Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.

Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.

Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.

In effect, she’d made plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.

The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.

It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to it was absorbed.

It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.

She would be hailed as a savior later. Any industry that needed a hard surface would benefit immediately. Impossible architectural masterpieces would blossom. The military would gain invincibility. Hard materials would become possible with no natural matter being used.

She never lived to see any of it.

That first suit of armour that she tried out on herself didn’t have any airholes and the generator pack was on her belt, trapped inside the form-fitting field with her. The fields surrounding her hands couldn’t penetrate the shield around her waist to press the deactivate button.

No one knows what she was thinking trying it out on herself like that. It’s hard to believe what a simple, stupid mistake that was considering her brilliance. Conspiracy theories abound that the military complex got to her and killed her so that she wouldn’t stand in the way of her invention being used as weaponry. No one knows. She suffocated there. Her assistants found her in the morning.

Since the energy supplies are theoretically infinite, she is still encased in that field, resting peacefully in her coffin.

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows