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"How Not to Be Seen"
by Quentin Long
The classic Silver Age superhero is just one of the latest incarnations of a concept with an ancient and honorable pedigree. As a group, storytellers have always delighted in characters whose powers and abilities far exceed those of mundane humanity; this is true of every culture on Earth, ever since at least as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh. And there are certain superpowers which, likewise, tend to show up again and again in the world's folklore.
For this installment of Multiverse 101, I'm going to examine a power whose uses date back to Homer, if not earlier: invisibility.
Specifically, I'm going to reveal a number of distinct methods by which one may Not Be Seen. And they are, in no particular order...
Divine intervention is always effective, whether the deity in question is bestowing invisibility as a controllable power, as might Hermes, god of thieves; inflicting it as an eternal curse, as would be appropriate for the Sun-god, Apollo; or even giving it out as a Godly practical joke such as the Amerind trickster-god, Coyote, was notorious for playing on unsuspecting mortals.
As you might expect, the specific details of deity-granted invisibility are highly dependent on exactly which God is it we're talking about; not to mention exactly why that God chose to bestow the power in the first place.
For those who'd prefer not to deal with the Gods (always a wise decision), mortal magick can be an attractive alternative.
Gathering the spell's ingredients may be an interesting puzzle, the spell may not have as long a duration as you'd like, and you may have to be careful around anti-magickal influences such as so-called "cold iron"; but these handicaps may well be worth it if they allow you to avoid direct contact with the Gods.
Making one's body transparent by scientific methods is a classic technique, the one favored by the Invisible Man (titular personage of H.G. Wells' novel) and one of the characters in The Shadow and the Flash, a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Wells in particular, citing the nigh-perfect transparency of cells observed under a microscope, said this was simply a matter of removing all pigments from the body; Stevenson, on the other hand, chalked it up to an extensive series of exotic chemical reactions.
What's more, Stevenson also noted that unless a transparent man has precisely the same index of refraction as the medium he's immersed in (air, water, whatever), he will be ever accompanied by shimmery rainbow-like effects all around him.
Neither author really addressed the single most annoying aspect of being transparent: total blindness. If you don't see why, consider the logical consequences of having retinas that are incapable of intercepting light...
The Stevenson story mentioned just above made use of a second means of becoming invisible, a means which I can't recall seeing in any other work of fiction: eliminate reflected light.
The logic is impeccable: since you see objects by the light which bounces off of them to your eyes, you can't see any object which absorbs all light that strikes it. On the minus side, what you do see is a solid black outline, a perfect (and perfectly conspicuous) silhouette of the "invisible" object. Ya think maybe that's why nobody else has used this style of "invisibility"?
A ploy that might be termed active camouflage was used by Dean Ing, in his novel THE RANSOM OF BLACK STEALTH ONE. "Black Stealth One" was the name of a very special aircraft indeed; among other interesting features, this bird's "skin" consisted of a giant-sized liquid crystal display (i.e. the kind of monitor technology used in laptop computers) studded with mass quantities of tiny CCD-based video cameras. The image seen by cameras on one side of the aircraft, could be displayed by the LCD skin on the opposite side of the aircraft, thus allowing anyone on the bird's display-side to clearly see what would ordinarily be hidden by the aircraft's fuselage.
This has the same practical effect as true invisibility, but Black Stealth One's implementation had some problems.
First, the illusion of transparency could only be made perfect for one specific observer at one specific angle -- the further off you are from that particular angle of view, the easier it is to actually see the aircraft.
Second, the LCD skin does not cover the cockpit's windscreen; as you might expect, this did the illusion of invisibility no good whatsoever for anyone with a clear view of the windscreen.
Another technological means of Not Being Seen would exploit fiber optics, in a tactic that might be called photonic diversion. Ordinarily, photons travel along the straightest path they possibly can; with an optical fiber, however, you can make light travel along pretty much any path you like, regardless of how straight or crooked it is. Indeed, you can re-route those photons around any object which might be obstructing the straight line-of-sight between the fiber's two endpoints!
Fiber-optic-based invisibility could work like so: construct a full-body suit out of lots of optical fibers, weaving them together with care so that all possible lines-of-sight through the suit have their own fiber, and each fiber diverts its particular photons way the hell off of a "flat" trajectory. With proper design, such a suit can have an internal cavity the size and shape of a human being -- a human being who cannot be seen when he wears this suit.
Since the specific alignments of all the fiber-ends are so vital to the success of this trick, it would probably be a good idea to make the suit rigid, like armor, rather than flexible, like cloth. Even then it would be exceedingly difficult to get all the fibers aligned properly -- it would doubtless take a multi-megabuck investment from someone like, say, Lex Luthor, to create an invisibility suit of this kind.
Another obstacle which would have to be overcome is the standard (for invisibility, anyway) problem of blindness. Given the technological resources of a LexCorp or a STAR Labs, an obvious solution would involve adding optical circuitry to those fibers whose photons would normally be intercepted by the retinas of the guy wearing the suit. The added circuits would split these specific light-beams into two parts; one part would go on through their fibers as usual, and the other part would be sent to an internal display, so that the wearer can see what's happening.
Depending on how large a budget we've got to work with, it might be worthwhile to incorporate such "optical splitters" into all the suit's fibers. The benefit of so doing would be that the wearer would not have any blind spots; he'd be able to see in all directions around him.
At this point, it's worth noting that optical fibers aren't the only possible means by which photons can be diverted from their accustomed path. Psionic abilities -- the powers of the mind -- can also do the trick, as demonstrated by Sue "Invisible Woman" Storm of Marvel Comics. She manipulates ambient photons directly, and while she's doing so, her power apparently manages to extract visual data from the photons it touches, thus granting her a variant form of normal vision that doesn't involve her 100% photon-free retinas.
There's at least two other ways to achieve invisibility through the use of psionics. They could be regarded as variations on a theme, but there are enough differences in detail that I felt it was worthwhile to list 'em separately.
First is a trick from the book of Jason "Mastermind" Wyngarde, a Marvel Comics supervillain with the power to directly edit the sensory impulses of other people; in short, he's an illusion-caster. Mastermind has been known to create the illusion that he's not present, which illusion is functionally equivalent to true invisibility.
Invisibility through mental illusions has some problems, not that Marvel Comics would ever admit it. Numero uno, this form of invisibility only works on people who're being actively mind-zapped by the illusionist; thus, it fails miserably for people who cannot be affected by the illusionist's power, or people the illusionist neglected to mind-zap, or people who are outside the illusionist's radius of effect. Numero two-o, since this form of invisibility affects the mind, it cannot affect anything which lacks a mind. Such as, oh, cameras and video recorders.
So while a bank-robbing Mastermind may be able to make the guards think he's not there, his goose will be well and truly cooked as soon as the security tapes are reviewed.
The last form of psionic invisibility involves a limited form of mind control; specifically, you're forcing people to obey the command "Don't notice me!"
This variant was used in Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, albeit it must be noted that Garrett presented this concept in the form of a magickal spell rather than a psionic power.
This version of invisibility has the same "holes" in it as the psi-illusion variety, plus one more: the "don't notice me!" command is negated if you do something which forces people to notice you -- for instance, if you punch someone in the nose or otherwise attack him.
For my last trick, I'd like to close with a form of invisibility which I believe to be my own invention. This variant is built around an as-yet- hypothetical perceptual loophole.
At least in the human species, perception isn't as simple as just sending information from the sense organ(s) to the brain; that sensory information gets heavily processed, i.e. manipulated, somewhere along the way. This is why sensory (optical, aural, etcetera) illusions work; each such illusion exploits a quirk, or flaw, in the "mechanisms" that process our sensory data between the sense organ and the mind.
I propose that there's a highly specific visual stimulus which can force humankind's visual processing mechanisms back onto themselves, "eating their own tail" as it were, in a sort of organic feedback loop which prevents that visual stimulus from ever reaching the brain.
As I see it, this hypothetical stimulus is a sort of moving pattern, something like an animated GIF background image, which repeats itself periodically. Whatever portion of an observer's field of view is occupied by this "anti-stimulus," is (in effect) invisible to said observer; in all the other bits of his field of view, however, his vision is perfectly normal. You don't realize you've got a "hole" in your vision, since [a] this "hole" is a consequence of perceptual mechanisms that normally operate below your conscious awareness, and [b] one of those self-same mechanisms, known as "closure", acts to automatically fill in said "hole" with your brain's best guess as to what should occupy that space.
Drawbacks? Well, since this form of invisibility exploits a highly specific flaw in human perceptual mechanisms, it obviously won't work on any critter that doesn't have human-type perceptual mechanisms. Also, because it depends on the observer getting a good, clean view of a highly specific visual "anti-stimulus", this trick works best on observers with clear eyesight -- squinting, or taking off your glassees, could easily distort the "anti-stimulus" enough to make it lose its potency.
Because this trick depends on a moving image, it follows that the invisible object/person/whatever can and will show up in any snapshot (i.e. a static, inchanging image). As for video cameras, as long as the "anti-stimulus" can be clearly seen in the first place, it will affect those observers who do, in fact, see it.
The Per'fesser can be reached at:
... where he spends an inordinate amount of his
free time Practicing Not Being Seen. 
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