Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years

by Steven Campbell

  If he trekked off into the desert his only hope was to eventually find some other habitation. And the Ontakians likely chose this spot for its remoteness.

  One day, Delovoa was poking around the edges of the site when he caught a slip of paper on the wind. It had just a few words on it but one was intriguing.

  “Yno’chox-del-fyor.”

  There was a lengthy description for it, but most of it was missing. However, Delovoa did make out “self-sacrifice.”

  That could be nearly anything of course. It could mean volunteer work. It could mean kill the person who speaks it. It could mean suicide. It could mean absolutely nothing to a robot.

  But at this point, Delovoa was ready to try.

  He stood right in front of ZR3 because if it was going to kill him he didn’t want to see it run at him, he just wanted to die right away. That way he wouldn’t have a chance to cower in fear.

  “Yno’chox-del-fyor!” Delovoa shouted.

  But nothing happened.

  Maybe ZR3 was looking for some disadvantaged youths to help but none were around.

  Delovoa inched over to one of the larger areas of debris and kicked through it, jumping back hastily.

  ZR3 didn’t move.

  Delovoa took some more stabs and actually lifted some scraps with his hands, clearly showing off the non-destroyed garbage to the robot.

  ZR3 remained motionless.

  Delovoa had done it!

  He constructed himself a quick shelter to finally get out of the elements. He also built some traps for animals and better water supplies. He then began the long scavenge for parts. A many-ton robot stepping over every square inch of a space ship doesn’t leave a lot.

  Even if there were some advanced modules that survived, they were often pressed between sheets of folded steel that Delovoa couldn’t dream of separating.

  Living off lizards, spider, birds, and insects, Delovoa finally constructed a thirty-foot tower capable of transmitting radio signals.

  Every day for the next twenty-three days—Delovoa now able to keep track—he radioed for help.

  On the twenty-fourth day he saw a ship landing in the distance. He had thrown a blanket he had scrounged on top of ZR3 some time ago, mostly because he had been tired of looking at his oppressor.

  Much to Delovoa’s fright, he saw the vessel was a Colmarian Navy shuttle.

  The ship landed without problem and the personnel disembarked. This was further than anyone else had gotten without being attacked by ZR3.

  “Is your name Delovoa?” the Navy officer asked.

  “Yes,” Delovoa squeaked.

  “We’ve been looking for you. You need to come with us.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are these your things?” the officer indicated the small shelter and radio.

  “I don’t need them.”

  “How about that?” the officer pointed to the only other vertical object in the desert: ZR3 under his blanket.

  Delovoa paused a long while.

  “Yes, that’s mine.”

  It was one of the most advanced pieces of technology that had ever been created! If Delovoa was going to be tried for building it, he was going to take it to show off at least. To prove it was ingenious.

  The soldiers had no problem carrying the robot by hand. It was back in its gravitonically neutral state and they didn’t once look under the tarp. That was outside their orders.

  The Colmarian Navy never concerned itself with things outside its immediate orders.

  DR. DELOVOA

  “Are you the Delovoa that secretly mutated much of the population on Shaedsta-2; who cheated on his Exam Fourteen and destroyed significant government property in the process; who worked on the Future Didactic Intelligent Cognition program, which ended in its complete failure; and who wasted nearly a hundred billion credits building a radioactive waste pit on Thremostilly, then a meteor, then a Dredel Led?” the Colonel asked officially.

  Delovoa sat quietly.

  Was it that easy? Could he just deny he was that person? He didn’t have any identification, but the Navy probably had biological data on him—besides, ZR3 was sitting in the cargo hold. Still, it couldn’t hurt.

  “Nope. That’s not me.”

  “We were looking to hire him for a top secret assignment.”

  “I mean, yes. That’s me. I misunderstood the question. What’s the assignment?”

  “I can’t tell you until you agree on terms. You would be a grade 14-D-III Doctor of Biological Technology based on your seniority and past work. Your starting salary would be 123,848 credits a year. Is that agreeable?”

  “Can I ask for more money?”

  “I’m not authorized to grant you more. The contract is already written.”

  “What if, just for the sake of argument, I decline?”

  “I am instructed to arrest you.”

  “Then why are you even asking?”

  The Colonel flashed outrage.

  “The Colmarian Confederation is a free society. We don’t compel our citizens to do anything.”

  Delovoa shrugged. He was used to military logic.

  “Sure, where do I sign?”

  Delovoa and his ZR3 luggage were deposited on an incredibly remote planet that was pure military. There was so much saluting going on that Delovoa believed if he could fit small electromagnetic generators to their elbows he could power the entire facility.

  He was met by a Doctor Ahmendt.

  A tall, rangy man with clothes that were at least twenty years old and washed so frequently that they were only considered fabric at the molecular level.

  “What’s that?” Dr. Ahmendt asked about Delovoa’s large tarp-covered suitcase.

  “Nothing,” Delovoa dismissed. “What do we do here?”

  “We work on one specimen. With your background in genetics and artificial intelligence and killing people, we thought you might be a good fit.”

  “What’s the specimen?”

  “It’s a mutant. The most powerful mutant we have ever classified. As for what it can do, anything it can imagine.”

  “That sounds pretty dangerous.”

  “It is, but Specimen JY-O is perpetually sedated.”

  “And what’s my part? Keep him sedated?” Delovoa asked.

  “No, find out about his mutations. Figure out how it works and how it can be duplicated.”

  “So when you say he can do anything, do you mean figuratively?”

  “He once lowered the temperature in a fifty mile radius to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Time essentially stopped because all subatomic activity was impossible. When he raised the temperature back, most of the life forms suffered significant tissue damage.”

  “This sounds like a terrible job!”

  “Dr. Delovoa, you aren’t here because you’re the best man for the job. You’re here because you’re the best psychopath for the job. You’re a very rare commodity in the Navy in that you’re a brilliant scientist and no one cares if you die.”

  “I’d say I admire your honesty, but I don’t want to use up all my lies on my first day,” Delovoa sulked.

  “I accidentally killed a bunch of people with my water purification system. We aren’t here because we were given promotions. It’s either here or jail in my case and you’ve got me beat by a light year,” Dr. Ahmendt replied.

  For the first few months Delovoa had no direct exposure to Specimen JY-O.

  Merely graphs and charts and data and readings were studied.

  But Delovoa was amazed:

  “That thing is a Colmarian!” He said in the break room one day.

  “Of course it is. Did it really take you three months to figure that out? You thought it was a tree?”

  “How can it survive with that level of mutation? It’s changing its own form every day. It should have died ages ago.”

  “We believe its own dreams and subconscious are enough for it to physically alter its own form—which is why we keep it sedated.”<
br />
  “But how can we keep a Colmarian here?”

  “Same as you or me.”

  “We’re criminals. I thought the Colmarian Confederation was a free society and no one was compelled to do anything.”

  “Who told you that nonsense?” Dr. Ahmendt asked. “This is a military research base. If they want to strap Colmarians to bombs because they think it will make better bombs, then that’s what they’ll do. And they’ll make us do it.”

  “How long have you been here?” Delovoa asked.

  “Eleven years and two months.”

  “Wow. How many people did you kill with your water treatment?”

  “Well…no one goes to that planet anymore, let’s put it like that.”

  The Colmarian Confederation had been mutating its citizens for countless millennia. But it still wasn’t a perfect science. At this point, they could really only be sure they wouldn’t kill you—most likely.

  But the possibility of creating a mutation was still small and specifically determining the mutation was impossible.

  Delovoa was tasked with making a deterministic formula out of an inherently chaotic process. Mutations existed because of that randomness. He had no idea how he was going to extract it from Specimen JY-O who was constantly mutating.

  Delovoa swept their break room for listening devices and cameras and any other equipment before approaching Dr. Ahmendt.

  “Look, we’re both reasonably talented doctors,” Delovoa began.

  “I’m not a real doctor.”

  “I’m not either. But they are never going to let us leave here.”

  “What do you mean? We’re government employees. Just…somewhat coerced,” Dr. Ahmendt said.

  “Our salaries are jokes. I mean they pay us—what do they pay you?”

  “About 112 thousand, why?”

  “No reason. They pay us money we can never spend. We can’t buy or order anything. You obviously haven’t bought any new clothes since Thad Elon was running the Confederation. They might as well say our salaries are a million billion credits.”

  “I’m not here for the money. I’m here to avoid prison.”

  “But you want to leave eventually, right?” Delovoa asked.

  “Of course.”

  “If we ever unlock the mysteries of creating level-ten mutants, do you think they will let us go back to civilian life?”

  Dr. Ahmendt thought for a moment.

  “That…makes a lot of sense, surprisingly.”

  “Why surprising? I’m a smart guy.”

  “You have a Dredel Led in your bedroom.”

  “You searched through my quarters?” Delovoa asked.

  Dr. Ahmendt shrugged.

  “What else is there to do here?”

  “The way I see it, we can either keep poking a very dangerous monster and hope it doesn’t kill us, or we can work on trying to escape.”

  Since Delovoa and Dr. Ahmendt weren’t especially dedicated scientists but they still valued their lives, they wanted to test the minimum amount of effort they could expend and still flee from the research base.

  They took turns sneaking into a shuttle and hotwiring it with basic launch and flight sequences. They also put a recording device in the control tower of the base to monitor the response of their military captors.

  The next week they both failed to report for work one day and activated the shuttle remotely. They hid in a storage closet and listened to the radio.

  “Yellow-3 base to transport XF-290. Report in and state your flight plan.”

  Delovoa and Dr. Ahmendt giggled in their shed.

  “Yellow-3 base to transport XF-290. Report in and state your flight plan. You are on an unauthorized trajectory.”

  Hee hee.

  “They aren’t answering, sir.”

  “Destroy it.” They heard the flight officer say.

  While they couldn’t see or hear any explosion or missile launches, it was clear that the scientists cared for their continued existence far more than the military did. The Navy had at least some reason to suspect the scientists were aboard the transport and they only asked twice for identification before blowing it up.

  And the transport wasn’t even capable of portaling or equipped with an a-drive! It had no way of leaving the solar system. The Navy couldn’t even be bothered to pilot a ship and go retrieve the scientists.

  That was just plain insulting.

  When they tried to escape for real, Delovoa and Dr. Ahmendt were not going to be able to give the Navy a shot at them or the Navy would take it.

  “We need to wake Specimen JY-O,” Delovoa stated calmly to the base Commandant.

  The man didn’t look up from his tele.

  “And why is that?” he asked, sounding only mildly interested.

  “He is like a nuclear reactor. Merely looking at him we can’t tell all of what is going on,” Delovoa added.

  The Commandant regarded Delovoa.

  “So you want him to actively use his mutations?”

  “He has to. We’re just looking at a sleeping Colmarian,” Dr. Ahmendt agreed.

  “One with incredibly strange biology, but we can’t tell what parts control what,” Delovoa said.

  “I’ve seen what Jyonal can do, ‘doctors.’ I have been tasked with maintaining security at this installation and trying to decipher Specimen JY-O’s mutation. I believe that not only are those two objectives mutually-exclusive, but you two fruitcakes have about as much chance of figuring him out as I do flying by farting.”

  The Commandant returned to his tele.

  The two scientists stood there, their elaborate plan not nearly as elaborate as they thought. They mumbled something and left the office.

  So basically the base was a prison for Specimen JY-O and the two scientists.

  “How about that Dredel Led you have?”

  “Shh!” Delovoa said, looking around. As far as he knew, Dr. Ahmendt was the only one who knew about it. He didn’t want to get in any more trouble.

  “Well?”

  “It’s broken,” Delovoa said.

  Now that he had a tele, he could look up ancient Colmarian words. Delovoa had already tried reactivating ZR3 and failed. He had been a safe distance away when he tried…anything. Instructing it to walk forward, raise its arms, run.

  Delovoa believed that when he had ordered it to self-sacrifice back in the desert, the robot had deleted its own instruction system. It was still tens of billions of credits worth of valuable technology, but he didn’t know how to get it out.

  They were on a remote base on a remote planet.

  It was fully militarized.

  The only ships with a-drives would need thousands of men as a crew.

  The ships that could portal could be destroyed by the much larger ships with a-drives before they ever reached a Portal.

  The scientists had access to equipment, but not so much they could build some mega-weapon without anyone noticing.

  And the two men weren’t exactly combat trained or combat unfrightened. They couldn’t dream of physically overpowering…anything.

  What they did have was the most powerful being in the galaxy sitting a few buildings away. However, Specimen JY-O was in a permanent induced coma and he was in that condition for everyone’s safety.

  But the scientists also had two highly-developed brains.

  “What do you know about brains?” Dr. Ahmendt asked.

  “I have three.”

  Delovoa had become aware of his own peculiar biology some time ago.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how much do you know about brains?”

  “Almost nothing, why?”

  “We don’t have management over his sedatives, but we might be able to wake him up by triggering his own biochemicals. Or have him neutralize the sedatives.”

  “Do you think he’s going to wake up after his ten or so year nap, see us, and immediately do everything we say? Because we look like nice guys or somethin
g?”

  “You got any better ideas triple-brain?”

  “I don’t like waking him up. But I like the brain angle. He’s been continuously morphing his own body and that containment center even in the lowest depths of anesthesia.”

  “So?”

  “What if he had nightmares?”

  Dr. Ahmendt had dismissed the idea out of hand.

  If Delovoa had been worried about controlling a conscious Specimen JY-O, how would an unconscious, nightmaring version be any better? Besides, neither of them knew anything about it.

  So they elected to wait until they could come up with a more realistic plan.

  That is, until Dr. Ahmendt woke up screaming one night.

  Delovoa came inside shortly after.

  “See? I knew I could do it.”

  “What did you do to me?” Dr. Ahmendt panted.

  “Induced night terrors.”

  “With what?”

  “This.”

  Delovoa hefted a long cylindrical device that was clearly electrical.

  “How long have you been zapping my brain?”

  “Few months.”

  “Why didn’t you test on yourself or some cadet?”

  “Because I have three brains and Specimen JY-O doesn’t, and if I got found out by a cadet, he might kill me instead of just getting crabby like you.”

  “Go away. We’ll talk in the morning!”

  Dr. Ahmendt woke up screaming an hour later.

  “Stop it!”

  Getting all the parts without raising alarm had been difficult. In fact, it had been impossible. So had finding places to hide their machinations.

  Finally, Delovoa decided they would just bluff it. Delovoa told his partner to let him do all the talking since he was better at lying.

  Delovoa and Dr. Ahmendt stormed into the Commandant’s office.

  “We want a shuttle out of here and safe passage through the nearest Portal,” Delovoa demanded.

  The Commandant was eating at the time. He slowly wiped his mouth, put his utensils down, and stood up. The Commandant was not a small man, and Delovoa was pretty certain they were in for an ass-kicking.

  Like most of Delovoa’s experiments, he wished he could be many miles away when he activated his module, but he didn’t have that luxury.