It's a common enough occurrence: animals migrate to areas of burgeoning vegetation and eventually cause a food shortage for the indigenous population, before moving on to greener pastures. As it it with animals, so it frequently is with people. However, with people, it's usually simple economics that drives them to up-sticks and move to the city.
Caliphates is suffering more than most worlds from this phenomenon. Less than thirty percent of its landmass is stable enough to erect anything more permanent than a pile of stones, so people have always congregated in the coastal regions rather than the mountainous ones, but now pure economics are making them move, too.
With only limited and fully exploited hydro-electric power available to them, the Caliphates government embarked several decades ago on a long term policy of developing renewable energy production methods, however, their plans have now been thrown into disarray by the spontaneous, voluntary, translocation of more than forty percent of their global population into the planet's centre of advanced, and highly marketable, software technology, Silicon Canyon.
For more than a century, Caliphates has been renowned for its highly original software development techniques, based on the Caliphates digital morphology theorem, which can be applied across a wide range of applications, from calculating the orbits of planet-killer asteroids to the length of time necessary to soft boil an egg. With new markets opening up almost daily, the companies located in Silicon Canyon have been touting for unskilled workers to operate their shrink-wrap packing machines in an attempt to prevent the illegal cloning of their products.
The largest company in the 'Canyon' is CaliSoft, run by its mercurial CEO, Villi D'Hors. Calisoft owns the copyright to the operating system the other companies in the 'Canyon' write applications for. This incestuous interdependency with other 'Canyon' businesses, which competitors say gives them an unfair advantage, has led to profits for Calisoft which are greater than the GDP of ten of the largest planets in the Free Trade Organization of Ganymandian Worlds added together.
Now, an energy supply shortage threatens to silence the shrink-wrap machines, one day in three. The Caliphates government is split between importing nuclear power generation technology from the nearby planet of Cotch to ease the situation, or waiting until the investigation into Calisoft's business practices, currently being conducted by the F.T.O.G.W.'s Monopoly Commission, reports its findings next year.
"The smart money is still on D'Hors to pull it off," a Calisoft User Group spokesperson told our reporter, "so the government had better get moving on this power shortage issue." He denied that the government of Cotch had offered D'Hors a more business friendly environment for Calisoft if the F.T.O.G.W. investigation found against them.
