Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

“What did happen? I heard like a hundred people died. That’s…a lot, Hank.”

“I’m not sure how it happened. I’d ask them, but everyone who knew anything got killed. This corporation came out of nowhere and began attacking.”

“Which one?”

“Fifteen Stars Holding Authority. Do you know it?”

“I know of it. It owns one of the freighters.”

“The what?”

“One of the ships that’s hooked to Belvaille.”

“What do they manufacture?”

“How should I know?” she complained.

“Well, what services do they use?”

“Electricity, water, air, gravity. Same as anyone else. I don’t nose around what any of the corporations do.”

“I thought it was your business to know all this stuff.”

And I saw from the tele screen she was uneasy.

“Not with these guys. You work for them and if you try and reach beyond that…well, we got enough evidence of what they do.”

“So how’s Bronze?” I asked.

I saw her blush. Garm blush!

“Fine,” she said quickly, looking away.

“You guys sleep with each other yet?”

She looked back to the screen, brow furrowed, mouth open in anger.

I hung up.

On the train I noticed people were not sitting near me. Or looking towards me. Normally I would at least get a few salutations. That’s fine. I could get more work done.

I rang Delovoa’s door.

His face came on the display.

“Hank, come in,” he said.

The door unlocked and I walked inside.

“Hello?” He wasn’t around.

I moved to the basement. As I was on the ramp down, I looked over and saw Delovoa standing beside a work table. A nude man was lying on top of the table.

“I knew it!” I yelled, covering my eyes. What was it with naked guys lately?

“Hank,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Come down.”

“No way, weirdo.” I pawed around with my hand to try and find the railing to get out of the basement.

“Hank, it’s okay. He’s dead.”

“Oh, yeah. That makes it great.”

“This is one of the soldiers you killed,” he said.

And I paused, my hand still covering my face.

“Why do you have a soldier I killed?”

“Come down, I’m not going to yell all this up to you.”

I removed my hand and walked down the ramp to the lower basement.

“I swear, about half the time I come here I see something I wish I hadn’t seen.”

I stopped nearish Delovoa but not so near. My eyes were on the ceiling.

“So is this one of the bodies from the club fight?”

“No. From the APC you destroyed.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you carry this body all the way here?”

“No. I dragged it.”

“This city is so screwed up,” I said, thinking about all the people who must have seen Delovoa dragging a dead body for twenty or more blocks and didn’t care. “What did he die of, anyway?”

“Heat and concussion from when the armor piercing shot burrowed through the plates of the vehicle. Which is why his skin is charred in spots.”

“Lovely.”

“But this guy was really dumb,” Delovoa stated.

“Well, he worked for a corporation.”

“No, look.”

Delovoa took out an x-ray and held it up to the light for me to see.

“What am I looking at here?”

“This is his brain.”

“I’m not a doctor, Delovoa.”

“You can see he’s missing half his brain, can’t you?” Delovoa asked, annoyed. He highlighted it with his finger. “This is his skull. This part is his brain. This is all empty.”

“Maybe the autocannon did that?”

“It’s not going to melt his brain—half of it. He had on his body armor, including a helmet.”

“So he wasn’t very smart. I’ve worked with a lot of people like that.”

“Now look at his DNA.”

Delovoa began to drag out some equipment from under the table and get it all situated.

“Okay,” he said, once it was all connected. “This is trying to match his DNA and mine.”

The machines hummed and whirred and spat out a bunch of colored numbers onto a screen which were meaningless to me.

“He and I are a 23.2% match,” Delovoa said.

“So you aren’t related?” I asked blandly.

“Hank, even the weirdest Colmarians are still Colmarians. We all share at least half our DNA. And often it’s up to 99%. I have more in common with a tree than I do with this guy.”

He saw from my face that I wasn’t getting it.

“Look, I have some blood from someone on-station that I’ll match to mine.”

“Delovoa, you’re starting to really freak me out. Why do you have someone’s blood and all this DNA equipment?”

“I do paternity tests on the side.”

“Really? Like for who?”

“That’s confidential,” he replied sternly. Then he leaned in to me and whispered, “Hrelix and Veolbos.”

“Oh, that’s his baby for sure,” I said certainly.

Delovoa smiled broadly and nodded at me.

“This is Hrelix’s blood. And she comes from the other side of the galaxy.”

The machines went at it again and popped out a result.

“There, an 83.6% match. And I’m a mutant male nothing like her.”

“You’re staring at me like this should be some huge information, but I don’t understand.”

“Hank, it’s not possible for us to match this little. He shouldn’t even be functioning biological life. At least not one that looks like that.”

“Maybe he wasn’t functioning. Maybe he was already dead in the APC.”

“Doesn’t matter. The DNA would still be the same. The autocannon didn’t blast apart his genetic makeup.”

“So what does it mean then?”

“We have a lot of DNA that we don’t use. That is kind of…legacy, from when we evolved. It’s still there but it doesn’t do anything. So what is happening is that he and I are matching on the big stuff. Like how to create cells and proteins and organs and muscles and whatever. But he doesn’t have any of the material we no longer use.”

Delovoa stared at me with his three eyes popped.

I shrugged, waiting for him to continue. Or at least talk simpler.

“Hank, he never evolved.”

“Wait, what? So is he sick?”

Delovoa’s head drooped.

“Ugh. Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean you have to guess. He’s not sick. I mean, he’s dead. But he wasn’t sick. I think he was created in a lab.”

“Like this one?” I asked, wondering if Delovoa was creating soldiers.

“No, not like this one. I build guns and security systems. I’m an engineer. You would need vast resources to create him.”

“But why? I don’t get it. What does taking out his brain and DNA do?”

“I don’t think they took them out, they never put them in. He has exactly what he needs to do his job. As much brain as he needs to work.”

“So someone built him? Like a machine? Is that even possible?”

“I think so,” Delovoa said, after sucking in some air. “We had done it in our past. I remember reading about it. It’s illegal.”

“Why illegal? Though, just about everything is illegal in the Colmarian Confederation.”

“This isn’t just our law. This is galactic treaty. Everyone agreed to it.”

“What’s the big deal? He’s stupid, right?”

“You know how many procedures we have at quarantine to prevent outbreaks from all the different planets? Well, all our races have coexisted for, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of years. Our genetic material is all spliced and combined together. But this guy has DNA that’s completely foreign. If he sneezed it might wipe out a planet’s population.”