A travel journalist named Izzy once met the little girl named Zagora outside one of the old crumbling kasbahs in Skoura Ahl El Oust, Morocco. Izzy had been interested in the camel, not the girl. She approached the camel to get a better look and Zagora ran up to her. Apparently, going to see that camel was what a lot of tourists did, so little Zagora was ready. Before Izzy knew it, Zagora had shoved a camel woven from palm fronds into Izzy’s hands and then stepped back, waiting. Izzy had to either move forward and give it back to her or pay for it. Zagora’s move was brilliant in its manipulative simplicity.
Izzy had no dirham, so she made a snap judgment and gave the girl twenty Euros. She earned it. Zagora snatched the money from her lightning fast, but she had her reasons. Seconds after Zagora snatched the money, the hand of her little brother was there; he was seconds too late. Zagora ran off with the money before her brother could snatch it from her. And Izzy never saw her again. But that doesn’t matter. Izzy remembered that girl and later, years later, Izzy put the story all together. This is what happened . . .
On that day outside that kasbah, Zagora was ten years old with black bushy hair and dusty gym shoes. She was short for her age. Her parents were nomads, and Zagora and her family lived in caves nearby. Her father was a Berber sheep herder, her mother an immigrant from Timbuktu, Mali, another desert region.
Zagora had grown up hearing her mother tell the story of the 52-day journey she made across the desert on foot from Timbuktu before Zagora was born and listening to her father sing old songs to the sheep as she rode along on her donkey. Oftentimes, she’d quietly sit, gaze at, and think about the Oracle Solar Complex in the distance that seemed to get bigger every year. The solar farm was as vast as a town and consisted of thousands of apartment-sized mirrors that shifted throughout the day, like the heads of sunflowers, to focus sunlight on a tower in the center. All this got Zagora interested in the sun. There was also that story her mother was always telling her about the day Zagora was born:
“I’d gone to Zagora to see my doctor, and you got impatient. We pulled over near some palm trees and you came into the world right there. You were born in the sun, but you were smart enough to keep your eyes closed.”
So that’s how Zagora got her name; she was named after the town she was born just outside of. Maybe seeing the sun through her newborn eyelids sparked something powerful in her.
Zagora took the money Izzy gave her and used it to buy a brand new receiver for the device she was tinkering with. Then she had a grand amazing idea. But she wasn’t quite ready to turn that idea into a reality just yet. It took her six years, years of trial and error, learning from the Internet, studying, thinking, and going to school, for her to reach that fateful night in the cave.
It was the hottest day of the year and sixteen-year-old Zagora was standing in the sunshine when she realized how to realize the idea she’d had so long ago. Her parents and two brothers were all in the cave, sitting around the portable air conditioner. Her parents were debating about a forthcoming World Cup game between Morocco and South America, her youngest brother was taking a nap, and her middle brother was doing school work. She took her bag of tools and climbed into a small enclosure that she used as a work space. It was hot in there, but she was used to it. The only book she had was a beaten up old copy of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. She loved this book so much and had since she’d started reading it repeatedly three years before.
When she finished creating the new transmitter that fateful day, she positioned the receiver about a half mile away, far from the herd of goats, donkeys sleeping beneath a make-shift tent and, of course, her family. She didn’t know it but the only creature near the receiver was a snoozing jackrabbit. It was a good day to charge her power source battery because the sun was full of rage, blazing hot and bright. When she clicked the “transmit” button on her phone, no one in the area would know that the future had just come to greet the present. Except the jackrabbit who lazily awakened, saw the ghost-like shimmer coming toward it, and went right back to sleep, not feeling a thing as the shimmer passed through it to reach the receiver.
It really was like the sun’s ghost, this payload of energy that was gathered, condensed, and restructured from the day’s intense sunshine. Zagora watched it float across the rocky expanse and then, once it got within range of the receiver, disappear. When she ran to her receiver and took measurements of the amount of energy now in its battery, she threw her head back and laughed. Exactly five megahertz! Enough to power all her family’s appliances for the day. The same number that had been in the battery she’d connected to the transmitter. Not a single megahertz lost in the transfer. Success! Finally. Zagora had just invented directable long-range wireless energy transfer. And because the power was converted from ionizing radiation to non-ionizing radiation before it passed to the receiver, it was completely safe to be around.