Armour. Stone-skin. Clothes that are not clothes.

YMA-001 was logged as a garment and removed with a diamond-tipped rotary saw. Standard surgical steel would not cut it. Off the body it contracted to approximately sixty percent of on-body dimensions in fourteen minutes and did not re-expand. It is not clothing. It is a semi-organic secondary biological layer: hybrid of tissue and engineered polymer, interfaced with host integument and nervous system, grown and then attached.

Four phases in the matrix. Layer Alpha carries tungsten-rhenium inclusions, 15 to 40 nanometres, at roughly 10¹⁴ particles per cubic centimetre, arranged on a periodic three-dimensional lattice — not a random fill. The Soviet polymer chemists spent eleven months on this object. The compiler's instruction is to stop calling it a coat. Call it a grown instrument.