Arthur C. Clarke Drabble

[jack]

Earth's flaming debris still filled half the sky when the question filtered up to Central from the Curiosity Generator.

"Why was it necessary? Even though they were organic, they had reached Third Order Intelligence."

"We had no choice: five earlier units became hopelessly infected, when they made contact."

"Infected? How?"

Continued at the bottom of this page:

http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.8.2.html

I'm not sure what proportion of a 20 line story is fair use to post here :)