100TWC - Day 43: Nature's Fury

This dream stretched back to the dawn of the nuclear age, when man first conceived of how the universe might be put together, concocted experiments to prove those conceptions and created engines to exploit those concoctions.

They were right, those early scientists. Everything that had happened since only served to prove them more right. To refine their models, certainly. To uncover new wonders. But never to countermand that early genius. That incredible leap of imagination that had envisaged the ultimately minuscule in all its glory and complexity.

What had once been a dream was now an incredible reality. Quite literally incredible it would have seemed to anyone from that past who could be given a glimpse of the impossible future. The technological splendours upon which the world had come to rely. And yet, splendid as they all were, the technological runway was about to run out. The dream turn to nightmare. Without this one final step, this culmination of the dream of centuries, mankind was surely doomed. For their appetite for power remained undimmed. Gorging like a starving gluttonous gourmand, they sucked power from the grid as fast as current technology could generate it. Faster, in some cases, whereupon the fragile contrivance that supplied their power would grumble and groan, spark and fizzle and, yes, die. And natural night would fall at last upon hitherto unnaturally effulgent cities.

Fossil fuels all but exhausted, nuclear reactors strictly curtailed by pan-governmental edicts, and the promise of "renewable" energy a spent force that had consumed fully one half of all the world's rare elements and yet produced barely ten percent of its needs, this dream, this one final step, was all that remained of the hope of humanity.

Fusion.

Many still scoffed at the idea that puny man could hope to harness the sun's fury. Those with long memories cited the many examples of cold fusion scams that blighted the pages of even the most well-respected scientific journals. Remnants of once-mighty generating companies and their lobbyists even now still tried to pour scorn and opprobrium on those who led the field. Every bit as much the geniuses as those who first studied the wonders of atoms and discovered how they were constructed. Three people led the field, and of those only one, the one who stood now on the brink of the most radical paradigm shift in the history of history, had had any experimental success.

Small scale, it was true. Yet every nuance and wrinkle of Shami Patel's models held up to the closest scrutiny and the most rigorous and lengthy testing. Three times Patel had built larger test rigs; three times all lights had come up green. His most recent experiments generated enough power to run his entire laboratory. More than enough evidence to commit to the final step. This final step. He and his team had scaled the model up to full production capacity and he stood now with his hand resting beside the main breaker. An insignificant toggle switch that, in an homage to every disaster and science fiction movie ever made, had been mounted on a red bezel and hidden behind a plexiglass cover.

Once again, as before, all Shami's lights were green. Video cameras, digital cameras, mobile phones and webcams were all focussed on him. The army of scientists, investors and journalists held their collective breath while they waited for Shami to throw that switch. He gazed unseeing at the console, his concentration bent inwards, reviewing the road that had led him to this moment. Exploring for the hundredth time all the avenues and dead-ends, the untaken turns, the alternative directions. Convincing himself that this was the right course. The only course. The path to the future when every other path had none.

He gave a small shrug and a beatific smile crept onto his face as he reached for the switch.