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

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