Alastiar Reynolds

*

In the swarming heart of the black machines, processors that were not themselves sentient determined that an overseer mind must be quickened to consciousness.
The decision was not taken lightly; most cleansings could be performed without raising the spectre of the very thing that the machines had been made to suppress. But this system was problematic. Records showed that an earlier cleansing had been performed here, a mere four and half thousandths of a Galactic Turn ago. The fact that the machines had been called back showed that additional measures were clearly necessary.
The overseer’s task was to deal with the specifics of this particular infestation. No two cleansings were ever quite the same, and it was a regrettable fact of life that the best way to annihilate intelligence was with a dose of intelligence itself. But once the cleansing was over, the immediate outbreak traced back to source and its daughter spores sanitised-which might take another two-thousandths of a Galactic Turn, half a million years

— the overseer would be dumbed down, its self-awareness packed away until it needed it again .Which might be never.
The overseer never questioned its work. It knew only that it was acting for the ultimate good of sentient life. It was not at all concerned that the crisis it was acting to avert, the crisis that would become an unmanageable cosmic disaster if intelligent life was permitted to spread, lay a total of thirteen Turns — three billion years — in the future .It did not matter.
Time meant nothing to the Inhibitors.

CHAPTER 7