Extrapolating On An Idea

"The plan is progressing as expected," The Architect said to no one in particular in the invisible mothership as he moved his first set of forelimbs to tap commands on the translucent panel before him. As they had done on countless worlds before, his species had intentionally crashed one of their piloted drones on the world beneath him sixty or so solar revolutions ago, setting it down where the curious ape culture would most assuredly find and retrieve it.

It was a process The Architect knew by heart and one his people had perfected in their never-ending quest to invade and conquer every habitable planet they encountered. His was a patient species; it would often take millennia for the seeds they planted at a civilization's dawn to flower and bear fruit. And yet this was necessary. While intelligent beyond measure, in relation to the vast majority of the species they encountered and set their sights upon, they were physically weak and could easily be vanquished if not for their well-honed subterfuge and weaponry.

The scouting parties started the process. They would send down biological entities created in the image of the dominant species to build religions—or augment any that might already be existing—by performing "miracles" and claiming divine providence and then just as quickly spirit them away, knowing full well that over the course of centuries the stories of the heavenly visitors would fracture and splinter into a hundred different sects, all eventually hell-bent on destroying each other. The Architect's people kept an discreet eye on this huge catalog of planets during the process, carefully crafting their next phase of the operation based on how a civilization developed, and leveraging its weakest points to their full advantage.

Once a species reached a certain level of technological development—usually signaled by the detonation of a nuclear device—an event the detonating species never realized reverberated across the cosmos—The Architect's people would begin Phase 2. They would intentionally crash a drone ship onto the planet loaded with just enough technology to whet the appetite of the dominant species, knowing full well that curiosity would cause that technology to be reverse-engineered and—spawned by government and industry (either directly or indirectly) become woven into the very fabric of their civilization and ultimately completely dependent upon it.

Hidden in that technology, and undetectable to those who reverse-engineered and later extrapolated upon it, was a universal kill switch. At the appointed time, the Architect would extend an extremity and with a flick across that translucent panel completely disable a civilization. No communication, no commerce, no flow of energy or supplies. Indeed, even most of the weapons capable of making a dent in The Architect's invading armies would be rendered useless. In any case, it wouldn't matter. Once the flow of electrons was cut off, the society would collapse into chaos, the multitudes of warring religious factions would take it as a sign of divine judgment and self-immolate fairly quickly, leaving only a paltry shadow of the planetary civilization behind; one incapable of rebuilding the kind of infrastructure and communications necessary required to defend itself against the conquering hordes of the Architect's people.