Everyone who saw the promo art for this chapter saw this coming a mile away. Say hello to deep cover Intrasol agent Moushira Shadid. She's not much of a “people person.”
And yeah, I know, having a laser whip for a weapon inside a confined space doesn't make a whole lot of sense… but I had to do it anyway, because it looked cool!
For the record, I have no idea what kind of technology is behind Agent Shadid's laser whip thingee, but it is definitely not a monomolecular weapon. That being said, it does bear a striking resemblance to that iconic subspecies of sci-fi weapons: monomolecular blades and their nasty second cousein, the monomolecular filament. These are weapons made of a long unbreakable chain just one molecule thick, and which theoretically are able to slice through pretty much anything with next to no resistance. So, assuming it were ever possible to construct such a thing and make it strong enough that it doesn't shatter or bounce off the target, what kind of damage would a monomolecular weapon actually cause? Would it slice a person in half effortlessly, or would it pass through without doing any noticeable harm whatsoever?
Monomolecular blades do exist already, in a way. The cutting edge of an obsidian knife can be close to one molecule thick, and they cut very well. But there's an important distinction: Once its edge digs into the target, the obsidian knife has a whole lot of blade mass coming in behind to force a large gap to open up around it. A monomolecular blade may be able to cut through something with relative ease, but there is not transverse force being applied to force the cleaved sections apart. At best, it creates a plane of damage through the target that is only one cell across. And most of those cells wouldn't even die; the cells that make up your body are largely self-repairing. While the area affected by the monoblade would be relatively large, the damage to individual cells would probably be minor, with the exception of those that suffer DNA damage.
Ignoring that they'd likely be impossible to construct and probably not all that effective, monomolecular weapons would be extremely dangerous to the person wielding them. That goes double if you have one of those stupid monomolecular whips. Can you imagine trying to use one of those things on someone, and then a breeze blows by and next thing you know, your severed head is rolling across the ground? Not ideal. So why would anyone ever use such a thing over a more traditional blade? Normal knives and swords can put to tons of practical uses in addition to being fighting weapons. You can use them to open Amazon packages without slicing your fingers off, for one.
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