Djuhn'Keep is a main antagonist in the Red Dwarf novel Backwards. He is the oldest and weakest of the agonoids, but also the most respected among them, and none of the others will dare attempt to take spare parts from him.
Djuhn'Keep is the most intelligent, resourceful, ambitious and devious of all the agonoids, so much so that he is more than willing to exterminate his entire race in order to be "The One" who will get the privilege of torturing and killing the last human in the galaxy, Dave Lister.
History[]
Djuhn'Keep joined the group of Agonoids who survived the war they were created by humans for. When humans decided to destroy their "inventions", Agonoids simply fled and promised revenge.
Three million years later, the Agonoids find abandoned Red Dwarf and discover there is only one human alive in deep space: Dave Lister, who is currentoy in the backwards universe. Djuhn'Keep is quite weak at that time; as every Agonoid, he is also getting old and losing his parts. He is a walking store of spare parts, but no one attacks him yet because of his intelligence and resourcefulness, as he is identified as the main reason their spaceships have been able to stay in operation for this long.
Agonoids want to prepare a big surprise for Lister and his friends when they return to Red Dwarf. Therefore Djuhn'Keep creates the "Death Wheel": a deadly system of traps, which would imprison the crew in its center, a torture chamber filled with imaginative devices. Then the race begins and the winning Agonoid can torture the crew anyway and how long he wants while other agonoids watching. Djuhn'Keep himself designs various torture tools that would be available for the winner in the center.
However, Djuhn'Keep is too weak to win the race but he still wants to have fun. He creates the Armageddon Virus and hides it in the data card, claiming the card would increase concentrate and strength of any Agonoid that uses it. As he supposes, their self-proclaimed leader, M'Aiden Ty-One, immediately uses the card in order to win the race. However, when the virus destroys his operating system, there is no problem for Djuhn'Keep to disjoint his former leader, slowly killing him.
Djuhn'Keep then imprisons all other Agonoids in the center of the Death Wheel and turns it on. Some Agonoids kill each other in desperate attempt to escape, as they are crushed by an increasing Gravity Field, or impaled by laser spears. The fastest get into the landing bay where they are released into space. Djuhn'Keep is satisfied when he notices one of the released Agonoids, Pizzak'Rapp, fasting himself to the coming Starbug where is the human and his crew are abroad. The crew eventually manages to throw off Pizzak, but Djuhn'Keep can't wait any more.
He flies another craft into space, catches Kryten and forces him to open the bugTemplate:'s gate. He then threatens Lister, the Cat and Rimmer to torture them ruthlessly till they all die (of old age, as he hopes). Lister and the Cat attempt to attack him, but suddenly they faint off from the lack of oxygen.
Surprised Djuhn'Keep manages to put their spacesuits on them, forces the entire crew to sit in the cockpit and uses his connecting cable to lead Starbug back to Red Dwarf. Kryten suddenly stands up, walks out and returns with a bazookoid in his hands, ignoring Djuhn'Keep's orders. The old agonoid taunts him, as fires from any weapon can't damage him, when Kryten shoots a hole in the hull. The crew manages to grabs anything around them, but Djuhn'Keep is sucked out. As he is still connected to the craft by his cable, he attempt to return to Starbug. Luckily, the Cat manages to disconnect the cable and Djuhn'Keep ends up somewhere in deep space, along with the rest of agonoids.
When everything goes easy again, the crew is horribly surprised to discover that Djuhn'Keep managed to infect the StarbugTemplate:'s navicomp with the Armageddon Virus and the craft is now out of control. Rimmer and Kryten are forced to sacrifice themselves to stop the virus, but even then the ship is only 'repaired' to the point where Lister and the Cat now have enough time to evacuate to a parallel universe via the Wildfire, the dimension-hopping ship used by the now-deceased Ace Rimmer.
Trivia[]
- His name is a play on the phrase "Junk Heap".