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ten speed through emptiness, reason gone, bereft of logic and organization. A dull roaring pounded in his ears.
     Dimly he thought he could hear Charliebo frantically howling outside the door. There was a hammering, though whether outside
     the screen-secured door or inside his brain he couldn’t tell. He pressed his palms over his ears, letting the vorec spill
     to the floor.
    Something was coming out of the wall.
    A full-sense holo, a monstrous alien shape thick with slime and smelling of ancient foulness, an oozing shifting mass of raw
     biocircuitry-generated false collagen that pulsed slowly and massively, booming with each heave. Reflective pustles lining
     its epidermis bristled with raw neural connectors that reached for him. The hammering on the door was relentless now and he
     thought he could hear people shouting. They’d have to be shouting very loudly indeed to make their presence known through
     the sound-dampened barrier.
    He tried to block out sight and sound of the ballooningapparition. The door was security sealed to prevent unauthorized access. Where was the override? It was manual, he remembered.
     He fought the sensorial assault, tears streaming from his eyes, as he struggled to locate the switch.
    Bits and pieces of the false collagen were sloughing away from the nightmare’s flanks as it drifted toward him. The amount
     of crunch required to construct a projection of such complexity and reality had to be astronomical, Cardenas knew. He wondered
     how much of Parabas’s considerable power had suddenly gone dead as it was funneled into this single gate.
    As it drew near it became mostly mouth, a dark, bottomless psychic pit that extended back into the wall, lined with teeth
     that were twitching, mindless biogrowths.
    He stumbled backward, keeping the desk between the projection and himself.
    Near the center of the desk a line of contact strips were glowing brightly as a child’s toy. The expanding mouth was ready
     to swallow him, the steady roar from its nonexistant throat like the approach of a train inside a tunnel.
    Hit the release.
The voice that screamed at him was a tiny, fading squeak. His own.
The yellow strip.
He extended a shaky hand. He thought he touched the right strip. Or maybe he fell on it.
    When he regained consciousness he was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling of Vladimir Noschek’s office. Someone said
     two words he would never forget.
    “He’s alive.”
    Then hands, lifting him. The view changing as he was raised. He broke free, staggering away from his saviors, and they waited
     silently while he heaved into a wastepail. When someone pressed a mild sting against his right arm he looked around sharply.
    There must have been something in his expression that made the man retreat. His response, however, was reassuring. “No combinants.
     Just a pickmeup. To kill the nausea and the dizziness.”
    He managed to nod. The Brazilian turned to whisper to his companion. Like images drawn on transparent gels Cardenas saw collagen
     teeth bursting before his retinas as the afterimage of the monster continued to fade from his memory.
    “You scared the shit out of us.” Hypatia was watching him carefully. She looked worried.
    Something heavy and warm pressed against his legs. He glanced down, automatically stroked Charliebo’s spine. The shepherd
     whined and tried to press closer.
    “What happened?” one of the medicos asked as he closed his service case.
    Somehow Cardenas managed to keep down the anger that was building inside him. “It was a psychomorph. Full visual, audio, collagenic
     presence. The works. Sensorium max.
Why the hell didn’t somebody tell me this was a tactile screen?”
    “Tac…?” Both medicos turned dumbfounded stares on the east wall. It was Hypatia who finally spoke.
    “Can’t be, Angel. Designers aren’t given access to tactile. Nobody is. Uses too much crunch. Besides, that’s strictly military
     stuff. Even somebody as valued as Noschek