Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [21]
In this way, light could be trapped and made to flow over the surface. If it were let out at the opposite end in the same direction, an observer would look straight through such metamaterial without seeing it. It would appear that the light had never strayed from a straight line. One would be invisible—or close enough.
Varying the patterns, the same trick could be performed for other frequencies as well, from radio to ultraviolet. But no such polaritonic cloak could provide protection at all frequencies at once. Nor was it possible to be invisible from all directions at the same time. They would have to choose and constantly adjust the range of visible directions, making it as narrow as possible.
But Nathi didn’t have the fancy nano-shapes of gold and silver. So instead, he folded and arranged the instrumented proteins in such a way that the remaining space, filled with free electrons and ions plentiful in any living tissue, formed the necessary patterns. And what’s more, he could reshape patterns at will, to switch protection to another range of frequencies.
One was especially important—infrared, for it meant heat.
“WE’LL HAVE TO BE INVISIBLE IN INFRARED TO DODGE the castle security,” Nathi explained. “But it’ll be even more important outside.”
Outside. It was her turn to reach the Needle.
She remembered. “We will be back,” Nanny had sent her over the laser beam. “Hold on.”
She didn’t see her Nanny blast another hole in the wall. She only felt it over her skin, right through the surface of the spacesuit that her captors stuffed her in, already halfway down the transport tubes. It found her, the pressure wave, it pulled—except the enemy was stronger.
I’d rather be dead.
She didn’t see her Nanny and the few remaining guards escape to reach the Needle for support. They didn’t break the wall until she left the vault—the only one without a proper suit to go out.
That reminded her. She asked him, “Will we have a battle-dress like Nanny’s?”
“No.”
She froze. “How will we breathe?”
EVEN KNOWING THE PLAN, HE FELT UNEASY.
In this little body lying in a coma, trillions of living cells depended on a supply of oxygen. From the most superficial layer of her skin down to the center of her brain, her spinal cord, the marrow inside her bones, the chemical reactions of the oxygen cycle ran non-stop, transferring electrons from molecule to molecule, creating voltage gradient. Embedded in the mitochondrial membranes, the molecules of ATP synthase enzyme formed tunnels for protons to pass through in an electric current. As they passed, the protons rotated the long stalks of ATP synthase, causing them to make the molecules of ATP—the currency of life, the source of energy all cells required to live.
This was what we breathed oxygen for—to rotate the mol? ecules of ATP synthase. This was the bottom-line of breathing.
But the electromagnetic fields of Nathi’s nanobots could do that, too.
Still, Nathi felt uneasy. Will we have enough?
“We’ll borrow some energy from the captured light,” he said.
Thus risking exposure. Holding breath, if only in imagination, wasn’t such a random choice of trigger. They may need to do that too to compensate for any loss of heat. Air was a poor heat conductor, and the Martian air, only one percent the density of Earth’s, was even worse. On Mars, one froze mainly from the radiation loss. With their metasilk, that would be minimized. But, though much more slowly, they’d still keep losing heat. The energy required for this to work would strain the nanobots’ capacity. They’d have to reach the Needle quickly to recharge.
“Now try to pull an object with your eyes, toward yourself,” he told the girl.
“Wow.”
Nathi was impressed himself. The superlenses were made from a so-called “left-handed” metamaterial that bent light in a “wrong” direction, on the same side from the vertical. Such lenses could resolve things even smaller than