The Contest - Flash

The invigilator spoke to us for a few minutes, laying out the strict rules of engagement. We heard very precise and deliberate instructions, and a no-nonsense sternness painted everything else, including the invigilator’s suit, glasses and accessories.

Each of us were to have a turn, then as necessary, each of us would offer suggestions for improvements, deletions, methods of operation and so on. Mary went first. She showed her device, put it through its paces, and running it full speed, and over-clocked, without any external cooling or venting. We were amazed, and Mary gloated. Don was next with his apparatus. It was almost at the limit of the size allowed, but it performed beautifully, and no one could detect any output errors at first inspection. Debbie was next. She based her appliance on some older models she had shown before. This one was a little different. It was faster, seemed to pull power out of the air, and was extremely prolific. We didn’t have time to run any quality checks on the output, but we trusted that it did a good job. Billy Bob was next in order to demo his contrivance. He pulled it out of a sleek, aluminum case and plugged in a small, hydrogen fuel cell. It hummed for a few seconds and a flexible, oleophobic lens slid out of the side to project a hundred or so lines of text on the far wall of the room. We all could see the text of the piece of fiction he was working on. He fed his device a few more parameters, shut off the granny filters, and pressed a few buttons before a second piece of fiction was displayed on the wall. His optional hard copy device supplied a copy of the second piece for each of us to read and edit. There were no questions or comments. The Invigilator appeared, smiled, shook Billy Bob’s hand and awarded him the grand prix. The winning piece of fiction was published within days, and the machine was awarded patents and was subsequently purchased by a big publishing house.