I asked this prompt to Gemma3:

please write the best possible creative and fictional story about a member of World Community Grid who lived in a flat he didn't own, but somehow managed to get his computer to crunch only on renewable energy (not from the public grid).

Here's the answer:

## The Static Bloom

Old Man Tiber lived in a shoebox of a flat above Mrs. Petrov’s bakery,
smelling perpetually of yeast and regret. He didn’t *own* the flat, not
exactly. It was a legacy arrangement, a silent agreement with the late Mr.
Petrov, who’d let him stay in exchange for… well, for being quiet. Tiber
was good at being quiet. He was also, surprisingly, a fervent believer in
the power of distributed computing. He’d been a member of World Community
Grid since its inception, dedicating every spare cycle of his aging
desktop to solving problems humanity couldn’t tackle alone.

But Tiber wasn’t just *participating* in the Grid. He was obsessed with
purity. He believed the very calculations, the potential breakthroughs,
were tainted if powered by the dirty, fossil-fuel-choked public grid. It
was a peculiar, almost religious conviction for a man who hadn’t stepped
foot in a church in decades.

The problem was, his flat was wired to the grid. And Tiber, a retired
clockmaker with more ingenuity than income, couldn’t afford solar panels,
wind turbines, or anything remotely conventional.

His solution was… unconventional. It started with the bakery. Mrs. Petrov,
a woman built like a sturdy oak and with a heart to match, had installed a
massive, antique wood-fired oven. It wasn't just for bread. She also
roasted coffee beans, a recent, surprisingly successful venture.

Tiber, observing the oven’s heat radiating through the floorboards, had a
spark. Not of electricity, but of an idea. He began scavenging. Discarded
bicycle dynamos, broken clockwork mechanisms, even the gears from a
defunct cuckoo clock – all found their way into his flat.

For months, the flat above the bakery became a symphony of whirring,
clicking, and the gentle scent of burnt toast (early prototypes weren't
perfect). He built a network of miniature, hand-cranked generators, each
connected to a flywheel. These flywheels weren’t powered by human hands,
though. They were connected to a complex system of belts and pulleys, all
driven by the *waste heat* from Mrs. Petrov’s oven.

It was a ludicrous, Rube Goldbergian contraption. The oven’s heat warmed a
sealed water tank. The steam drove a tiny turbine. The turbine spun a
series of gears, ultimately turning the flywheels that powered a
custom-built DC generator. The generator, in turn, fed a trickle of
clean, renewable energy directly into his computer.

It wasn’t much. A few watts at best. But Tiber was a master of
efficiency. He’d stripped his computer down to its bare essentials,
replacing the graphics card with a simple text-based interface, disabling
unnecessary processes, and even overclocking the CPU to squeeze every last
calculation out of each watt.

He called it “The Static Bloom.” It wasn’t a beautiful system. It was a
tangle of wires, gears, and repurposed metal, constantly humming and
clicking. But it worked.

He monitored the power flow with a homemade voltmeter, a relic from his
clockmaking days. When the oven was hot, the needle flickered with life.
When Mrs. Petrov wasn’t baking, the computer would gracefully shut down,
patiently waiting for the next burst of thermal energy.

He never told Mrs. Petrov. She was a practical woman, and he suspected
she’d think he’d finally lost his mind. He simply explained the constant
whirring as “a new hobby.”

For years, Tiber’s computer crunched data for the World Community Grid,
powered by the aroma of sourdough and the heat of a wood-fired oven. He
wasn’t solving the biggest problems, not with such limited power. But he
was contributing. He was doing his part, fueled by a conviction that even
the smallest contribution, if pure, could make a difference.

One day, a notification popped up on his screen. A breakthrough. A new
protein folding model, potentially leading to a cure for a rare genetic
disease. The calculations had been completed by a distributed network, a
collective effort of millions of computers around the world.

Tiber stared at the screen, a single tear tracing a path down his
weathered cheek. He didn’t know if his tiny contribution had been crucial.
But he knew, with absolute certainty, that his computer, powered by the
Static Bloom, had been a part of it.

He looked down at the tangle of gears and wires, humming softly in the
background. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t efficient. But it was *his*. And
it was powered by something real, something honest, something that bloomed
in the quiet stillness above the bakery, fueled by the heat of a good
heart and the unwavering belief in the power of a single, dedicated cycle.