The following is a work of fiction. Here is the Table of Contents, which is updated as new chapters are written.
It is the third in a series of sci-fi novels of the type known as
alternate history. What’s different is that this series takes place in
our time, with characters familiar in your real life.
The first book in the series, The Chinese Century, was written late 2004. Its table of contents is here. The second, The American Diaspora, was written in 2005. The table of contents for that book is here.
The scene had become so familiar to me, so comfortable. Food vendors and souvenir stalls filled the cement plaza under another city’s former skyline.
The Twin Towers of Africa, directly across from the old Carlton Centre, stood like obelisks from another planet above the bustling street scene of Johannesburg, South Africa.
I had come to enjoy this scene, popping out in a linen shirt and khaki pants each lunchtime to try what was new. I felt the cool breeze of a Johannesburg winter, and smiled.
I now worked, I believed, as a blogger, a writer, tracking the activities of Virgin Maverick, the global computerized marketplace created two years ago by Mark Cuban and Richard Branson across the street, now housed above me. All three buildings were, legally, an autonomous homeland under the protection of South Africa’s government, a sort of white Lesotho. I also advised Always On Technologies, a wireless network applications company I had inadvertantly founded through my writing, a few miles to the south.
I had built a new, comfortable, but ultimately somewhat anonymous and quiet life, one that gave me the time to indulge my passion for new tastes, the love of my wife, even a bicycle ride on the weekends.
Why should it change? It was, I thought, the ultimate happy ending. I sighed to myself before a vendor, smiling placidly down at the wide Xhosa woman as she filled a styrofoam container. I paid her, told her to keep the change, and tipped the cap I always wore outside against the South African Sun.
I took the goat stew, potjiekos with mielie pap, which I would be certain to call "Smiley Stew" when my wife saw it, just to gross her out a little, up the elevator of the North Africa Tower, which we had nicknamed the Branson Tower. A Virgin-Maverick board meeting was about to begin. I had been invited by Mr. Branson himself, and would shortly sit in a row of chairs behind the oval boardroom table, the smell of cumin and seeds of paradise rising out of my styrofoam, subtly reminding everyone of where we were.
With the board constantly engaged in the markets of the world, it was a small quiet rebellion against the sterile office environment. I figured I was harmless and could get away with it, the quirky American, the sidekick, the mascot.
As I saw down I saw the board was already seated, or available via video screens located along the wall opposite me. Richard Branson suddenly burst from behind a doorway, sitting down quickly.
"I have an announcement," he said.
"I have an offer for Virgin Media. It’s for 11 billion British pounds and I’m inclined to take it."
There was an audible gasp around the room. "I am also soliciting offers for my half of this company, Virgin Maverick," he added quickly. "I’m hoping for another 5 billion pounds, which may entail a renaming."
Branson saw the faces sagging around him and smiled. "I’m not going anywhere," he said, as the stew grew cold on my lap. "As the man on TV once said, ‘I have a cunning plan.’" Then that wide Branson grin came out and we all relaxed. A little.
I stopped relaxing immediately as a long finger pointed toward me. It felt like the hand of fate pointing through me. "I have incorporated, here at Virgin Maverick, a new company called Virgin Energy, and that man will be its CEO." I stood up quickly then, the stew falling partly on my pants, partly on the carpet.
"You’re surprised, Mr. B?" he added mildly, using a nickname I’d first crafted for him, on one of my informal days, turning it around against me. "It’s not like you’re going to have to do this alone. Let me explain."
And Richard Branson then proceeded to tell his board some facts about Michael Wong which even I didn’t know. He told of secret negotiations, of late night flights into Houston’s Bush Airport, about the assembly of contracts by men and women who were even now preparing to take up offices below our feet, with a research building to be built near Witswaterland University and a new construction facility out by the Airport, near where my son and I had been conducting experiments on plants just a month before.
"Dr. Wong trusts Mr. B here. So do I, and thus he will be in everyday charge. You don’t mind a little paper shuffling, do you Dana?" I shook my head sheepishly.
"There is a worldwide crisis before us," he continued. "We must fight a War Against Oil with all the energy our forefathers took to the fight against Mr. Hitler. It’s not America or Arabia or Russia we need to fight this time, gentlemen, it’s oil! The great seductress, coming so easily out of the ground, so easily cracked into so many useful components – tar, paraffin, chemicals, gasoline, jet fuel, natural gas. We have become dependent on this demon, to a greater extent than any cigarette addict, and we have to kick the habit.
"Not just for commercial reasons. Not just for policy reasons. We need to kick this habit in order to save the planet itself from the perils of carbon dioxide. Already weather patterns throughout the northern hemisphere are changing, hurricanes moving west-to-east, storm systems moving south-to-north and then sitting stationary. At times this summer the ozone hole itself will twirl and spin and sit over Durban, just a few hundred miles to our south.
"And it’s growing, gentlemen! The ozone hole is growing. It will be over our heads soon! And it won’t stop until it devours the whole planet, all life on Earth.
"So we must act. Mr. B here has brought us important research, and vital human assets we will use to tap the Sun itself in order to help us out of this crisis. We expect to have Version 1.0 product on the market by the end of this year, solar panels with 10 times the power-generating capacity of any current model, and by this time next year Dr. Wong believes we’ll be out with Version 2.0 product, another 10-fold increase in generating capacity.
"Dr. Wong says it can be done. Right here, in South Africa. We can use that energy to power cars. We can use that energy to create ethanol and power jets. We can use that energy to power our cities, in an electric grid invulnerable to attack because production and use are right next to one another.
"Gentlemen, we are about to make South Africa the new Saudi Arabia. And Mr. B here will lead us."
He smiled as I gulped. I hadn’t moved a muscle through the entire speech. So Branson concluded. "That is, after he changes his pants."
