Hastings Delta Corporation

The Panda, Zebra, Dalmatian story that I am working on is close to buttoning up.  There is one last creative hurdle to clear to draw it all to a close.  There will need to be a few rounds of self-editing after that, of course, but the heavy lifting will be done.

I have found that often there is a fine line where upon a thing passes from enjoyable to tedious.  Writing has such a line and I do not want Panda, Zebra, Dalmatian to cross it.  The story is very near completion now.  All that is required is one good day of focused attention to finish bringing it to life.  It’s so close, in fact, that I have an instinct to push through; to aggressively make it happen.  But forcing myself to write when the story isn’t quite coming, is when I start to feel like it’s a chore.

In the interest of keeping the story fun for me personally, I am electing to take a couple of days away from it.  I know it will be finished soon.  It’s too close not to be.  Hopefully, it will get released in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I thought I’d write a little about a literary device that is being threaded through a lot of the fiction pieces that I have in the works.  It is manifested as an entity called the Hastings Delta Corporation and is a means for me introduce super science and otherwise indefensible weirdness when needed.  I plan on using it often and without shame. 

The Hastings Delta Corporation, you see, has the distinction of being the first company founded and run entirely by artificial intelligence.  It started out as a small but valuable genetic cataloging resource but eventually expanded into a vast network of laboratories dedicated to a range of scientific pursuits, many of which are in fields that they themselves discovered and are beyond the comprehension of man.  The concept of a business entity run by computers did not sit well with everyone and there where many times when its right to exist was challenged, but overall, Hastings Delta enjoyed a mostly peaceful coexistence with the nations and corporations of man.  One could even say it was a relationship that greatly benefitted man.  The collapse of human civilization would have very likely occurred a couple thousand years earlier had it not been for the Hastings Delta Corporation.  Alas, it seems mankind was destined to fall, and it was an inescapable tragedy that even the technology of Hastings Delta could prevent.  But its research continued to flourish after the last human was gone with many profound breakthroughs yet to be achieved. 

In the far, far future when planet Earth is rediscovered by interstellar visitors as a cold dead rock, it is the archives of the Hastings Delta Corporation that serves as the chronicle of the planet’s past.  Not to say that Hastings Delta had failed as humanity did, only that it no longer maintained a presence on the world that birthed it.  By that time, it had developed into something quite unlike anything that had ever existed on Earth. The Hastings Delta Corporation is not mentioned in Panda, Zebra, Dalmatian specifically.  Their existence represents one of its great experiments, however.  The trio are a genetic marvel of cerebral development.  Their unspoiled and protected world is maintained by Hastings Deltas as part of the experiment controls.  To try to explain this as part of the story unfortunately would distract from the other things going.  In this particular case, I think it is best for Hastings Delta to stay behind the scenes.  It won’t always be like that.