W D Smart

The Gliese Project W D Smart

Dr. Sarah Chambers, Dr. Haneefah Baqri, and Dr. Raza Ahuja, all technically-oriented Ph. Ds. with a different set of skills, first met at a job fair sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley. Their meeting was unplanned and in many respects, coincidental. As a result, however, they were drawn together in an unlikely alliance by a mysterious set of circumstances that was set into motion by an equally mysterious employer who was only identified as "HETC." They were, as a team, offered a very lucrative, month-long engagement which involved doing research at HETC's isolated, underground headquarters located in the California desert near the Nevada border. Their first assignment was to analyze the feasibility of a proposal to develop and deploy space-based, orbiting solar arrays as a future source of energy to help address Earth's rapidly growing and seemingly insatiable appetite for energy. The project was called "Helios" after the Greek god of the Sun. All this was done under the umbrella of one of HETC's four main projects - The Gliese Project - which was focused on Energy Technologies. Their research culminated in startling conclusions, but the experiences they had during their stay at the underground facility left them with more questions than answers.