Eyies Read Book Blog

“Mother, I have brought another for conversion,” Tork announced proudly.

 

There was a rumble of thunder and a few flashes of extremely bright light. The clouds parted to each side and a round, floating mass, a miniature earth, descended towards them. It was huge, twenty times their size. It was… beautiful. He could make out the continents floating in the ocean, the green of the land. It was a living, breathing image of Earth. Wind could be felt coming off it. It rotated slowly and seemed to pulsate. Then the sweetest female voice he had ever heard sang from within.

​“Your work is appreciated, Tork, Lilly.”

 

Both of them bowed respectfully.

“We need to take his memories and re-name him, Mother. Then I will train him.”

“Yes, you will be a fine trainer, Lilly. This one will need lots of help.” There was a note of disdain in her statement.

“Oliver,” the sweet voice continued, “I want to show you something.”

Before he could respond, he was looking at Africa. More specifically, he was looking at an aerial view of the Niger Delta and its four regions.

“The year was 1956. Here is where you drilled into me over 25 times and finally tapped into my oil. You and your engineering team pumped oil out of me and sold it for money.” Little red lines lit up now, zigzagged across the land right off the coast. They represented the steel pipe infrastructure of his design perfectly.

“You wiped out half of the Niger Delta’s fish population with your industrial waste. You leaked oil everywhere. Oil isn’t meant to be on the surface of me, but you brought it there andcaused disaster.” In the blue water, little bubbles and miniature fish, belly up, floated to the surface. He could see an advancing black sheen on the water too; it spread as she talked.

“You, with you cars and your diesel fuel, your transportation highways, your mega structures and national trading, manufacturing plants and chemical burns- you!” Across the land masses were headlights from little cars and tractor trailer trucks. Fog began to billow out and envelope the landscape.

“You brought more developers to the peaceful villages of the Ogoni, the Ijaw, and corrupted their whole political system! Those natives knew how to live in harmony with me. You came in with your corporate giants. All of them had to stick their greedy fingers in and get a piece of the pie. Now those natives who knew how to love and respect me are filthy with my oil. They are forced to work in it day in and day out because that’s all the economy they have. Are you taking anything in right now? Are you listening to me?” She demanded his attention but he could only nod submissively.

“None of this means anything to you, does it?” she asked. “You are still proud of yourself, aren’t you? What must I do to humble you? Is this not enough? Can you not see the gruesome and disgusting things your race does to me every day?”

“I…” Oliver trailed off in to thought, trying to recollect those exciting moments in his young life…