What intrigues me about A Topiary is the story has so many details, twists, and turns that clearly there’s some central theme in Shane’s head that guides all the facets of the story. When choosing why the creatures have extra fingers and why cutting them off helps, he has a reason in mind. When choosing sawdust as the ideal material, he has a reason. I’m attempting to figure this out through dialogue I’ve created between the aliens that faxed down the blueprints for the Maker.
I’m working under the assumption that the plates lining up create the plan for the Maker, the adults play with it for a while and build the casing that limits it, and then lose or get bored with it before the kids in the second half find it.
"A new civilization just popped up. Spectral readings show it’s carbon based. Fax down our plans to create a terraformer."
We haven’t had a lot of luck with that. 90% of planets we send plans to do not build the device once they see the plans, or successfully isolate it and prevent terraforming.
"We could use our relay stations to make it seem mysterious, coming from the universe in general rather than a specific planet, requiring more effort on their part to construct and negating their suspicion of malevolence."
Good idea. Still, many of the worlds are so alien that regardless of how well designed our terraforming creature is, it very often fails to maneuver on the surface or gather enough materials.
"That has been a major problem. We really need to send parts that interact and allow the dominant species to assemble these into shapes and patterns that are known to “live” efficiently in their environment. Readings show that world harbors carbon-based life, so make sure the machine only runs on the most carbon-rich biomass of that world (sawdust)."
Even with people building their own creatures emulating local fauna, we can’t encode a generalized program that will succeed in any environment.
"Let’s include plans for some sort of neural interface so the "animals" can be trained that way. What better than the local population to teach our terraformers how to maximize the biomass conversion?"
It also works much better if we can add an element of gamification to the creatures’ development. We need people working against each other, and ideally, we need to stimulate the curiosity and competition of beings with the least ability to recognize and contain the long-term damage to their existing ecosystem we intend.
"Alright, we will make the combination of parts as boring and open-ended as possible with no specific designs to work toward or figure out, frustrating the problem-solvers who decoded the message and instead engaging the more immature, creative, and reckless people of the planet to create the creatures and unleash them without fear."
Agreed. This seems to be the best plan for converting the planet’s biomass entirely to our white substance by using the specific strengths and weaknesses of different groups of people inhabiting the world. Hit send.
I've forgotten most of the plot, especially all the things the kids do, so there may be many other details or plot points that support or undermine my theory. What I'm trying to express with this dialogue is that Shane is trying to come up with the most reliable way for aliens to get us to destroy our own planet and A Topiary is a display of how such a message would look and exactly what weaknesses and curiosities of which groups it would need to take advantage of to be successful.
