I asked ChatGPT to “write a 1000-word adventure story about the invention of the Phillips screwdriver and how it revolutionised home handyman traditions. Include a romantic angle and political intrigue. Have the ending suggest that the Allen key is plotting jealous revenge.” I also asked it to create the noir illustration. Here’s the result.
They said the screw was a tiny thing, but on the night the city went black, it felt like the axis of the world.
Nora Vale was halfway up a ladder in her rented bungalow when the lights died. Her hands were streaked with paint. The living room ceiling, a flaking museum of previous tenants, hovered over her like a storm. She looked down, squinted through dusk, and swore at the flathead screwdriver that kept skittering out of the screw head like a fish from a net.
“Hold still,” she muttered—to the screw, to the ladder, to the night—just as the front door opened and spilled streetlamp amber across the rug.
A silhouette filled the doorway, tall, lean, carrying a suitcase in one hand and an apology in the other. “Henry Phillips,” he said. “Though tonight I’m just a neighbor with a spare fuse and maybe a better idea.”
“Better than this?” Nora hopped off the ladder and waved the flathead like a white flag. “If you can make a screw stay put while I turn it, I’ll marry you on the spot.”
He blinked, as if she’d issued a technical spec. “Careful,” he said. “I’m a man who writes things down.”
Henry kneelt, twisted in the new fuse, and the room warmed into light. He set his suitcase on the table, opened it, and revealed a small velvet tray. In the tray lay a strange, star-shaped bit of steel, crossed like a compass rose.
“Cross recess,” he said. “A simple geometry to solve a simple problem.”
Nora took the tool, surprised by its balance. “I’m Nora,” she said. “I make a living telling complicated stories. You’re telling me this is a simple one?”
“Simple as an assembly line,” Henry said. “Simple as a bolt that doesn’t strip, a driver that centers itself, a worker who doesn’t have to fight gravity.”
She climbed the ladder, pressed the cross into the cross, and turned. The screw drew home as if the house had taken a deep breath and decided, finally, to hold itself together.
She looked down. He was smiling in that cautious way inventors do when the experiment works in someone else’s hands.
“It’s going to change everything,” he said.
“Everything?” She cocked an eyebrow. “That’s a bold claim for a little flower-shaped socket.”
He hesitated. “A revolution starts with the smallest click.”
—
The next week Nora met Henry for coffee at a diner that smelled like burnt toast and fresh hope. He told her about the factories that ran on speed and sweat, the way flathead drivers skipped and chewed through slotted screws, the tiny lost seconds that multiplied into ruined hours. He told her about a machinist named Thompson, who dreamed the cross-shaped recess first but couldn’t sell the world on it. He told her about buying the patents, about retooling the idea until it wasn’t just clever but inevitable.
“What I have,” Henry said, tapping the table, “is a geometry that forgives. When the worker isn’t perfect—because who is, eight hours into a shift—the driver still finds the center. It guides you. It holds you. It makes you feel, for once, that the tool is on your side.”
“You’re not just selling screws,” Nora said, stirring her coffee. “You’re selling dignity.”
He blushed at that, and Nora filed it away: dignity as an angle of approach.
They began seeing each other in the odd hours: evenings when Nora escaped the newsroom, mornings before Henry went to a meeting with a car company, midnights when the city’s clocks seemed to wait for an answer. She wrote under a pseudonym about a quiet American invention that might make modern life less cruel. He took long phone calls and longer train rides, chasing signatures that could put his cross on every assembly line in the country.
On a rainy Thursday, Henry arrived at Nora’s door with his hat dripping and his eyes lit. “General Motors is interested,” he said. “If we can prove the driver means fewer broken glass, fewer mangled paint jobs, fewer cussed foremen… If we can save them minutes, we’ll save them fortunes.”
“Show me,” Nora said.
“In Detroit,” he said.
They rode the overnight train in a compartment that rattled like a shoebox full of bolts. Henry fell asleep reading diagrams; Nora fell asleep listening to his breathing, steady as a press. She woke to gray factories hunched against the dawn, and to men in coats tracing their gloves along the railings as if they were reading braille.
On the floor, under the roar of a hundred machines, Henry placed the driver in a worker’s palm. Big hands, oil stained, cracked. The man set the driver on the screw, and the driver found the center as if pulled by a magnet. The line moved faster, smoother. Screws seated perfectly with a satisfying, democratic click—no special finesse needed, no apprenticeship in cursing required.
Nora watched the foreman’s eyebrows climb, watched the ledger in his head start to shift figures around like furniture. She took notes. She fell a little more in love.
At lunch, the plant manager took Henry aside. The conversation was quiet, the smiles too polished. When Henry returned, his jaw was tight in that American way that says “everything’s fine” when it isn’t.
“They want it,” he said. “But they also want me quiet about how they’ll use it. They want exclusivity, for a time. And there are senators sniffing about tariffs and antitrust. There are rivals with slotted loyalties whispering that the cross is a trick to corner the market on tools.”
“Politics,” Nora said. “I can help.”
“Careful,” he said again. “You’re a woman in a newsroom owned by men who do their own screwing.” He winced. “I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” She squeezed his hand. “You bring the geometry. I’ll bring the verbs.”
—
The smear campaign began on page two.
Syndicated columns warned of “foreign” geometry corrupting the honest American slot. Editorial cartoons sketched a cross-headed screw drilled into the Capitol dome. Anonymous pamphlets claimed the driver would ruin the craftsman’s touch, turn a noble trade into a machine’s chore. A committee chairman from a state with a major slotted-screw foundry held hearings on “Standardization and the Death of Skill.” A rival lobby whispered that the cross recess was a hidden religion, smuggling holy shapes into every home.
Nora wrote an unsigned piece that opened with a factory worker’s split knuckles and ended with a widow’s fixed window. She argued that forgiving tools didn’t erase skill; they freed it to do higher things. She interviewed carpenters who said they could drive twice as many screws before lunch without stripping the heads. She quoted a mother who hung shelves for the first time and cried because nothing fell.
Henry went to Washington with a polished driver in his pocket and a speech about safety, speed, and the common good. He met staffers who confided they couldn’t assemble their own campaign signs without blistering. He met a senator who slid the driver between his fingers, smiled, and said, “My wife will thank you.” He met men in gray suits whose pockets clinked like coin jars.
Back home, Nora’s editor warned her that a slotted-screw manufacturer had bought an advertisement the size of a barn and wanted favorable ink as change. Nora said she’d rather sell her typewriter. The editor said he’d take that too. She went home and fixed a loose cabinet door with the cross driver, and when the screw seated with a whisper, she decided to write it as a love story.
She wrote about Henry’s hands and the way the driver nested into his palm like a promise. She wrote about the delicate sound a screw makes when it finds the wood’s grain and the world stops fighting back. She wrote about dignity returning to tool and user, about homes that could finally be mended by the people who lived in them. She wrote about the wild romance of a click that meant you didn’t have to brace the whole universe to turn a tiny thread.
The editor ran it on Sunday, thinking the city would laugh. Instead, they lined up at the hardware counters, asking for the cross-headed drivers by name.
—
The revolution, such as it was, happened quietly. In kitchen drawers across the country, old flatheads shifted to the back, resentful and long, while a new tool took the front spot and wore the fingerprints of ordinary people. The home handyman—who was often a handywoman who didn’t much care for titles—found the faith to fix what had always seemed to belong to professionals. Hinges stopped drooping, picture frames straightened, children’s wagons held together through one more summer. The cross became a little star you could hold.
Nora and Henry married in a backyard bright with strings of lights that were hung, of course, with new screws. The vows were short. The cake leaned a little. Henry fixed the wobbling table with a quarter turn of his driver, and everyone cheered.
But politics has the memory of a drill press. A consortium of old-guard manufacturers sued over standards, alleging that the cross recess would lead to “driver tyranny.” A bill slid into committee to require “traditional slots” on government contracts, argued in the name of heritage and invisible subsidies. Henry looked tired; Nora looked dangerous.
“Write one more,” he said, pressing her hand. “Make it about all of us.”
She did. She called it “The Click We Share.” She told a story of small mercies—of a widow, a factory worker, a child building a birdhouse with a father who wasn’t good with his hands until the driver forgave him. She didn’t mention Henry by name. She didn’t have to. The story turned phones into switchboards and senators into listeners.
The bill died on a quiet Tuesday, and the standards committee adopted the cross recess as a recognized shape, to be used wherever it made sense. Which was almost everywhere. In the weeks that followed, Henry slept for the first time in months. Nora slept on his shoulder and dreamed of a world held together by small, kind angles.
—
On a winter evening, years later, a man in a gray coat stood in a hardware aisle and stared at a wall of drivers like a general surveying uniforms. He lifted a package labeled HEX KEY SET, rolled the thin steel into his palm, and smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Everyone loves a star,” he said softly, tracing the six cool flats with his thumb. “But the world also loves a secret.”
He turned the Allen key over, admiring its simplicity, its refusal to need a separate driver, its ability to hide screws flush and smug. He imagined furniture packed flat in mysterious boxes that confessed their shapes only to those who possessed the right bend of steel. He imagined a generation of home handymen humbled before a drawer without the proper key.
In the next aisle, a young couple chose a cross driver and laughed about fixing their first apartment. The man in gray listened to the happy, ordinary sound, and his smile sharpened.
He slipped an Allen key into his coat pocket like a whisper and walked into the night, already rehearsing the quiet click of jealous revenge.
iDigress 