Judging Comment
It didn’t have MP3, nor did it have Web’n’Walk. What kind of a phone is that? How old fashioned can you get?
Old-fashioned enough to base you story on one of the oldest fairy story ploys: The three wishes. But modern, and adult enough, to plant the wishes in a mobile phone.
But our hero is too smart to be caught by a trick like that, isn’t he? You need to be pretty up to date to work for Mobile Madness, and certainly stretwise enough to pitch for your commission on worthless insurance.
But everthing changes when wish number two goes off into cyberspace, and our hero discovers who is behind the three-wishes trick. Richard Fox convincingly creates the sense both of menace and panic in the room with the black walls, the glowing floor, and the transparent ceiling, and he successfully ratches up the tension as our hero struggles to make his escape and to get out that final desperate message.
Three wishes may be something of a cliché, but Ricard Fox puts them into a very adult setting – which is exactly the brief for the adult fairy story competition.