[REPOST] Fan fiction: Tek Jansen

Hello, readers! I’ve been thinking a lot about Stephen Colbert and his work lately, and of course, one of the things he has created is the universe of Tek Jansen.

I could SWEAR he came to my door in… well, maybe 2005? I had just started to dye my hair black. He was on my doorstep and asked me a bunch of questions and I had no idea who he was or what he wanted, and basically, it was a strange conversation but I made a joke about having a “harem of men” (it was a lie, I am demisexual and do not have a harem of any kind). I’ve had so many nightmares since that people who realized the conversation had taken place may have followed up by impersonating me to him and bombarding him, or his friends or relatives, with shitty messages, or intercepting his messages to me and finding ways to profit from them while making me look like an asshole. There is literally nothing I can do about that, though, so hopefully if something like that did happen, I get to clear the air at some point. Basically: I have never had Stephen Colbert’s direct contact information, and while I have tried mailing letters, to him or his manager, none have ever been returned. It’s OK, he’s busy and I’m not anyone he has a reason to remember, but it pisses me off to think that what could have been a promising beginning to a new career (I love to write) may have been pinched off before it could start by horrible people.

Anyway. I am working on an autobiography full of my imaginings, some where I worry about an organized effort to discredit and impoverish me, as well as people trying to cover up indiscretions and crimes. I have some real doozies of recollections of things a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who often insists on wearing white or orange has said to me, or done in front of me- she’s completely awful and I really pity her husband because she brags about cheating on him with men she finds more attractive, and said she stays with him for the money. She’s also attempted to sleep with ME, by the way, and I find her entirely unappealing. She’s like a cheap, flimsy cardboard copy of the seductress I had to create to protect myself, Mrs. White, who has completely misunderstood Mrs. White or what she actually represents and does. I’ll tell you more about Mrs. White and her sisters both in my autobiography, and maybe in a teaser post for that, soon.

Anyway. I wrote this the first year my blog was active, in 2023. I think 10 people saw it, and I had no responses. Here it is:

[From 2023:]

I wrote this in 2019, one year after I had discovered the Tek Jansen website and read the graphic novel. It’s silly and I didn’t like one of the things that happened in the graphic novel, so I wrote this to patch that up. Tek Jansen and his universe was created by Stephen Colbert, and if you enjoy this story I hope you look up his work.

Encounter on Califzona: A Tek Jansen Adventure

It was a sunny morning on the planet Califzona, and Clarisse Diamond angled her telephoto lens toward the hotel that the galaxy’s greatest hero, Tek Jansen, was currently asleep in. She aimed the lens toward the window of the penthouse suite. Her contact was in the window, a willowy green creature with leafy hair, photosynthesizing. She was not holding a cup of fertilizer. This was the signal- if Tek Jansen was with her, she would appear alone in the window, nothing in her hands.

Clarisse packed her equipment back in her tactical backpack and made her way down the rough scree of the slope she had been perched on. Only one thing to do. She had to use Tek Jansen’s notorious libido against him, gain his trust, and ferret out the secrets she needed to save her doomed home world from destruction. Tek’s government had set up robotic fracking sites on 90% of the small moon Ontington’s surface, sucking up its mineral wealth but destroying Ontington’s ecosystems and fragile tectonic crusts in the process. The only way to stop the machines was to gain access to codes that only Tek knew.

Could she rely on Tek’s better nature? Clarisse considered this as she made her way down to the doors of the Hotel Elegante, where Tek Jansen was staying. She didn’t know. She couldn’t take the chance.

The Hotel Elegante was hosting a pet show. Clarisse would find him and seduce him there, perhaps. This entire mission had to be improvised.

She actually didn’t know the name of the contact, but pulled out a credit chip wallet and discreetly handed it off to her in the lobby of the hotel as the contact brushed against her, ever so gently, leaving the hotel. Clarisse found a note pressed into her hand.

Suite 1001.

Clarisse booked herself into a room one floor below Tek’s suite, and carried her tactical backpack with its quantum-dimensional interior pockets, one of which carried a selection of evening gowns, up to her room. The backpack was pretty heavy as a result, even though it only appeared to be a cubic foot in size. She placed it on the bed and the bed sagged somewhat.

Clarisse was about to take a shower when there was a knock on the door. She eyeballed the door with suspicion. Her contact had left. Who could this be? A maid? Clarisse had been traveling under the guise of being an enthusiastic desert hiker. Surely that would raise no suspicion on this arid planet.

Clarisse belted her hotel robe around her more tightly and answered the door.

“It’s this one, just go right in,” grated a gravelly voice. Clarisse blinked. At her door was a tall, muscular figure, fully dressed in a tight Spandex uniform complete with cape and epaulets, his dark hair curling down slightly over his forehead. Tek Jansen held up a glass container in which an ugly dark substance swirled.

“It’s right here,” said the substance.

“Meangar, I don’t think this is the spa,” replied Tek.

“It’s not,” said Clarisse, slightly breathlessly. Tek, in person, was almost overwhelming.

Get the codes, girl, she told herself, sternly. She had a mission, the entire population of her native moon was depending on her.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” said Tek, and was about to turn away when Clarisse touched his arm.

“No, it’s fine. Is this your pet?” She gestured toward the swirling blackness in the glass jar.

“You’re an ugly loser and you’ll die alone,” grated the blackness.

“Isn’t it cute? This is Meangar,” replied Tek, patting the jar fondly.

“It is something,” replied Clarisse.

“Say, haven’t we met before?” Tek squinted at her.

Clarisse blinked. Had they met before?

Remember the mission, she thought, looking at Tek’s kind dark eyes.

“Can I buy you a drink?” she blurted, all her seduction lessons, which she had uploaded during the trip to Califzona via neural hyperlink forgotten.

Meangar said an expletive. Tek chuckled and tucked it under one arm.

“Where are you from?” asked Tek.

“I’m from… all over,” Clarisse replied. She started to play with her shoulder-length black hair. He really was quite handsome.

“I’m Tek,” he said, and Clarisse smiled at him. He held out his hand and Clarisse took it to shake it, and he brushed a kiss across her knuckles.

“I’m Clarisse,” she replied. She was acutely aware of having just finished a hike outside in the hot sun with a heavy pack on her back.

“I’ll buy you that drink,” Tek said.

“I’ll kill you first,” Meangar snarled.

Clarisse looked at Meangar, then at Tek.

“You get used to it,” Tek said, patting the jar.

“I’ll meet you down in the lobby at seven?” Clarisse replied. Her heart was pounding. Normally she was a lot more composed about her assignments, but this was… this was Tek Jansen.

She found herself grinning stupidly.

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,” she said.

Tek frowned.

“Jabberwocky?” he said.

“Jabberwocky,” she replied. “There are Jabberwocks on my home world.” A stray curl of hair escaped from his forehead and she smoothed it back.

He smiled.

“You both smell like Limburger!” yelled Meangar.

“I’ll enter it in the pet contest before we meet,” said Tek, patting the jar, and Clarisse smiled, suddenly shy.

“Seven, in the lobby,” she replied, and Tek smiled down at her. She blushed.

“I’ll see you then,” he said, and turned away, walking down the hotel hall corridor as Meangar started screaming about kidneys and piñatas.

That evening, Clarisse patted her carefully coiffed hair, in which a number of recording devices and weapons were placed, and wriggled her toes in her specialty pumps, which had a vial of sleeping potion located in the left heel, and, when activated, could eject four-inch spikes from the toes. She had let the charms of the dashing Tek Jansen get to her head before, but now she would be all business. It was time for her to get those codes.

She made her way, slinking as seductively as she could, to the bar in the hotel lobby, and looked around for Tek.

He hadn’t arrived yet. In the distance, she heard Meangar screaming something about its eternal revenge and how much it hoped to kill everyone in earshot someday. Ah, apparently it was being entered into the pet contest.

She walked up to the bar and seated herself at one end. Behind the bar, a glowing green metallic chimp shook a cocktail shaker.

“Hi,” it said. “What can I get for you?”

“Hi,” replied Clarisse. “I’m waiting for a friend.”

“It wouldn’t happen to be Tek Jansen, would it?”

Clarisse started. Was she that transparent?

Behind the bar, the robotic chimp took out a cloth and started polishing the counter.

“Well… well, yes, I was hoping to talk to Mr. Jansen.”

The chimp straightened his little black bow tie.

“I know him,” he said. “Before I got this job, I worked with him on his spacecraft. I was loyal. He was not.”

Clarisse hesitated. “Oh?” she replied.

“He left me in a space void, circling a black hole,” said the robotic chimp. “I’m C.A.S.E.Y.”

Clarisse switched on a discreet recording device in her purse. Maybe she could use this story to blackmail Tek into giving her the codes to stop the machinery on her home world.

For the next fifteen minutes, C.A.S.E.Y. told her a story of sadness- of a robotic chimp unappreciated and abandoned, and Clarisse felt her heart hardening against the charming and handsome Tek Jansen. How could he abandon his loyal robotic friend? How many scrapes had they been in together, how many times has C.A.S.E.Y. helped Tek, only to be left in a cold void in space, awaiting rescue, with came quite a long time after Tek had left, promising to be back soon?

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” said C.A.S.E.Y. “I plan on confronting him once and for all, here in this bar.”

Clarisse patted the robotic chimp’s arm.

“I had no idea he was so cruel,” she said. “This puts him in a whole new light for me.”

C.A.S.E.Y. looked over at her, dispassionately.

“Everyone loves him,” he said. “You will too, no doubt, once he’s here.”

“Clarisse?” said a familiar baritone. Clarisse turned and saw Tek.

He had changed into his dress uniform and looked even more handsome than he had earlier. His brown eyes shone behind his glasses as he smiled at her. She swallowed.

“Hello,” she said, and remembered C.A.S.E.Y. Her expression hardened.

“Remember this robot?” she asked, gesturing at the chimp.

Tek looked and an expression of delighted surprise swept across his chiseled features.

“C.A.S.E.Y.! I thought I had lost you forever in that space void. Meangar told me you had gotten a ride with the rest of Alpha Squad Seven, and it wasn’t until I had gotten it drunk on chlorofugue gas fumes that it confessed to me that it had lied. Are you okay?”

Clarisse and C.A.S.E.Y. both froze for a second, then the chimp broke down, sobbing.

“I thought you had abandoned me!”

“Abandon you? You are one of my most loyal followers! What would I do without you? I have missed you since I lost you,” said Tek. He reached across the bar and patted C.A.S.E.Y.’s glowing green shoulder.

Clarisse bit her lip. She couldn’t really blackmail Tek for something that had been the fault of his obnoxious little pet.

She waited until the robot stopped crying and then cleared her throat. Her seduction lessons were coming back.

“So,” she said, putting a hand on Tek’s arm, “tell me about yourself, Tek.”

She led him over to a small, secluded table. Over the next few hours, she practiced dumping space champagne in the mouth of a Califzonian pitcher plant instead of drinking it, while Tek drank most of two bottles, supplied by a grateful C.A.S.E.Y. on the house. She had to start taking sips once the plant started to hiccup.

He was an entertaining speaker and even when somewhat inebriated, he was charming and graceful. One sip of the heady space champagne after another, and Clarisse found herself telling him about her childhood on Ontington, and the Jabberwocks, and finally, the widespread scourge of the fracking machines.

“If only there were some way to stop them,” she said, tearfully, touching his muscular arm.

Tek leaned in toward her.

“Stick with me, baby doll,” he said. “If it would stop you from crying, I’d shut each one down myself.”

Clarisse looked over at him. Her large dark eyes were shining.

“Really? You’d help me? But- but your government-”

Tek flashed a huge and perfect grin.

“They don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s grab C.A.S.E.Y. and get into my NinjaBlaster 9000 scout ship, and save those Jabberwocks.”

Clarisse knew there would be complications. It couldn’t quite be this simple, could it?

“If you gave me the codes to shut down the equipment, I could relay them to the Ontingtonian secret service and we could just stay here,” she said.

Tek reached up and smoothed a lock of black hair behind her ear.

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked, and kissed her.

This is the cover of the Tek Jansen graphic novel I bought in 2018 that describes C.A.S.E.Y. and is the main source of my knowledge of this universe and the characters. There had been a website with a few chapters of a novel that seemed unfinished and was puzzling since, in tone, it varied a lot from lighthearted /poignant at first to impersonal and horrific in one of the later chapters on that site. I just assumed someone with the soul of Meangar had sabotaged his novel project. I’d have written stuff like the above story.

I really wish that I had known about this work at the time, but it could have been during the period of my life where I didn’t watch television at all. In any case, I can see definite room for a resurgence of Tek Jansen on the small screen. If you want more of my thoughts on this or any other matter, just contact me.

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