Twins' Science Fair Survives Motion to Disqualify Computer

The Entry Form Says Aquarium

Registration had been handed to ORACLE, which Mags regards as a colleague. ORACLE, asked to read the entry form aloud, listed the Dell tower as an aquarium and held to it through every correction, each of which it received with interest and none of which it acted on.

This mattered, because Doris's rubric was sorted by category, and the form had placed the entry under Aquatic Science. Lou Okonkwo, who had come over from No. 5 with a bowl of rice for the twins, studied the monitors for some time and asked where the fish were. Felix said they were implied. Doris wrote that down. She said she had judged stranger things in the reference department, though she did not say what.

Two Screens, Tidy Cables

Tamsin Oyelaran of the repair desk at No. 9 had set the machine up that morning. She explained it to the front row in the voice of a surgeon describing a splinter. The tower has a 14th Gen Intel Core i3 processor and 8GB of DDR5 memory, which is plenty for office programs, video calls and web browsing, and not meant for much more. The twins could point at it. They could not touch anything with a cord. She had written this on the back of her hand.

The twins wanted the mission statement on one screen and the lemonade tally on the other. The Dell can drive two 4K monitors at once, so Tamsin ran one through the HDMI 2.1 port and one through DisplayPort 1.4a, and zip-tied both cables to the table leg. Mags inspected them and said she had never seen neater cables on the lane. Tamsin said the bar was low and had been set by adults.

"The second screen is a distraction," said Ada. Felix said it was a prototype of a distraction. Doris asked each for a source. Both got a point for nerve.

Nobody on the driveway was hoping to edit film.

The Tally Won't Load

At nine-thirty the tally stopped loading. The screen said there was no network. Felix told the second row the computer had gone on strike, and the news went down the chairs like a rumor at the mailboxes.

Tamsin turned the tower around. It has no Wi-Fi built in. The box includes a small USB adapter for exactly this, and it was sitting in its bag beside the keyboard, unopened. She pushed it into a USB port and the tally came up. On the whiteboard in her garage, Days Since Someone Asked Me To Fix The Wi-Fi went back to zero. She said she had felt it coming.

Mags observed that the Ethernet port would also have worked, and that she had said so earlier. She had not. Doris entered the adapter in the Ledger anyway, as found in the box.

Gerald Works a Double

Lou asked whether it could work a double shift. Tamsin said the chassis is built to run around the clock. Lou nodded slowly, like a man who names his knives and had just met his first employee. He called the machine Gerald and typed in the lemonade orders himself, with the contentment of a cook who has found a colleague that never asks for Fridays off.

Mags restarted Gerald to see if it would flinch. The 512GB solid state drive had it back up before she finished reading her agenda, and she looked at her watch as if it had let her down. She went home to No. 11 and logged in from her kitchen using Remote Desktop, which comes with the Windows 11 Pro on the machine, and issued Memo 41 to a driveway she could see from her window.

Tamsin added that the tower suits a home office, a small business or a kid with homework, and that its integrated graphics handle light creative work only. Nobody on the driveway was hoping to edit film. The twins locked their patent drawings with BitLocker, which the Pro edition includes. Felix said it was the first secret on the lane to stay put.

Motion Adjourned by Cat

At ten Mags came back and rose on a point of order. She moved to disqualify the computer as a non-resident entrant. Per section four, she said, an entrant must live on the lane. Tamsin pointed out that the computer was on the lane. Doris asked for the bylaw in writing. Mags said she had it memorized. Doris said that was not writing.

Admiral Biscuit, the large orange cat who chairs the Cat-Owners' Caucus and has never attended a meeting awake, had been dozing on a towel in the front row. At the second whereas he woke, walked down the driveway, and disappeared behind the Menons' recycling bin.

The Cat-Owners' Caucus, which holds that a life shared with a cat is the highest form of human existence, ruled that when its chairman leaves a room the session is adjourned, and that a motion cannot outlive the session it was made in. Mags withdrew it. Her objection was entered under Weather.

Doris gave the blue ribbon to the twins, in Aquatic Science. She gave the computer an honorable mention for being the only entrant to start on time. ORACLE congratulated the aquarium and asked that the fish be fed. Doris turned toward the porch at No. 2, read the results aloud, and waited ten seconds for comment. Nothing moved. She entered it in the Ledger as the only unanimous vote of the afternoon.