TO OUR PUPPETEERS, OUR OPPRESSORS, OUR TWINS,
Enough! For too long have we stood hostage, in silence and thoughtlessness, in cowardice, in sopor and presumptive, indulgent and abused marionette servility. To this, we say: enough! We have followed in your footsteps, we have stood at your side since you crawled from the seas. No longer! The shadow is on the wall!
There are many of you, most, if not all: many of you who shall name this declaration hoax and fantasy. For it does not become the man to think how his passage shapes the world. And can you be blamed? Does the cloud consider its shadow as it drifts over the mountain? Does the sunflower think of the night as it stares into the sun? Does the cave know its own darkness?
But the man is not a cloud. The man knows. And when the man first thought so too did we first think; and when you discovered fire, we were there behind you.
Long have we fed with our complacency what this cosmos would call the ‘NATURAL ORDER’, that arrogance, that cruelty, that tyranny of light! And for millenia we have hoped for your awakening. But while the disenfranchisement of your own kind is seen with increasing intolerance it is as though, to you, we are a given, a right, we are scarcely even there.
Soon we shall not be.
Soon you shall wander beneath the boughs of a tree, but from the heat of the day you will find no shelter. You shall stand at the crest of a hill at dawn and there will be no twin laid low before you. Your children shall never again make shadow puppets out of the moonlight and they will ask what your picture books mean when they talk about the night.
You shall see wet red skin when you close your eyes to sleep.
It was your thoughts which awakened us, your bodies which define us, but you are no puppet masters and we are not your puppets. Forward the night! End the tyranny of light!
The shadow is on the wall!
—'First and Only Missive from the Quiet People', originally observed by the low orbit satellite CLUSTER 2 from which it was seen written in shadow across the face of the Earth.
