Free Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years by Steven Campbell Page A

go and moved on.
    Delovoa slowly collected himself and looked up
the hallway. He saw one of his fellow Shaedstan janitors lying on the floor. He
was playing sick. Seeing Delovoa so mistreated had triggered the other
janitor’s defensive instinct.
    It was then that Delovoa decided for certain he
did not want to be like this. Even if the mutagens killed him, he would try.
    Two nights later he got the opportunity.
    He snuck into the storage area and was again
confronted by the library of gene formulas.
    Delovoa reached up and grabbed a random sample.
It was in its own sealed, mechanical container. Delovoa had earlier stolen a
syringe that he knew could administer the containers and he put the sample in.
    But where to apply it? His arm? His chest? The
doctor might see those.
    He felt the top of his hairy head.
    His hair! It would cover any injection marks.
    Delovoa took a deep breath and injected himself
at the back of his skull.
    He woke up on the floor an hour later, his head
throbbing, his vision blurred. He quickly replaced the sample and hurried out
of the mutagen center, running into walls and doorways along the way.
    After three months, Delovoa had injected
himself eight different times with eight different samples. He was getting
better at the procedure.
    Of course, the “procedure” was completely
incorrect. The mutagens were never meant to be injected directly into a
subject. The mutagens also shouldn’t be randomly chosen. And only one was
supposed to ever be used per patient.
    Delovoa’s DNA was busy sliding around and
fighting with itself when he bumped into the doctor.
    “Native. What’s wrong with your head?” he
asked.
    Delovoa felt his skull, which was tender and
bruised. He didn’t know it, because mirrors were not tools regularly used by
Shaedstans, but his eyes were starting to become misaligned on his face, the
shape of his cranium was changing, and his hair was falling out in patches.
    “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