"Several tall stacks of electronic equipment stood in a loose circle around what appeared to be a transparent coffin. Paul Cramley lay in it, floating in a translucent pink liquid. He was naked, his face covered by a conical mask of blank flesh, the apex of which fused into a thick plastic air tube that snaked away into a socket in the top corner of the coffin. Hundreds of filaments no thicker than hair sprouted from the skin along his spine; every few centimeters clusters of them were braided together and plugged into thick bundles of fiber-optic cable."