She named her invention, “Sahara Solaris,” a name her brother suggested. Solaris was the name of a science fiction book they’d found on the ground at the kasbah, most likely dropped by a tourist. They’d brought it home and taken turns trying to read it to practice their French. Eventually, she grew so bored and frustrated with it that she threw it out of the cave to be later chewed on by the goats. She and her brother had both laughed hard because it had been a windy day and the book had sailed farther than expected before landing right in the middle of a group of goats. “As it should,” Zagora joked. She and her family lived right at the mouth of the Sahara desert and the sun was the whole purpose of the device, so the name was perfect.
After perfecting the Sahara Solaris over the next year and with the help of her school teacher, Zagora managed to get it before the eyes of Oracle’s CEO. That in itself is a long-winding story, involving several key elements:
An overly ambitious and hateful uncle
Government officials hacking into her computer attempting to steal her Sahara Solaris notes
Government officials who tried to pay off her parents
Masked men who tried to kidnap Zagora
A village of nomads plus the director, actors, and staff of a sci-fi movie that was being filmed nearby all guarding Zagora and her family for three days and three nights before the fateful meeting
Those in power came after every element of her life. The long and the short of it was that it all required some powerful qualities to get to this pivotal meeting. Focus, determination, audacity, and courage were a few of them. Zagora recognized the battle when it came to her and she knew she had to win it. And she was no fool, which was why she arrived at that pivotal meeting with her parents, her school teacher, and the teacher’s best friend who was a lawyer well practiced in community rights. The night before, Zagora had shown all four of them her Sahara Solaris. And thus, when she entered that meeting in the morning with the Oracle Complex’s CEO and her advisors, she knew exactly what to do.
She was seventeen years old. And as she stood before the board, finally, she felt herself steady. Her heartbeat slowed. She was calm. She knew why she was there and what she had to do. She was there to save the world. Zagora had always had big dreams, despite her small means. She imagined herself channeling the activist she and her brother had watched on their phones some years ago, the girl Greta Thunberg who had the nerve to speak with the entitlement of the adult white men Zagora sometimes saw in the market.
Zagora spoke. First, she provided evidence that she had already patented her invention.
“Okay, it belongs to you,” one of the Oracle engineers growled. Impatient and irritated. “Get on with it.”
And she did. Zagora presented the Sahara Solaris with panache and vigor. “Follow me,” she then said. The group of officials followed the girl outside, and there she gave a most astonishing demonstration of what she had invented. There was silence. Then there was murmuring. Then there was applause. The CEO of the Oracle Complex was speechless. She’d heard plenty from her advisors and assistant, and general rumor and hearsay, but nothing was like seeing it in action. How could this “beggar girl” who came from the desert caves invent something so ingenious? Such a simple, precise, useful device. The CEO knew she had to have this invention before this girl took and sold it elsewhere.
But Zagora wasn’t done yet. “The metaphor of the mirrors has not been lost on me,” she said. She’d practiced this speech many times at home. Always in Arabic, not Berber. She needed to be understood by everyone in the room. “You see the Oracle solar farm and think, ‘This is our future.’ It is a reflection of what we deserve, what we can be. It looks like a Star Wars kind of thing where all is clean and beautiful. It is. But there is also an ugly reality we, the people who live here, know well.”
Zagora didn’t say it in so many words, but she hinted at the fact that the land used for the solar plant belonged to people and that the government had applied capitalist definitions to that land in order to justify seizing it without the full permission of, and without compensating, those people. She said that those who approved the Oracle project decided that land was only valuable if it was “useful” and not valuable if it was not useful. If the land was desert, even if it was ancestral land that belonged to people, it was useless. This “useless” land was therefore subject to being put to “use,” i.e., generating clean renewable energy for Morocco and beyond.
Zagora paused dramatically and then said, “I have a list of demands.” Now, these demands were the idea of Zagora’s team, especially the lawyer （who helped her patent the Sahara Solaris）。