Wired (part three)

The fabric slowly began to fade away, as the surface briefly reflected the flaming fireplace. It was transforming and shifting light from any angle, shimmering and vanishing. Seconds felt like minutes, and Beat couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. This was actual, real, optical camouflage fabric, which could have been woven into anything. The longer he stared the less he saw, to the point that he even forgot Jakob’s whiskey glass hidden beneath the fabric. It was utterly and truly invisible by this point, obscuring anything beneath it and in direct contact with it. All he saw was the top of the table and nothing more.

“Blyat,” Beat uttered. He couldn’t find the words to express his disbelief. Jakob had actually done it, and he had kept it all to himself. Not a single other person on earth knew about this. They couldn’t. Beat gazed upon true danger, and yet, there was nothing to see.

Jakob was grinning ear to ear. He knew the magnitude of what Beat was witnessing. He only wished he could witness his success all over again, without any of the pressure. “And now, for my next trick,” Jakob whispered, as he removed the silken connectors from the fabric, “behold.” He placed one strand on his left sleeve, and another on the right. From the neck down, Jakob disappeared. Beat instinctively lunged for Jakob, trying to catch his floating head, knocking over his own bourbon glass in the process. As the glass rolled behind him across the floor, Beat stopped short of actually grabbing Jakob, as his rational mind caught up with reality. Jakob laughed to the point of a short coughing fit, and as the tears streamed down his cheeks, he belted out, “I got you, Beat! I got you good. You should have seen yourself. The only thing wrong here is the material, and maybe the battery life, but a change here and there…” The fabric across the table faded back into view and so did Jakob’s jacket shortly afterwards. Ta da, indeed. It was quite the magic trick.

Beat stammered, “how could you keep such a secret for so long, across 3 wives, surely someone would have mentioned it to someone else at some point in the past.” Jakob replied, “That was the easy part. What does it look like, powered off? Any old piece of fabric. I could have left this lying around the house for years and who would know different? I never made it a big deal, so it never became anything uncommon. It also happens to be fairly unbelievable, and I hadn’t really perfected it until after my 3rd wife passed. That left me with a lot of time, and a lot of privacy.” Beat nodded his head slowly, soaking in the clever genius before him. This still left him with a nagging sense of doubt. If this was the only man in the world that created this technology, and nobody was any wiser, was Jakob the invisible man? Was he meeting with the Bowler Man in the footage? Something felt off.

Jakob placed the fabric back in his briefcase, took another sip out of his glass, then retrieved another item from the bag. “This, I believe, is the pinnacle of my work,” Jakob said, as he unrolled another sheet of fabric. This fabric seemed different; it had a very geometric texture on the surface, like millions of triangles, edge to edge. “Relax, Beat, this one needs electricity, but not much. You’ve already made your blood sacrifice,” he teased, as he retrieved a different control blob from his bag. This one was greenish-white, similar in color to glow-in-the-dark plastic; long and cylindrical, with two obvious buttons on top. “Do you happen to own a monocular with night vision? Eh, never mind, I brought mine. Here, take it,” Jakob said, as he handed the device to Beat.