Post by senko on Sept 1, 2021 2:21:48 GMT
This was partially inspired by Red Dwarf's better than life.
In the late 25th Century mankinds entertainment systems saw a revolution with the new 5D Artificial Reality system, the 5th dimension is emotion. Using telepathic circuits acquired from an alien race the 5D system is able to cause a viewer to actually experience the emotions of their character. Whether you wish to experience the racing heart and joyous sensations of a young woman in love, the terror of a child in a horror movie or the grim determination of Batman 1,205 Batman returns again you can do it with our systems. Essentially using the system you don't just experience the movie from the perspective of a character you are that character. You don't forget your past or get their memories but everything they experience in the movie is shared by you in place of your normal reactions. So a normally brave 6'10" man can feel what a petite girl would if she thought someone was stalking her, he will be nervous and frightened and feel helpless (assuming your watching that kind of psychological thriller).
Now normally this doesn't have a long term effect on the viewer for a number of factors first your aware it is a movie you can pause, rewind etc. Even if the actor/actress watched it from the point of view of their character that knowledge would still be there e.g. I am Jennifer Gray actress not Stormcloud the strongest super being in this world. Secondly even movie marathons only last a day or two at most and third most people would be chosing to experience things they want either things completely alien (our man from earlier wanting to understand how his girlfriend feels at times) or things we want for ourselves (watching superheroes to experince that courage). However certain groups have found a way to abuse this technology by putting people into continuous long term scenarios they believe are real and making them keep experiencing specific emotions in response to a given trigger. Which is where you can go a number of ways depending on your group some examples are . . .
Corporate Control
Corporations have found the new 5D AR can be used to help enusre employee loyalty. This involves corporate trips where they have a long trip during which their sleeping mind is made to experience several virtual years where they are a "good employee". Feeling guilt when they buy products by other companies, feeling bad when they question management, feeling proud when they contribute to the corporation succeeding and so on. Its aimed to produce loyal, obedient employees who don't question management because they know management know's better than them.
Toys for the wealthy
Unscrupulous adult entertainment industries have found they can use this to train the perfect obedient dolls to sell to wealthy clients. They target runaways and have them continuously subjected to a training program to enforce certain behaviours and beliefs before selling the new "doll" to their buyer after altering them physically to match the clients tastes.
There are plenty of other ways you can go from government actions to create agents in an opposing country to simply that the technology is not as safe as believed and constantly watching the same movies and experiencing the same emotions can slowly shift a persons personality.
The party can stumble across this by accident or wind up as part of an event like a corporate team building exercise and notice the employess personalities are changing noticeably each time they sleep. From their it can be a short term adventure to topple one specific threat, an open ended ending with people aware of the issue going on after they leave or potentially even setting in motion events to cause 5D technology to be banned.