Peter Watts, author of Crysis: Legion takes us behind the scenes of the novel and game to expose the science behind the N2, a super-powerful, hyper-technical battle suit. Part 2 of 4. You can read Part 1 (Be Strong, Be Fast) here. Also, check out this free 50-page excerpt of Crysis: Legion.
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The Crysis Legionaire’s Online Backstage Nanosuit Grand Tour, Part Two: Be Invisible
Last time, the superpower we discussed was pretty straightforward: we’ve been building force multipliers ever since some Cro-Magnon sat on the end of a fallen log and discovered the lever (or the teeter-totter, I suppose, depending on the mood s/he was in). Invisibility is a dream that must be almost as old, but is a lot harder to pull off in the real world. And for all the folks that have fantasized about the ways in which we could vanish from the visible spectrum, remarkably few have spared a thought to the obvious drawback. Not even HG Wells, the inventor of the modern Invisible Man trope, stopped to realize that anyone so gifted would be blind: because whether light is passing through you or bending around you, it’s missing your retinas. Sneaking undetected into the girls’ change room isn’t quite the thrill you imagined when you can’t actually see anything.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from trying. It hasn’t even stopped them from succeeding.
There are a few different ways to fade from view. One way is to become a flounder, or an octopus, or any other pattern-matching beast who uses specialized pigment cells called chromatophores to blend in with their backgrounds. If your sole experience with cellular camouflage has been via the Nike Chameleon you may regard this as a laughably ineffective solution, something that would only work on people who were pretty much blind anyway. In which case I would challenge you to find the fish in this picture:
Well? I'm waiting...
Or if you like your evidence a bit more dynamic, check out this excerpt from a recent TED talk. Then tell me it can’t be done.
Nature had a few million years to get that right. We could probably finagle a few technological shortcuts: a suit coated with microscopic pixels, similar to the “electronic ink” we’re starting to see in color eReaders; fractal algorithms to help match background textures without having to map every pixel one-on-one; some kind of Bayesian software to handle pattern changes resulting from the cloaked object moving against the background. The “invisibility cloaks” that made headlines a few years back aren’t nearly so sophisticated; they’re more proof-of-principle than anything else, basically a couple of cameras at the back of a raincoat projecting their images onto the front. We can do better. We will do better. Nanosuit 2.0 shows us the way.
Another solution to the same problem is the use of “metamaterials” to physically bend light around the cloaked object: think of a garment built from a billion tiny prisms, stitched together just so. It’s not exactly a new idea. Edgar Rice Burroughs played around with it in his “John Carter of Mars” novels — his Martian flying machines came sheathed in refractory sand that rendered them invisible — and that was way back in the nineteen-thirties. Here in the real world, progress has been a bit slower; as of a couple of months ago we’ve only managed to cloak objects about the size of a sugar cube. It’s a start.
Cut-scenes in the game show us an up-close-and-personal view of the N2 booting into cloak mode, and sure enough that transformation looks a lot like what you’d expect from some kind of chromatophore or refractory technology. But how does the suit manage to cloak guns and ammo clips, all those other things Alcatraz carries around with him that don’t come equipped with built-in cloaking tech? You won’t find that answer anywhere in the game; it’s mentioned in the novel, but you have to read a ways before you find it.
Fortunately, I’m willing to save you the trouble: turns out there’s yet another way to bend light around an object. Don’t look to the animal kingdom or the materials engineers for that precedent, though; look to the sky. Anything with a strong enough gravitational field bends light around it; we can actually see galaxies hidden behind other galaxies, thanks to this so-called “lensing effect”. And lensing occurs not through physical conduits, but throughout a volume of space — a field which could presumably contain a heavy machine-gun, a brown-bag lunch, and all the ammo you can carry. Furthermore, since Einstein showed us that mass and energy are interchangeable, you don’t even need the mass of a black hole to pull off this trick; you just need energy.
A fuck of a lot of energy.
There’s the rub. We’re nowhere near being able to lens light around anything the size of a human body; if we can do it by the time Crysis 2 begins in 2023, I’ll eat my cat.
Fortunately, the technology behind Nanosuit 2.0 is, shall we say, somewhat ahead of its time. And so I get to have it both ways, as you can see in the following extract. Like the last excerpt, this one shows our hero trying out a nifty new feature of his Nanosuit for the first time. It shows the reach and the limitations of Hargreave-Rasch’s proprietary cloaking technology. And it shows the first stirrings of a change in Alcatraz, a certain bloodlust that — like the cloak itself — might have its origins in biology, but which has since been subject to certain technological enhancements…
Excerpt from Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts
On Sale 3/22/2011 from Del Rey BooksBootsteps, crunching just around the bend. I duck behind another war memorial—big granite cookie-cutter, this time—a moment before he comes into view. He’s got the head of a spider with glowing orange eyes, one of those full-face helmets with the quadroptic lenses and the built-in respirator. He obviously thinks he’s some serious lethal hotshot, but he’s got so many belts of flashbangs and bullets wrapped around him he looks more like a vending machine than a killing machine. He unbuckles the gear around his waist and unzips for a piss against the wall. I figure now might be a good time to try out the N2’s cloaking option. I sacc’ the icon and watch my hands melt away into the background.
Not just my hands. Not just me. The shotgun I just scavenged melts away as well.
It takes a moment for that to sink in. I haven’t worn a cloak since Annapolis but I know the tech: fast-fractal pattern-matching, Bayesian wraparounds. Same basic thing an octopus does when it wants to blend in. But this Jackal doesn’t pack a cloak, and neither do the ammo and supply clips I’ve scrounged, and all of that’s just turned clearer than glass. The only thing I know that could do that even in theory would be some kind of lensing field, and anything that could bend light around that much volume would need the magnets from a cyclotron to shape the field and a CAESAR reactor to power it.
What the fuck kind of secret lab did this suit come out of?
I step out from behind the memorial (Universal Soldier, the plaque says; hey Roger, what are the odds?) just as the merc zips up and turns around. He looks right through me, turns on his heel and ambles innocently back the way he came.
I almost let it go to my head. I almost miss the little shrinking bar down in the lower-right corner of my eye, don’t notice it at all until the whole readout goes red. By the time I clue in I’m already starting to cast a shadow. I barely get back behind the cookie-cutter in time.
The Urinating Soldier hesitates, looks back over his shoulder. Grunts. Keeps going.
So. How long did that last: twenty seconds, thirty? No such thing as a free lunch. The power bar’s creeping back, though. The cloak recharges.
Someone screams.
No: Parchman screams. My squadmate screams. And then he stops. And in between there’s a gunshot.
From inside the Castle.
The cloak’s not quite recharged yet but I’m moving anyway, hugging that curved brick wall, closing on the main gate. But it’s the flatbed parked in front that catches my eye: it’s the bodies piled on top of it.
Some of them are in camo.
Heavy doors clank open around the curve; I flatten back against the wall as a couple of spider-headed mercs carry Parchman down the steps and sling him onto the flatbed like a fucking sandbag. The N2’s got a zoom option but I don’t need it to see the burns on Parchman’s arms, or the cuts on the soles of his bare feet. I’ve seen those marks before. Those are the marks of special rendition. Those are the marks of interrogations which might not fit comfortably under the rubric of international law. No biggie, they told us in basic. Everyone does it.
They never said anything about the neat little hole in Parchman’s temple, though.
The mercs head back into the building, swapping stories about pukeheads and Susie Rottencrotch. They leave the gate open: doubled iron doors set into a stone arch, big square columns on each side like something out of a gladiator game. Their own personal coliseum.
If that’s how they want it . . .
I cloak again. I walk right through the gates of Castle Clinton, through an outer ring of trashed offices and gift shops. I find myself in an open circular compound full of crates and supplies, a ring of eighteenth-century cannons left over from the tourist season, and a couple of blood-stained plywood pallets outfitted with leather straps where arms and legs might go. And a bunch of CELLulites swapping bets on who’s going to take this Prophet asshole down.
And then the power bar goes red and my suit goes zzzzt and everyone falls silent as snow.
I look down at myself. There I am.
I don’t know how many there are. A dozen. Two. It doesn’t matter. There could be a fucking regiment and they still wouldn’t stand a chance. I am the reaper, man, I am all four Horsemen, I am unstoppable. I spent my whole damn career training for toe-to-toe with the enemy and here they are: these paramilitary fuckwits, these mercenaries, these washed-out border guards and wannabes who never swore allegiance to any country or any cause or any thing but the highest fucking bidder. I remember the trampled tents, the broken stretchers, the dumpsters full of dead civilians. I remember the beaten corpses of my brothers-in-arms and it is not only my sacred duty to take these assholes out; it is my pleasure. I could fight them all day and be ready to dance all night. I am—
I am into it.
And to think that I might have missed it all if I’d let the cloak recharge just a little longer, or if the circuits had drawn just a little less power, or if I’d moved just a wee bit faster. I could have snuck through the Castle and made my way out of the park without any bloodshed at all. What a pity, huh?
I blame the suit.
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Here’s some video showcasing the awesome invisibility properties of the N2:
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Peter Watts is the author of Crysis: Legion, official novelization of the highly anticipated Crysis 2 from developer Crytek. Peter will be back on Tuesday, March 29 to give you more behind-the-scenes insight into the N2.
