"The receptionist’s phrase had prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim signal routed via Bell Europa. She’d assumed she’d wear a helmet studd

"The receptionist’s phrase had prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim signal routed via Bell Europa. She’d assumed she’d wear a helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a passive viewer as a human camera. But Virek’s wealth was on another scale of magnitude entirely. As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact. Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder."