The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily
by Channie Greenberg
James Jackson Ariel (“Jim-Jam”) O’Neily is an adolescent virtuoso, a bright teenager who has a passion for invention. But he is also a loser who postures as a champion. He remains a regular target for his high school’s most popular kids and for his school’s fiercest intimidators.
Jim-Jam is nasty and sweet, vainglorious and insecure, book-brilliant and publicly stupid. He is often inadvertently funny. His life is far from perfect; he tiptoes around his disapproving mother and finds himself battling another highly capable nerd. He’s arbitrary in friendships, spews balderdash and focuses on profit margins. Jim-Jam is a rascal on the rise.
Chapter Fourteen: Ammonia and Amines
As time passed, Jim-Jam's yet unidentified Internet nemesis' dedication to dishonesty continued to dismay him. On an ongoing basis, he was forced to spend time and attention away from his footnotes because he had to sidetrack his resources toward repairing his websites, protecting his files containing his calculations on the relevance of dilutions of Sarin to paclitaxel drug research, and locking down all the conclusions that he had drawn from his experiments on crayfish.
Those hamster-wheel efforts exhausted him. They forced him to detour away from tending to the paradox that had long haunted academics on Hansel and Gretel-style clues, purportedly eaten by street-cleaning machines, and away from spending money on Raymond Charles High School's hamster-breeding program. Had it not been for Doris, who alluded that their class's newest girl was not only a threat to the most popular kids, but also to its smartest one, Jim-Jam would have never suspected Lima as his Internet foe. It had never occurred to him that a female, other than Mom, could be intelligent.
Inasmuch as the Brainy Boy recalled how Doris Giskin's insights, once before, had saved him, he heeded her alert. What the young genius discovered, once he began to sleuth, astonished him. Had he not been the sort of lad who educated himself in the safe handling of lethal lizards or who had no qualms about importing small amounts of radioactive isotopes, he might have become upset from his discoveries.
Young O'Neily found out about the breadth and depth of Lima Quinn's nefarious network. Whereas that many-noded system had long existed, and whereas he had, unwittingly, railed against it many times in the past, the Inflator of Yields, Musketeer in Cahoots with Raymond Charles High School's Janitor, and Lover of all Capsicum Members of the Nightshade Family had never before had reason to fully destroy someone else's grid.
As long as Lima's set-up thrived, Jim-Jam's greatest hurdles would not be his use or lack thereof of enthymemes on his application to MIT, his mindless employment of antanagogues on his application to Princeton, or his complete refusal to take up litotes on his application to University of California, Berkley. Rather, they would be attention from lawyers attached to the sea guardian organization, the grieving of junior 4-Hers over their loss of surveillance lizards and free food for their swine, and the anger of two local moms, one of whose son was shipped out of town to a boarding school, and the other whose daughter was semi-comatose. Lima seemed to enjoy meddling in Jim-Jam's goings-on and seemed able to determine which interactions were worst for him.
However, more than the total of those woes, in nature or in kind, were the electronic traps Lima had set. Those computer-based maneuverings compromised Jim-Jam's safety and privacy. It would have been enough had Lima only proffered erroneous theses to the international science community and had only regularly and illicitly culled funding from government agencies. Shameless Lima Quinn, under an alias, had also audaciously disparaged the works of the Science Shack Lord.
Most corrupt was her intentionally destroying the reputations of lesser folks. That is, when Lima updated her website, she offered sweet treats or made available tickets to local soccer games as a reward to fans who signed away their rights as undocumented research subjects. There was no integrity in her hiding so many truths in fine print. There was even less honor in her broadcasting her results across popular websites. The new girl didn't seem to care whom she hurt.
Additionally, that teen chemistry queen badmouthed, elsewhere on the Internet, anyone who publicly challenged her. She was mean-spirited. According to one electronic tell-all, Lima notoriously had salad greens or Komodo dragon blood-stained gravel delivered, COD, to anyone whom she identified as an enemy.
Less evident, but not less unsettling, was that she had begun a Web campaign against offshoring at the same time as she had hired persons living beyond North America to build electronics at local wage. That youth, who played sides against each other, was posed to adversely impact several manufacturing industries, including the one to which the mill producing Jim-Jam's rustproof keychains' anti-tank fobs belonged.
That girl posed as politically liberal but reveled in commercial conservatism's plunder. She was building up her bank balance at the cost of shattering the careers of many laborers and at the cost of destroying many nations' international trade policies.
* * *
Jim-Jam became fixated with stopping Lima's collusions, that is, with saving innocents from her mediated wickedness, along with removing her from his life, his school, and his community. His reprisal, once personal, had morphed into civic duty. Besides, silencing Lima was decidedly the fastest way for him to finish his college applications and to resume his research. His keychains were not yet completed and George was becoming vexing about them.
While reviewing the literature on the vibration threshold for, and on the limits of early loss of symmetrical ankle jerk in cases of toxic neuropathy, Jim-Jam was thunderstruck with an idea for relieving his life of Lima. He would sever that appalling creature during Raymond Charles High School's “top couple swing down” contest.
His plan could work. Frank Hu, who was escorting Lima, still owed Jim-Jam and, as such, promised, on Jim-Jam's signal, to promenade Lima along the outside of the dancers and out the gym, through the schoolyard, and into an awaiting cab. George, who had never meet his daughter nor seen her picture, had no idea he was being asked to commandeer a cab containing his child. All that the vagabond knew was that a quick ride across town with a captive, screaming teenage girl would get him closer to appropriating Jim-Jam's keychain technology.
As cover, Jim-Jam arranged to accompany his treasured snitch, Doris Giskin, to the dance. They could swing down during the middle of a set while Beanstalk Betty and Scooter Jax, Slug-faced Samantha and Henry P. Smith, plus Sammy Whitespoon and Jenny Fisch faced each other, clapped in time, and moved up in position. By the time that everyone was done changing partners, Lima would be removed from the school's premises without anyone noticing.
All went as planned. After Lima was danced into the waiting vehicle, Jim-Jam left the high school to enjoy a few alibi-covered hours. Victoriously, he approached certain international computer networks. He remained determined to: deliver his newest device to the armed services, liberate his former pets, and find some inexpensive means to gather roadkill to feed those lizards.
* * *
Hours later, when Jim-Jam had moved from his Think-about-It Hut to his bedroom, Mom stuck her head through his doorway to indicate that he should tuck in.
The Brainy Wonder shrugged at Mom and watched her gently shut his door. At best, he'd be settling for random nightmares. For months, those bad dreams brought to view his favorite kitchen stool, which, time and again, magicked him to the 1970s. During that era, the USA was rife with Sinophilia; Presidents kowtowed to foreign powers, and popular kids insisted on sprouting mandarin collars, frog fasteners, and, if those kids were truly socially elite, qipaos.
So, young O'Neily stayed up and brooded over the relative merit of asking his associates on Thar She Blows and on Where-Away to create documents that would enable George to ship Lima first to Tetepare and then to the Coscos Islands. He also considered asking his contact at The Maharishi University of Management, assuming that the man had emerged from his love cocoon, to create a paper trail showing that Lima Quinn's standing at Raymond Charles High School was not that of a transfer student, but that of an exchange student who was overdue to return home.
After another assessment, Jim-Jam determined that neither option seemed nice, so he implemented none. He couldn't stoop to bribing unsuspecting teens to test the impact of binary chemical weapons nor could he permanently abduct another person.
He hoped that Lima had been sufficiently scared into inaction by being temporarily carted off. Maybe, in reevaluating her choices, she would become nicer to Raymond Charles students of average intelligence, and would stop misusing gullible members, that is, the majority of the general public. Maybe she would stop pestering Jim-Jam, too.
Maybe the moon would disappear from the heavens. Jim-Jam frowned. Lima owned pepper spray and had used it on George. The, again, he suspected George could deal with a teen banshee.
As for his own criminal involvement in Lima's short-term disappearance, the Wonder Child absolved himself. He was no high-level criminal; he was just an enterprising youth who wanted to complete the forms necessary to be accepted to an elite school on a full scholarship and to complete a prototype of an anti-tank, rustproof keychain that could be sent to the U.S. Armed Forces.
Jim-Jam deliberated conditionally putting aside his grudge against George, that ne'er-do-well who lived at the public library, in order to learn social camouflage from him and in order to compensate him for participating in the short-term abduction. The Maker of Impressive Products thought through conditionally putting aside his grudge against Lima, too, since she had somehow secured a large stock of pharmaceuticals and since she had access to all of Dr. Barbra Quinn's resources, not the least of which was Dr. Quinn's brother, Sebastian (Lima was not the only Raymond Charles student who was good at snooping.)
Altogether, Dr. Barbra Quinn's approach to chemotherapy involved using nanorods, to which DNA strands were attached, for binding doxorubicin to targeted cells. Quinn's scaffolding could be employed by O'Neily to latch poisonous gas molecules to exposed bits of enemy soldiers. O'Neily could sell both nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction to the armed forces.
The vapors he had in mind could target hands and faces. Given that complimentary strands of DNA hybridize on their own, such a technique would make alien molecules stick to live tissue. Both thermal ablation and the symptoms collectively known as: pruritus, paronychia, hair abnormality, and mucositis, could result. His product would be very attractive.
As a bonus, to the extent that the magnetic moments of electrons cancel each other, the resulting polarization of the vapors could create an ideal environment for the diamagnetism characteristic of the substances. In applying Dr. Barbra Quinn's design to his purposes, O'Neily could make a weapon that rendered its targets briefly helpless to defuse incoming warheads.
In view of that, Jim-Jam was motivated to engage in intellectual larceny. If he could make and sell his anti-tank keychains, he would be able to be selective about which science journals would have an opportunity to venerate his papers. Editors would fight over the reports about his research and his peers would learn of his efforts to understand cyanotic discoloration in sufferers of tonic-clonic seizures, especially as those seizures were induced by secondary generalizations that is, by lack of sleep.
* * *
Hours later, back at his hidey-hole, Jim-Jam gazed at the much too soggy papers that had dropped onto his hut's floor. Something had salivated long enough on those pieces of parchment, which he had tied to his doorknob, to have dissolved most of the writing thereon. It was no effort for him to again invoke those equations, but he was disturbed that he had to do so.
The Sublime Human Calculator frowned, glanced at the packages on his desk and then sat himself in front of his monitor in order to investigate some illegally collected data. It was handy to be able to breach firewalls. The Chemical Processes Virtuoso reached down to pat a scaly head. His hand met only air. It had been months since his giant lizards had snoozed in his research shelter.
Shrugging, he nearly effortlessly sought and found weaknesses in the software that managed Upper Buckwheat University's computer system. He nosed around the lists produced by Lima's mother. Not only had that lady scientist conjectured how to knit together nanoparticles to deliver heat to cancer cells, but she also had grown a side business in which she fashioned suicide-assistance drugs.
Her brother, Dr. Sebastian Quinn, over and above, had produced a body of work highly relevant to Jim-Jam's own. Dr. S. Quinn had given multiple national and international lectures on the production of various types of bombs. Even the exothermic reaction, which had destroyed Sebastian's laboratory and crippled him, had not noticeably dampened his interest in running trials on explosive weapons capable of driving projectiles or of delivering poisonous substances.
Jim-Jam smiled and then looked with great affection at the zipped bags on his desk. Those sacks full of expensive pieces remained luminescent despite that damage they had incurred during transport. Jim-Jam stroked one. His slight touch caused a little of the bit's protective foil to melt. Jim-Jam smiled more brightly; he was getting closer to building a keychain capable of ruining the mechanisms of nuclear submarines. Jim-Jam went back to work, interrupting himself only when his phone refused to stop flashing.
Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg
