Newspaper is long dead. The screamsheets have replaced it. Select the news you are interested in at the dataterm and the relevant articles are downloaded direct to your PDA, computer, or printed for your convenience. Advertising can be smaller and less intrusive, because its based on your news profile, so targeted right for you. Subscription services available that will send you the latest sheets every day. It’s like the paper now only contains the news that you actually want to read, without all the rest of that junk.
Hasn’t changed much since the 1990’s. There billions of channels. Every home has a flat panel on more than one wall. While it has lost a lot of ground to virtuality, its established base and the fact that its cheap to produce and low-effort to interact with keep the humble TV going. As a broadcast medium it is expected that it will be here for years to come, just that certain types of show will leave the screen and more entirely to virtuality.
Was going to be the future in the 2010’s and early 2020’s: TV with hologram generator – no goggles, glasses or that bollocks, just 3D images projected in front of the screen. Took a hit when braindance become commercially viable in the 2020, but has basically been killed by Virtuality. Virtuality is just better in every conceivable way so 3D TV has been relegated to the technological graveyard. If your family was in the technician brand or above your parents probably have a 3D TV and a collection of films and shows that they refuse to buy the new virtuality versions because “they’ve already paid once”
It’s Legal Cocaine
—Nameless DMS executive.
The most immersive entertainment experience money can buy. The mind of an actor is recorded: thoughts, sensations, emotions, actions, experiences. You hook in via a special set of ’trodes and you experience everything they did, the braindance overrides all of your senses and bodily functions.
Originally an education and correctional tool, braindance exploded as an entertainment medium in the early 2020’s, completely killing 3D TV . Braindance requires a special player with specially adapted interface trodes to function, but during 2020’s the price of that player fell from thousands of dollars to hundreds, making it affordable to the person on the street. Once there the popularity skyrocketed as the ultimate sensory experience and very, very psychologically addictive. Any attempts to regulate it were crushed by a landslide of corporate lawyers from the mediacorps.
Braindance falls into a few categories: adventure, smut, drugs, education, correctional, lifestyle
Smut never acknowledged officially, but is by far the largest earner. Porn where you can feel everything and you can buy chips for every position, gender, body (yes, even full borgs) you can think of. For the corps it is also one of the easiest and cheapest to produce. Network 54 has a whole range of subsidiaries such that the forbidden fruit is never branded with their logo.
Drugs was a spectacular own goal for crime prevention. Record the experiences of people under drug effects and distribute as an anti-drugs message. In other words: get all the high with none of the risks to your body.
Education is the experiences of people doing things, in reality they are no better than a really good self-help video. It’s not really you doing it, so you don’t really learn the skill, you just have memories of it being done.
Correctional is where you see the darker side of braindance: because you experience everything, this includes their emotional point of view, which means that with repeated exposure braindance can start to change your worldview. The old US Penal service made extensive use of force braindance with simple recordings of compliance or guilt to “remodel” prisoners.
Lifestyle is simple: who doesn’t want to be a famous rockstar or powerful executive for a day?
Adventure is the hardest and most expensive to produce: its the equivalent of an action movie where you are being the star, except this is where the cost comes in, because you get the entire experience of the actor, which means if they are acting, you are acting, not living the experience. If they know that the special effects are done with wires and there is a drop net, so do you. So in order to get the experience, the person being recorded has to really believe that those things are happening to them.
Illegal if you know where to look, there are all sorts of things here: serial killers, murder victims, cybersoldiers in actual wars, social predators of all sorts, blood sports participants. If you can think of it, someone exists who can sell you the chip of it.
The “total experience” is where the big problems in (legal) production come in and why porn is the easiest: the sensations people want are the ones the actors are feeling, nothings really changed except the recording medium. Adventure is the hardest as braindance editing is an entirely black art based on instinct: removing one thing from a braindance stream can leave the experience feeling flat, it’s almost never something anyone can lay finger on, but users can “feel” the edit and don’t feel as immersed. This leads to intense corporate competition for the best editors who immerse themselves in their streams and tweak by gut feel. Immersed so long in brancedance they often don’t seem quite with it when interacting in meatspace… As for getting the source material for them to edit, the corporations literally have teams of people that go out and “find adventure” and try not to die whilst doing so.
Getting your braindance recording can be done a variety of ways:
After the fact
Recording “live” Via trodes / non-invasive
Recording “live” using a braindance cyberware
The first is by far the worst and least immerse, often not being suitable. Peoples memories just aren’t reliable – your meatbrain naturally edits out most of what you experience before committing it to memory. The experiences are flat, disjointed, vague – you feel like you are experiencing it through a lens – the lens of memory.
Recording live is the only way to fly, trode based rigs were impossible before 2026, but the same enhancements that allowed virtuality made non-invasive recording a possibility as well, they get the sensory and emotional experience, but are limited to picking up what the brain is processing, we are still limited by bandwidth of the actors meatbrain, but it is a full conscious stream and sensation. It’s also as good as you are going to get for a lot of lifestyle or educational braindances as chances are if the subject is someone that people want to be, they have enough clout to tell you that they are not getting cyberware installed for the recording.
As with all things, cyberware is where it’s at. By interfacing directly with the neural processor the braindance recorder can pull in everything the body is sending to the brain and everything the brain is feeling about it. These streams are easier to edit due to a more discrete signal and it is entirely possible that users will actually experience things slightly differently if their brain decides to focus on sensations that the actors brain dampened and visa-versa. It is by far and away the best experience (and used to be the only one), but requires your actors to have the wetware installed.
Experimentation has been done with totally synthetic braindance recordings done by AI’s weaving elements of existing ones or creating from recorded templates. Again they don’t feel quite right, and are generally only useful for educational or childrens programs. Rumours persist of people who experienced them being dazed and “zombied” for periods afterwards.
Braindance safety is an exciting one as it is even more a total body experience than virtuality. In theory the braindance player can suppress or limit the sensations, in practice, much like editing, it’s a black art and it is possible for malicious chips to bypass the safeties.
Previous national terrorist incidents have included where a batch of Killing Machine II was replaced by the experiences of a cow being led to slaughter – 25 people died within the first 2 hours alone. The Mirror Mirror braindance, again performing a factory replacement, was of a woman sitting on her coach braindancing while her body was rotting away, the chip overrode all body functions making it impossible to jack out of.
Even without the addiction concerns, braindance experiences can cause a hole host of psychological and physiological trauma – again to quote the matrix “your mind makes it real”. Particularly with some of the aforementioned illegal chips – the neural impulses can cause your body to go into shock and die.
More long term safety is the other thing – braindance can change your perceptions and feelings on issues, make you more receptive to a point of view because you have to all intensive purposes lived it, be used as an exciting version of aversion therapy, or conversely a pleasure-addiction therapy – the carrot and the stick, and rumours persist about subliminal messages implanted in the chips, commands transmitted directly into your subconscious. Don't forget this was technology invented to "re-educate" prisoners by way of aversion therapy!
Braindance’s rosy future took a massive hit with the formation of the ISA. The government now did have the clout to regulate it, declaring it a “controlled substance” – aka a drug. This means that the only legal braindances are ones that are approved by the government. This has substantially cut down on the legal braindances available: say goodbye to drug use and a lot of adventure and lifestyle dances (if they don’t fit the profile of “acceptable”). Also those educational ones about how to fly an AV or hotwire a car – for some reason they didn’t get through the censors.
New braindance releases have slowed, as now everything has to go through the approvals process, and they are pretty strict about what is “acceptable” content. It has killed most of the smaller legal operators, so now the only producers left are the megacorps churning out their manufactured line-towing crap and illegal bootlegs if you can find a fixer in the Outside zone. They’ve had to become a lot more circumspect now, as the penalty for getting caught is deeply unpleasant.
Oh Porn survived, but is relegated to the top shelf and requires proof of age (read: your SIN is registered as purchasing). Pre-ISA legal material has a grandfather clause where it gets approved with minimal checking if the corporation submits it and the subject matter is an approved one (to avoid creating a massive backlog reviewing a decades worth of material). To see if your braindance is legal there is a list you can access from any dataterm about what titles have been approved, rejected (and should be handed into to your local police station), or are approval pending.
Also, we are talking about a government that has made subliminal messaging, propaganda and crowd control into an art form, and now they get to approve, vet and edit the things that imprint directly onto your brain.
Braindance players for home use (2 sets of interface cables, more sold separately) can be bought for a few hundred bucks, a braindance recording to watch will cost about $50, but can be rented for $10 making them an affordable entertainment for most people.
Braindance parlours, where you rented a room with a bed, a player and your chip run to about $20-30 depending on how nice a place it is. They’ve taken a hit over time, when the players cost thousands the parlours were the only way the majority of people could experience it, now many people have personal players demand has dropped, but they are still about. The second hit they took was with government control, since after all they are peddling a controlled substance now, “respectable” joints in the outside are few and far between due to the pain to get a license then the number of investigations that happen afterwards. Seedy places in the dirty parts of the outside that can pack down and be gone at a moments notice are probably more common.
Braindance has lost some of its edge with the advent of virtuality. Some, but not all. Braindance is the complete sensory experience of what something is like, virtuality can’t compete with that for a pure experience. Braindance though is a recorded medium, you live through the memories, you can’t alter them, a virtual scene can adapt around you. Because its not the entire experience, virtuality is a lot cheaper to produce. Braindance is a solo experience, virtuality can be shared. While there will always be diehard fans of any given medium, the opinion of the media corporations seems to be that both will co-exist with different things sitting more naturally in one than the other. For Smut the total experience is where the fun is at, for adventures, the ability to interact and the huge cost difference in creation is pulling them more towards the virtuality end.
Investment is a different matter: with braindance being expense already and now a controlled substance it is seen as poorer bank-per-buck than virtual experiences that are the new and trendy thing. They are not getting rid of it, but the investment is definitely in virtuality at the moment.
Interesting hybrid approach: Braindance of Virtual Experiences. The latest braindance: CDC Mutant Hunter, where you live the life of a CDC agent “apprehending” dangerous carbon plague mutants was a hybrid production. Network 54 were keen to get on the government anti-plague bandwagon so arranged for a few of their solos with braindance rigs to join the government capture teams. Then drugged them while they were asleep, transported them into a warehouse that they had totally rigged up with virtuality and ran them through an “adventure” involving dangerous mutants trying to kill them. The solos believed that everything was real and reacted accordingly and the corporation got to produce a propaganda braindance that was both a best seller and earned them brownie points for a fraction of the cost and effort of normal.