They're called Trips, short for Travel Implants; and if they're not produced by one of the government licensed travel bureaux, then they're illegal. Up to one hour in length, all recorded on one little WORM disc the size of a standard CD, Trips offer the ultimate in virtual entertainment. Hook your mind into one through a Neural Induction Cap, or spider as we call it, and you can relive someone else's memories. Okay, so you don't necessarily share the thoughts or emotions of the guy that made the recording; but you do experience everything he (or she) experienced, through all five senses. Nor can you react differently. Trips aren’t an interactive video game. They’re passive recordings. The recorder’s own actions are the only ones you notice; but what you do get is total immersion, which no interactive game can yet offer. It's as though you were actually there, doing the same things yourself.

Rock concerts and educational guides, travels in exotic lands and dangerous sports form the basis for all the official collections. Guided tours of cities around the world have been recorded, complete with samples of the local cuisine. Armchair travellers can be plunged into the sights and sounds, smells and flavours of New York, Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro, to name just a few. Instead of live concert videos, supergroups now have their gigs stored to disc as Trips. Better even than Tri-D videos, you actually feel as though you’re at the concert; and the recordings are almost impossible to bootleg. Want to know what it feels like white water canoeing down the rivers of the Hindu Kush? National Geographic sponsored an expedition to record just that. Now anyone can experience the thrill themselves thanks to Trip technology, right down to the psychosomatic pain when the guy wearing the recording unit hit a rock and broke his wrist.

Not many individuals can afford the NIC units, the spiders, priced at nearly a quarter of a million apiece. Then there’s the playback deck, which isn’t cheap either. The recording equipment costs even more, and requires a licence from the Home Office, which is why the government is able to control their use so effectively; but there’s still a thriving black market. If you want to take a Trip, you need to visit one of the licensed travel bureaux with their limited libraries, or come to someone like me.

The government sites are all right, I suppose, if all you want to experience falls under the classification of 'family entertainment'. Once they started defining ratings, and proscribing discs, they opened up the market for illegals. I mean, they banned a perfectly good educational recording of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, just because the recorder got a bit hard for a pretty girl in one of the processions. I imagine that the sensation would probably puzzle women viewers — it’s not something they’d be used to — but it didn’t harm anybody.

According to official statistics, the number one Trip for last year was a ten minute short entitled 'Sledging the Cresta Run'. Unofficially, it was ‘An Evening with Eve’, a most accommodating young lady, as seen through the eyes of a very lucky guy called Adam. Recording units are small enough to conceal under a wig: you can’t even see them. Both Adam and Eve wore them, to record that particular Trip so ‘An Evening with Adam’ was also available for the female audience. Not that it’s uncommon for guys to want to plug into Eve’s viewpoint, and a few girls like the reverse. I even know some weirds that like to experience both; but again, they’re harming no-one.

As you might expect, most of the black market is for pornographic Trips. Adam and Eve are pretty tame really, just straight sex in a variety of positions. The punters that can afford the illegals generally want something more spicy: threesomes, bondage, S&M, or gay and lesbian scenes. I deal in all those, and a few of the more common kinks, but that’s where I draw the line. I don’t do snuff, kiddie, or animal Trips, not like some of the black market dealers. I know they make big money, but I do have some morals. I stick to hardcore without the perversions. I pay my premiums each week so the cops turn a blind eye, never stay too long in any one place, and I’m discrete. Stepping over that line would only draw unwanted attention and damage my nice, steady income.

It’s really the unwanted attention that concerns me. As long as the cops think that I’m just a small-time porn Trip dealer who never goes beyond the bounds of acceptable (rather than legal) decency, and they get their commission, they won’t look too closely at my other activities.

Occasionally I get a punter that asks if a disc can be changed, and I just tell them ‘no’. Last time, it was a smarmy little accountant who brought his own recording, wanting to play it through my spider. I wondered at the time how a cheap bean-counter like him had been able to make a recording; but it was innocuous enough, just him humping his missus. Then the pervert asked if I could edit the disc, to replace his wife with his daughter. I told him outright that it wasn’t possible. Next time I slipped my regular plain brown envelope to the boys in blue, I reported him. They never came back to me about it, for which I suppose I’m grateful. The publicity wouldn’t have done me much good.

The official line, as espoused by Government scientists, is that it’s not possible to modify a Trip. Once an experience has been written to WORM disc, it’s set in stone (so to speak). That’s what WORM means: Write Once, Read Many. After the sensations have been recorded, you can play it back as many times as you like, but you can’t store anything further on that disc, or overwrite what’s already there. Everyone knows that it’s possible to edit voice tapes, or photographs. The gutter press does it all the time. That’s why photos, tapes and even videos are no longer accepted in a court of law, unless the chain of evidence can be established. Trip discs are different. Because they can’t be edited, they’re considered acceptable by the lawyers, as a maker of snuff porn learned to his cost when he wired up his victim as the recorder. Sick bastard got the chair for that, and I still think it was better than he deserved. Living as I do among the slum dwellers of the EmFour sprawl, ethics might seem out of place, but I have some morals. It’s why I never touch that type of material.

The government probably even believes that discs can’t be altered once a recording has been made. The storage format is complex, with six independent, yet interlinked, tracks: one for each of the five senses, and one for the recorder’s own physical movements. It took nearly five years of research to determine the structure, and it was never documented. Just after the original record and playback units had been perfected, but before the data definitions could be detailed on paper, they closed down every lab that was working on Trip research. No-one had looked closely at further possibilities for the technology back then, so nobody realised that the information on disc could be modified. Some of the large corporates that can afford to sponsor their own research might still have secret facilities, and know better. I know better, but I have a slight advantage.

Contrary to the official government line, the sensations stored on a Trip disc can be changed. That’s my real line of business. It takes a lot of computer power, an insider’s understanding of the technology, and a flair for the artistic in all five senses, but a Trip can be altered to reflect a new reality. I have everything that’s needed. Dealing in porn thrills is a good cover story. It also keeps the bailiffs from my door until I’ve paid off the loan sharks. The Cray supercomputer didn’t come cheap, especially as it was bought with hard currency — there’s no credit transfers in the grey market. It also required bribes for falsifying the audit trail to hide its real destination, and the interest rates I pay are in three figures. Still, at the prices I charge, if I get just one real job every six months, I’ll have fulfilled my debt to Laura Street, who fronted the money, in another three years. If I manage my current project within timescale, I’ll be all paid up by the end of next year.

I suppose, having said all that, I should introduce myself. The perps in the sprawl call me Jez, but I was once known as Professor Jeremy Taylor. I was part of the original team at Edinburgh University that made the breakthrough in multi-sensory data storage, allowing Trip recording to become a reality.

Perhaps you’re wondering what an educated man like myself is doing, living among the lowlives, druggies and sleaze merchants of the sprawl. It’s a big step down from the ivory towers of academia. The government stopped Trip research once the crucial storage breakthrough had been made, claiming that it was on ethical grounds; and with that stigma, I just couldn’t find work. My name was too closely associated with the Edinburgh lab for any other academic establishment to offer me a tenure. Research corporations weren’t prepared to risk the scandal of employing me. I even applied overseas, but the story was the same everywhere I looked. So I chose to seek out a private backer willing to provide financial support while I continued my studies, and to lose myself in the neon-lit grime and Darwinian destitution of the sprawl. There, I have both my anonymity and my sponsor.

Ms Street is a loan shark, but not the type that breaks your legs if you’re a week behind with payments of a few quid. At least, I don’t think she breaks legs. She does maintain a small army of street samurai, ostensibly as bodyguards. She certainly doesn’t deal with small sums of money, but with five, six and even seven figure loans. Her rates are exorbitant, but she maintains enough personal interest in my work to ensure that I find clients able to pay my fees and hence to repay her loan.

As for the sprawl, it reminds me of the hellish London described in Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, which I once read when I was younger, or the rainwashed Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. An urban conglomeration stretching from the mouth of the Thames to the Severn estuary, the population overflow is reminiscent of Tokyo or Hong Kong. Apart from the heavily guarded enclaves and arcologies of the megacorps with their skyrise offices of glistening glass and shining steel, it’s dirty, overcrowded, and populated by druggies, cheap crooks and the other dregs of society. I hate the frenetic, suicidal pace of hustling with the street-smart dealers of the sprawl, but it gives me the anonymity I crave. At least I hope it does.

Sometimes I wonder if guys like that accountant have been sent by the government to check up on me. When they closed down the Edinburgh research unit, they probably decided to keep track of everyone that had worked on the project. I tried to slip into obscurity, but it wasn’t easy to cover my trail. That’s why I choose to maintain this low profile as a harmless sleaze merchant. If they have managed to trace me from Silicon Glen to the cesspools on the edges of the EmFour sprawl, I’m just another petty criminal, fallen on hard times and living on the fringes. Hopefully, too small to bother them. Dealing in porn Trips is illegal, but not a serious crime, and the prisons are full enough as it is. If they knew what I really did though, the best I could hope for would be a six by four room with no visitors and no chance of parole.

Unlike the depraved accountant, my real customers don’t need to ask if it’s possible to change a Trip disc. The people who can afford my services know exactly what can and can’t be done, and never come looking for me directly. Genuine clients all approach Ms Street. She has a vested interest in keeping both me and my equipment safe. She keeps a guard on the latter, at the godown in New Maidenhead where I have my laboratory cum studio. She acts as an agent on my behalf, more like a manager sometimes, dealing with the business of finding customers while I handle the production side of each task. She verifies their bona fides and makes the necessary credit checks before they’re ever introduced to me. It’s to her benefit, as much as mine, that she doesn’t make any mistakes; and delegating that task to her cuts down on my own overheads. It’s a good arrangement, as far as I’m concerned.

The last editing job I did was a nice simple one. I wish they were all as easy. It was for a large multinational corporate. They’re a household name, you’d recognise them if I told you, but client confidentiality forbids me. All they wanted was for me to add a newspaper to a Trip scene that someone had recorded. They even provided the paper, a Financial Times dated from last October. Like I said before, Trips are now accepted as evidence in a court of law. I suspect that I was probably creating an alibi for some suit, but in this business you don’t enquire too closely about motives. Nor do I pass judgement on my clients, as long as they pay promptly, and don’t expect me to break those few scruples that I have left.

My current project is a lot harder than just editing in an old newspaper. You might have heard of my client, Doctor Alfred Newman. I shouldn’t really have told you his name — sometimes I talk too much — but he isn’t going to sue. The publicity would be as damaging for him as to me. I knew him by reputation even before we were introduced by Ms Street. He made a fortune designing prosthetic and cybertech limbs for the medical establishment: he’s certainly rich enough to afford my services. Sad really, his daughter, Hilary, and her husband died in a hovercar accident just a few months before he came to me; on their honeymoon too. For all the advances in surgery over recent decades, the doctors were unable to save her. She was only twenty-four as well. That’s too young for anyone to die, especially a pretty girl with all her life still ahead. Doc Newman was grief-stricken. Hilary was his only child, and it’s why he came to me.

He brought a lot of video and Tri-D footage with him, film of her growing up. It covered everything, from first learning to walk to her wedding day, and every important event for twenty-four years in between: a complete diary of her life. In all, it amounted to nearly three hundred hours of tape. At first, I thought that he just wanted something to remember her by.

That alone would have been enough of a challenge, converting such primitive media to Trip format. Video is adequate for simple sights and sounds, but it’s not easy adding in the appropriate smells and flavours, and the tactile sensations are particularly tricky. Then there’s the perception of the observer's movements, which adds even more to the complexity. All of those would require creating from scratch, and manually editing into each scene. Finally, every sense needs to be perfectly synchronised, otherwise the viewer can recognise that something is amiss. If you’ve ever seen an old movie where the speech was out of synch with the actors' lips, you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, as I was saying, that wasn’t the task he wanted me to perform. While we watched it all through, and that alone took over a month, he explained that he wanted everything in the videos to be visualised from Hilary’s perspective rather than that of the photographer.

Well! I thought it strange. I decided that the poor doctor must have lost his mind; probably a result of his grief. He was prepared to pay well though, very well. I realised that this one job would be enough to repay all my debts in one go, so I wasn’t about to try and dissuade him. Once I’d learned the nature and size of the task, we turned to business. I estimated that it would take four years, and quoted him a fee of five million. Allowing for the interest on my loan, it was more than enough to pay off Ms Street, and she nodded agreement with that price. It seemed pretty reasonable, and I wasn’t taking advantage of Doctor Newman’s grief-stricken state of mind at all. He seemed to appreciate the enormity of the task, and didn’t even flinch at the figure. In fact, he said he’d pay me double that if I could do the job in just two years.

***

I’d modified Trip scenes often enough, but I’d never before created one from scratch. I wasn’t even sure it could be done, yet the principles were simple enough. While the WORM disc used for Trip recordings can’t physically be changed, it’s just a matter of copying the data onto computer disc, editing it there, and then writing the modified data onto a new WORM disc. Apart from the programs to actually read and write the Trip formatting, most of the computer software for editing the data is based on commonplace applications such as 3-D modelling, raytracing and sound editing. It’s funny really: I’m working on the leading edge of technology, yet all the tools and utilities that make the task easier have been around for decades.

We started by watching through all the videos again while I made extensive notes. With only sight and sound recorded on tape, I’d need to create the sensations of taste, smell and touch completely from nothing. The video helped to some extent: at least I could see what foods were being eaten, which flowers filled the gardens with fragrance, the material of the clothing Hilary wore and the objects she touched. As we watched, I quizzed Doctor Newman, drawing on his memories. Under my probing, he described everything that he could remember from each scene we saw, his own impressions of every event.

He wasn’t as fussy about the quality of the video footage, the two dimensional VHS, that is. After all, he said, childhood memories are less clear than recent ones; and that’s what these were, pictures from Hilary’s childhood. That made things simpler. The mono sound would have been difficult to convert to true three dimensional stereo, although I had a program on the Cray that did a pretty good approximation. It was old technology, a throwback to computer game writers from just before the end of the millennia, but sophisticated enough despite its age. Doc Newman listened to the results through headphones, and declared himself satisfied, although the perfectionist in me wasn’t totally happy. Still, he was the client, and paying well for it. With his acceptance of the limitations, I set about the work in earnest.

The first stage entailed digitising every scene from the film footage onto the Cray’s own disc storage, called Frame Grabbing, and using that to build a three dimensional model of each inside the computer’s memory. It was easier with the Tri-D than the video; but the machine was designed for complex mathematical modelling and lapped up the task. The software for such work had been around for years, used by the CIA, and for military photo reconnaissance among other applications. Originally intended to create models from satellite and aerial photographs, where there were only a few stills of a site, the sheer number of frames on video made the program’s output so much more accurate, although it took a long while to run.

Doctor Newman remained with me for the first few clips. He wasn’t overseeing my work, but seemed to have a genuine interest in the technology. He asked frequent questions about the techniques and algorithms for adjusting the shadowing and the Doppler effects of movements, as I translated each object within the computer model to an independent entity, and built up the texture maps and light sources.

Once each scene was complete, I was able to define co-ordinates and aspects of view for different positions within the model, and programmed a path so that the observer seemed to move through the scene. Later I would code this to show Hilary’s own perspective of the location, but at such an early stage I just wanted to verify that the theory worked, and that it could build a Trip-format visual track from such raw material. The technique for rendering such a model has been around for years, and is known as Ray Tracing. The programs I employed were no different to those used by graphic artists on home computers at the end of the century: but using the super-computer I had the advantages of speed and complexity. I could easily manipulate models that were too large for any home computer, work to a higher resolution of detail, and render a single frame in seconds. The Cray bustled silently away, adjusting the areas of brightness and shade for the ambient lighting, determining reflections from those surfaces textured as reflective, and blurring the nearer objects slightly to mirror Hilary’s 20/15 vision.

Again using the filmed footage, I built up a series of animations for each object, allowing them to move around within the model, following the paths and actions that they had done in the videos. It wasn’t just the other people in the videos that moved: the branches of trees swayed in the wind, and waves broke on the shore in the holiday shots. That task accomplished, I was able to retrace the observer’s path through a dynamic scene.

It was just as well that the doc did stay through that first trial run, as we hit a setback at that point. When we laid down an experimental visual track from the first scene, displaying it through a standard computer monitor, he was dismayed by the distorted perspective. I had to explain that Trip discs didn’t merely display their visual effects like a video or a computer game, with distant objects reduced to a smaller size. The mind itself is more sophisticated, picking up its clues from stereoscopic vision and experience as well as perspective. Try looking at a nearby object, closing each eye in turn, and you’ll see what I mean. I explained all that to him through the use of simple optical illusions, and the paintings of M.C. Escher; showing how the mind could be tricked into a false sense of perspective when it’s forced to rely on the size of objects alone. Remember when you first looked through a pair of binoculars? Everything seems closer despite the fact that the perspective is identical to viewing without the binoculars. After the first time, your mind recognises that the view is no closer, merely enlarged. That’s experience.

Faced with this problem, although I didn’t understand why it was a problem, the Doctor brought in an opthalmist, Claire Vieux from America’s John Hopkins, and a neurosurgeon, Kurt Denkweise from the Medical college at Leipzig. I explained it all again to them. They, in turn, introduced an Artificial Intelligence expert to the group. Throughout the project, they worked as a support team. Initially, although they were only with me for two days each week, I was able to delegate many of the more mundane tasks to them, easing my workload and making the two-year timescale more feasible. As time went by, they developed a greater understanding of the technologies involved. The perspective of a woman was especially useful, and their support and assistance became invaluable. I felt like a movie director, with a crew of specialist technicians.

Adding the sensations of smell and taste to each scene was a long job, but not overly difficult. We simply made a series of recordings, building up a library of aromas and flavours. They were all carefully digitised, and I was then able to copy them into each scene as appropriate. With the sensations stored on computer disc, I could edit them in the same way a sound engineer might edit a piece of music, separating them into individual pheromones rather than tracks, emphasising some and nullifying others. From my notes, I knew that Hilary hadn’t liked green beans, but there was footage of her eating them at a friend’s birthday party, pulling a face as she did so. To create a sensation of distaste, I added an oiliness to the basic flavour, in much the same way the hypothetical sound mixer might have dubbed in a backbeat.

Tactile sensation, the feeling of touch, was always the most complicated of the sensory tracks to modify in Trip format. Touch consists of much more than just determining texture: nerves react in many different ways to different states. An object can be solid, liquid or even gaseous, hard or soft, rough or smooth, elastic, viscous or rigid. It can even feel different depending on how you touch it. Slip your hands slowly into a bowl of water, and it’s soft: hit the surface with the flat of your palm, and it can hurt. Or try brushing your hand across a carpet, first with the pile, then against it. Those two commonplace examples give you some idea of the complexity of touch. Again, an object can be hot or cold, moist or dry; and those sensations are relative. Warm water can still seem chill on a Summer’s day.

Like all computer artists — and I see myself as such, as well as a scientist — I put a piece of myself within my work. Sometimes, in the computer business, such narcissism is called an Easter Egg, but it’s not anything new. Film directors have done the same, predating the advent of the computer. Hitchcock, for example, always appeared in a walk-on role in his own films. In my case, it was only a small vanity, a cameo role, a face in the crowd at the church on Hilary’s wedding day.

The footage had some delightful scenes that really taxed my abilities. The most difficult was Hilary’s eighteenth birthday party, when she’d had too much to drink. It was all the harder because the doc wanted her to seem just happily drunk, when she looked almost paralytic in places. Another episode he wished changing showed her dancing closely with her new husband on their wedding day. He requested that I should tone down the obvious passion and eroticism, so that she appeared more the archetypal blushing bride. I guess that’s how all fathers like to imagine their daughters. Other challenging clips depicted the twelve-year-old Hilary trying to wash a muddy dog; while a fourth, still on the theme of animals, had her learning that stroking kittens can lead to static shocks.

***

It’s been two years now since I started telling this story, and I’ve completed the Trips for Doctor Newman. I must have done a good job. When I’d finished, he not only paid the ten million that he’d promised, he offered me a position within his own organisation leading a new division conducting further studies in Trip technology. I might have stayed in the sprawl — after all, I now owned all my equipment outright, and Ms Street was willing to continue as my agent — but his offer was just too tempting. A return to academia, but with all the staff, funding and equipment that I needed; running my own research facility, with no fear of government reprisals. No more peddling porn thrills to perverted punters in the smoke-filled backrooms of seedy bars, bribing the police to turn a blind eye. No more struggling to sleep each night in the cheap coffin motels of the sprawl, surrounded by twenty-four hour clamour and the bright glare of neon and strobes.

***

Some months after I took up my new position, the doctor decided to retire as CEO of Newman Industries. He brought his successor on a tour of the research complex, introducing her to all the heads of department, including myself.

"Hilary, this is Professor Taylor, the head of our Trip research division. You won’t remember him. I recruited him from Edinburgh University when I founded the facility, while you were still in the hospital recuperating after the accident. Professor. May I introduce my daughter, Hilary. Now that I’m retiring, she’ll be running the company in my stead."

Logic told me that she couldn’t be standing there beside her father. Hilary was dead, more than two years in the grave. As she shook hands with me, her skin was cool to the touch, but not too cool. It was real, living flesh and blood. She was perfect. As beautiful as she’d appeared in all those videos that I’d so painstakingly recreated as Trips. Moreso, as beautiful and virginal as any daughter seen through the eyes of a loving father. I’d suspected Doctor Newman’s real purpose, but the introduction to Hilary still came as a shock.

The doctor’s own skills with prosthetics, the AI specialist, opthalmist and neurosurgeon who had been seconded to work with me, the memories that I’d produced for him. Even knowing everything that I did, I still couldn’t believe what my mind insisted was the truth: not until she spoke herself, her voice as soft and musical as I remembered.

"Oh but Daddy, I do know Professor Taylor. I’ve met him before, don’t you remember? He was a guest at my wedding."