The Body Scanner
By wouldnitbnice@yahoo.com
Chapter 1 – My Scanner
Things had worked out very well indeed. Well you might be wondering just how I got so lucky and how you can too. Well it’s a long story, but let me give it a shot; there’s not instant sex in it, so you’ll have to be a little patient. I’ve changed some of the names, dates and locations to protect the innocent and not so innocent, but the core of my story is true. The girl’s perspective I’ve picked up in conversations and interviews with them after the fact, but I tried to represent it all as accurately as I could.
My name is Walter Stiltson but my friends call me Stilts since I’m 6′ 3″ and I’ve always been on the skinny side. Well, my story really starts back in 2007. I was working for a small company that was designing and building a low power full body X-ray machine. You know, the kind that’s gotten such bad press lately at all the airports. We knew the government was going to be putting out a bid and would most likely settle on two vendors to supply all the scanners across the country. We wanted to be one of them; big money was on the table.
With my dual master degrees in computer science and physics, I was the lead engineer for the project. Although to be fair there were only five engineers in the whole company and less than 30 people overall. One of my old college professors had founded the company and it turned out he was much better at innovating new solutions than he was at winning government contracts.
We had taken a radically different direction than the other companies in the design of our scanner. Our product worked just was well as theirs did but it used a lot more power and since we didn’t have the economies of scale of the larger firms, it cost about 25% more. Like I said, it was using a very different technology that allowed it to be configured in many interesting ways. At the time, the government didn’t care about that; but they would in the future. Needless to say, we didn’t win the big contract in early 2009. And that was the end of the road for the company.
Since they didn’t even have funds to pay me my final paycheck my professor told me I could keep our one working scanner prototype as a lab device for future experiments. He was getting out of the business world entirely and going back to teaching. He’d lost so much money, sweat and tears that he didn’t want to look at another scanner for the rest of his life.
So I took the one working prototype and all the design material since no one else wanted it as my severance package and started looking for a new job. I ended up getting a job with one of our competitors that did manage to land the big government contract and I worked on tweaking their design. It paid the bills at least.
At the time, I had a decent apartment right outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It was a three-bedroom place that had a full basement that I converted to a lab. I had setup the prototype-scanning machine there and would occasionally run a comparison test of it versus the scanner that I was now getting paid to work on. My original scanner was much more flexible; you could adjust the power output of the X-Rays and effectively turn it almost into a medical grade device that saw deep inside a person’s body. Or turn it all the way down and just look for concealed weapons on the surface under their clothes.
Since we hadn’t won the government contact we’d never gotten around to installing software that blurred the face or genitals of the person getting scanned. So it showed everything in 1080P HD. For fun, I tweaked it in the other direction, adding powerful facial recognition software to it and integrated everything so that it went way beyond the normal surface bone structure you’d find in even top of the line security products.
Since I was tying the facial recognition software into an X-Ray machine, I added additional data points for dental structure and deep bone structure and made it into a full body recognition scan. Hell, if a person had gone thru the machine, then undergone major plastic surgery he would still be recognized going back thru a second time. It made me smile, the ACLU would throw a fit if they ever saw my software!
At this point I was just working on the scanner as a hobby more than anything. Doing things with it that I wasn’t able to do in my day job. In my basement lab I was able to develop preset templates for doing deep tissue scanning. I figured it was only a matter of time before one of these idiot terrorists would get on a plane with a powerful bomb in their stomach or up their ass. So I made templates to look for them.
Now a couple of things to point out: one, the current scanners on the market couldn’t do this nor would they be able to in the future without exposing the people being scanned to a huge dose of radiation and that wasn’t going to be acceptable to anyone. Two, my design could do it without the increased radiation, but required some highly trained operators; not the normal TSA minimum wage guys. And three, I wasn’t able to know that these templates really worked without someone to test on.
Since I couldn’t test on myself and also run the machine, I would need to get an assistant. I didn’t want to advertise for an assistant openly since I figured my current employer would look at that as moonlighting and I’d have to find a new job. I had just moved down to Georgia, so I didn’t have any nearby friends that could help me out and I obviously wasn’t going to use a co-worker.
So I decided to get a roommate and work something out with them. Easier said than done. I first just advertised for a roommate with a very low monthly rate. I got a half dozen interested reply’s but when I told them that I’d need their help for a x-ray scanner project they all backed out.
I changed my approach, put another add for a room to rent with an even lower rent. Mentioned that I was looking for a roommate with a positive ‘aura’. See, in addition to changing HOW the device scanned a person, the output could be tweaked in many different ways. I created a little template that used a combination of body heat measurement, deep tissue scan of the person’s head coupled with an overall body scan to create a false color image of the person’s aura.
Total Bull Shit as far as I was concerned, but I tried it on my neighbor’s cat and I was able to make a very convincing aura around it, especially around the cat’s head due to the deep tissue scan. It took some trial and error with the exact power levels and frequencies to use, but I thought it would work well on a person too.
So my plan was to find a person that was into new age aura’s and convince them that my machine was measuring a person’s aura and that I needed help fine tuning it. After two day’s I’d gotten only one response from a young woman who had just moved down to Georgia from New York. Not exactly where I’d expected someone into aura’s to come from. But I setup an appointment to show her the room for rent in my apartment. When she showed up, I noticed two things right way. The first was that she was probably the most beautiful blonde I’d ever seen and she couldn’t have been more than 21. The second thing my partially stunned mind realized was that she hadn’t come alone. Her companion was also young, also 21 or 22 and a stunning brunette. I’m only 31, but they made me feel really old and frumpy.
The blonde introduced herself as Jennifer and her brunette friend was Lisa. I’m a normal looking guy, not super handsome as I mentioned, slightly above average, but I’m tall and in good shape, so I think I made a good first impression. They definitely made a good impression on me. It’d been a while since I had a girlfriend, and they were both looking unbelievably good. Jennifer was about 5′ 7″ with large tits and an amazing ass. She was wearing skinny jeans and nice top that just showed a hint of her cleavage. Her face was easily top model quality with gorgeous green eyes. Lisa was taller and more slender, about 5′ 9″ with an only slightly smaller chest and tighter ass. She was wearing shorts and had really long tan legs. Her eyes were a striking blue and I noticed a large engagement ring on her finger, but no wedding band.
I’d really gone all out on getting the apartment ready to sublet. I’d had the whole place professionally painted and cleaned, bought a new 65″ plasma TV and added brand new furniture to both of the extra bedrooms. I was just using them for storage before. When I showed them the apartment and the bedroom for rent they both loved it. But, they looked at me suspiciously and Jennifer asked, “Why’s the rent so low, you have to know you can get a lot more for it than what you’re asking?”
“Well, that’s why I asked about the positive aura.” They looked at me blankly. After a pause, Jennifer said, “I thought you were just looking for an upbeat roommate”
“I am, but I’m also building a machine that can measure and take a picture of a person’s aura but I need someone to pose for it so I can calibrate it. It won’t be a fast process and would probably take one session a week for 6 months or so to get it right. I’ll need to code a lot of software and calibrate the machine after each session.”
I wanted to make sure I had enough time to fine tune the internal bomb scanning capability, but I figured 6 months would be more than enough time. I felt a little guilty not telling her everything I was planning with the scanner, but I knew it wasn’t dangerous and I really wanted to make my scanner work, so I justified it in my mind.
Surprising me, Lisa spoke up before Jennifer could reply, “I saw a show on the discovery channel about cameras that could take pictures of aura’s. It was pretty cool. They could show mood and some people said health and other things too.” Thinking quickly I replied, “Those are just portable cameras but mine will be able to take a 3D image of a person’s entire aura – no one else can do that. It could be a big breakthrough.” “Let’s see it.” Jennifer said
I took them down into the lab basement and showed them the pictures of the cat’s aura I took. They were very impressed; especially since the aura around the cat changed subtlety with the pose and the angle of the picture. Now my basement wasn’t some dingy mad scientist style lab. It was a large well-lit, fully finished room that was nicely decorated with a mahogany wet bar, office style computer desk and my body scanner machine. I ran the scanner from the three sleek computers at the desk.
The scanner itself looked like something out of Star Trek. It was a tall circular enclosure about the size of a large shower. It had a single door in the back and at its ‘front’ facing the computers was a window that was 3 feet by 3 feet, the rest of the material was an off white super strong plastic. It had a ceiling filled with small bright lights that was right against the basement ceiling – about 9 feet tall. The floor of the scanner was the same off white advanced plastic as the walls and there was a slightly raised round red pedestal in the center. It was only raised about 6 inches and it was actually built to rotate the person standing on it so all angles could be viewed.
Attached to the front of the scanner below the window was a large rectangle of the same white plastic. This contained the actual X-Ray scanning equipment and it shot directly thru an opaque section of the enclosure right below the window. It also had a bank of 15 status lights and a small LCD readout screen in case the computer connection failed. All in all, the scanner looked very futuristic and cool, in a geeky sort of way.
Jennifer and Lisa talked it over and 5 minutes later Jennifer agreed, “I’ll take the apartment and help you with your science project. But I have a job and school so it can’t be too many hours and I’ll need you to be flexible. When can I move in?”
“That’s great, I can be very flexible with the timing; no problem. I’m fine with you moving in whenever you want. Is this weekend ok?”
“Sure, that’s perfect” she replied.
I smiled as I watched them leave, I had my roommate and future lab partner. Now I had a chance of turning my scanner design into a next generation version that was capable of detecting internal explosives or even drugs. Who knows, there might even be medical applications in the future.
I’d just read about a collaborative effort between Doctor’s and scientists that used a low power microwave machine, somewhat similar to my body scanner to kill malaria parasites inside infected people. Turned out that since the strain of bacteria that is spread by mosquito bites and actually causes malaria (which kills millions of people a year worldwide) feeds off of blood cells it ends up with a much higher iron content than the surrounding cells. The scientific team built a full body low power microwave that effectively heated up the high iron content bacteria until they burst but didn’t harm the surrounding tissue or patient. It was like a big malaria zapping microwave that you could step into sick and come out the other side malaria free. It is still early days with a lot more research needed, but it could prove to be a very elegant solution to the increasingly drug resistant malaria strains.
Maybe my device could have an equally positive affect on humanity.
Only time will tell.