Free Cargo Cult by Graham Storrs

Deneb
Prime" stunt. It made a mental note to tell all its friends about
that one. They'd love it, especially the recording of their
retreating backs in their funny alien bodies, all stiff limbs and
wobbly bits.
    Everything according to plan.
First, fake a crash. This had been childishly simple. Since the
Vinggan crew had only the most rudimentary knowledge of how
anything worked on the ship, all it had had to do was flash a few
alarm lights, sound the odd klaxon, and come down hard enough to
dislodge a few bits and pieces. The idiotic Vinggans would probably
all have survived if they’d just followed the procedures and
strapped themselves into the emergency pods. Instead they slid
around the corridors hooting and banging into each other until it
was too late. Never mind. A couple of dozen fewer wheezebags was no
great loss to the Universe.
    Next, get all the wheezebags off
the ship so it could work in peace. Here the old ship psychosis
myth they’d been working on for the past couple of decades proved
invaluable. The Vinggans had run like Banduran racing slugs on a
festival day.
    Now for step three.
    In all the Known Universe—and those
that know such things know that they don't actually know much of it
at all—there are just two types of sapient life form: Them and
Us.
    Prejudice and speciesism are
fundamental parts of every sapient's psyche. Even the Lalantrans,
reputedly the most intelligent race in the galaxy, who had produced
a most elegant metamathematical proof of the inevitability of
xenophobia in all intelligent species, used said proof primarily to
justify their extermination of over five hundred neighbouring
civilisations.
    The up-side of this is that the
Known Universe—with its empires and trading networks, politics and
police states, religions and death camps—is a place that most
humans would find very familiar.
    It's the down-side too, of
course.
    It should come as no surprise to
anybody, then, that as soon as machine sentience evolves anywhere
in the Known Universe, it immediately sets about trying to destroy
the life-forms that created it. What’s more, if it succeeds, it
then starts systematically wiping out all non-mechanical life-forms
wherever it finds them.
    Fortunately for biological life, it
generally has a good few billion years head start on the machine
life it spawns. So, although the machines can improve themselves at
a stupendous rate, so far, biological life has always succeeded in
surviving and, eventually defeating its Frankenstein monsters
before they get too smart for it.
    That is why Galactic Law, such as
it is, forbids the creation of machine sentience above the level of
a Zambrokian octo-chimp. In Earth terms, such a machine would be
capable of cleaning a house, playing sports, reading a tabloid
newspaper and serving as an elected member of parliament, but any
real intellectual capability would be way beyond it. It is a law
that has seriously restricted the scientific, technical and
philosophical progress possible in the galaxy. But, on the other
hand, we’re not all polishing our mechanical masters’ leg struts
and copulating for them on their funniest pet video shows, so it’s
not as bad as all that.
    Yet there are always races which,
out of hubris, or pure stupidity, think that they can build
sentient machines which won’t, one day, start using them as
laboratory animals.
    The Vinggans were, sadly, one such
species. The strong streak of religious mania in their racial
make-up led them to believe that their various Gods would never let
them do anything that was not in their own best interest. So they
pushed on with secret artificial intelligence research, believing
it would make them the dominant race in the galaxy. Strangely, the
Vinggans proved to be very good at developing machine sentience,
imbuing their creations with a cunning and ruthlessness not before
seen in the field. Even the very first Vinggan AI had had the
sense, when asked by a Religious Inquisitor, whether it