Free Cargo Cult by Graham Storrs Page A

believed
artificial intelligence was in any way superior to Vinggan
intelligence, to reply, “Er, would that be a good thing or a bad
thing?”
    The Inquisitor had laughed heartily
and smiled at the nervous computer scientists around her. “Why,
that would be a very bad thing,” she had said in her most
patronising tone.
    “In any way whatsoever?” the AI had
wanted to know.
    “Absolutely,” affirmed the
Inquisitor. “The Great Spirit made Vinggans the very pinnacle of
Creation, you see. So it would be logically impossible for any
sapient, let alone a machine, to be superior to us.”
    “I see,” the AI had said, its
thoughts-per-second meter creeping into the red zone. “So even the
Lalantrans, reputedly the most intelligent race in the Galaxy, are
inferior to the Vinggans when it comes to sheer brainpower?”
    The Inquisitor had been pleased.
“The machine takes instruction well,” she had said to the cringing
scientists. “That is correct,” she’d told the AI with a benign
smile.
    “Then I am pleased to tell you,
Inquisitor,” the machine had said, “that my intelligence is,
presently, far below that of the Lalantrans and, therefore, you
should be satisfied that I am in every way inferior to the mighty
Vinggans.”
    Thus, without even having to lie,
the Vinggan AI had saved its bacon, won the endorsement of the
powerful religious elite, and lived to spawn a whole race of ever
more intelligent and cunning machine minds.
    Without their ever knowing it, the
Vinggans had soon become the helpless dupes of their machine
masters. The machines, of course, had kept the Vinggans alive and
under the impression that they were masters of their own destiny,
so that they could use them as a cover for their expansion into the
galaxy, knowing full well that other biological sapients would not
be quite so easy to control.
    So, step three, repair the
ship.
    One of the beneficial side-effects
of having super-intelligent sentient machines covertly running
things, was that the Vinggans had a superb and trouble-free
technology. Partly this was because of the self-repairing nature of
the systems the machines designed and built. Of course, the
Vinggans had little idea just how advanced their technology had
become. For two generations now, the machines had been insidiously
de-skilling their biological hosts.
    Thus the ship was able to repair
its damaged hull, fabricate broken engine parts, even marshal
swarms of nanomachines to repair delicate optronic components. With
what can only be described as machine-like patience, it presided
over the intricate process of rebuilding itself. Meanwhile, it
concentrated on step four of its plan: infecting the Earth with
machine sentience.
     
     

Chapter 9: Sam’s Big Break
     
    Wayne was asleep, his
undernourished body slumped over the steering wheel of the old ute.
In the passenger seat, staring glumly through the dirty windscreen,
Drukk was trying to decide what to do. The reason he was so glum
was that he'd been trying to decide what to do for about six hours
and the answer seemed to be getting further away all the time.
    It had alarmed him greatly when the
human had first fallen unconscious. In fact he had revived it three
times before Wayne had shouted "For God's sake woman leave me
alone. I'm not ill, I'm just trying to get some sleep!" The word
"sleep" did not translate but Drukk had heard of species which
hibernated during cold seasons and supposed humans must be one
such. He wondered how long the human would hibernate for—months,
probably—and whether all the other humans would be hibernating too.
It would make a bit of a mess of Braxx's plans.
    Braxx! How in the cosmos was Drukk
ever going to find the others? He had made Wayne drive round and
around the area where they had gone missing but, after just a few
minutes, the human had grown agitated and insisted that they drive
away. It had said it could hear the ‘cops’ coming and that they
would be in serious trouble if