72
Some two-hundred-thousand miles below the orbiting space station and the transport, which now docked successfully, Josephine Carson’s body lay stretched out across a slab of concrete. From this concrete, wires rose from nodes, and these wires connected into various parts of her body, which was engaged in meditation so deep, a solid nudge would not have disrupted her.
The slab of concrete was wrapped in a solid sheet of metal, which wrapped her and the concrete completely except for a two-micron slit, which ran the length of the enclosure’s surface. As the enclosure rotated at nearly 4,000 RPS, it served as a windowed Faraday cage. Within the Faraday cage, nothing could detect her. However, the slit in the enclosure meant that something might detect her if it knew the specific location of where she was now lying in perfect stillness. Because the probability that anything would seek her out and because the probability that it would subsequently find her were together so remote, she was all but hidden.
The enclosure’s slit, however, as minute as it was, allowed a signal to be directed outward from the concrete pad. The rotation of the cage more than sufficed to disperse the signal, which was then re-focused and re-dispersed at various nodes across the galaxy, rendering her location nearly impossible to find. As such, it would be virtually impossible to ascertain that the holographic representation of her that now departed the transport ship and vanished quickly into the space station was anything but what and who it appeared to be. Not even the artificial-intelligent droid race that she suspected existed somewhere in the far reaches of the Beta T system would be able to detect her or understand what she was.
In fact, not even Ms. Carrols who now was flying some three-thousand feet above the location of Josephine’s physical body would ever suspect or photograph anything related to Josephine's whereabouts. Instead, Ms. Carrols was once again hanging upside down from a newly rented Honda Cicada in an attempt at a perfect shot of the growing nano-volcano that officials reassured the general population was of no threat to anyone.
Click. Click, click. One photograph after another. Ms. Carrols kept clicking and clicking and clicking, all the while secretly hoping for another sort of explosion.
She did not have to wait long.
