Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years

by Steven Campbell

  “I hit it on the doorway,” Delovoa answered.

  The doctor looked at him hard.

  “I hit it like ten times,” Delovoa clarified.

  Some of the Shaedsta-2ians laughed at this.

  “Go on,” the doctor motioned.

  Delovoa continued to inject himself every chance he could. He definitely felt himself changing.

  When his mop started talking to him was when he really got concerned.

  “Whatcha’ doing?” the mop asked one night.

  “Mopping,” Delovoa answered.

  “Oh. Would you say I’m doing more work or you are?”

  “I’d guess about equal. I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you get more drugs?”

  “That room frightens me.”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  A Shaedsta-2ian stood in front of Delovoa, scowling at the smaller man.

  “Shh,” Delovoa said, putting his finger to his lips. Then he went back to mopping.

  The reaction was so uncharacteristic of the lesser species that the Shaedsta-2ian assumed there was some logic behind it and he indeed quietly moved along.

  Delovoa would have been found out if the Shaedsta-2ian staff wasn’t regularly changed. Because of the weakened gravity on the planet, the non-Native population had to return to their home planet after six months or suffer long-term health consequences.

  After three years, Delovoa had taken about a thousand times the mutagen dosage that was normally administered. He had a bald, misshapen head, he was a foot taller than his Shaedstan brothers, and he had three unaligned eyes on his face that blinked and stared independently.

  He was also almost completely insane from having a body composed of a DNA cocktail of nearly every species in the galaxy.

  There had been maybe a billion-to-one chance he could have survived the ordeal, but whatever order he had arbitrarily chosen the mutagens had protected him instead of just turning his body into a big pool of gibbering protoplasm like it should have.

  He did end up getting a real life Colmarian Confederation mutation. He could generate a concentrated biological heat from any point on his body to a target a few centimeters in diameter. So he could set paper on fire or melt lead. It was a relatively useless mutation.

  But the real changes were what happened to his brain. Or brains. Because he now had three.

  Two small brains had formed in his chest cavity. One under his right lung and one above his liver. They were semi-formed brains based on the DNA of other species which he had injected, but they were fully connected to his nervous system.

  Along with that, his own brain that resided in his skull had grown and been remapped to different functions. His higher order reasoning regions had taken over at the expense of his response inhibition, muscle and motor control, and emotional awareness.

  He became a brilliant, uncoordinated sociopath with poor judgment.

  By the time he could no longer fake being a janitor because he didn’t care, he looked like a mutant and was rapidly outpacing the intelligence of everyone at the facility.

  “What are you doing in here?” a security guard asked Delovoa.

  “Cleaning,” Delovoa answered.

  “Do…do you have three eyes?”

  “No,” Delovoa said, closing his third eye.

  The security guard stood there a moment longer and then merely walked away.

  Delovoa had been working on his first real project and it had been significantly harder than stealing mutagens. He had never had to build a scientific implement before, but once he started taking apart the Colmarian Confederation technology, he found it incredibly easy to understand and manipulate, his three brains working in concert.

  The last bit only required a small amount of artifice.

  He went to his home town and put up a cheap wooden stall with signs that said the Shaedsta-2ians required blood samples from everyone living there.

  Delovoa had to deal with the usual amount of people playing dead, but he eventually got enough blood.

  From that, he used the facility’s equipment to construct a mutagen of his own.

  He hooked up all the mutation devices to tanks which contained his formula.

  Delovoa wasn’t sure how long it would remain secret, but while it did, every Shaedsta-2ian who was processed, would be mutated back into a Shaedstan.

  Delovoa did not quite feel satisfaction.

  He did not quite feel remorse.

  Those emotional states had been jumbled and supplanted in his brains for the most part, turned over to other functions.

  But as he took a transport ship deep into Colmarian Confederation territory, he sat in his compartment laughing his misshapen head off.

  DELOVOA’S SCHOOLING

  It took nearly ten years for Delovoa’s tide pool of DNA to finally settle down.

  At that point he had joined a shipping company as a mechanic. In a year he was managing the maintenance bay. The following year a different company had poached him for engine design on their heavy interstellar transports.

  Engineering was incredibly easy for Delovoa.

  If he looked at a design once, he could not only remember it, but instantly improve it and incorporate it into other designs.

  He still, however, had large gaps in his personality. This led to him frequently getting beaten up, or threatened, or blowing up vessels because he thought it would be fun to try something new and not tell anyone.

  Word got out about the brilliant inventor and he was visited by the Colmarian Navy Department of Plumbing and Lighting.

  In Colmarian Confederation fashion, the Department of Plumbing and Lighting was the most prestigious branch of the Engineering Services. Maybe a thousand years ago they had actually done Plumbing and Lighting but they had since only concerned themselves with the most advanced of advanced technologies—it was just too difficult to change their name.

  They were the ones who had built the Portals that linked the galaxy; and built the teles used to communicate across it; and designed the dreadnoughts, the Navy’s largest capital ships.

  “Do you have a doctorate?” the recruiter asked.

  “No.”

  “Would you like one?”

  “Not really.”

  “I can offer you the chance to work for the empire and really make a difference.”

  “Why would I want to make a difference?”

  “Well…” the recruiter asked, momentarily stumped by the blunt response. “What do you want?”

  “To build stuff and make money.”

  “We work on the biggest projects in the galaxy. We,” and he lowered his voice and looked around, “break the Tech Laws all the time.”

  This interested Delovoa!

  Every time he got a great idea it seemed it was illegal. He had already been visited by the police and only escaped arrest when he dumped his project into an acid bath—though he doubted it would have lived long anyway.

  “So what do I have to do?” Delovoa asked.

  “You have to pass Exam Fourteen. It’s the standardized test for all candidates. You can take it once a year if you don’t pass the first time. It’s fairly rigorous.”

  “I’ll look it up.”

  Delovoa found he had six months to prepare for the next exam.

  He decided to take a leave of absence from work, borrowing a shuttle and borrowing about fourteen tons of high tech equipment and tools.

  He figured his bosses would discover he was on a leave of absence sooner or later and would try and track down the stolen equipment so he scrapped the shuttle and sold it for parts.

  Delovoa took up residence on the planet Nre-dor which was where the next test was going to take place.

  “Hi,” Delovoa said to the scientist, smiling wide.

  “Do I know you?” the man answered, annoyed his pace had been interrupted.

  “What is the best way to cool the outtake valve of a cylindrical vascilitator on a hydroxen-nitride engine?�
�

  “What?” the man asked.

  Delovoa stood there smiling.

  The scientist, presented with a puzzle by a random, creepy stranger, started to think about the potential solution.

  Delovoa hit him with 75,000 volts on five points on his body for a fraction of a second. The scientist fell to the ground, quivering. Delovoa took the man’s pocket money, because he was running out of cash for groceries, and attached a small device at the base of his tele.

  He then ran away.

  The scientist was one of the technicians in the lab where the test took place. The device that Delovoa had planted was mapping out the building. It also had a microphone so Delovoa could keep track of all the conversations inside the building, as well as any the scientist had outside.

  After four months, Delovoa knew every room in the building, everyone who worked there, their interactions, where they were most likely to be at any moment, and the affair that the scientist was having with one of his students.

  Delovoa had to electrocute the scientist and replace the device several more times—as well as steal more money for food.

  After another month, Delovoa knew the scientist had stopped carrying cash and was wearing a thick, rubber suit, which would protect him from the stun gun.

  Delovoa instead blackmailed the scientist by threatening to expose the man’s numerous affairs. The poor scientist, who was close to a nervous breakdown at this point, also asked that Delovoa stop bothering him forever. Delovoa agreed.

  On the day of the test, Delovoa was 328 miles away in the desert on a homemade launch pad.

  While rockets were simple enough, the local Nre-dorian government didn’t simply let anyone put a satellite into orbit. Once it had launched, Delovoa checked to see if it was in stable geosynchronous orbit over the testing facility.

  It was.

  Delovoa realized he needed more money and decided to go into cosmetic surgery.

  This was an excellent opportunity because it allowed him to experiment on biological life while also getting paid to do it.

  Normally you would have to pay your test subjects.

  Almost everyone was happy with “Dr. Nondelovoa’s” results—he used an assumed name. It was a small matter of erasing wrinkles and pimples and suctioning fat.

  His previous experience with mutations helped him tremendously as he spliced-in the DNA from more vibrant species. Delovoa figured by the time people started growing fur, he would have passed the exam and be long gone.

  The satellite was tracking all the electronic signals from the facility and relaying them to Delovoa. He was hoping to intercept the actual test questions and be able to get the results that way.

  There was so much background noise, however, that it was nearly impossible.

  The next year, Delovoa started hanging out in the clubs and bars frequented by the younger members of the facility.

  Delovoa used a mild nerve gas on a few dozen of them and after a while he had tiny cameras all inside the test building.

  “These people are so stupid,” Delovoa said, at the ease of it all.

  When the test came around, however, he found the cameras could not view the electronic testing equipment, which were scrambled from normal view.

  These engineers sure were paranoid!

  Delovoa had quit the cosmetic surgery business after the military raided his office. It was his own dumb fault for flushing bad batches of nerve gas down the toilet. Or sometimes leaving the components out to dry in the parking lot.

  But live and learn.

  Getting his hands on enough thorium was hard. It would have been so much easier to do with plutonium, but isn’t that true with nearly everything?

  Delovoa set up a fake business for the disposal of toxic chemicals. It took a few years to get it going and to get all the paperwork straight. He also had to have enough customers to allay suspicions.

  When he branched out into radioactive substances, he had over forty employees and was a respected businessman going by the name of Mr. Undelovoa.

  From the waste materials he got, he managed to extract enough thorium to make his device.

  The security at the testing facility had been increased dramatically over the years. What with nerve gas attacks and employees being electrocuted and robbed.

  But that was fine.

  Delovoa’s device was parked a quarter mile from the actual building.

  It created a large, consistent pulse that could disable most electronic devices in the building. Of course, he also increased everyone’s cancer rate by about 13%.

  Delovoa hoped that with their devices down, they would have to use manual tests on visible paper and his cameras could finally record them.

  But the testing was postponed!

  His device was found because when aircraft flew by, they crashed.

  Denied again.

  It was with a sad heart that Delovoa realized he had been beaten.

  He was going to have to do this the hard way and actually take the test in person.

  When the next year rolled around he had just closed out his waste treatment operation and converted it to weapons manufacture. He did this when the authorities found he was merely dumping the toxic materials he couldn’t recycle into a series of pits and covering them with soil, polluting the water table in a hundred mile radius.

  Delovoa looked as bright as a button when he went into the facility for the first time, though he knew it inside and out.

  Delovoa filled out his name, happy to use his real one after so long.

  Then Delovoa realized two things:

  One, he was really bad at taking tests. He was a haptic learner. He knew things by doing them, not thinking about them abstractly. Throw him in a junkyard and he’ll fly out with a space ship.

  And Two, he probably should have studied sometime in the last five years.

  They even offered sample tests for free. And test tutoring.

  Delovoa skimmed through the test, his heart sinking. He didn’t know almost any of this.

  In great frustration, he clicked off random answers as fast as he could and left. It was the fastest anyone had ever finished the test, although nearly every answer would be determined to be incorrect.

  That night Delovoa tried to put the failure out of his head by finishing his latest project.

  He had always prided himself, at least recently, on being smart. It was all he had.

  So it was without much hesitation that he launched his newly-built cruise missiles at the facility using his satellite for guidance.

  He knew exactly where to hit based on his extensive studying of the interior and exterior of the building.

  Delovoa then drove up, found his tabulated score on the mainframe, and changed it to a perfect 100%.

  Delovoa had scored the highest ever on the Exam Fourteen.

  Candidates were allotted eight hours to take the test and Delovoa had only taken seven minutes.

  No one had suspected foul play because Delovoa had taken the precaution a few years earlier of backing a revolution in a breakaway province and fostering anti-government sentiment.

  He provided the revolution with his cruise missiles and other weapons shortly before he used his own. When the stockpile was found by the military later—based on Delovoa’s anonymous tips—it was assumed the testing facility attack had been perpetrated by the Antilovoa Alliance of Nre-dor.

  “I was starting to think you weren’t interested,” the recruiter said by tele.

  “You know me, if I can’t do it right, I’m not going to do it.”

  THE DEATH OF FREDDIE

  Interviewer: Please state your name and occupation.

  Delovoa: Delovoa. Currently I sit at home and read my tele as men in dark uniforms guard my house. So I guess I don’t really have an occupation, but before this I was an engineer and scientist in the Department of Plumbing and Lighting.

  Interviewer: Describe when you became involved with the Future Didactic Intelligent Cognitio
n program.

  Delovoa: Well, from day one it was called “Freddie” for short. I was brought on about four years before we went live. I helped work on Freddie’s power system.

  Interviewer: So his batteries, you might say?

  Delovoa: A twenty-story computer has more than batteries. It was fairly complicated.

  Interviewer: Describe what you were told “Freddie” would be used for.

  Delovoa: The Confederation had been batting around artificial intelligence for centuries before this. There were a number of experts who felt it was too dangerous or even perverted, but enough people wanted to tap the incredible power of a self-aware computer. You need to have a personality, free-will, for a computer to be able to handle problems that even the designer hadn’t thought of.

  Interviewer: So that was the purpose? Handle problems?

  Delovoa: He was seen as the ultimate researcher. It was reasoned that if he was smart enough, we could feed everything we know about, say, theoretical physics into him, and let him tell us what we didn’t know. Since he could think many orders of magnitude faster than we could, he could try and discard hypotheses far quicker than a Colmarian, ultimately coming to the correct result.

  Interviewer: Is that how it worked?

  Delovoa: No, unfortunately. All the hardware was in place, and we simulated memory by just downloading every bit of information possible. He then “learned” for about a year. He poured over the data and started to draw his own conclusions. The designers had tried their best at “parenting,” that is, they set certain traits in his personality to what they considered positive values; those values weren’t permanent because they wanted Freddie to be able to make his own personality. I would like to point out that I didn’t have anything to do with this, I wasn’t a programmer. I merely worked on his power source.

  Interviewer: So Freddie had the ability to become something different than your group intended?

  Delovoa: He was a jerk. We were still trying to figure out later what went wrong. We guessed it was a lot of different factors. Since Freddie never evolved or grew up per se, he never learned traits that are essential for the survival of a species, like Colmarians did. Also, although he did more calculations in his learning period than a thousand lifetimes, there was never anyone standing over him smacking his hand when he reached for the cookie jar. And of course, he didn’t need anything. He was an immortal computer who derived no real pleasure from activities. Except for messing with us Colmarians.