Think Tank

Inspiration

Think Tank was originally written for Six Sentences, although they clearly didn't get the joke of it consisting of five identical one-word sentences surrounding one very long sentence, because they ignored the submission.

Placings

After several misfires, a substantially re-written Think Tank was commended in the 2009 Leaf nano-fiction competition.

Publications

As a result of that commendation, Think Tank was published in the ensuing Leaf anthology, Ada and more Nano-Fiction.

Notes

Here is the original submission to Six Sentences:

Water. Water. Water. Christ that’s it that’s the answer to everything i mean my god i’ve cracked it that’s the cure for aids and cancer and bloody hell i’ve just worked out a workable unified field theory too wow this is amazing and hang on i think i’ve also worked out how to fix global warming and what we need to do to solve world food and energy shortages and make everyone live in peace and harmony and gosh i’ve managed to prove the riemann hypothesis as well by the way and all I need to do now is work out how to get the message over maybe if I flap my fins like this so they catch the light perhaps I can do some kind of morse code thing and. Water. Water.

In some ways I almost prefer that one.

Incidentally, it turns out that goldfish actually have a memory-span of around three months, so the central conceit of this story is scientifically inaccurate. Which is a bit of a shame, really, although probably a good thing from the point of view of a goldfish.