The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman Read Free Book Online Page A

Basically, it was a futuristic novel about drug enforcement, and the police officers in the book wear something called a Scramble Suit. In the book, a Scramble Suit is this superthin material that a policeman wears over his body like a membrane, and it’s made from some kind of malleable quartz lens, and the idea is that the suit allows you to look like a million different people interchangeably. Essentially, it makes someone look like everyone and no one at the same time. This is totally fiction, of course. It’s totally impossible. But evidently, that book was the seed for an idea, at least from the military’s perspective. They wanted us to make a suit that would make someone impossible to see, or at least very, very difficult to see. No one at Chaminade was told this directly, but we all sort of understood that this novel had been the genesis. We talked about it among ourselves. I mean, the type of person who worked in this lab was the same type of person who read a lot of Philip K. Dick novels. And you’d be surprised how often the military operates like this. They get so many ideas from bullshitlike Star Trek and Arthur C. Clarke and World War Z . At one point they were trying to genetically engineer a Wookiee in Greenland. I’m not kidding. They wanted to build an army of fucking Chewbaccas for hand-to-hand warfare in arctic climates. They tried for ten years. I have photographs. One of my colleagues allegedly had hair samples, but it just seemed like regular yak hair to me.
    But, regardless … it was like this: We were instructed to make these cloaking suits, although—as I said before—none of us really knew why. And obviously, you can’t make a fabric that disappears on its own. That’s nonsense. But we came up with a concept that immediately felt semiplausible: What we needed was a sheer suit that reflected light, but was covered by a viscous fluid. This fluid would capture the light and move it. The elements within the fluid are something we refer to as metamaterials, because the components are smaller than the wavelength of light. Are you understanding the premise? Do you remember talking about this before? We called this theoretical fluid “ozone fluid,” because it was loosely modeled after the way the ozone layer traps ultraviolet rays: Light would pass through the cream, but it wasn’t reflected out. This was where A Scanner Darkly actually played a role. There are certain natural elements—quartz being one of them—that naturally bounce light back toward its source, almost like a mirror. And if you combine a specific sequence of these elements, they each refract a universal light source at varying wave distances. So that was what we infused into the cream: The cream is filled with crystallized metamaterial that reflects light capriciously. But the surface of that cream provides resistance. It’s like the suit has its own visual atmosphere. This, obviously, was the key—the key was developing a cream that allowed light to pass through its membrane, strike the surface of this highly reflective suit, bounce, and then bounce again . But it couldn’t refract at a right angle. It had to refract at an angle that was either obtuse or acute. Because what we were trying todo was make this light move . We wanted to move it one hundred and eighty degrees from the point of origin. Our hypothesis— my hypothesis, really, because I did all the heavy lifting—was that there would inevitably be a pool of light at the opposite pole of whoever was wearing the suit, since the refraction would be happening from both sides simultaneously and at the same speed. That pool of light would overcome the cream’s resistance and become our quote-unquote “third-party visual.” This was the plan.
    Is this making sense? Any sense at all?
    Now, what does that mean in a three-dimensional world? It basically means that any third party looking at a man wearing the suit would see whatever was directly behind that man. If