The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Sixteen: Acacias, Myrtle, Oleaster and Cypress

Mom suspected that she and the rest of the defense team knew only a portion of Jim-Jam’s mischief. Perhaps he had even gotten involved in transnational money laundering, counterfeiting or piracy. Among the details that she and the other astute attorneys lacked was how, months earlier, Jim-Jam had drained all of his holdings and then paid an overseas agent for his formerly pregnant lizard. They had yet to discover how his original reptile cleared customs.

It was a bonus that those lawyers had no writ which allowed them to investigate Jim-Jam’s PayPal tab or his Bitcoin holdings. Whereas his brick and mortar bank funds had been searchable because he was a minor, no accessible electronic logs existed that proved he had bribed officials to look the other way when he had shipped his first Komodo.

If Mom had learned that importing that dragon was the least of Jim-Jam’s wrongdoings, she would probably have been distraught. She and her keen team were as yet unaware, though, that Jim-Jam had bribed other law enforcers to the effect that he had imported from Sri Lanka and Brazil select, unstable isotopes that emitted a traceable, peculiar glow and could be used for small-scale nuclear fission

Counselor O’Neily improvised. Local laws were tough. International laws were that much more hard-hitting. None among her band knew whether Jim-Jam was going to be put on trial first by the legal representatives of private investigators or by actual federal agencies. No matter the nature of her data catch, in the end, protecting Jim-Jam was not going to consist of straightforward appeals. Long-arm jurisdiction was a complex matter; new powers had been invested in the courts following the signing of The Hague Service Convention. Jim-Jam was skunked.

In the face of the prosecution’s prose — that is, despite their global discrediting of her son’s lawfulness and, subsequently, their global discrediting of his right to equitable representation, free speech and other civil basics — Mom had maintained decorum. Jim-Jam’s opponents had positioned themselves as promoting statutory welfare. Mom refused to suggest that they were interfering with ordinary court procedures because she feared that such a contest would distract the judges from the truth. By carrying on in a more conservative manner — that is, by paying more attention to the presentation of her own line of reasoning than to the substance of the opposition’s planks — Mom’s confreres hoped to sway all the magistrates toward leniency.

Sociological research had long ago settled that individuals who successfully showed their beliefs to be legitimately derived from prescribed social roles were, to some extent, able to find safe harbor in the law. Mom and the other lawyers representing Jim-Jam planned to make him seem like a well-intended kid. The law’s undergirding existentiality was the linchpin for that plea.

More exactly, those lawyers wanted to demonstrate that Jim-Jam’s actions were “standard” responses to “nonstandard” situations, not aberrations of ordinary behavior. Statements toting innovation or retreatism might result in the judge doubling punishments, so the team intended to avoid such claims. For the time being, social rebellion remained litigiously thorny, since absconding from the status quo threatened institutions and as such was often ruled against. If witnesses could make it obvious that the youth’s actions supported culturally emphasized goals, he might, with great effort on the part of Mom’s legal team, be declared innocent.

Mom and her crew would have to cast him as a misguided humanitarian whose puttering with science would be of future service to humanity. To reach that end, they would have to risk bearing out Jim-Jam’s habit of sticking his nose into secured places. Fortunately, it would be a small matter to show that his mucking around in those places was gainful to them.

Maybe she could come up with a strategy that showcased his intelligence. While Jim-Jam’s biochemical research might not be of any actual importance to their country in particular or to the welfare of humanity in general, such investigations were atypical for a kid of Jim-Jam’s age. She and her companions could make those studies seem characteristic of something wonderful.

* * *

Mom tapped the shovel and shrugged. She regarded her son as book smart but, in other respects, average. Like many adolescents, he was interested in: social rank, get-rich-quick schemes, and exotic wildlife. It was just that so few teens, nationwide, ever put those aspirations into practice and that even fewer of them, consequently, found themselves in conflict with local and federal laws.

It was a pity that beyond mucking around with exotic beasts’ metabolisms or experimenting with odd formulae for healing specific kinds of psoriasis, lending lips the illusion of being plumper, or limitedly curing jock itch, Jim-Jam had not been interested in medicine. It would have made his legal eagles’ work much easier if they could have established that Jim-Jam focused on creating cures for life-threatening illnesses and that he wanted to help the Food and Drug Administration more than he wanted to profit from the sales of his remedies.

The legal experts were further stumped when it came to making evident the social importance of O’Neily’s scholarship on crayfish and his scholarship on strawberry trees. That he made and sold hats and other small adornments was an additional fact that Mom’s team planned to keep hidden.

What’s more, there was, foremost in their minds, their new discovery that Jim-Jam had been duplicitous in his international monetary transactions. They knew that, when the young man’s case played in courts, Jim-jam would be sunk by that datum. The lawyers filing against him were neither simpletons nor naïve. For all intents and purposes, many of them hoped to advance to partnership based on their indicting the O’Neily child.

Mom’s team thought about bringing in favorable witnesses and, beyond that, building Jim-Jam’s case from sticky discourse. Even if they lacked enough proof to back their assertions, they could costume Jim-Jam as a future war hero or, better yet, as a doyen at peace, whose scientific know-how would advance America’s image.

Striking the shovel against her son’s workshop, Mom grimaced. Why couldn’t her smart child help their nation enhance its armed forces? If only he had had the social aptitude to think about their country’s needs, she and her team could frame his noisy, unrelenting talk about trivialities like molecular spins as appealing to their government.

* * *

There were moments when Counselor O’Neily contemplated turning her back on her child’s legal crises. No one would dissuade her. Even though Jim-Jam’s case, if argued successfully, would be a boon to the other lawyers’ careers, her office had suddenly become overwhelmed by other work. The town had hired them to respond to an announcement made by their district’s state congressman, Mrs. Preenberry’s father, that federal employees were being dispatched to Upper Buckwheat County to investigate the shipping of incendiary materials for fission bombs. The town had paid an advance to the lawyers to defend it against search and seizure activities lacking, among other things, proper paperwork. That case was not as interesting as Jim-Jam’s, but it was producing billable hours whereas Jim-Jam’s was being defended pro bono.

* * *

A few blocks away, another bright female was quailing over having to dispel obstructions set in place by young O’Neily. He had somehow managed to call up the proxies identified by Lima’s IP address, that is, to somehow build up his LAN connection to enable it to use her computer system to act as an intermediary for requests from users seeking resources from others of her functionality-providing devices. Although none of her transactions showed up as having been performed on O’Neily’s computer, that breach was significant.

It wasn’t merely a matter of Jim-Jam O’Neily having succeeded in enabling HTTP authentication in her sphere, as it was that he had one-upped her again. That kid had enough common sense about the world to tag her from a publicly-sourced machine, such as a unit at a library, rather than to use his own computer to overcome the programming limitations that Lima had set in place. It was more than maddening that he had gotten past Lima’s filters because she couldn’t determine the exact nature of his bypass. He might even have reconfigured his router for port forwarding.

Given that attack, Lima Quinn understood that her place in the milieu of international thinkers was being undercut. She had long secured that status by circulating columns, stories and poetry, which referred within and beyond conventional perspectives to countless readers. O’Neily’s breaking and entering was far more threatening to her standing than had been his distracting her supporters by deconstructing her media missives and by making trouble for her in chat rooms. It rotted that he was as facile with a keyboard as was she. His deeds could not to be allowed to pass with impunity; it was imperative that Lima return to her reign as sovereign of interlocking computing and information technologies.

Lima amplified her efforts to storm Jim-Jam’s electronic fortress. Among her exertions was her furtively contacting a handful of the legal proxies of the U.S. Army. If caught, she’d recant all knowledge of the NSA’s workings and of their prior communications with her. Meanwhile, she’d work to sway those lawyers to bring down O’Neily. At worst, she’d make sure that O’Neily received a lifetime ban from YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, Smugmug, and Vine, and that he never again have access to Twitter, Pinterest, Tumbler or Instagram. Regrettably, she couldn’t proscribe him from LinkedIn, because he had made friends with one of that social networking site’s executives.

Lima didn’t grasp O’Neily’s motivation. She doubted that the Guardian of Quadratic Equations and of the Structure, Properties, and Reactions of Organic Compounds allowed himself to get riled over spam traffic, even over the match seekers, that she had sent his way. Maybe O’Neily had guessed that she sought his role as dominant teenage scientist.

“Elitism is almost always destructive,” the female highflier wrote with a sharpie on the inside of her wrist. Thereafter, she typed in certain commands and brought up an application that admitted her to unauthorized accesses. Abruptly, Jim-Jam’s computer could no longer safeguard its connection from hers. Lima did a deep system cleanse and then dropped her head to her hands.

Jim-Jam O’Neily was a horror. It had been a bad strategy on her part, immediately upon entering Raymond Charles, not to try to become his friend. She could have siphoned his abilities early on. Maybe she could yet yoke his talents. Embedded in his attacking software had been praise of Lima’s fiber art. Jim-Jam had noticed and had admired her macramé necklaces. Although he could never rise to the position of her equal, O’Neily might be transmutable into a tolerable subordinate.

Taking a cleansing breath, Lima stopped vacillating between vexation and feeling thunderstruck. There would be other smart boys in her life. Her mother’s life promised as much. Whoever had been Barbra’s most significant other had been reduced to a nonentity who was neither named nor described. Over the years, many men, Barbra’s pursuit exploits evidencing such, had replaced Lima’s father.

Contradictorily, Lima’s mom never seemed happy. In fact, she seemed a bit unbalanced.

Lima would not allow a mere male to similarly destabilize her. Brains were attractive, but dependence was not. Lima didn’t want to devolve into either a sorry sop or a sad sack. And yet, Lima wondered if she might be more efficacious in her marauderings if she allowed herself to love.

* * *

Wiping away tears, Lima sent her adversary a piece of malicious software that had a rootkit embedded in it. “Talk to the hand,” was all that the program said on its surface. Beneath that layer, though, the code sought Jim-Jam’s adjunct electronic weaknesses. The program was called “Acacias, Myrtle, Oleaster and Cypress.” Like Isaiah, Lima was planting seeds where none had ever been sown.

* * *

“Everyone” at Raymond Charles High School knew that Ralph Dupas wanted to enlist because “everyone” knew that he had no desire to finish high school. He said as much and pinned any students disinterested in his news against various hallway walls. Once restrained by Ralph, ambivalent teens were forced to listen, until he felt that they sufficiently appreciated his ideas, to his twaddle about his glorious future.

By joining the armed services, Ralph could make something out of himself, reduce his parents’ grocery bills, and earn money toward college tuition. He’d have to move away from Lynnie Lola, whom he still loved, stop working at Deli Deluxe, which he still loved, and forgo his ballet lessons at Miss Kay’s School for Dance and Drama, where he was loved, but he’d spend the last part of his formative years in an advantageous setting.

All said, Ralph ought to have been let go from Raymond Charles in the same way that his friend, Snorkel Preenberry, had been removed. Those boys had had similar academic miscarriages and had been similarly promoted on the basis of social advocacy. Ralph’s scholarly failure was so extreme that when school officials began to process Ralph’s graduation papers, they discovered but denied that he was Jim-Jam O’Neily’s cousin. The adults were not at all interested, all things considered, that Ralph had been Lynnie Lola’s beau or that he continued to be Marina Dupas’ older brother.

At the same time as those adults were puzzling his genetic deficiencies, Ralph privately added a second option for his future. If the army refused to enroll him, he would seek admission to the local hospital’s locked ward; he was still having waking nightmares about large lizards.

Proceed to Chapter 17...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg

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