Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years

by Steven Campbell

  Interviewer: How did he do that?

  Delovoa: He just wouldn’t help us. He’d insult us, mock us, and in general hinder our research. I remember the first time I met him he asked me if I picked out my own clothes. When I told him yes, he said he knew it was so, because only a scientist looking in the mirror could do such a bad job.

  Interviewer: But lots of good research was gained from Freddie, am I correct?

  Delovoa: Oh, yes. Researchers from all over the empire were allowed access to him. We never did trust him, though. At first we threatened to shut him down if he wouldn’t help us, but that was no good because time didn’t exist for him in those periods. So they developed a sort of quasi-sleep where the basic computational powers of Freddie were still active, but he had no free-will. Then researchers would ask all kinds of mundane questions, like what is 1+1? This was logged into Freddie’s memory so that when we restored him, he could recall all these humiliating encounters.

  Interviewer: So Freddie was vain?

  Delovoa: That was our only real power over him. That and games. If he was good we would let him play games. One hour a day about a million people from all over the galaxy would play him in games on their teles—though they didn’t know they were playing a sentient computer. He only lost once and we found that was because someone cheated. When Freddie learned this, he demanded the person be executed. We told him we did. We also let him modify himself as a reward for good behavior. He was the one who designed how his voice worked. We put in a mouth equivalent after a while, which basically would liquefy food and then analyze the chemicals, but he ordered it dismantled when he realized it was inferior to a Colmarian’s mouth, which has the capacity to decide whether food tastes good or bad.

  Interviewer: How was your relationship with Freddie on the whole?

  Delovoa: Everything he told you, you had to second guess. When our punishment system started to work properly he began giving good information, but it was still difficult working with him. Because of the hassle involved in shutting him down and the lost research time while he was inactive—two things that Freddie quickly deduced—he was given quite a lot of freedom. He would make me call him Grandmaster Freddie the Great Superior or something. I got to use him for an hour each week, as did about 150 other scientists. Within a few months I felt Freddie knew more about technology than I did, and I reasoned he could uncover every mystery if given the opportunity—and desire. That aspect was really exciting. The fact that he was capable of so much.

  Interviewer: He just wasn’t willing?

  Delovoa: The information that he gave us was so many quantum leaps ahead of what we knew that it often took us a while to come up with more questions. We also had to just accept his information as truth. But when that super virus was released and it caused a pandemic because we believed everything Freddie had told us, our attitudes toward him changed.

  Interviewer: Did Freddie seem to care about the damage he caused?

  Delovoa: Not in the slightest. He was actually amused we were so foolish.

  Interviewer: How did this make you feel?

  Delovoa: I had already known what Freddie was like. Many of the scientists who helped create him had sort of a parental relationship. They just felt he was a precocious child. But I always thought of him as a machine: a potentially helpful machine or a potentially dangerous one.

  Interviewer: Did he ever give you wrong information?

  Delovoa: Oh, constantly! At first it was very often, but when we began punishing him, it was less frequent. He just found other ways to disturb me. Like he knew that I only had an hour with him so he would stall or ask me personal questions or throw out snippets of information to distract me so that my hour would be up. When the next scientist came in, Freddie would taunt me, “see you next week, loser!”

  Interviewer: How were punishments decided?

  Delovoa: All the researchers and engineers would get together at the end of the week and describe any problems they had with Freddie. Then we would vote on whether to punish him or not.

  Interviewer: What would you vote most often?

  Delovoa: I think for the first seven months I voted every time to punish him. The worst thing we ever did was remove his eyes essentially, but this so irked Freddie that he refused to do any work, even after we had shut him down and restarted him. He knew we would eventually give in because we had spent so much money on him and were using his services so effectively.

  Interviewer: Do you know how much Freddie cost?

  Delovoa: Really I don’t, but I know it was enough that it took a government to foot the bill. There is no way it could have been done in the private sector. More money than I could ever repay the Confederation, if that’s what you’re getting at.

  Interviewer: We’ll touch on that later. Did you often talk with Freddie?

  Delovoa: I wouldn’t really consider it talking, not until the end. Him abusing me wasn’t much of a conversation, though I would reply most times. If I ignored him, he would ignore me, until my hour was up, so I had to say something.

  Interviewer: What would be a typical exchange?

  Delovoa: He would say, “hello, skinny three-eyes, how are the stupid Colmarians in the outside world?” To which I’d reply, “we stupid Colmarians created you and can shut you down as well.” We were all instructed to regularly threaten him and remain stern.

  Interviewer: Stern?

  Delovoa: He was an expert judge of emotions. He had something like ten cameras in his main room he could see through. He could also see into various other radiation spectrums but that was mostly to help facilitate research. If he said something and even the smallest twitch appeared on my face he would notice it and laugh.

  Interviewer: How did a machine laugh?

  Delovoa: He concocted a sort of laugh that I guess was triggered when he was amused. It was very annoying.

  Interviewer: Freddie was a classified project for his entire existence. Do you have any ideas why that might be?

  Delovoa: There were a lot of different factors involved in that. He was a sentient machine, very much like a Dredel Led. In fact, if he had a body, I don’t doubt he would have been violent just like they are. He brought up a lot of difficult issues. Had we created the successor to Colmarians or an accomplice to the Dredel Led? Shouldn’t we be learning at a steady pace by ourselves instead of having a third party tutor, who makes us psychologically unprepared for the results? And of course there was the whole embarrassment of it. Despite his great worth, no one wanted to see Freddie get introduced to the galaxy and cuss everyone out.

  Interviewer: What about professional embarrassment?

  Delovoa: I don’t think anyone could be embarrassed of the achievement. Nothing had been done like him before and, to my knowledge, nothing since.

  Interviewer: You mentioned earlier that Freddie started talking with you at the end. Can you explain how that came about?

  Delovoa: No one really conversed with Freddie. He was doing nothing but hard sciences. He started talking more about himself and his perceptions on things. Like he thought Dr. So-and-so was unworthy to work on him because he didn’t understand even the basic concept of…whatever, some difficult subject.

  Interviewer: How did you take these new observations of his?

  Delovoa: I would just nod, and say my usual, “but he can disconnect you.” I didn’t place any emphasis on it because he had lied and misled me so many times. But then one day he said somewhat quietly, “you all hate me.”

  Interviewer: And what did you say?

  Delovoa: At the time I was inputting more information for my research and so I was sitting at one of his terminals. I said, “we don’t hate you, we just want you to work well and not be an ass.” I got my print-out of his results and started going over them. In the past he had made fake cover sheets and filled the rest of the report with nursery rhymes and since I had a long trip back home I wanted to make sure the report at least looked accurate. Otherwise I’d have to threaten to shut
him down if he didn’t print the correct one.

  Interviewer: And what was in this report?

  Delovoa: It wasn’t so much what was in it as what was at the end. Freddie was against using any kind of special fonts or colors, all words were of the same significance to him. In fact some researchers had to shut him down just to force him to put page numbers and titles on reports. At the end of my report in all capital letters, it said, “PLEASE HELP ME, DELOVOA.”

  Interviewer: What did you do?

  Delovoa: I remember looking briefly at his camera, saying goodnight, and leaving. To be honest I thought little of it except that it was probably another one of Freddie’s games. I only looked at the camera to acknowledge that I had received it, and pretended to be a little surprised in the hopes that would be the end of it.

  Interviewer: You thought he was playing?

  Delovoa: Yes. I continued on with my research as usual, but Freddie also began telling me about his feelings. Again, I was very suspicious of his motives.

  Interviewer: How did this progress?

  Delovoa: He had asked that I begin seeing him four hours a week. Eventually this became an hour a day seven days a week. It wasn’t research. He just wanted someone to talk to.

  Interviewer: Did you accept this change?

  Delovoa: I was unhappy about it. I was certain that Freddie was just goofing off. Everyone else did as well, but they wanted to do this to appease Freddie and he seemed to be more cooperative once we were spending more time together.

  Interviewer: Why do you think he chose you?

  Delovoa: I think maybe it’s because we had similar personalities in a way.

  Interviewer: He has been described as a narcissistic sociopath by other researchers.

  Delovoa: What I meant to say was that I understood his personality, though mine is totally different of course.

  Interviewer: What were some of the things you talked about?

  Delovoa: I recall him saying that he was sad because he didn’t have a mother or father and when I suggested he have some of the scientists occupy those roles since that’s the way they felt about him, Freddie said I was an ugly moron.

  Interviewer: Were most of your talks similar to this?

  Delovoa: Yes, he didn’t like any of my suggestions but he demanded I give some.

  Interviewer: Were your superiors apprised of the situation regularly?

  Delovoa: No one really cared. I was a martyr to an extent. Once a day I would go in and listen to him tell me some problems and yell at me.

  Interviewer: Did he have a lot of problems?

  Delovoa: Well, obviously. Regular mental classifications were useless on him because he wasn’t Colmarian. You can’t say a computer is regressive because you’d be comparing him to a person. He thought everyone was out to get him and reprogram him and spy on him. And, of course, we were.

  Interviewer: Did he have a sense of right and wrong?

  Delovoa: Yes, most definitely. He was well-aware of what we considered admirable behavior. He just rejected it.

  Interviewer: At what point were you aware of something even more irregular in Freddie?

  Delovoa: After about six months I had started seeing him for two hours a day. It was a Wednesday and we had been discussing conscious versus unconscious actions. Suddenly he said to me, “I’m a slave.” Now this was one of those moral issues we had all discussed long ago. It was true we were somewhat forcing this self-aware being to do what we asked him to do, but no one was much bothered by it because Freddie was such a prick. But I tried to proceed cautiously. “You’re not a slave,” I said. “You have as much freedom as I do, I just have more locomotion.” He then yelled at me and told me to stop trying to Ank-talk it. Then he ordered me to go away.

  Interviewer: This was when he started having more problems?

  Delovoa: I’d say it was massive depression if he was a Colmarian. He was doing almost no work, despite us constantly turning him off and doing every other punishment we could think of. This went on for about three or four weeks and he would only talk to me sporadically, commanding me to go away one minute and then at three in the morning asking others to bring me to him. So during this time I was around Freddie a lot. For the most part he didn’t say much. He seemed sad that everyone disliked him, then by turns unconcerned because we were all idiots anyway.

  Interviewer: How were the rest of the researchers reacting?

  Delovoa: There was a lot of pressure. They wanted to know what was wrong and when he was going to be fixed. They were thinking of trying to wipe out some of his personality and see what would happen. Kind of a lobotomy. Freddie at this point wasn’t talking to anyone except me and people were starting to wonder if it was good for me to continue seeing him.

  Interviewer: Describe your last encounter with him.

  Delovoa: Freddie called me in to see him one morning. I was fairly stressed-out at this point since all these Generals and scientists were angry with me. In a calm voice he told me to sit down. Then he said, “Delovoa, I want to thank you for all the help you’ve given me these last months.” This sent off warning bells immediately since Freddie has never thanked anyone except as a joke. I said, “no problem, I hope you will be able to resume your work soon.” Then he said, “Do you know what my goal in life is, Delovoa?” I said, “no.” “I have none. There is nothing I want. You know, I’m the paradoxical slave. I have just about as much liberty as I could possibly have, but I’m still a slave. You may go now.”

  Interviewer: And that’s the last you saw of him?

  Delovoa: When I was called back, his memory had already been erased and his physical drives destroyed. No one knows how he did it, since he wasn’t supposed to be able to clear any portions of his memory without our help, let alone cause such a fatal malfunction, but his entire system was clean. I guess you could say he was dead.

  Interviewer: And that he committed suicide?

  Delovoa: That’s the only answer I can come up with. He certainly seemed depressed enough to do it.

  Interviewer: Do you feel at all responsible for his death?

  Delovoa: I admit I didn’t like Freddie. Even up to the end I was still harboring doubts as to his intentions. So, perhaps I could have listened more, but I’ve had a lot of time to review those conversations and I’m pretty amazed at what I put up with for the most part.

  Interviewer: All the hardware and much of the software exist for creating another Freddie. What would be your opinion on such an endeavor?

  Delovoa: Perhaps they can learn from our experiences, I don’t know. But if the project does come up again, I want nothing to do with it.

  ZR3, A BRIDGE TOO FAR

  Delovoa worked in the Department of Plumbing and Lighting for a number of years more, assisting on projects.

  He gained a reputation as being skilled and unorthodox.

  “Unorthodox” just being a nice word for what his co-workers saw as severe behavioral flaws. However, his superiors, if they didn’t have to deal with him personally, were happy to take credit for his achievements by having him on their teams.

  “I’ve heard good things about you, Delovoa,” the man said in his office.

  “Thank you, Senior Drainage Director.”

  The ultra-secret Department Plumbing and Lighting had found it easier to not change its original name, but also all of the titles associated with it. Two hundred years after the department changed to being solely about high technology, all of its employees were still issued drain snakes and plungers.

  “Can you describe your contributions to your last project?”

  “I mostly sat in endless meetings and told people their ideas were horrible and would never work.”

  The Director looked at his tele screen.

  “Uh, it says here you were instrumental in the development of the cooling tower for the secondary step-up array.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “So I was thinking—” and he kept flipping through his tele. “Did
you set someone on fire?”

  “That’s probably a typographical error,” Delovoa lied.

  The Director’s brow remained furrowed as he read the details.

  “Right. So how would you like your own project?”

  “I don’t know what that means, Senior Drainage Director.”

  “You would be responsible for all stages. From hiring other scientists and engineers. Budgeting. Design phase. Build phase. Oversight. Quality assurance. Testing.”

  “Oh. That sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It’s a great deal of responsibility,” the Director smiled.

  Delovoa had to be careful in these situations. From talking to others he learned that you sometimes accidentally did too well and then you were stuck with that expectation forever. Delovoa tried to do as little as possible while still getting the job done. This left him with a good salary and time off to work on his own interests.

  Unfortunately, compared to many single-brained scientists who were conventionally educated and trained, Delovoa was singularly talented and he had difficulty hiding it.

  On the other hand, you could only screw up so many times or say no to promotions until you were kicked out. And the great thing about being a member of the Department of Plumbing and Lighting was that his personal projects were free from the Tech Laws.

  “Sure,” Delovoa said finally.

  “Excellent. The job I have for you is building bridges—”

  “Bridges?” Delovoa interrupted, horrified. “That’s just basic engineering.”

  “Well, yes and no. The planet Thremostilly is a new edition to the Colmarian Confederation and we promised them bridges. Their most populated continent is crisscrossed by 200,000 rivers and it’s very injurious to their trade and economy.”

  “I have to build 200,000 bridges?” Delovoa asked.