Saturday, November 21, 2020

Page 2775

He needed an attack that would cover a wide area. The sonar couldn't give him pinpoint accuracy, so he had to account for that. The mini-missiles might work again, but he had something better in mind.

Abbas, Haqq, and all their researchers had spent considerable time breaking down the many problems that the Invisibility-inducing aberrations presented so that they could develop countermeasures. Discerning how they functioned was key to that effort, and the major issue there was figuring out how the cloaking "shadow" actually interacted with light.

Whether it should be regarded as "magical" or "a matter that was beyond science" was irrelevant. Obviously, it was not reflecting or refracting light as any normal material would, which meant there were really only two other options for how the interaction might work.

Either the light was passing perfectly through the cloaked entities as if they were not even there; or the light was being absorbed entirely and a perfect replica of what was "behind" the entities was being projected back out to the eye of the viewer.

The first possibility seemed less likely, because logically speaking, if light was truly passing through the cloaked entities, then anyone inside should have been rendered blind, as the light would also be passing through their eyes without touching their photoreceptors. And by now, they knew very well that the invisible aberrations were not blind at all.

The only reason they had theorized this as a potential explanation at all was because, well, these were aberrations they were dealing with. Much like servants, they did not always follow the conventional wisdom of science, to the chagrin of many lifelong academics like himself.

In this case, however, their extra caution was unwarranted. Through further field testing, they had indeed been able to confirm that it was the second method. The light was being absorbed and a perfect image was being projected back.

It was an incredible feat, far beyond what any "normal" technology was currently capable of. If it could be reproduced with said normal technology, that would be a tremendous breakthrough.

But right now, that didn't matter. What mattered was that first bit: the light was being absorbed.

A high-powered laser, therefore, would be especially effective against it.

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