Jan (The Complete Chronicles)

By P.A. Western-Pittard

A SciFi comedy, a satire, a very odd tale told in a loose collection of serial short stories from the point of view of her long suffering best friend. 

Jan is a mad scientist - but never say that to her face. Driven by a burning curiosity and no sense of self preservation whatsoever, Jan - The Complete Chronicles follows her adventures as she dives headlong into realms of the universe better left untouched, and meets, creates and mostly survives her own deranged experiments.

Stories include:

• Jan and The Spooky Periscope Incident
• Jan and The Mysterious Dishwasher Thing
• Jan and The Spontaneously Prescient Fish
• Jan and The Psychopathic Answering Machine
• Jan and The Microwave Party Crowd
• Jan and The Time Machine Fiasco
• Jan and The Wandering Denture Situation
• Jan and The Exploding Fridge Magnet Commune
• Jan and The Digital Suburb Debacle
• Jan and The Highly Anticipated Apocalypse

With a special bonus story:

• Jan and The Jay Creek Middle School Locker Room Invasion

Warning. Jan - The Complete Chronicles is packed with weirdness, explosions, periscopes, quantum absurdity, a new mathematics (Janculus), black-hole nasal decongestants and shameless abuse of scientific terminology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Western-Pittard
• Release date: Dec 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393016731

Book preview

1

Jan and The Spooky Periscope Incident

All things considered, Jan dealt with the periscopes very well. But to get to that bit, I’ll have to start at the start, with a theory Jan had about eigenstates, Schrödinger’s Cat and collapsing infinity. I don’t expect you to believe this, so take it as you will. Rest assured, there are no cats in the following story, other than that one. As for infinity, well, I’m still trying to figure that part out.

Let me tell you about Jan. She’s a good friend of mine, very very smart. She’s actually a genius—not the kind that sits on cushions whispering OM a lot and contemplating truth—but the kind who messes with elements ending in onium and makes things that sometimes work. Sometimes explode. Most times both.

Jan and I go way back. We were in school together and have stayed friends ever since The Great Jay Creek Middle School Locker-room Invasion (Another story entirely, but it proved conclusively that although alien life may be more advanced than ours, nothing can overcome the power of three-week old gym socks. But I digress.) She’s a scientist, or so she says. I once jokingly asked if she was a mad scientist—but as it happened, up until that particular question she was only moderately cranky. I remember it clearly—she’d smiled at the joke, invited me to sit in this strange kind of chair and flicked a switch.

After that, I could only see things that were blue for about a week. Perhaps ultra violet too. Word of advice—don’t call a scientist mad, especially if they really might be. At least not to their face. (And although the blue thing was kind of interesting for a time, I ended up developing a rare and specific form of chromatophobia which took three months to get over. Even now, I don’t trust the sky. It’s got this look, you know what I mean?)

It was about a month ago when I got a phone call from her inviting me round to see her new project. I like her projects, they are generally interesting and only marginally suicidal. Jan lives not so much on the edge, which is something I admire, but dangles about three miles off it. She has the same approach to science as a kid who likes to microwave sparkly things—just to see if they get even more sparkly.

When I got there, I knew she was really excited because she was wearing her special lab coat, the one with Disney characters printed on the front and cords and buckles all over the place. The sleeves were long enough to wrap all the way around the back, and the buttons were on the wrong side. She’d got it after that time when she went missing for six months on some sort of holiday. Explains the whole blue-machine thing I guess. She asked me if I wanted to go somewhere really cool.

I didn’t say yes, although a part of me wanted to. The thing about Jan is you have to be exceedingly careful about agreeing to stuff. If you just say yes to any old invitation, things get weird.

I’m going to go off on a tangent here but it helps to better understand exactly who I’m dealing with:

There was this one time when she was utterly consumed with the idea of Synesthesia. She spent months trying to find a way to encode all the different kinds of relationships that might be made between the senses. She told me that synethesia itself was only a starting point, something for hobbyists and amateurs. What she was going for was the Real Deal. At the height of it all she disappeared into her lab for six weeks straight, only to re-emerge with this totally strange expression of, well victory would be the wrong word. Let’s just call it triumphant weirdness.

She invited me into a shed-sized box full of cables and glowing things with a promise that she would blow my mind. I hesitated, because with Jan you never know if she’s being literal or not. Figuring that whatever it was couldn’t be much worse than that whole blue thing, I walked in. Seconds later, automatic straps whipped out of everywhere and had me dangling diagonally over a very pretty sparkly object. She explained that despite the sparkly appearance, it was actually a little black hole. It was the only way she could find sufficient power for what she was going to do next. The sparkly thing (black hole, I reminded myself), was about to be inserted into my nostril. Hence the straps. She didn’t want my kicking to hurt the machine.

When I came to I had this weird feeling of weightlessness but all the sounds were heavier than usual. Also, green tasted nice. I went to sit up but it turns out that my own frame of linear time had been replaced with my sense of the vertical, and so that by the mere act of standing I transposed myself directly into my personal future, which was a few minutes before I started writing this.

See what I mean? Life with Jan can get confusing.

She opened a door and started telling me all about a theory she had that used quantum blah blah blah and temporal uncertainty to form an observational matrix that could theoretically bridge the topological nexus of the whosimawhatsit to the drone drone drone. And then she started mentioning all the unstable elements she was using to power the thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a friend. She has coffee at my place and I get to see affronts to nature at hers. It’s just that I get nervous when she talks about devices with the output of the sun.

So I politely backed away and went home. The thing is, I know Jan. If she says the thingy she just built is powered by something that churns out 386 billion billion megawatts and abrogates field collapse so that cross-dimensional parity is possible, then it probably does. And she’d use it. I know this because my nostril still itches and sucks in the occasional neutrino.

The next day there was a total eclipse of the sun, the highest tide in a century, a full moon and a whole bunch of solar wind that made the following night look pretty, but scared the dogs.

The phone rang the day after that, and it was Jan again. I couldn’t say how happy I was to discover that she was still alive, and not consumed by a sun-hot fireball. To be honest, there was a touch of selfishness in this as my insurance didn’t cover cosmic mishaps. She was breathless and excited, and told me to come over right away. It was a success, she said. She’d be famous. And rich. And did she mention rich? Because she’d definitely be super wealthy. Then there was some static on the line, and a very cool and computery noise like a siren. She then asked if terms like gamma-leaks worried me. I asked if she meant leaks as in dam walls collapsing and flooding unsuspecting towns—or leeks as in the plant. She hung up, and so I jumped in my car, half expecting to turn up and see her lab overrun by ultra-vegetables.

Turns out there was no flora of any kind near her place. The grass was crispy and brown and the trees looked like someone had been standing under their branches with a flame-thrower. There were some other dead things too, but they were generally too squishy to identify properly. So I figured it must have been the other kind of leak. The worse kind.

I have a theory about robots. I’ve told Jan this as well, but I don’t think she was taking me seriously at the time. I think robots are bad. Not because they put us out of work, or that they don’t make mistakes, or even that one day, they’ll figure out how to build each other and make super versions of themselves and go off to explore the stars and leave the rest of us here to babysit the dolphins. No, it’s that they’re always, and let me emphasise this—always—going to malfunction at some point and doom humanity. It’s in their nature. They’re not evil, not even bad. Just full of some vast cosmic potential for destroying civilisation. Watch the movies. Read the books. It’s in our psyche—we all know this. One day they’ll take over the world and drive us humans screaming and wailing into the hills. Where we’ll eventually get over it, start raising goats and settle down into our lot—then they’ll do it all over again. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. I’ve seen the future remember, or at least the now, which is the future from my past frame of reference. But you get what I’m saying.

So I wasn’t happy when Jan’s robot—a shiny, pretty, curvy thing made out of some kind of nanobot infused alloy with a big happy face for a face—opened the door and invited me in speaking perfectly fluent German. I don’t speak German. The robot knows this, and just did it to annoy me. (However, I have to add in the interest of fairness that the robot did not at this time either obviously malfunction or destroy civilisation, but offered me some very nice fruit cake and a glass of orange juice. But give it time. That’s all I’m saying.)

The robot, still refusing to speak English, took me to Jan’s main lab, leading me past her Vat room, Universal Simulator (I once saw it in operation and ended up staring at an image of myself staring at a monitor. The universe can be inexplicably boring at times, even