He was surrounded. He tried to hide behind the flat, smoked-glass rectangle, but the spheres formed a complete circle around it, a chain of beads on an invisible string. Each was as smooth as a billiard ball, a solid yellow, red, green, or blue, with a white stripe around which black letters and numbers scrolled like a marquee. Beyond the spheres was only empty black space.
Red Wraith considered the old-fashioned iconography. The rectangle was an RTG system access node with spherical LTGs circling it. No big deal. So why did Louis Cheng find it so frightening?
They were only pretending to be LTGs. He knew what they really were. Eyeballs. Watching him. See-that large dot that kept circling around the band of white on the red sphere, hidden between the letters? It was the pupil. They were eyes, watching him, waiting for him to make a move. He tried to make himself smaller, but the rectangle didn't hide him. Instead it reflected his image-reflected it out to the killer eyeballs, telling them where he was. With a terrible dread, he realized that the mirror was talking to the eyeballs-sending them messages. And there was no es cape. That blackness-it went on and on, never ending. He was a tiny speck, trapped here. Any second now the eyeballs would open their gaping mouths and devour him whole…
DIAGNOSIS: DELUSION. SEVERE PARANOIA COMBINED WITH PHOBIA. TREATMENT RECOMMENDATION: TREAT SUBJECT LOUIS CHENG WITH POSITIVE RESPONSE CONDITIONING PROGRAM POSCON 1.2 TO RESTORE NEUTRAL RESPONSE TO NON-THREAT ICONS.
Another notation followed: TREATMENT TERMINATED WHEN SUBJECT EXPIRED.
Red Wraith was returned to the sub-menu. He chose another simsense file: PAULA WEBBER.