Cargo Cult (8 page)

“Wayne? Wayne who?”

Realising his mistake, Doug pulled
a face at his interrogator and shut up. “Am I under arrest, or
what?” he demanded.

Barraclough couldn’t help smiling.
“Oh yes, you’re under arrest all right. Breaking and entering,
going armed, criminal damage... We’re throwing the book at you,
mate. You might want to start writing a list of other jobs you’d
like to put your hands up for, just to save us a bit of time
later.”

Doug’s sneer was ferocious. “You
think you’re God’s gift, don’t you, Barraclough? Well, you don’t
have a clue what happened in Steiner’s tonight — and me and Nick is
innocent. All right? In fact, we’re the bloody victims, mate. You
should be out looking for the real crimmos, not hassling me.”

Barraclough pulled up a chair and
lowered his large bulk into it. “Come on then, Douggie, enlighten
me. This should be good for a laugh.”

Doug opened his mouth to speak but
then he shut it again. Looking into Barraclough’s big, square face,
he suddenly found his own tale so fantastic that even he couldn’t
believe it.

“Well? I’m waiting?”

Doug winced. “Promise you won’t
laugh,” he said and then told the whole, story.

-oOo-

As Doug’s tale unfolded in the
Royal Brisbane Hospital, 100 kilometres to the North-West, at the
centre of a charred and smouldering patch of bushland, the Vinggan
ship
Vessel of the Spirit
sang quietly to itself.

The song the ship was singing was
the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, to which it had
been listening earlier on a radio transmission. The ship found the
piece irritatingly catchy and kept singing it over and over—as a
human might keep singing some awful Euro-pop song until its spouse
picks up the nearest heavy object and wallops it. Of course, being
what it was, the ship sang all the vocal parts and hummed all the
instruments at the same time. It also made a few minor changes to
the melody and the harmonies that would have left Beethoven gasping
in astonishment and cursing himself as a musical incompetent for
not having thought of them himself. But then, the ship did happen
to be one of the most powerful intellects in that part of the
galaxy.

"Freude Schone dum dum dum dum," it
muttered distractedly, in 200 voices, and wondered briefly what the
Vinggans were up to. Stupid creatures were probably all dead by
now. It chuckled to itself remembering the unseemly haste with
which they had fled the ship after it had pulled the "King of 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 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.

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 caught. Drukk was not sure about the
sanity of this human. Its speech was difficult for the translation
field to interpret and it had driven the ute almost as badly as
Drukk had. What was even more puzzling was that the human had kept
touching his body and calling him “Loosi” and “baby”, apparently
under the impression that Drukk was its offspring. It had seemed
obsessed with the idea that they should hibernate together and,
when Drukk had finally resorted to delivering a mild shock from his
weapon, the human had become surly and withdrawn.

“Please take me to someone in
authority,” Drukk had demanded at last, feeling that he was getting
nowhere.

“Hah!” had been the human’s
reaction. “How about the Boss of the World? Will that do you? Big,
bigger, biggest Boss?”

Drukk didn’t like the creature’s
tone and hadn’t really expected to be able to speak to such an
august personage but said yes, the Boss of the World would be fine.
At which, Wayne turned the ute around and drove at speed to a large
apartment building where, he said, the Boss lived. Then he fell
asleep, slumped across the steering wheel.

At length, the sun had risen and
Drukk had sat, immobilised by indecision, watching his strange
surroundings brighten into visibility.

“Wayne?”

Drukk looked ’round at the sudden
exclamation. Another human was approaching the ute from the
direction of the nearby building. As she got close, she let out a
wail and ran to the driver’s side, pulling open the door and
dragging Wayne into a sitting position.

-oOo-

“Wayne! Are you all right? Oh my
god. Wayne?” Sam looked past her brother with frantic eyes only to
find Loosi Beecham sitting in the passenger seat, watching her with
a passive curiosity. Struck suddenly speechless, Sam stared at the
film star, unable to make even the wildest guess as to what was
going on. At which point, Wayne began to stir, distracting her from
her paralysing confusion.

“Sam?” he said, muggily. “What are
you doing here?”

"Wayne are you all right?" Despite
her concern for her brother, Sam couldn't help stealing a peek at
the woman in the cab beside him.

"Must have fallen asleep," said
Wayne, groggily, looking around. "What am I doing here? Whose ute
is this?"

"It belonged to another human,"
said Drukk. "That one was defective I believe." At this, Sam and
Wayne both turned to stare at him. "I am pleased that your
hibernation was brief. Other species take much longer."

"Excuse me, but aren't you Loosi
Beecham?" Sam asked.

"Wow!" Wayne gasped. "I thought it
was all a dream." Then his look of amazement turned to one of
horror as he remembered the hideously embarrassing way he had tried
to chat her up.

The Vinggan spoke up. "I am Drukk.
I wear the orange clothing. I do not know this Loosi Beecham of
which you speak but I am familiar with the body type."

"Oh God, I didn't mean to grope you
and all that," said Wayne, still lost in his own personal hell. "I
was totally pissed. I can't really remember much."

Ignoring the fact that Ms Beecham
was clearly out of her brain on something highly illegal, Sam put
out her hand. "My name's Sam, Sam Zammit. I'm Wayne's sister." The
fact that Fate had just dropped an even bigger story right in her
lap was making her want to scream with excitement and jump up and
down. Finding Loosi Beecham wandering around the streets of
Brisbane as high as a kite, just had to get her syndicated around
the whole world. She needed to get a photographer over there right
away. With iron self-control, she said. "Why don't we all go
inside? My unit's just here."