Exo: A Novel (Jumper) by Steven Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

helmet flange was connected to the power supply, as it was when I first saw it.
    “So, electroactive polymers,” said Cory. He handed me a piece of what looked like dark gray insulated wire, about six inches long. “This one is an ionic EAP. Pull it tight.”
    I held it between my thumbs and forefingers and pulled it straight. It wasn’t at all stretchy.
    Cory took a pair of leads from a smaller power supply on the bench and clipped each one to the ends of the gray piece where they stuck out past my fingers. “Hold it tight,” he said, and flipped a switch on the power supply.
    The gray piece suddenly thickened and was three inches shorter, drawing my hands together despite my best efforts to pull it back to its original length.
    “Huh!” I said. “Muscular!”
    “Yeah. In fact, that’s one of the biggest applications under development. Artificial muscles for prosthetic limbs and actuators for small robots and drones.” He turned it off and it relaxed, allowing me to stretch it back out to its previous length. “The molecules fold under current, pulling in on themselves. Now try this one.”
    He handed me a different length of what looked like a fuzzy cord, also six inches and, while I held it, he shifted the alligator clips from the gray rubbery piece to this one. “Give that a tug.”
    When I pulled hard on this piece it stretched out. I managed to pull it out to about eight inches but it retracted to six inches as soon as I relaxed. “This one has some elasticity. Is that what the suit is made of? It’s pulling pretty hard now. I hate to think what it would do when you put the pressure on.”
    He smiled. “Keep some tension on it.”
    I did and he threw the switch.
    It didn’t bunch up or pull together. It relaxed . I was now holding a piece of thinner smooth cord nearly fifteen inches long.
    “The ECP core of this one relaxes its molecular structure under current and folds back up when we remove current. We could’ve gone the other way, but we decided pretty quick that you wanted a power failure to enable, not disable, the suit.”
    For a moment I pictured my arm, the place where I’d had the frostbite, suddenly and unexpectedly exposed to vacuum. “That would be … bad.”
    He nodded. “Mind you, we’re not talking about exploding limbs etcetera. Our skin is tougher than that, but you would get swelling and tissue damage. You know why the target is thirty kilopascals don’t you?”
    “One third an atmosphere. Twenty-nine thousand feet above sea level. Mount Everest.”
    He looked pleased. “Right. Your skin can handle that easily enough.”
    “Yes,” I said, rubbing my wrist through my shirt. “Up to forty-five thousand feet, though that’s pushing it.”
    He nodded and flipped open the laptop on the bench. The screen lit up as it came out of sleep mode. A chart of numbers appeared, with labels like Anterior Torso 4 , Right Leg 23 , and Left Foot 16 . Above it were three larger numbers labeled Max , Min , and Avg . They were 31,250, 30,700, and 30,986. “It’s in pascals.” He reached over to the suit and dug his thumb into the chest. Immediately the max went up to 31,540 and the average crept up slightly, too.
    “These are measured by strain gauges in the surface of the life-model pressure sensor. When we change out the underlying gel packs for different-sized life models, we get comparable results.”
    He reached out and turned a knob on the heavy-duty power supply connected to the suit. The suit shifted on the stand, going from a sleek, smooth surface, tightly covering the structure beneath, to suddenly looking like ill-fitting and wrinkled coveralls three sizes too big. Only the neck flange seemed the same as before, though the fabric of the suit now seemed to bunch together where it met the stainless steel.
    Cory let me look at the suit for a moment, my mouth open, before he directed my attention to the laptop screen. Across the top of the screen read Max: 320 Min: 0 and Avg. 11 .