Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

  Disengaging himself, Barraclough went into the building. The floor was still sopping wet, with soggy clothes dripping everywhere, making a constant tinkling, like a light, summer rain. He had to use his torch since the lights were off. He made his way through the dismal wetness to where portable lights had been set up for the forensic team. They were just packing up to go as he arrived.

  “This where they found Douggie and Nick?” He asked.

  A slight, craggy man in a plastic coat turned to him and smiled. “G’day, Mike. How’s it going?”

  “Not bad, Jim. What have you got?”

  Jim shrugged. “Not a lot, mate. This is where they found them, all right. Both out cold. Both flat on their backs. There were two shotguns lying nearby. One had discharged one chamber — presumably the shot that set off the sprinklers.” He showed Barraclough a spent shotgun cartridge in a plastic evidence bag, then indicated the hole in the ceiling above them. “No other weapons. Uniform have been over the floor once but we can have another look in the daylight. No cartridges or shell cases apart from this one.”

  “Then how did they blow up the seven dummies?”

  Again, Jim shrugged. “It could have been explosives. We found a sports bag over there with some plastique in it. Enough to blow a safe, maybe, but perhaps they had some more and were having some fun. The mayhem in here suggests they ran amok before they shot the sprinkler and passed out. The M.E. might want to check them for drugs.”

  “Was there anybody else involved?”

  Jim shrugged yet again. “No idea. This is a department store. Hundreds of people walked around here today, so there’s no point looking for dropped hairs, or fibres, or even fingerprints. The watering this place got won’t have helped.”

  “Have you checked the edges of the hole for fibres or blood?”

  “That’s where we’re heading now but, you know, there have been a lot of people through there tonight. I doubt that we’ll find anything conclusive.”

  Barraclough thanked him and wandered off across the floor. He called the police on duty at the hospital and asked them to make sure their prisoners were tested for drugs, then he went back out to his car and sat in it, thinking.

  Something was very wrong with this whole picture. Douggie Mack was a hard-nosed, serious criminal. He wasn’t the kind of bloke who would get doped up and vandalise a department store. Maybe someone had spiked Douggie’s drink. The man had plenty of enemies. But why would he take out his burglary kit if he was just off his head and fancied a bit of fun? Could the drugs have been slipped to him after he’d set out on a raid? How could anybody do that? It just didn’t make sense.

  Then there was that hole in the wall. What kind of blagger would excavate a hole in a wall big enough to drive a truck through if all he wanted was to get inside the building? It must have taken hours to chisel out all those bricks and carry them off somewhere.

  He shook his head vigorously, trying to clear it. There were two people who knew for sure what had gone on in that shop tonight and it was time he had a word with them both.

  -oOo-

  “Oh great,” Doug moaned as Detective Sergeant Barraclough walked up to his hospital bed. “The perfect end to the perfect fucking day!”

  “Watch your language, Douggie,” warned Barraclough, nodding towards the uniformed constable sitting near the bed. “There are impressionable young people around who aren’t used to dealing with sewer rats like you. What’s the matter with you anyway? You don’t look too crook to me.”

  “Piss off, cop.”

  “You made yourself look like a bit of a galah tonight, Douggie. Had a few tubes too many, did we?”

  “Hey. The only one pissed tonight was that runt Wayne.”

  “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, the
n, 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.

  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 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."

  Judging that the out-thrust hand must be a greeting, Drukk thrust out his own. "I am Drukk," he said again, his hand hovering in the air near Sam’s. "I wear the orange clothing."

  -oOo-

  Out in the blackened bushland around the Vessel of The Spirit, a group of ten, dirty-looking kangaroos milled about in an uncertain manner. The place reeked of burnt vegetation and a pall of smoke still hung over the area. The ground was littered with glowing embers and more than one of the roos had burnt its paws in coming here.

  “There, see?” shouted a young joey, pointing with a short forelimb.

  The Vessel of the Spirit stood silent and gleaming at the centre of the devastated forest. A bevy of small maintenance bots were giving the hull a final polish but most had already gone inside, their repair tasks completed. Some of the kangaroos seemed reluctant even to look at the gleaming spaceship while others stared at it in deep concentration, scratching their woolly bellies as they pondered its significance.