512 The Flood, Ch. 25



Chapter Twenty-five


The water in the university swimming pool was replaced by an electro-static gel in much smaller suspension tanks in our labs, but my goal was always to create a dry suit. 

Breathing underwater, or in a gel, is too difficult. Plus, you need a shower everytime you go into VR. My people tried convincing me about a gel that wiped off without needing a shower, but I tried it, and felt like a newborn baby. A hot mess, needing more than a wipe down.

No, the answer was soft robotics. So I poached a bunch of talent from a startup in Bangalore, and hired away the entire research department of a certain technical institute, and the T-suit was born.

There are several components that made a T-suit a trillion dollar invention. With previous exosuits, the goal was usually creating superhuman strength, or compensating for an injury or disability. We disrupted the field with a suit that was the opposite: instead of boosting the wearer's strength, our suit contained it. Instead of adding motion, the t-suit focused on taking it away. 

My engineers came up with some pretty brilliant ways of using existing technology. Regenerative braking borrowed from EVs became motion charging. All of the evacuation stuff, the pee and poop gear, that was borrowed from spaceflight. The in-suit HVAC came from race car drivers. And the haptics were taken from everything from video game controllers to smartphones to physical therapy devices. 

The magic sauce that made it all work though was our patented GDflex Fabric TM. We found a little startup sandwiching interwoven layers of motive cloth, moisture wickers, and low voltage semiconducting gridcloth. They were focused on, again, helping people with injuries and disabilities. We bought them for under a hundred million, and turned their technology into a global licensing golden goose.

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Unfortunately, I couldn't just tap out of my t-suit right now, and return to the real world. My only path to the real world was by diving in.










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