Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Writing Contest Entry #1 (Exhibition Round)

The Jameson and Gorthund C51 motor anything but advanced. The silver/graphite bearings had a lifespan of only six years, with sporadic failures under duress. The electrical contact brushes had long been superseded by continuous shear deformation gel rings in products from reputable vendors. The rotor's neodymium magnets were brittle even for their time, and often fractured under extended use or protracted heating, or even crushed themselves under their own magnetic fields. The stator's antiquated copper coils, used in place of conductive nanotubes to generate the driving field were shielded by a polyvinyl-teflon coating that was readily damaged if the cast-titanium/aluminum casing was compromised in the slightest, frequently shorting the motor and rendering it useless if not deadly. It was in every way inferior to its modern counterparts, shunning a century of steady advances in materials science.

But despite its faults, the C51 had one overriding consideration: price. And in the Modality it found a perfect match: a government sharing the philosophy of quantity over quality. Dirt cheap to produce, available on demand by the ton, scalable from hand tools to battleships, the C51 was the key economic enabler. The Modality cared little when it broke down transporting tanks to enforcement zones; There were always more factories in each freshly liberated territory. Sometimes the coils would literally melt from waste heat, often setting vehicles (and occupants) ablaze. But there were always more soldiers - no shortage of volunteers to see to realization of global peace. The bearings were sieve-like and the exposed metal within corroded at a glimpse of saltwater. But what did the government care if boats were stranded? The Modality was quite used to playing statistics. It was their unilateral approach.

The C51 powered their supply trains, their aircraft, their tools and their weapons. Dependability was a memory, but the Modality preached incessantly about the dangers of clinging to the past. Their construction squads scheduled demolitions every month to remind the people. The C51 was everywhere - government vehicles rolled by in the night constantly, the police trucks dispatching justice and the coroner's trucks cleaning it up. The motor's shrill whine was so ubiquitous that children no longer heard the upper registers of sound, even at birth.

The C51 brought bountiful fortune as the money rolled in. It took it away in trucks when they seized my assets. As I lay here, I know it will in only moments take my life away as well, whirring at the heart of the surgeons' tools, liberating the engines of the body for those 'better fit' to use them - standard practice for convicts.

Somehow, I imagined such success differently...

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