Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [20]
She had been only ten, three years ago, when this very castle, called the Dragon Nest by the Flamethrowers, had been taken from them by force and treachery. Three years since the Order of Flamethrowers had been expelled from Mars. Now he knew she hadn’t spent them all in coma. That would’ve been a mercy.
She was stronger than he was.
A touch of mind on mind. “You can’t be bad. You must have asked the Fairy how to become a doctor, long ago, right? You simply don’t remember that.”
She didn’t know that he didn’t have the Fairy back then.
FROM THAT POINT ON, THEY MET IN EVERY DREAM. Now Nathi knew exactly what he had to do to bring her back to life. He knew that they could do it, too—could bind their minds not just in dreams, but in the waking world. But at a price—he knew the symbiotic union would not be easily dissolved. Most likely, they would have to stay together unto death.
The challenge of restoring the girl’s consciousness, however, paled next to the material components of the plan. It was not just the matter of escape, but also of survival in the harsh Martian environment, and of avoiding a recapture.
Nathi’s chances of convincing anyone to stash hard-duty military suits inside the room were infinitesimally low. But he never lacked in medical supplies. His work on the girl’s brain was given top priority. But even so, procuring iron oxide nano-particles in sufficient quantity proved challenging. The irony! That was the very stuff the Martian soil was made of. Nathi had to wax nostalgic, asking for a sample to be brought from his ancestral land.
He put it to good use.
This kind of nanoparticle was a workhorse of medicine from as far back as the late 20th century, the dawn of nanotech. Binding easily to proteins and DNA, they were magnetically guided to deliver their load anywhere with high pre cision—liver, brain, you name it. This time, it was skin.
Pretending he was harvesting new neurons from certain cells in the girl’s skin, Nathi applied the powerful machinery of alternative gene splicing to coax the skin’s collagen- and keratin-producing cells into altering the folding patterns of those basic building blocks of hair, skin, and nails. Binding with the iron oxide nanoparticles, these tough and fibrous proteins could now be rearranged in complicated beta-sheet and alpha-helix patterns at a wave of Nathi’s “magic wand”—the powerful magnetic fields of nanobots.
Now he could turn the girl’s skin into silk.
“Abracadabra, voila, and…. Just imagine it—the purest, softest silk.”
No, he did not reorganize the instrumented molecules in groups of pleated beta-sheets with randomly coiled intervals to turn her skin into a real silk. Not really. They practiced skin control in dreams.
“What color will it be?” she asked him.
“Anything you want. Yes, even polka-dot.” They smiled. “But, left unmodulated, it’ll be red. You’re truly Martian now, daughter of the Martian soil.”
She sighed. “I’d rather be invisible.”
“Well, actually, you can.”
“I can? But how?”
“Hold your breath.” He had already preinstalled the necessary triggers.
Abracadabra, voila, and—
“Wow!”
— light is trapped.
“Relax, and let it flow over your skin.”
HE CALLED IT METASILK, FOR IT WAS A METAMATERIAL, THE kind of substance whose physical properties depend not so much on what it’s made of but on how, on its internal structure.
Until then, metamaterials had mostly been made from various electrical conductors—metals such as gold and silver—or semiconductors. Nathi came up with a new design to make her skin invisible.
With the right pattern of rings and wires, and of other geometric shapes on nano scale, one could create a quantum lattice with a restricted set of stable oscillation states—surface plasmons. A photon striking such a surface would bind with an oscillation