The man who appeared, chair and all, was dressed in an immaculate, tailored suit from one of the finest designers in Paris. Lanier knew because he owned a couple of them himself. The visitor’s short dark hair was swept back from a face with aristocratic European features, features Lanier remembered well. The imagery was perfect, down to the detail of the threads of his suit and the individual strands of hair. Lanier would have sworn the other man was actually in the room with him instead of being simply a virtual projection, but that came as no surprise. There was nobody in the world better at virtual-reality technology than Fuchi Industrial Electronics, and the image was as real as their tech could make it (which was "realer than reality," if you believed their ads). The man who sat across from Miles Lanier was Richard Villiers, CEO of that megacorporation. He was also Lanier’s former boss and his good friend.