The inventor behind James Bond's ingenious gadgets, codenamed "Q" in the spy films, exists in reality and is actually a woman, the head of Britain's MI6 espionage agency has said. "The real-life Q is looking forward to meeting you, and I'm pleased to report that the real-life Q is a woman," Alex Younger said at a women's technology awards ceremony recently in London.
Q, the head of gadgets at foreign intelligence service MI6, has always been played by a man in the Bond series, though the inventor's boss, "M", was played by Judi Dench from 1995 to 2015. Younger, known as "C", also revealed that the devices used by his operatives were much more sophisticated than those dreamt up by Q. "The gadgets that we employ -- or operational technology as we more properly call it -- probably defy the imagination of spy writers," he said. "Technology now is at the core of what we do in a way that it wasn't before."
