Julia DeMarco was a genius, a scientific protégée, and an extreme techno-nerd. She could read and write well before her third birthday, had graduated from MIT before her fourteenth birthday, and received her third doctorate before she could legally drive at the age of sixteen. The breakthroughs in long distance holography which she developed while getting those doctorates were immediately adopted by the military. But for security reasons, it was not until she reached her eighteenth birthday that she was allowed to actually begin working for the federal government in a very top-secret government project based on her discoveries.
On those very rare occasions that she would go home to visit her family someone would always ask where she was working and what she was working on. She would give them her widest smile and then respond with a complex scientific explanation that caused them to stare wide-mouthed at her and say, “Oh...” The subject was never brought up again by that person.
She would often giggle after they walked away shaking their head because her explanation had been pure gobbledegook. It was a meaningless string of the most pompous-sounding technical words she could muster. What she was actually doing was relatively easy to explain, though very difficult to understand. She couldn’t tell anyone anything about it, though, because what she was doing was using her phenomenal skills in holographic manipulation to develop a way to safely spy on whomever and whatever the government wanted to spy on anywhere in the world and possibly beyond. And that project was way beyond top-secret... as in “If I tell you I’ll have to kill you!” kind of secret.
The theory was simple on face value. A web of satellites, based on Julia’s theories, was sent into orbit all around the globe. The cover story was that they were a new generation GPS that would be switched on once all satellites were in place and the technical bugs worked out. In reality, they were long distance holographic projectors and receivers using lasers and microwaves and some other functions that couldn’t even be spoken of aloud, only written down on slips of paper that were immediately destroyed.
The system, itself, was simple... in a very complicated sort of way. If three satellites had a clear enough path to lock onto exactly the same spot, they could create a holographic projection at that point. With Julia’s new technology, clouds– or even rain– didn’t make a difference. For that matter, neither did buildings unless they were protected by more than ten feet of special concrete or were buried several stories underground... like Julia’s lab.
More importantly– at least for the government spooks who employed Julia– if an additional three satellites could lock onto the exact same coordinates as the first three, those satellites could use variations in the original holographic image caused by sound and visual waves striking it to create a virtual image of the reality around that spot. The advantage of this system was that a human wearing VR goggles could then see– and interpret– whatever the holographic image was seeing and hearing. The disadvantage was that a human figure would appear wherever it was that the satellites were snooping.
Why would the government develop such a system? Artificial Intelligence is great, and computer image recognition is amazing, but nothing compares to the human brain for getting past various forms of camouflage and deception, especially with the image manipulation capabilities that Julia built into her holographic projectors and receivers. This was a perfect spy system... if it could be made to work without having to first project a holographic human image. What Julia and the rest of her team were working on was a way to see the virtual image without having to first create a holographic human at the desired location.
Where Julia was working was a little more difficult to understand, and just as top-secret. The facility where Julia was developing her theories was located underground just outside of Indian Creek, Nevada, at the Creech Air Force Base. In the upper levels real life gamers playing real life war games sat at their consoles controlling unknown numbers of drones flying all over the globe. Six stories down, Julia tested and modified the control programs for her special projectors and receivers.
She was, however, starting to get bored with the whole project. Boredom was a fact of life for Julia. When you can rapidly solve almost any problem, there isn’t much challenge in life. In addition to being bored, she was also somewhat lonely and was beginning to wonder what it would be like to actually interact with people her own age. When you spend weeks and weeks working– and living– underground, it is a little difficult to make friends. And the security protocols were very strict about the use of social media.
But it wasn’t friendship Julia was seeking, at least not in the traditional sense. More than anything else, what Julia wanted was for someone to notice her as the beautiful woman she had now become. She wanted someone to think she was beautiful. She wanted someone to think she was sexy.
It wasn’t that she wanted sex, per se. She didn’t want a man– or a woman– to make love to her or even kiss her... or, for that matter, even talk to her. She just wanted someone to SEE her. She was, as are many women– or men– of extreme intelligence, almost asexual... and a total introvert. She didn’t want to be in a relationship with anyone. But she did want someone to appreciate her body as well as her mind. No one at the facility, however, seemed to even notice her.
Once, she decided to work naked just to see what anyone said. Her entire lab was a virtual reality room that displayed the input from the spy satellites on the circular walls around her. The few people who came in while she was standing in the middle of the room naked did not react at all. Doctor Collins, her supervisor, who stopped by late in the afternoon for his daily briefing, merely asked, “Does not wearing clothing make it easier to interpret the data?” As I said, many men and women of extreme intelligence are often almost asexual.
After Doctor Collins left, Julia let our a loud groan of disappointment. “Doesn’t anyone notice that I am a woman with a beautiful body?” she asked herself loudly.
That thought stayed with her for the rest of the day and into her sleep that night. Many of her great breakthroughs came to her overnight as she slept, and this one was no different. She dreamed that she was back in her lab walking naked through the virtual reality created there, but this time she had the holographic projectors turned on so that everyone at the locked-on coordinates could see her. Since they were soldiers, not asexual scientists, they reacted with applause, wolf whistles, and cat calls. In her dream, Julia at first felt fear. She was, after all, standing naked in front of a group of horny soldiers. But then one of the men jumped for her and fell to the ground on the other side of her apparently solid image. There was a lot of shouting in a foreign language and Julia woke up. She sat bolt upright in her bed shaking with excitement. She knew exactly what she was going to do.
There was no problem with her using the technology. She had access to the entire satellite network. All she had to do was log in to run tests as she usually did. The lab protocols said that tests had to be run within the United States, but there were no other safety overrides in the system. She fell back asleep smiling. Tomorrow, someone would notice her... and her beautiful body.
***
The next day, Julia began work on her secret project within her secret project. Her first choice was Coney Island in New York. She had done several experiments on the boardwalk there and the total range of coordinates for the entire area was already in her computers. But then she remembered that all of the data would have to go through several nodes before being relayed to the satellites. And since all information sent through the nodes was monitored, her actions might be tagged as suspicious by the AI algorithms that safeguarded the network. That left her only one choice. She would have to link directly to the satellites without going through any of the data repeater nodes. That limited her to those satellites reachable in the sky directly above her lab. And from them she would only be able to lock onto coordinates within a few hundred miles of her location. The only sizable city in that area was Las Vegas.
Julia spent the rest of the day reconfiguring the search capabilities of the satellites directly overhead. Then, as darkness fell, she zoomed in on the crowds along the Las Vegas Strip. She was mildly enjoying playing tourist from thirty-six thousand kilometers above the surface of the earth when she noticed people entering the giant Viva Vision video tunnel of the Fremont Street Experience.
“I’ve always wanted to see what that looked like at night,” she said to herself as she zoomed three satellites down onto the entrance. The glare of the thirteen million LEDS which made up the four-block long video ceiling spilled out onto the ground at the entrance, but except for the flashing colors obvious on the sidewalk, that was all she could see in standard surveillance mode.