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No matter how he rehearsed it in front of the mirror, the speech
just did not seem right, he knew that on the presentation night that his
mouth would go dry and his trousers wet.
His anxiety was due though; he was the front to a most ambitious
project, one quite unprecedented, and a marvel of the age. A plan to
change the bleak wasteland of deserts and scabland of North West Africa
back into fertile plains. The implications of this project were immense,
on the plus side; there would be huge creation of arable land,
eventually, and the days of famine in Africa would be over, indeed they
would have a thriving export market, also this would the first step into
the New Africa campaign, a plan to modernise Africa, and the
implications of this would also be monumental, it would be like the
resurrection of the continent.
On the bad side, they were destroying millions of square
kilometres of desert, something that the ecologists disliked, he
couldn't see their point, think desert he thought, definition, devoid of
life, so how the hell could they be pissed off. He looked at himself in
the mirror and winced his wife had made a good job of covering the
bruise, honestly, I am going to give a speech that would change the
world, and I'm doing it in my wife's foundation. The bruise had been a
sore point in more than the obvious way, it had delivered by an irate
christian, who had a justified reason, and he saw the project as
'meddling with God's creation'. This project was very complex in the
issues it raised.
The actual initiation of the project could be done without all
this ceremony, half the world’s important ambassadors were here for
this event, and lots of other no doubt more important people than him
were here, it was not as if the button he presses does anything, merely
it would indicate to a bloke downstairs to start the project from his
laptop, and the appropriate start commands would be relayed by satellite
to the turbines. He was as ever, just the figurehead for the project.
In any case it was time to go to the stage, he would actually say
very little during this evening, most of it was video presentation,
pretty pictures entertaining all these science illiterate guests, it was
his job only to make a short speech, and press the button, no doubt
there would be a long and arduous press meeting after.
---Later that evening---
His speech had not been so bad, he particularly liked the god
reference, 'and by this remarkable project of transformation, we better
understand the nature of god', however he had made a mental note to
avoid all churches in the near future. Any way he had received a
rapturous applause, and now it was button pressing time, and then a
tedious evening in front of the press, but after that he could relax, he
needed a strong drink, especially after the video presentation ran mute,
still they enjoyed the purely visual display not realising that it had a
sound track to it as well.
It was time, he pressed the button. Across the western coast of
Africa thousands of little solenoids retracted into their housings, and
allowed seawater into the turbines. The
turbines were huge vertical wind turbines, of the Darreus variety, two
beautiful curved blades meeting at the top and bottom, and rotating by
the sea breezes on their vertical axis. Soon seawater was pulled up the
hollow rotating blades, and flung through nozzles on their trailing
edges by centrifugal force. The
live telescope feeds to the giant display screen behind him showed the
turbines in action, telescopes on the coast showed a rising cloud of
mist envelop the turbines. A satellite in space showed the clouds
trailing from the turbines like so many comet tails, and head inland,
rising and ascending over the coastal cities. Some clever person
realised they could play the soundtrack to the original display and the
commentary perfectly complemented the images on the screen behind him. Soon
he thought, that evaporated mist would rise over the desert and form
clouds, and from these clouds, rain. He realised that pressing the
button was merely one in a chain of events that would start the process
of transformation; the changes over the next few decades to create the
fertile land were out of his hands. His work on stage was done, he
walked off to tremendous applause, and the display in the background
showing the beautiful image montage of the dunes of the Sahara turning
to rolling green hills, and lush growth, the computer simulation would
indeed be overwhelmingly accurate. Representative
of the SaharaTransformation project, a project that would do more than
what it promised, it not only resurrected Africa, but the amazing growth
of plants colonising the once desert consumed huge amounts of carbon
dioxide, offsetting the progression of global warming. Earth,
North West Africa, Mauritania, 2041, |
