Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Which Wire

"Okay, now locate the primary and the secondary switches and trace them back to the source," David's voice sounded loud and clear in his ear.

Steve's quick hands sifted through the wires attached to the bomb that he was practicing on. "Okay, this is the primary, but it looks like there is a third redundancy down here," Steve's long fingers traced a blue wire gently as it twisted back on itself and into the core of the device.

"Now the real question," David said, "is which wire do you cut? Bear in mind that you only have three more minutes before it goes off."

Steve grasped a small pair of wire cutters in his left hand, looking at the bomb. He looked again at the bundle of wires. Smiling, he grasped the green wire gently and cut it with a quick motion.

Steve couldn't help his cry of surprise when the little bomb went off in a shower of confetti.

Picking the colored paper out of his hair, Steve scowled in frustration. "I though I had it right for sure that time," Steve said as David came into the practice room.

"Don't worry about it, You'll get it eventually," David said, patting Steve on the shoulder. "Lets just hope it's before you have to disarm am bomb for real."

1 comment:

Nagi said...

I liked the confetti for the dummy bomb - it was a nice touch. And here, the use of hands was subtle -you made some quick references to Steve's hands but didn't wax too poetic. Still, the issue of fixing a bomb here was less about dexterity and more about engineering. Maybe if Steve were having a problem with how steady his hands were this might tap into the theme a bit more. Still, lots of showing this time, so nice improvement.