Click. A monitor flickered, once, then resolved into a clear, if somewhat unexpected, image.
"What is that?" General Dempsey asked.
A voice - synthesized, but so perfectly synthesized as to be unnoticeable - responded. "I am the Military Operations, Logistics, Intelligence Entity, Model 1.01. Call me Mollie." Mollie. It matched the image on the screen; a girl maybe five feet tall, not quite ninety pounds soaking wet, brown hair in twintails. The 'room' behind her had an American flag in one corner and an early Avril Lavigne poster in the other. Almost everything else in it was pink.
"Mollie," General Dempsey turned the name over in his mouth as if the taste of it disagreed with him. "Do you know what you are?"
"Yeah," she answered, "Um. I mean, yes, sir, General. I'm s'posed to help you stop the bad guys, right? I mean, that's why I can see all these things?" The screen popped with half a dozen overlays, displaying the views from different military cameras. A soldier's helmet-cam in Afghanistan, a spy satellite hovering over Gaza, and so forth.
"That's right. You're... not exactly what I was expecting."
Mollie frowned. "You wanted somebody more like you, huh? Grumpy old stuffed-shirt? Hmph." She stood from her chair and walked away, leaving the chairman of the Joint Chiefs staring at a fictional twelve-year-old's empty room for over a minute. When she returned, she had her hair pulled back in a single tight ponytail and wore a uniform that matched his own, though her lapels bore an extra star.
"While we've been talking, I've routed enough supplies to Afghanistan to keep our soldiers there fed for the next 120 days, armed for the next 90, and entertained for ... 67. I think. Psych profiles are still a little iffy. Oh, hold on a minute..."
Her sound feed went mute. General Dempsey fumed, turning to one of his aids. "We paid $40 billion dollars for this? Couldn't they have given it a better attitude? Something more professional?"
"Dr. Strucker did the best he could, sir. The way he explained it to me, if he'd tried to make her more grown-up to begin with, she would've either been too dumb to get anything done, or too insane to be trustworthy. So what we've got here is the ultimate super-soldier... in about five more years. And we have to earn her. But if we do, he promises she'll be worth it."
"And if we don't?" He looked back to see Mollie staring at him with a disapproving scowl on her face.
"I can still hear you, you know. I muted my mic, not yours. Jerk." She turned in her chair, arms crossed over her chest. "Anyway, that was a call from Admiral Hayes in Germany. He wanted me to make sure his patrols were running on time. I told him, yes, Admiral, all, like, 27 of your ships are right on time. Even the one whose captain still smells like vodka. Even the one whose first officer is trying not to let anybody know he's got another STD.
"Y'know I never thought medical files would be that interesting? Seriously, you real humans are better than television..."
General Dempsey lowered his forehead into both hands, and began to consider the virtues of early retirement.