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The Thinking Molecules: Voting on the First Twelve Endings and Four More Endings

When I first decided to put up Roger's story "The Thinking Molecules of Titan," on which he was working when he passed away, and to ask you readers to contribute an ending, I didn't know what to expect. Would there be a few submissions? Would people have the time to do this?

When I saw all the entries, over 30, and the dazzling array of ideas you came up with, it filled my heart. And then Krishna Bala Shenoi started producing illustrations for the stories, and my heart was filled again.

We wanted to let you read these endings, and vote on which ones you like. So we've started posting batches of endings. After we'd posted one set of four and gotten the technology mastered to have voting, we posted four more and set up voting on the first eight endings we posted. The next week, we posted four more, and this week we've posted another batch.

So, here are four more endings to Roger's story. Enjoy! We certainly did. Now we want you to vote! Check out these endings from Andreas Belgun, Ellen Chen, Dylan Dougherty and Jason Pulley. Then vote on your favorite!

Editor's note: Voting on these four endings has closed.

Which of these four endings for "The Thinking Molecules of Titan" is your favorite?
pollcode.com free polls 

Each week we'll post more, and we'll let you vote for a week on your favorite out of each week's endings. We will give you four at a time until we are done. We got three hundred votes in the first two rounds of polling. The winner of the first batch of eight was Ariel Gonzales, whose ending you can read here. In the next batch of four, the winner was Jeremy Gable, whose ending you can read here. Once we've published all the endings, we'll bring back the winners from each week's voting for a final round.

But of course, in my heart, you are all winners, and you've all given me a wonderful gift. Roger would have been so excited to read your entries. So one thing we will do is give everyone who entered the contest a hardbound copy of Roger's memoir, "Life Itself." I hope you enjoy it.

In fact he was working on other contests because he loved the ones like the New Yorker cartoons, and guess the celebrity, and so forth.

This first contest is longer and involves more skill, but Roger was always so proud of you. He (and everyone else) said this website had the best audience on the Internet, smart, passionate and civil.

Now that we have found our polling method we may ask other questions from time to time to see how we can serve you better. And we are going to add a feature to encourage more comments and dialogue.

So thank you. We are grateful for your patronage.

Sincerely Yours,

Chaz

Chaz Ebert

Chaz is the CEO of several Ebert enterprises, including the President of The Ebert Company Ltd, and of Ebert Digital LLC, Publisher of RogerEbert.com, President of Ebert Productions and Chairman of the Board of The Roger and Chaz Ebert Foundation, and Co-Founder and Producer of Ebertfest, the film festival now in its 24th year.

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