NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

Scale up, scale down.

As the spring heat rose over Johannesburg, which is kept from being painfully hot only by its Denver-like altitude I reflected on my good fortune with my wife during our commute into the city.

It’s not far from our home northeast of JoBurg to the skyscrapers of the CBD, now being joined by a huge square tower New Yorkers would find eerily familiar, with a second hole being dug behind it.

Our offices are in the Carlton Centre, a 50-story box built nearly 30 years ago, which for decades stood as the city’s apex, and during much of the last decade as its shame.

The shame arose because, with the end of Apartheid, white flight had left the center of Johannesburg deserted, and the tower nearly worthless. That is, until just about a year ago, when Mark Cuban and Richard Branson hatched their daring plan to encourage the flight of liberal America after the defeat of John Kerry and consolidation of Bush family power.

Since then, the collapse of the dollar, and the arrival of major trading houses (under very favorable tax conditions) had created a perfect storm of economic demand here. Not only was the entire Johannesburg CBD now rented, at very favorable rents, but land prices throughout the area were rising rapidly, even in the poorest neighborhoods, and two new towers were going up alongside the Carlton, an unmistakeable homage to the Twin Towers destroyed on September 11 in New York.

Now the first tower shone in the light of the rising Sun behind us, as Jenni and I made our way through commuter traffic, something I never expected to see when we lived in Atlanta and I worked as a writer from my home. But given our great jobs, and the money we’d earned from them, it was a fair trade.

Our lives were scaled up, and what I didn’t realize, as I arrived at the Carlton garage, and we joined the crush of the elevators heading skyward, was that the best was yet to come. That’s because in an era of $60/barrel oil, South African and American creativity was turning into a huge asset.

During apartheid, when the rest of the world was refusing to do business with South Africa (and rightly so we felt), the Nationalists perfected a coal-to-oil process first developed for Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Sasol, now our private oil company, is booming now, thanks to that same process. It costs about $1/gallon of refined product, which made it ridiculous back when oil was at $30/barrel, but at 65 Euros it’s a breakthrough. We weren’t just strip-mining the countryside, but building, through Virgin Maverick, a huge engineering enterprise that could build Sasol plants around the world.

American emigres are also tapping the local stock market to fund windpower, solar power, and even wave power (actually ocean current power). The idea was to bring this power onshore, and produce hydrogen from sea water.

It’s not yet perfected, let alone efficient. The salt and minerals and (frankly) grime in seawater today means the inflow systems have to be cleaned regularly. Creating and storing hydrogen is a continual energy drain. Transport can be simplified by running it through standard natural gas pipelines. Export will be expensive, because it has to be compressed to a nearly liquid state (which would frankly be impossible, given that hydrogen doesn’t liquify until near absolute zero) for transhipment via LNG tankers.

So I put on my business journalist hat, went downstairs, and sat in on some meetings under NDA agreements. Why not scale down instead of up, I suggested? Remember that Thomas Edison once backed a plan to give every home its own generator, before the days of DC power. Make every building a solar collector, then pool the power that doesn’t go into lights or air conditioning for hydrogen production.

What’s the incentive, someone asked?

Most of the country is semi-arid, I noted. Homes that create their own electricity, and their own hydrogen with the excess, can then use that hydrogen in fuel cells to create water. In fact, one of the biggest problems with the use of hydrogen in transport is venting and disposing of the water which is the “waste product” of the whole enterprise. Any climate with ample sunlight and little rainfall can bloom. Pool and meter excess hydrogen within a neighborhood or village, make it all self-sufficient.

Scaling down can also work for wind power, I pointed out. If each home has a windmill, along with a solar collector, then you have supplies coming in even when it’s cloudy, even when it’s night. Even if solar collectors can’t supply a surplus, wind power probably can. It’s probably more efficient to store the excess energy as hydrogen rather than selling it on the grid.

So think in terms of scaling down, I concluded. I was supposed to be doing the interviewing, but instead I was casually becoming the expert.

When I got back to my office, however, the news was bad.

There was a voice mail from Mma Ramosawa, and I detected a panic in her voice I hadn’t heard before. It seemed someone was doing knock-offs of our Always-On systems, and selling them for less than it cost her to produce them.

Someone in China.

I called back and I had two words for her. Scale up, I said gently. Let’s escalate this. Can you find some of these Chinese made units and bring them in?

She was at the Carlton Centre within an hour. She was surprised to see lights on in my office in mid-afternoon. I pointed over to the skyscraper next door, now clad beyond the 40th floor, well above our heads. Beyond it, the pit for the second “African Twin Tower” was already going in.

The units Mma had were a match for our own, all right. And why shouldn’t they be? We had used standard parts. The innovation was in the software. And software can be copied.

I got out my toolkit and got one of the units apart. Together Mma Ramosawa and I looked for part identifiers. The makers’ OEMs could be pressure points, I suggested. Don’t worry, we’ve got full international patent and copyright protection on all our designs.

“This is why it’s good to have a big partner with equity,” I said. “Virgin Maverick owns 25% of our company. Our results go to their bottom line. So Virgin Maverick lawyers will want to protect your interests.”

“Lawyers take time,” Mma said sourly.

“Governments don’t have to,” I replied. “I’m sure Virgin Maverick can get the government to act on this. And quickly.”

She left unhappily, and I got busy. I called the lawyers. I called Mbeki’s brother, who had been so helpful to us some months before. They called the WTO. They called the Chinese government.

By day’s end they had a settlement offer, one I suspected had been in the cards all along, since it came together so quickly. The Chinese company was willing to take up to a quarter of Always On Technologies, halt Chinese production, and build new production facilities in South Africa, with cross-licensing on their manufacturing technology to Virgin Maverick, and then to us. The deal would reduce the stake held by both myself and Mma Ramosawa, but she would get 100 million Rand in cash, and with Virgin Maverick still control a majority of the equity.

I took a risk, gave my verbal assent, then ordered some flowers sent to Mma Ramosawa’s small house in Soweto. A lot of flowers. I called Jenni’s office, upstairs from my own, and joked that we should spend the evening consoling a Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes winner.

It wasn’t until we were halfway to Mma’s home that I realized we were now multi-millionaires, too.