Alla's Rule of Doors decreed that the beast slavered in all thresholds.
       Thus, she avoided the split-second Zen moment of not being in either/or. As a child, she'd tried to hop, jump, leap. As an adult, she paced her steps to make sure her body lingered in the door for as short a breath as possible.
       Today, she lengthened her stride down the hallway, forcing her new assistant, John, to scurry beside her, his gaze fixed on some inner space of newsfeed, or virtcatz. He stumbled into her when she came to a short stop at the transport tube, his wolverine whiskers tickling the purple sensory blotches on her bare arms.
       Today, for the big meeting at advertising headquarters, she'd come prepared to present; and the thrust of her argument to the Kən'glämərət was the perfection of herself and the poison dart frog sequence she wanted to insert into the fall season updates -- minus the poison of course. Instead of venom, her designed skin blotches emitted pheromones engineered to attract those who were willing to lick skin to achieve a rush.
       She just had to get through the doors between here and there.
       "About the genome," John said, after apologizing. "Next update, I think we should add more wolverine to the sequence. The kids are all crazy about it."
       She could've figured that out for herself. Her latest assistant was a walking advertisement for the fashion he wished to mass-produce -- metrosexual, in a masculine way, but too much hipster in the chin line and ears for her taste.
       "Too done," she said, foot tapping. The lights above the tube flickered, counting down their entry point. "We need something fresher. Tubular. Groovy. Rad."
       She needed not to have to go through doors, but her job, which hardly ever required her to leave her open-plan-ult-Scando-penthouse, had apparently activated the hardly-ever clause today. So far, she'd made it out of her front door, and now, here she was, waiting for the next elevator capsule, with a new assistant -- they never lasted long -- and he was still arguing with her about the fall roll-out.
       "I don't know those words," John said, "but I think you mean extranor, or woooshie."
       Three, two, one. The tube entry flickered green.
       Coming from a full stop, she knew the best method of entry was to simply step and let the beast attack, trusting her momentum to propel her forward and through, leaving as little of her soul behind as possible.
       John prodded her with a cleared throat and a tentative tap on the shoulder.
        The entry point flickered back to red, and her shoulders relaxed. They'd have to wait for the next open module. The space elevator never stopped its circuit of up and down to the Kən'glämərəts, the car they'd missed would be filled at the next level up. A small delay wouldn't make them late to the meeting of her life.
       "I wanted to hear your other options before the meeting," she said, stretching her neck, achy from trying to turtle into her body.
       "Lynx," John said, after a brief stare into the nothingness of his feed, but his tone did not hold any conviction of belief. A few hand gestures later, while her foot kept tapping, he blurted out, "Flamingo!"
       Her mind on the door, she startled when his word hit. "What the hell would we do with flamingo in the genome? Pink feathered hair? The ability to stand on one leg? Why the fuck would the kids pick our update when they could have claws and fangs, night-vision, or the ability to swim like a dolphin for a cycle?"
       John's whiskers shriveled. Her conscience twitched.
       Three. Two. One. The entry flickered green.
       Heart pounding, her feet stopped. Sweat beaded up under her breasts and down her ribs, acrid, oniony with the Italian delivery eaten last night.
       She spun. "Tell me we've got something good. Something useable," she said, close enough she just knew he could smell her, if not her sweat, then the coffee-stale breath. "Or they're going to crucify us."
       "Um," John said. The entry point was still green. "We can talk on the way up?" He reached out to hold the door open.
       Her heart sputtered, thrummed into a higher gear, and the sweat threatened to merge with her waistband. "Fine," she said. She just had to take one step.
       She lurched through, and the moment began, the Zen infinity of both yes and no, the not where the beast lived.
       And true to its nature, the beast came. In a trickle at first, like fog descending with sunset, creeping over grass and flowing through bushes, then as the not took hold, the beast reared, filling her all with blackness. A giant blackness that moved, had form, coalesced into the mass of nightmares, full of squeaks and bubbling pops, and the odors of old trash, dog shit, stale litterboxes, and congealed grease, and extruding viscous arms, pseudopods, surfaces rippling with razors.
       Her breath caught on the edges of time. The roar, "Mine," the beast said, every time. Mine for the moment. And the moment was now, and the time was forever.
       When the momentum of her step completed her transition through the door, she'd been in the hell between for eternity, for all-time. But time had resumed, and the beast couldn't follow.
       Her momentum carried her into the capsule, and her node links automatically switched routers to the elevator's net. In motions of old habit, she reacclimated herself to the normal, stretching to release the knots in her back, counting to remind herself of her past, and then her brain snapped into focus.
       "Fucking flamingos," she said.
       Behind her, John was frozen, shaking hand held out. He stared back from the open port, his mouth open so wide she could see the results of his latest genome update--the series of additional taste buds activated in little nodules on his tongue.
       And then she knew. Somehow the beast had followed her when it'd never been able to do that before. The larger part of her had already tensed her body into familiar muscle memories, hunched her shoulders, and curved her back, forced her nails to dig tightly into her palms.
       Although she knew her body was shaking as much if not more than John's rictus dance, she turned. She did not mean the motion to be slow. She meant to whirl, to pounce, thinking perhaps to fling the beast back through the stuck portal, back into the threshold.
        Then she could shut the door, and they'd be on their way. Her job would be safe, and John would be safe (if he came up with something better than flamingo, at least). They'd have two hours in the cushioned capsule before she'd have to do it all again.
       She'd make sure, for the rest of her life, to never, ever, let anyone hold a door for her again, never, if she could just get this door shut, just get the beast, which flickered and flowed, howling in front of her
       "John," she meant to yell, though the words came out as a strangled squeak, much like the turn she'd meant to be a whirl. "Close the door."
       No response, and the beast grinned with ten thousand slobbery mouths stretching. "Mine."
       "Look at me," she shouted this time, reaching out to grab him. "Shut the fucking door."
       John blinked.
       When his eyes opened, he wasn't there. Maybe he was in his virtual, maybe he was gone forever, but he wasn't there now.
       The beast was given flesh. And through flesh, had access to the genome update center, flickering on the virt of John's internal screens. That realization hit both her and the beast at the same time, with a smirk from formerly-John.
       She lunged forward, trying to grab his hand before he could gesture before he could download and install.
       But his hand went up, and hers slapped empty air.
       The thing that had been John activated its genetic sequence, downloading and preparing for bio update through the netplants deep in his cortex, the ones that could spin apart the very DNA of life and twist it back together. She knew this by the snap of the beast's head into center, like a salsa dancer pointing and snapping through a turn, and by the subtle, slight twitches on the skin, ripples of coding sequencing.
       "Please move away from the door," the capsule said, sounding angry, which meant they'd been warned at least once already. "Depressurization will occur in two minutes. You have been warned." The elevator had a schedule to meet. "And mind the gap." The elevator did have accidents like this, that was true. But statistically speaking, the average person was more likely die by an impacted toenail than on the space elevator to the Kən'glämərət.
       The klaxon beeped a steady throb of basso anger, and the interior lights flashed red. "Please clear the door immediately." All the active viewscreens blared numbers, the countdown, which a distracted part of her brain noted was under a minute.
       Which wasn't too long, except that even if she was out of the infinity of not, John still had a foot in the door. And that foot had finished downloading. And the beast that had been John had finished downloading. The foot in the door shivered and bulged, and the sock split as the beast's tentacle morphed and John's foot -- not John's foot, the beast's foot -- not the beast's foot but John's tentacle....
       The beast fully flowed into John, code given flesh, the malevolence of the threshold given form.
       Thirty seconds left, and she still hadn't moved, feet stapled one step away from the shards of her former assistant.
       He was fully in the cocoon of the morph, skin pulsing and bulging in agony. The beast, John, laughing. "Mine," the thing said. Then even its mouth pulsed, the lips grew slobbery, and teeth clinked to the floor in a rain, and the smile tightened into an orifice of more tentacles.
       And the countdown was at twenty, and she had to act. With the eighteen seconds left, she lunged forward, arms in front, her full weight barreling down on the threshold beast, the remnants of her latest assistant. Her momentum was enough to propel the beast back, further back into the door.
       And for three seconds, it looked like her plan might work, that the thing would be caught in the door, and the door would close because the door always closed. And the thing would be in the door, and then the thing would be gone until the next door.
       She could handle that, and there probably wouldn't even be a meeting, what with the death of her latest assistant. Instead, there would be murmuring of sympathy. She'd have a few more weeks to figure out what genetic characteristics to put in the next update, to figure out the standards of beauty and popularity, of desirability, to set the trend for yet another genetic season.
       A final crescendo of lights and sound, the automated warning system on its last gasp, the finale.
       She braced and held the thing tight in the threshold.
       There was a lurch and a thrum as the capsule rejoined the chain of the elevator. But when she opened her eyes, the beast licked her forehead with twenty mutant tongues, bumpy with activated taste papillae.
       Now the capsule was moving with the beast braced against the doors, preventing the massive steel from closing.
       The beast licked again, perhaps picking up the pheromones from her skin blotches because it closed its eyes in satisfaction and let its tongue linger on her skin, swiping left, then right, leaving a trail of slime on her cheekbone.
       Even the capsule didn't seem to know what to do about this situation. She assumed frantic alarm warnings were going off in some control tower waiting for an actual person to intervene, or the person had already intervened or was even now trying to intervene. If she didn't get the beast out of the door, the door wouldn't shut.
        If the door didn't shut, she would depressurize in ten more seconds.
       Then, the beast would exit the elevator at the top, at headquarters, at the place from which all mods flowed seasonally, according to whim and market projections and the latest hot young thing's opinions. This time mods would flow from the beast. The beast would use John's virtz to breach the mainframe, and the next wave of fashion would fell humanity.
       The threshold of her doorway would truly become a Universal Rules of Doors.
       She had to shut the door, which the beast strained against. Modified genetic updates continued to parse through its body, forcing muscles and sinew to grow, strengthening chains of fibers, and aligning cells into purpose.
       The counters helpfully flashed '30 seconds' until depressurization. A human voice from the speakers: "You need to close the doors."
       "No shit," she hollered back, and the vibration of her own rage triggered a thought, and the thought became action.
       She pulled up her subsystems, flicking through the profiles she'd built for the Kən'glämərət, the ones she knew weren't quite there, the ones that had been waiting for inspiration.
       Not the fairy sequence -- too frail, too light, wings too gauzy, and only visually effective. Nor the goblin mods of the gothic dark line -- too withered and elegantly shriveled, even if the claws she'd designed were razor sharp.
       No, this next one, her third look for the season. She found the look she was already wearing -- the not-poison dart frog. The coding was already there, the underlying gene sequence sound. She just had to revert it back and reprogram herself.
       As the Beast was doing. There was a shower of exploding pustules, a sloshing nastiness of putrefying wounds, a reek of rotten decay.
       She flipped through the menus, tossing virtual code here and there, cutting and pasting. There'd be no time to run the result through the emulator, no chance for a mainframe coherency check before implementation. Either her hacks, her down-and-dirty coding, would work....
       Or the beast would win.
       Already the form formerly known as John had become a monster. It was a conglomeration of pulpy octopus, grotesque and scaly body, and a general outline that pulsed dementia. Only madness could envision it and the insanity of the borderland in which it dwelled.
       She spared a precious few seconds of regret for the terribly young John and all his metrosexual wolverine hipness, and the last remnant of him pulsed into the slobbering beast.
       Her code flailed, erupted a hiccup of mismatched sequences, which she fixed and sent to compile.
       One tentacle tightened about her neck. And now the beast had her hands, but the update had already started, and she braced herself for the peculiar floating to spread through her skin, the twitch of resequencing commencing.
       "Mine," the beast said, a roar, triumphant.
       Its thousand tongues flickered over her skin as the beast held her tight, enveloping her in its reek of madness
       Her bladder lost control, and her body quaked, and the beast licked.
       Slow and thoughtful, bumpy tongues played with her blotches and quivered about her neck, her forehead, down the curve of her collarbone, in familiar ways.
       A thousand times, she'd walked through doors, and each time the beast had come, taken her, trapped her like this in the moment of between. A thousand times, she'd suffered an eternity in its embrace.
       The beast licked and licked in throbbing glee.
       The capsule screamed a final warning, red claxons, and lights, staccato bursts of surreality melting into each other while she waited, twitching.
       The beast twitched as the poison hit, stiffening.
       Her vision spotted and whirled, then spasmed.
       The tentacles flung her away.
       "Not yours," she said, through a raw throat. "A thousand times never yours."
       The pressure doors slammed shut.
       The John that had been the beast released and slumped to the floor.
       The compressions of ascent popped her ears.

       When the capsule opened at the Kən'glämərət level, she let go of what had been John's hand and prepared herself for a running exit.
       She hoped this time no one would try to hold the door.