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The reporter ate breakfast in his hotel room, then read the news while a half-finished room-service tray cooled on the desk beside a stack of crumpled briefing notes on neural prosthetics.
His name was Erik Donovan. National Public Broadcasting Network, Science and Technology desk. He'd been covering tech industry news for eleven years and had developed the kind of weary skepticism that comes from attending too many product launches that promised to change the world and delivered phones with slightly different screens.
The Prism Sciences event was scheduled for one p.m. It was eleven now. Time to assemble the crew and head to the venue.
He pinged the team chat to let everyone know to head down. Then he pulled on his jacket and took the elevator to the lobby.
His crew was small. Camera operator Lou Camden, a soft-spoken professional who'd been with NPBN for fifteen years. Junior reporter Ava Mitchell, an intern in her final semester of journalism school who Erik had been mentoring. That was the entire team. Tight budget assignment.
"Erik! Let's go!" Ava's enthusiasm filled the lobby like a smell.
Erik had stopped being surprised by Ava's energy weeks ago. The intern was a card-carrying Ryan Mercer fan. The moment she'd been assigned to cover the Prism Sciences launch, she'd transformed into a Christmas-morning version of herself. Her excitement hadn't dimmed once across two days of preparation and travel.
"Equipment check," Erik said. "Cameras, batteries, audio. Anything missing?"
Lou ran through the inventory in fifteen seconds. Everything was accounted for. They climbed into the rental car.
Erik drove. Lou, in the passenger seat, was quiet by nature and didn't fill silence unnecessarily. Ava made up for both of them. Most of her chatter was speculation about whether Ryan Mercer would appear at the event in person.
"I mean, he has to, right? It's their first product launch. He's the technology lead. He's the founder's son. He has to be there."
"I hope he'll be there," Erik said. "If he is, this story goes from 'product launch' to 'cultural moment' in about thirty seconds."
The car pulled into the convention center parking garage, and the three of them stepped out.
"Erik. Long time."
Erik turned. Pat Conrad. Veteran tech reporter for a competing network, a heavyset man with a perpetually amused expression and a hairline that had been losing real estate for a decade. Erik and Pat had crossed paths at every major industry event for the past eight years. They were friendly rivals.
Erik laughed. "Skipping the phone launch today?"
There was a competing event happening on the other side of town: a major smartphone company was launching its annual flagship. The kind of event Pat usually covered.
Pat squinted in mock conspiracy. "I figured the real news was here. You old fox, same instinct, I assume."
Erik chuckled.
Pat's crew filed out behind him, three people. The two networks merged into a six-person procession heading for the center's main entrance.
They followed the signage to the Prism Sciences exhibition hall.
The first thing they noticed was the security.
A line of uniformed personnel in matte black tactical attire was manning a checkpoint at the hall's entrance. X-ray machines for bags. Metal detector wands. Cross-references against an invitation list. Every attendee was being processed individually.
The line was long. Reporters and industry guests were waiting their turn with the patience of people who'd suddenly realized they were not at a typical product launch.
"This is not standard launch security," Pat muttered.
"This is airport security," Erik replied.
The two men exchanged a look. Both of them had been in this business long enough to know that security infrastructure was a tell. The level of protection at an event correlated with the level of importance attached to its contents. Helios's launch was probably running similar security right now. But Helios was a billion-dollar firm. Prism Sciences was a startup. The match in security postures suggested that someone, somewhere, considered Prism Sciences worth protecting at billion-dollar levels.
Both reporters mentally adjusted their expectations upward.
Erik and his crew worked through the security checkpoint. Bags scanned. IDs verified. Names checked against the invitation manifest. The personnel were polite but efficient. No conversation, no deviation from protocol.
Past the checkpoint, the floor plan opened into a long corridor leading to the main hall. The lighting in the corridor was significantly dimmer than the bright convention center lobby. It felt more like a movie theater hallway than a tech event entrance.
Erik shrugged it off. Inexperience, probably. Prism Sciences was running its first major launch. Some lighting choices were still being refined.
"Looks like we hit the jackpot," he said over his shoulder to his team. "This level of attention means there's something here worth watching. Ava, you might actually get to see Ryan Mercer in person today."
Ava didn't answer.
Erik glanced back. Both Lou and Ava were standing motionless, looking past him at something further down the corridor.
He turned around.
The corridor was lined with glass display cases. They weren't displaying anything physical. Each case contained a pair of small projectors, one mounted at the top and one at the bottom of the glass enclosure.
Between the projectors, suspended in the empty space, was a holographic image.
The image in front of Erik was a three-dimensional rendering of a human brain. Soft colors, clear separation between the lobes, subtle anatomical detail visible at the neuron-cluster level. The brain rotated slowly on its vertical axis, displaying every angle in turn. The colors shifted gradually as the rotation progressed, highlighting different functional regions in sequence.
The image wasn't on a screen. There was no screen. The brain was simply suspended in mid-air inside the glass case, three-dimensional and stable, visible from every angle as Erik moved his head.
Erik stared.
He'd been a science and tech reporter for eleven years. He'd covered holographic display technology three times. Every time, the demonstration had been a special-purpose installation in an academic lab, with elaborate optical setups, controlled lighting conditions, and image quality that ranged from "barely visible" to "clearly an experimental prototype." The technology existed but had never been productized for non-laboratory use.
What he was looking at now was productized. The display case was a self-contained unit. Two small projectors. One brain, suspended in the air, visible to multiple viewers at once with no special viewing equipment.
He understood, suddenly, why the corridor was dimmer than normal. The lower ambient light was necessary for the holographic projection to maintain visual clarity.
"Is this a Pepper's Ghost setup or actual volumetric display?"
His professional brain was running through the possibilities. Pepper's Ghost effects (using angled glass to reflect a screen's image into apparent space) could approximate this look but with significant viewing-angle limitations. Volumetric displays used various techniques to render images in actual physical space and were considered the holy grail of display technology. He'd seen experimental prototypes of both. Neither matched what he was looking at now.
The other reporters who'd entered ahead of his team were already crowded around the various display cases, examining the holograms from different angles, looking for hidden screens, checking for projection seams. Pat had used his bulk to muscle a viewing position at one of the more popular displays, pulling his cameraman in beside him.
Ava was still frozen.
"Let's go," Erik said, grabbing Lou by the arm. "Move."
He found a less-crowded display and squeezed himself and Lou into front-row positions.
This case displayed a different image: an exploded technical diagram of a neural prosthetic, showing the layered architecture of the device's signal acquisition, decoding, and motor control systems. A small bronze plaque mounted at the base of the case described each component in plain language. Layperson education, paired with an unmistakably science-fiction visual. The technology was sophisticated. The presentation was sophisticated. The combination was overwhelming.
Erik looked closely at the prosthetic diagram. He studied it for a full minute, mostly checking the holographic image's resolution at close range.
The image quality, on close inspection, was lower than a standard phone display. Individual pixels were visible if Erik looked carefully. The technology had clearly not surpassed traditional displays in raw resolution. But it had completely surpassed every other holographic system on the market in two critical dimensions: ambient lighting tolerance (it worked in dim but not pitch-dark conditions, unlike some lab demos) and visual coherence (the image was stable and consistent from all viewing angles, not distorting at edge cases).
For a reporter watching the technology evolution of holographic displays, this was a generational leap. Not the final form. But the first form that could plausibly be deployed outside a laboratory.
He looked at the projector hardware mounted in the case. Each unit bore a small geometric logo, recognizable to anyone who'd been following the company. Prism Sciences' angular mech-inspired emblem.
The projectors were Prism Sciences hardware.
Erik mentally added a new headline to his potential coverage: Prism Sciences debuts holographic display technology at first product launch.
That was a separate story from the prosthetic launch. The prosthetic was the headline. The holographic technology was, somehow, the casual side dish. The fact that Prism Sciences had two industry-shifting technologies to showcase, and was relegating one of them to corridor decoration, told Erik something specific about the company's confidence and resource depth.
He waited for Lou to capture coverage of the holographic displays, then collected Ava (who had finally regained the ability to walk) and led the team further down the corridor toward the main event hall.
The launch hadn't even started yet, and it was already going to be one of the most significant events Erik had covered in his career.
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