Even though this title is very much a mainstream thriller, I couldn’t help but include nods toward science in one form or another. Given that, I feel somewhat compelled to either explain some of the science or maybe give a bit more detail than the story otherwise demanded.
Obviously, my goal in this addendum isn’t to give you a crash course on college-level science, but instead give you enough information or keywords so that you have the data necessary to do more research, if you’re interested.
Levi’s hat:
I actually introduced the concept of Levi’s rather useful hat in Perimeter, but let me take a moment to talk a bit about the science behind this.
For those who need a reminder, this hat has tiny metal posts on the inside liner that give its wearer a little directional tingle when someone is staring at them. In other words, you put this hat on, and when you walk through a crowd, you’ll be able to feel if someone is watching you, and from which direction.
It does sound a bit like science fiction, but the technology that would be needed to create such a thing is definitely in our grasp. Sure, some might argue it would be bulky or have some other complaint, but it’s definitely possible to construct.
In fact, for me to explain, let me grab a small caption from Perimeter, where I think I did a pretty good job of trying to explain things at a layman’s level.
Denny unclipped the hat from the belt and showed Levi the film-like electronics encircling the hat’s lining. “So, you’ve seen how at night, when a light shines into an animal’s eyes, you see an eerie glow reflecting off of them, right?”
Levi nodded.
“Well, humans don’t have that same reflective property, at least not to that extent. For our retina to reflect light, we need something brighter. You’ve seen what happens when there’s a camera flash.”
“You mean that red-eye effect?”
“Exactly.” Denny pointed at a series of tiny tube-like projections that barely poked through the lining of the mesh cap. “What I have here is something that’s a bit nuts, because if you could see the light, your head would probably look like it was a 360-degree flashlight it was so bright.”
“What do you mean?”
Denny pressed his lips together. “Okay, so we normally can only see light at certain wavelengths. Let me start simple for a moment. We probably all learned in school about ROY G BIV, the colors of the rainbow starting at red and ending at violet. That corresponds to light at wavelengths of roughly 700 to 350 nanometers. The bigger the wavelength, the closer to red, the shorter, the closer to violet. That’s what our human eye can detect. But that’s not the limit of the light that exists. For instance, that hat is sending out a bunch of light in every direction at roughly 1550 nanometers. Deep into the infrared spectrum. Each of the tiny lasers in there sucks up a good amount of power, and even though you aren’t feeling it, the laser’s aim is tilting up and down at about twenty times a second.
“So what you have is basically a hat that’s projecting light that nobody can see in all directions. It’s strong enough to hit things and bounce off. That’s where my electronic filters comes in. I’m heavily filtering what comes back and trying to alert you only if I’ve detected a signal bouncing back that seems to be following you.”
“Does it work from a distance?”
“It should be good out to about a hundred yards. Anything more than that, I’m currently squelching, because the reflection gets dicey.”
Levi removed the belt, and Denny put both items back in the case.
“So, let me get this straight,” Levi said. “I wear that, and it spits light out that nobody can see in every direction. If someone’s looking at me, the light is going to bounce back, and the hat has sensors that will alert me.”
So, even though there may not be a commercial product that you can buy that does what this hat does, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there were such things available for those with certain clandestine needs.
Denny’s Dry Suit:
We’ve all seen in the movies where the good guy (or maybe the bad guy) is trying to enter a highly-secure room and a drip of sweat sets off all sorts of alarms. That isn’t quite what Levi was dealing with, but it gives you a flavor of the type of problem second story folks (thieves) might have to deal with in an advanced security setting.
Of course, dealing with heat signatures is a whole new level of difficulty. There actually have been movies that demonstrated something like Denny’s dry suit. One in particular comes to mind. It’s the microchip scene in The Saint, with Val Kilmer.
In that movie, Val Kilmer finds himself trying to break into a vault to steal a microchip, but to even get near the vault, he has to pass through a series of thermal detectors. This is actually a great scene in that it’s actually tough to make a human body suddenly not have a heat signature. For a movie, The Saint did pretty well. The suit the actor was wearing did at least give an homage to covering all the skin and face. However, it missed a few details, which is inevitable for a movie. If you’re coming in from a cold climate into a warm one, no matter how good your thermal controls are, you won’t be able to immediately match the warm temperature. These things take time.
An example of a common issue would be condensation.
Think about it. When you have a cold soft drink, your glass will quickly get wet as the water in the air condenses onto the cold surface of the glass. It would be almost a certainty that our actor’s vision would be fogged up before the suit readjusts the temperature.
For Levi, he didn’t need something that did pretty well, he needed something that was rock solid.
Luckily, the scenario Levi faced was quite different than what Val Kilmer faced. The premise of any suit that’s advertised to match the surrounding temperature has a few difficulties it needs to overcome. The first being that the body inside it is constantly producing heat. So, to counteract that heat, it needs to be able to resist that influence.
The only real way to do that is to have excellent heat conductivity. In this case, the dry suit needs to be able to conduct thermal energy efficiently and constantly, without any of that excess thermal energy being detected.
To accomplish it, you’d need to be able to circulate cooling or heating (depending on the need) at a constant rate so that every exposed surface has the same temperature. The easiest way to do it is with a circulating (heated or cooled) fluid, almost like how an air condition works.
However, if you’re like Levi, and trying to match the temperature of the outside, let’s say near freezing, you don’t want your skin to be freezing.
What to do?
That’s when you need to have several distinct layers. You’d need an outer layer that has the ability to keep things at whatever external temperature you want, but you also need another circulating layer that keeps you from freezing to death. And in truth, you’d want a third layer in between the prior two to act as insulation, to lessen the effect that each circulating layer has on the other.
So, we now have a dry suit, with three layers, two of which have some kind of independent pump that circulates a fluid to help normalize the temperatures. And remember, each of these circulating layers would in essence be hollow—they’d need space for the fluid to flow.
So, even though making such a dry suit would be quite an undertaking, it’s certainly possible. And likely bulky.
For all I know, they may actually sell such things, but at worst, we know people like Denny will be around to supply our clandestine forces with all sorts of interesting goodies.
Who knows what new invention Denny will come up with next?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am an Army brat, a polyglot, and the first person in my family born in the United States. This heavily influenced my youth by instilling in me a love of reading and a burning curiosity about the world and all of the things within it. As an adult, my love of travel and adventure has driven me to explore many unimaginable locations
, and these places sometimes creep into the stories I write.
I hope you’ve found this story entertaining.
- Mike Rothman
You can find my blog at: www.michaelarothman.com
I am also on Facebook at:
www.facebook.com/MichaelARothman
And on Twitter: @MichaelARothman
The Inside Man Page 26