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.
“Time to make it happen,” she said eagerly as she activated the additional three satellites needed for her special holographic spy to function. She felt a special techno-nerd tingle as the ground level view of the tunnel suddenly filled the room. She knew that her holographic image– naked except for a black, super-hero style mask– would now be visible on Fremont Street, but that didn’t matter. In fact, that was exactly what she was trying to make happen. That thought brought another, less nerdy tingle to her entire body.
She found that she was surprisingly comfortable walking naked among the crowd. Her surprise wasn’t that she was comfortable walking naked. Her surprise was that she was comfortable walking in the crowd. There were so many people, but she knew that her real self was safe in her lab, so she did not feel the normal anxiety and fear large crowds brought out in her.
She started walking down the middle of the mall-like area under the video arch screen. As she walked along, she could hear gasps and shrieks and one or two lewd comments. She smiled to herself as she thought of the men– and women– who were finally noticing her beautiful body.
Then she saw her reflection in the doors of the Las Vegas Club as she walked past. She stopped and looked at herself in full profile. She wasn’t quite as busty as the girls in the photographs behind the glass, but she could tell that she had a really nice figure. She had never really seen herself naked before. Yes, she had seen herself naked in her bathroom mirror, but that is not the same as that instant realization way of seeing yourself you get when you suddenly catch sight of your reflection in a glass as you walk past.
“I really should be wearing heels,” she said to herself as she ran her hands over the underside of her breasts and then down the curve of her ass, “... really tall, fuck me, red stiletto heels.”
She was just starting to examine her reflection a little more closely when she heard several loud shouts– and a police whistle– behind her. Joining her reflection in the glass was the reflection of several running Las Vegas policemen. She terminated the program just before the officers’ hands reached her waist.
As soon as she was back in her lab, she switched her tactical scanner to the LVPD frequencies. The cops used encrypted communications, but that was no barrier to someone with Julia’s skills. She giggled as she heard the officer almost yell, “I didn’t say she got away, damnit! I said she disappeared!” There was a slight hiss and then a female voice said, “That’s right, she poofed away like a God-damned genie in a puff of smoke.”
Julia then pulled up her internet scan bot and had it search for anything that mentioned a naked female suddenly appearing or disappearing on Fremont Street. She was rewarded with several images of herself walking through the first intersection and one video which seemed to start shortly after she had first appeared. She hadn’t realized before that the hair in her crotch, especially when seen from slightly below, was much lighter than the hair on her head. The video, shot from one of the benches, made that even clearer.
Julia felt a deep, warm glow of satisfaction that became warmer and warmer as she watched herself strut down the sidewalk. Feelings she had only felt once or twice before seemed to overwhelm her as she slowly sank to the floor and then onto her back. Her hands moved down almost automatically between her legs as her fingers sought out her uncharacteristically flowing slit. Her orgasm was long, loud, and extremely satisfying.
After laying on the floor in a dreamy afterglow for several minutes, she suddenly startled, sat up, and said aloud, “Doctor Collins won’t like this.”
She wasn’t worried that he would disapprove of her nakedness or even of her masturbating in her lab. He was used to working with really weird techno-nerds. What she was worried about was that he would think she had violated security and revealed the existence of the holographic surveillance system to tourists and police officers in Las Vegas, which, in fact, she had.
This wasn’t the first time such events had to be hushed up. Julia quickly entered the proper parameters into her computer and set loose the cleanup bots which would scour the internet and delete all videos and images from the net and from any devices connected to the net. She smiled as she thought of the men... and women... trying to convince their friends that they had seen a naked woman calmly walking down the middle of the Fremont Street Mall.
The next night, Julia was again in her lab, but this time she decided to run through the dancing waters at the Bellagio fountain. Normally a human attempting that would sink into the over twelve feet of water near the fountain nozzles, but as a holographic image, she would be able to skip across the surface of the waters. As a precaution, she released her cleanup bots in advance. She was somewhat startled that she could not only feel the water from the fountains splashing her naked skin, she could also feel how cold it was, especially when it struck her directly between the legs.
Obviously, no policemen attempted to pursue her through the fountain, but several gathered on the sidewalk on the other side of the fountain. She disappeared just before reaching where they were waiting for her.
Afterwards, she sat on the floor listening to the officers on the scene trying to explain to their captain that seven different body cams had all apparently malfunctioned at the same time so there was no video of the “disappearing naked girl” who had somehow run across the surface of Bellagio’s fountain.
It wasn’t until she watched the videos the bots had captured that she realized that she had stopped in the middle of the fountain to do a series of high kicks in time with the music and the dancing waters. The slightly lighter hair in her crotch was darkened by the water, but when she high kicked, it hid nothing. She was flashing everything she had to the crowd.
She wasn’t sure if the heat she was feeling in her skin was blushing or sexual excitement as she watched her dance from three different angles. She was able to watch all the videos because one modification she had made to the cleanup bots was that they stored all images and videos on her personal area of the lab’s computers before deleting them from the net. She rewatched the videos several times that night, bringing herself to a very satisfying orgasm each time.
Very early the next morning, as she sat cross-legged on the floor, giggling, she said to herself, “I wish I could be a mouse in the corner next time, watching them try to figure out what happened when I disappeared.” A strange look came over her face and she jumped straight up into the air screaming, “EUREKA!” She giggled again as she sat back down and said laughingly, “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
She spent most of the next day modifying the algorithms that controlled the holographic projection. After a few hours sleep, she was once again ready to go. This time she chose the balcony around the flame on the torch of the Statue of Liberty at New York, New York. She stood gazing down at the crowds for almost a half-hour before somebody finally noticed that there was a naked lady up there. She could see people pointing up at her and the lights began reflecting off the various phones and cameras that were pointed her way. Shortly thereafter, she could hear the noise of heavy footfalls coming up the stairs. When the officers burst out through the access door onto the catwalk, however, there was no one there. No one, that is, except a small white mouse with a strange black pattern around its eyes. None of the officers seemed to notice the mouse sitting in one of the folds of the torch’s flame even though it was giggling softly in a very high-pitched voice.
The Naked Joker as the police came to call her, appeared at various spots throughout Las Vegas over the next month, but somehow the police were never quite able to catch her. Perhaps if they had paid more attention to the mouse or the squirrel or the dog at the scene or even the fly on the wall after she walked right through the middle of the casino floor at the Mirage, they might have gotten their woman. If they had connected the dots and realized that someone extremely powerful had to be involved in order to be deleting all records from the net and from their official computers, they might have started looking a little closer at nearby government installations. But they didn’t, and Julia was able to continue her exhibitionist fun while at the same time finalizing her proof of concept tests before getting authorization from Doctor Collins for real world testing.
She named the system an NJ Drone.. NJ for Naked Joker, drone so that the true nature of the spying was slightly obscured should someone talk about what they shouldn’t and be overheard. It still required that a holographic projection of a human form precede the final surveillance mode, but only for a second or less. And who is going to believe a bunch of soldiers who say that a beautiful, naked, young woman suddenly appeared in their high security area for just a moment before seeming to disappear... or turn into a cat... or mouse... or fly... or spider... and scurrying away giggling.
