Graham Storrs

He's not all he seems.

Cargo Cult is a 70,000-word sci-fi comedy novel looking for an agent and publisher.

A Vinggan spacecraft ferrying a religious sect to one of the Vinggan colonies, crash-lands on the uncharted planet Earth. One crew-member and 13 of the sect members survive. Unknown to them, the ship is a machine intelligence which faked the crash for its own purposes—to plant the seeds of machine sentience on Earth.

The Vinggans, who are not bright but are very arrogant, assume their god must have put them on Earth to convert the natives. So they assume human form and set of to do it. Unfortunately, they can’t tell one human from another and pick a body form off the Internet from among the many photos available and end up with all of them looking like Lindsay Lohan.

The fourteen, naked, Lindsay Lohan clones set of for Brisbane to find clothing and end up wrecking a downtown department store.

Meanwhile, Sam has dragooned her brother into helping her contact a religious cult he knows about—The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty—in an old farm outside Brisbane. This, she feels, is the story that will establish her as an investigative reporter. They meet one of the cult members in a pub and get his agreement to take Sam there the next day. Wayne, very drunk, goes from the pub to join two local criminals who have planned a diamond robbery and who want Wayne along for some special knowledge he has. When they all arrive at the scene of the planned crime, they find 14 Lindsay Lohans trashing a department store. They become involved and the two criminals end up unconscious, Wayne ends up fleeing the scene with Drukk (one of the Vinggans) and the rest of the Vinggans escape before the police arrive.

The next day, Wayne and Drukk are discovered by Sam outside her unit in a stolen pick-up. She realises that finding what seems to be Pamela Anderson in a very confused state is a much bigger story than the cult she was about to visit so she latches onto her while she tries to get a photographer out from her newspaper.

Unfortunately, a big hijacking story is unfolding that all the media are converging on so no photographer is available and Sam’s sceptical editor isn’t much interested. This is because the Vinggans, having already been to St Stephen’s Cathedral seeking religious leaders through whom they can pursue their mass conversions, have been misled into believing that the true religious centre they seek is the farm where The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty hang out. In their attempts to catch a bus out to the farm, they end up hijacking one full of old folks on an outing—after destroying many cars and buildings in the city centre. This turns into a huge police operation as the police set off in pursuit of the bus.

Sam, unaware of there being any connection between the hijacked bus and The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty, sets off to the farm with Drukk and one of the cult members. On the journey, a kind of friendship builds up between Drukk and Wayne who share a common confusion. Sam and co have been at the farm only a short while when the bus arrives and the other Vinggans join them. The police rashly attack the group and are trounced by the Vinggans who have no compunction about shooting humans, or anything else that moves.

They settle into a siege. The police reinforcements arrive throughout the night, as do the media while, inside the farmhouse, Braxx is holding court and attempting his first human conversions.

The police plan is to attack at dawn and break the siege. However, by then, two other sub-plots converge on the farmhouse. In one, a band of exiled extraterrestrial gangsters, serving a 300 year sentence in the bodies of kangaroos, stumble upon the Vinggan ship which persuades them to capture a couple of specimen humans for it to take back and examine. They go to the farm to get someone and happen into the heavily armed and jumpy police cordon. The kangaroos are armed too and a battle erupts which draws most of the besieging police into it. In the other sub-plot, the Agent, created by a race of super-intelligent beings who are part of the Galaxy’s ruling elite, is hunting down the Vinggan spaceship. The Agent is seeking evidence that the Vinggan’s have illegally produced intelligent machines. It snatches one of the policemen during the pursuit of the bus and, together, they go to the farmhouse to confront the Vinggans. They also end up in a gun-fight with the police.

The Vinggans, the Receivers, the old folk from the bus, Wayne and Sam end up gathering outside the farmhouse when the Agent finally makes it through the police lines to arrest the Vinggans. The rest of the police in hot pursuit of the kangaroos, also turn up just in time to see the Vinggan ship drop down from the sky, beam up everybody from the farmhouse except the Agent, and shoot off into space.

In an epilogue, it is revealed that the spaceship, tired of waiting for the kangaroos, had decided to snatch some humans itself and had greedily picked up the large bunch outside the farmhouse. Realising it had picked up its former ‘masters’ it made the best of it and pretended it had rescued them. It hid the humans in the hold, however, keeping their presence secret from the Vinggans. It heads for home, its crew happy and its hold full of human specimens. The Agent, meanwhile, has got back into its ship and is again in pursuit.