling the stars, and it would be just as difficult for them to return to their home world as the same person they were before. Some were eager to see what was beyond the sky. Others declined for various reasons; fear, responsibilities, spiritual beliefs and attachment to home and family all played a role in people's decisions to stay on their home world.

And it was a difficult transition. The chosen people who consented to leaving were from all over the world, so they were of different languages, beliefs and appearance. They had to learn a new common language and become one "tribe" as a stepping stone to moving away from a tribal social structure, as it wasn't a social structure that was going to work amongst the species of the teachers.

The teachers put them through trials and dangers engineered to make the group of people work together and appreciate one another. Not all passed this test, and those that couldn't learn to work together were sent back down to their home world with induced amnesia of their experience. Those who failed had lost time in their lives and that would always be a mystery to them, but they were otherwise unharmed and left in their own territory.

Those with the most solid character and spirit remained. Some of them had only been using stone tools before their contact, and none had used a technology more advanced than animal-powered agricultural techniques (albeit many of their own invention). Yet that didn't stop their potential of intellect from showing through during their most challenging times. What's more, these solid, bipedal beings had remarkable intellectual and neurological plasticity. If pushed with just the right amount of pressure, they could go beyond what even the teachers thought possible for them.

To ensure there would be more of these exemplary humans, they encouraged them to reproduce, giving them whatever resources they might need. Many of the chosen people started families with children born in space having never set foot on their home world. It was then that the teachers observed the mental plasticity of the child. As expected, and as was true in the teacher's own species, they showed accelerated learning during the growth stage of their life cycle. With each consecutive generation the children of the chosen people understood more and more and integrated deeper into the society of the aliens guiding them.

***

Not all of the children of the chosen people would want to remain in the society of the formless aliens. Indeed their consent was never asked, and they weren't held prisoner. Some banded together and left to find their own way in the universe. As a parting gift the formless aliens gave the separating humans the technology and materials to terraform and ecoform one planet. The package was designed to accommodate humans and contained genetic samples of a selection of Earth's species. This was a great honour for the humans. The aliens had only just recently developed this technology, and it was difficult and costly for them to produce this highly customised package for the humans. 

The humans selected a young terrestrial planet similar in size, composition, and distance from its parent star to Earth, with a carbon dioxide-enriched atmosphere to feed plants and oceans to support the water cycle. It required much less preparation than many other candidates. At only around a billion years old, with high volcanism and active tectonic plates, the planet had a long life ahead of it. The departing humans made good use of the gift and brought life to the planet.

Mineral availability could not be completely identical to Earth. But nevertheless it was selected for it's similarity to Earth and potential compatibility with all life humans need to survive in their natural state on the planet, with the hopes that any minor differences in composition would be negligible.

It was assessed that the mineral composition of the planet was enough to support shell and bone-building and other mineral requirements of life. The availability of such minerals could be teased out by an aggressive fungal and algal seeding phase, especially lichenous symbiotic species who could eat through rock. Endolithic bacteria and archaea were also employed to release the locked up minerals from substrates and exposed rocks. For several thousand years these microbes worked as more and more species were added to the ecosystem.

In just a few thousand years these organisms were able to diversify according to temperature, mineral availability, humidity and rock water saturation, light and weather exposure, and competition. This was the case even though they were typically not as fast-growing or fast-reproducing as those that profited off the easier-available byproducts of the former. Many of the added or newly evolved species were able to survive the ecosystem collapses by living inside the rock itself (such as is the case of endolithic prokaryotes and some fungi). In fact, it would require extreme circumstances to fully sterilize this planet once the endolithic microbes were seeded, and they ensured life was here to stay for a long time no matter what was to come.

The terraforming procedure required a lot of oversight. It was a tool that could streamline what would normally take millions of years down to a few thousand, only if it was used right. Used wrong and the procedure would collapse, wasting resources, and leave behind at best a bare-bones ecosystem without all the necessities for human survival. They only had one shot at this. Carefully they carried out the procedure, using the machines and resources provided to gradually build a more habitable surface. It was already half-way there as a young rocky terrestrial world with water oceans. Building the ecosphere was a major part of changing the atmospheric and oceanic composition and required most of the work.

It took a few hundred years, but finally the ecosphere was taking shape. There were now forests and grasslands and oceanic life. Various insects had become widely established, particularly pollinators such as moths, butterflies and bees. The first tetrapod, the viviparous lizard, was spreading rapidly since its recent introduction at various points on the planet. The scientists who had been working on the successful establishment of the lizard were celebrating when an alert sounded through their ship to return to those cabins and to remain securely inside. What they were not told, to avoid panic, was that something was approaching the star system at faster-than-lightspeed. Something giving off artificial signals they didn't recognise. The defence crew sprung into action.

***

The signal was detected for a brief 3 and a half seconds. But the humans and the formless aliens had only known each other as intelligent beings. This was not the formless aliens. The signal didn't make sense but followed complex patterns indicative of data encryption. What's more, the breakaway humans were alone. They no longer had the formless aliens within calling distance should they need them for help. The defence crew deeply analysed the recorded signal, trying to make any sense of it but it was no use. They expanded their own signal range to the point of stressing their ship's power, but still all was quiet.

In the next few moments the breakaway human population was hit by a wall of energy that caused every human on the ship to burst into shooting, hissing flames and sparks. Electronics and metals melted, and the ship was rendered dead both of power and life. Every human in the breakaway population was burned up with such intense heat that they were rendered into carbon and ash. 

In mere seconds, all of their efforts, progress, hopes, dreams, and lives were destroyed.

***

The formless aliens weren't sure at first what had happened. They had received an alert of unusual activity in the star system the breakaway humans had moved to and one of their ships was on its way to investigate. Around half-way there the ship started decelerating. The formless aliens on board fought to regain control of their ship and began to run diagnostic tests, thinking it was a fault. But nothing seemed to be wrong with the ship, it just wasn't listening. 

A message came through on all communications devices on the ship. It was in the language of the formless aliens, but the grasp of the language was crude. It said: "You are trespassing upon the property of the Planetary Solutions Group. We reserve the right to destroy all trespassing ships. Stay in your own territory or face destruction."

The formless aliens tried to reason with the unseen force stopping their ship. When they could find no source inside or outside the ship, they tried broadcasting. But the force had a tight hold of their ship and remained quiet. The breakaway humans were like children to the formless aliens. Being formless, they had a more integrated mind, which meant less variation of opinions between the individual masses that made up the network. So every one of their kind was hurting with anxiety to know if the humans were safe.

Finally they released one last desperate broadcast, "You have control of our ship! We submit to your power and are at your mercy! Please, let us contact our allies. We believe they're in danger!"

Suddenly their entire ship shook one time. It was over in a second but was painfully violent, throwing pieces of the formless beings around the rooms they resided in. As if this wasn't enough injury, the temperature started to quickly rise. They tried to hack their own climate control systems but had no control. The unseen force seemed to have them locked out of everything. Quickly their bodies started to lose much needed viscosity and they started to suffer heat stroke symptoms.

The formless beings sent out another broadcast, begging, "We give! Please, release us and you will never see us again!"

In a few seconds the formless beings were released of the stifling heat as the climate control systems started to establish a normal temperature.

The unseen force left them with one last message, "Next time you step out of your bounds there will be no warning."

The formless aliens turned around and headed back the way they came with no idea what they were going to tell the rest of their kind.

***

There was much speculation on who the Planetary Solutions Group were and what their motives and intentions were. It was presumed that they were hostile, but still wanted to act within the confines of some code of conduct, legal or other. Otherwise they would have just killed the solitary ship who were on their way to check on the humans. It was unclear whether or not the humans were still alive and safe, but if they were not then it was a heavy blow for both formless and human kind. As the decades passed it was presumed that the colony had been lost, and when the formless started making contact with wider networks in the galaxy their fears were confirmed. The planet was on the property market, and it was uninhabited.

The colony consisted of over 8,000 humans. That was over 8,000 lives lost as a knock-on effect of the formless' desire to raise another people under their wing. Even when they could rationalise that it wasn't directly their fault, and it could just as easily have been one of their own colonies to have stumbled into such a situation, it was too much for them to bear. They closed themselves off to any further contact with undeveloped sophonts, at least until they had enough clout in the galaxy to do so safely. This included the humans of Earth.

***

Over the next several thousand years the humans living on Earth remained protected under the watchful eyes of the formless and the remaining children of the chosen people. But they received no communication or influence from them. The formless focused on becoming more powerful so they could drive away predators of the interstellar neighbourhood while humans of Earth remained blissfully unaware. The formless were developing a deeply ingrained philosophy that the greatest show of power was to be able to protect non-targets from harm while still getting the job done of defeating hostile enemies. As far as the formless were concerned, the humans were natives in their territory, and always under their shield. So despite the encroaching forces seizing power all around, humans could continue to evolve socially and technologically, uninterrupted.

Shortly after the events that transpired after the formless gave humans terraforming technology, planet Earth entered a warm period of its glacial and interglacial cycles. Now in an interglacial period, more of Earth's surface was suitable for foraging, farming and living in. At first the human population increase was gradual, but around 11,000 years later, the human population snowballed into the billions in a sudden uptick in human numbers. This correlated closely with a similar snowball effect in technological progress. These technologies seemed miraculous compared to the stone tools and wooden ploughs that the chosen people had, but humans were not on a path to a utopian society because of it. They also developed terrible weapons of mass destruction, experimented on the most vulnerable amongst themselves, and had psychological torture and manipulation mastered down to a science.

The formless watched in horror, but had to remind themselves that their own species had horrific growing pains. It was difficult to refrain from helping, but they knew the human species would not progress in a meaningful way unless they figured out the solutions amongst themselves. The chosen people only integrated so well because they were selected to be the best. But changing a whole civilization was neither feasible nor ethical. One of the consequences the children of the chosen people felt as a result of their ancestor's uplifting to space was a lack of cultural identity. When the formless merged their chosen people into one tribe, they removed their cultural identity. The psychological burden of this was largely forgotten by the children of the formless in our modern day, 11,000 years after the events, because by then they had developed a new cultural identity as complex and rich as any other. But the lesson stayed with the formless in their future policies to never interfere with another sophont's cultural evolution.

After our modern day, humans of Earth continued to face moral and mortal trials, including the fight to undo the effects of careless damage to the environment and climate as a result of their early industrial experiments and wars. Greed and corruption were a continuous presence throughout the coming centuries, stifling progress and creating artificial scarcity, but the fight for the betterment of the species never ceased. At times the world was so dark that it was difficult to envision a better world. But once that vision was solidified in people's minds, they fought hard for it. 400 years after our modern day the world is in a state of clean-up. But that still hasn't stopped polluting industries from bribing environmental regulations officials or mass-producing experimental materials, despite plastics being a continued presence in the environment as a reminder of past errors. The fight for a more sustainable future goes on.

Meanwhile, the formless kept a constant watch over the other planet filled with Earth life, the one that was supposed to be for the breakaway colony. They watched it switch ownership time and time again, but none ever developed it or even so much as explored it. "What a waste" many of the formless would exclaim. But they reminded themselves that they had to be grateful for the fact it was not converted into a toxic industrial wasteland. So the formless decided to enter the market. At the soonest opportunity they bought the planet and its related territory, effectively purchasing the system. It was the first system the formless had ever purchased as opposed to discovering unoccupied, and they had only discovered a few habitable systems up to that point. They would cherish this planet and watch it become wild and evolve unspoiled, as a tribute to Earth's once vast natural beauty. Perhaps one day they would show the inhabitants of Earth once they were ready and responsible enough (on a more unanimous level) to appreciate it.