“You’re the first finisher, Max,” said Annika. “It’s only logical that you pick your own project.”
“Just make sure it involves robots,” said Klaus.
“Why?” said Hana. “Max is supposed to do good for humans, not machines.”
“We have several suggestions we’d like to make,” said Professor Huang. “After all, that’s why I was summoned here from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“I flew in from Colorado,” added one of the adult engineers. “I have some ideas about water shortages…”
Max did her best to block out all the voices and advice swirling around her in the conference room like a swarm of angry bees. She walked up to the center table and studied the glowing trouble spots on the holographic globe as it slowly rotated on its axis.
“What’s going on right here?” she asked, pointing to a throbbing red blotch in Africa.
“That’s the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” said Tisa, the girl from Kenya.
“We would love to bring electricity to some of the remote villages in that area,” said Charl.
“It would do a lot of good,” added Isabl.
“The DRC has been ‘rebuilding’ its power grid as part of the war-torn country’s reconstruction since 2003,” said another one of the professors in the room. “Only nine percent of Congo’s seventy million people have access to electricity.”
“Most of that is in the urban areas,” said Charl. “Only about one percent of the rural areas have electricity. They’re totally off the grid.”
“My father is very interested in investing in the Congo,” said Tisa. “But if the villages lack electricity, it is very hard for him to convince his board of directors to pour money into them.”
“Well,” said Max, as she slowly worked through a new idea in her head. “What if… what if we could electrify them without a power grid? What if a village could be energy self-sufficient and the national government didn’t have to build power plants or run transmission lines or worry about creating utility companies to manage it all?”
“And what if unicorns could fart rainbows?” said Klaus.