Simsense

Simsense is not video. Video records what a camera pointed at. Simsense records what a nervous system did: the muscle firing, the balance, the pressure on the skin, the adrenaline, the intention arriving a fraction of a second before the movement. Play it back and you don't watch somebody run down a corridor: you run down it, in their body, with their fear.

That is why it was worth inventing at all. It was invented in San Diego, in the electronics industry down the coast, by people solving a recording problem rather than a storytelling one, and the studios up here worked out what it was for. Recording it has been Hollywood's business ever since, and it is still done the way film was done: on lots, with crews, with a performer wearing a rig.

Two facts govern half the jobs in this city. Copying a sim is trivial. Forging one is impossible.

Copying is trivial#

It's data. A master duplicates bit for bit, as many times as anybody likes, and so does everything derived from it. There is no version of this where a recording is a unique physical object.

Which means nobody has ever technically held the only copy of anything. Exclusivity in this trade is a promise, and promises are what actually get bought and sold. Remember that whenever somebody pays a great deal of money for the only copy of something.

Forging is impossible#

Nerve conduction isn't uniform between people. Signal speed varies, so does the distance it travels, so the delay between intention and sensation is individual and consistent, limb by limb. A recording carries that pattern at full resolution. It's called the print, and street usage is exactly that: does it carry a print?

You can edit content, but you cannot manufacture a print, and every attempt fails the same way: it is too consistent. Real nerves are noisy, the noise drifts as the body tires, and the drift across a recording correlates with what the body was doing in it. A fake either has no drift or has drift that doesn't match the content. It takes a lab an afternoon.

So a recording proves three things nothing else in this world proves together: that a specific body made it, that the body was alive and working while it was made, and that nobody has touched it since.

Raw and mapped#

The other distinction, and the one the industry runs on. It isn't about copying: both of these copy freely.

Raw is what the rig wrote, at full bandwidth, exactly as one nervous system produced it. It's close to unplayable by anyone else: your neurology isn't the performer's, and raw fed straight into a stranger's head is overwhelming, wrong, and in the wrong circumstances medically dangerous. Master means raw.

Mapped is the playable edition: raw put onto a standard response curve, compressed, normalized and made safe for anybody's head. The mapping is one-way. Everything that made the recording that person's is precisely what gets averaged off to make it wearable by everyone.

So raw is the only thing that is evidence, and it's also the only thing that is proof against you. That's why masters get stolen, why they get destroyed, and why a studio will spend more defending a vault than a set.

Better than life#

A BTL is a chip with the peak controls taken off. Legal simsense is capped: peak controls are the legally recommended limits on ASIST signal level and modulation, and every commercial chip respects them. A better-than-life chip does not, so the signal lands harder than the body it lands in, and it stimulates the limbic area directly, the pleasure center, which wrecks the biochemistry and is the whole of the addiction. The street calls them beetles, mindbenders, playback, tracers and zombie chips. It calls the people who cannot stop chipheads.

Most chips do not last long, and that is the business model. Short life plus addiction is a market, and organized crime owns it.

California is the permissive state, and that is our problem specifically. Peak control limits are national, and the California Free State allows higher peaks than the UCAS or the CAS, because the entertainment industry lobbied for it. High-peak chips are called Californian hots, or cal-hots, and they are a black-market product named after the place the crew lives.

The kind that matters here is the dreamchip. A dreamchip is an ordinary simsense recording modded into a BTL, and canon's own description of how it is done is studio-produced simsense with the peak controls simply removed. Most are private recordings; the popular ones are pornography, recorded crimes and heroic fantasies, which the street calls fairy tales. There is a market for chips where the person recording dies.

A raw master is a dreamchip by accident, since nothing has been mapped off it and nothing capped, so a stranger wearing one gets the whole signal at the amplitude one nervous system produced, with no curve in the way. A studio vault and a Triad's back room are holding the same object, and only one of them thinks it is holding a legal one. It can be a high and an injury in the same thirty minutes, because a shooting day is whatever the schedule contained, in the order it happened.

Two other kinds exist and both matter more than they sound. A moodchip strips everything but the emotive track, sold as euphoria, aggression or desire under names like Blue Passion and Red Meanie, with the reticular override disabled, so the user can walk around while wearing it. A personafix rewrites who the user thinks they are into somebody specific, usually famous, and gets used in meatpuppet parlors and, occasionally, on an infiltrator who needs to believe their own cover.

Both are on Vernacular, and what a rig in a skull costs its owner is on Essence and chrome.

Then why steal a master at all?#

Because possession here is an inventory problem rather than an information one, and that catches people out.

A production's raw masters live on logged cartridges: one per shooting day, checked in and out of a vault, initialled. Getting the data is easy. Getting it so that nobody knows you have it means the slot in that vault cannot be empty, and what goes in it has to carry a plausible label and play as something unremarkable.

Which is a forgery, and forgeries fail. Not immediately, and not to anybody watching dailies, but the substitute's print won't match the performer named on the call sheet, and a lab finds that in an afternoon. So the real question on a job like that is never whether the swap works, but when somebody next has a reason to read the cartridge.

Raws get copied once a week, and the reason is the machine. Playing a cartridge is ordinary and any playback head does it, which is how dailies get watched and how a mapped edition gets made. Reading one at full bandwidth, so that what comes off is another raw rather than a lesser edition, takes a transfer bay, and a bay only reads the stock it was built for. Current stock is not the problem: an arena or a news outfit that records at sim quality keeps bays and thinks nothing of it. The problem is that the good stock is pre-closure, and the plants that made it and the bays that read it were the same San Diego industry, so both stopped at once and neither has been replaced. A matched bay is therefore shared between productions and a picture gets it for one run a week. That run is the transfer: the week's cartridges are read off into the studio's archive, which is a different building and usually a different city.

Nothing about the data is special, and the rule at the top of this page holds. It copies freely the moment it is off the stock. Until the bay comes round, it is not off the stock, so a shooting day exists once, on one cartridge, in the production's vault, and after the run it exists twice with the second one somewhere nobody is going to reach. A production in progress is the one point in a recording's life when it exists nowhere else, which is precisely why anybody who wants one wants it now.

The format is a choice, and an expensive picture makes the hard one. A production shooting mapped-native never needs a bay and never has this window. A director shooting full-bandwidth POV on pre-closure stock has bought the best thing in the medium and, without meaning to, a week in which every day of it is a single object in a room.

The old film words survive for exactly this and people still use them: the raw is the negative and the mapped edition is the print. Nobody carries the negative around, and until intake, nobody can.

The word somebody uses tells you where they learned it. On a lot it is the negative, and the room it lives in is the negative vault, because a studio kept the film vocabulary along with everything else it kept. Off the lot the trade says master: the unaudited shelf under the arena is a master store, and a fence offers you a master. Same object. A crew who use the wrong one in the wrong room have told somebody something.

So the intake is the deadline in both directions, and it's the same date. Before it, a raw is worth stealing, because taking the cartridge takes the recording. After it, the theft is pointless and the swap is over, because reading a week of cartridges into the archive means reading the substitute, and the substitute's print belongs to nobody on the call sheet. Everyone who does this for a living knows what day of the week it is.

How you identify the person#

Two layers, and they cost wildly different amounts.

One: the body, free, instantly. Anyone who plays a sim learns things about the wearer without trying, because they are briefly inside them. Height and reach, from where the world sits. Handedness. Old joints or young ones. Corrected vision. Whether they were in pain, and where. Whether they were cybered: a chromed limb is conspicuous by its silence, because it reports no proprioceptive noise at all. None of this needs equipment. It's why performers are protective and why sim actors are strange people.

Two: the print, which needs something to match against. A print is an identity, but it is not a name. It's a match, and a match needs a reference. Those exist in more places than people expect:

• Studios hold neural baselines for every performer under contract, because you cannot edit sim without one.
• Clinics take one before fitting any cyberware, and keep it.
• Anyone who has ever legitimately worn a rig left a baseline with whoever supplied it.

No reference on file and the print names nobody. This is the limit that matters: it's why identifying a stranger from a chip is an information-brokerage problem rather than a technical one, and why the answer usually costs money rather than time.

A print proves alive then, not alive now. It's not a livestream: a chip is proof that somebody was alive when it was recorded, which is not the same as proof that they are alive today, and a great many desperate people have paid a great deal of money to avoid noticing the difference.

What the crew knows#

• Anybody who sells you "the only copy" is selling a promise. Data copies. The scarcity is always contractual, never technical, and the people who forget that lose more money than the people who get caught.
• Take the cartridge, leave something in the slot. Everyone in this business knows the trick, so the people who care about a master check the print on it, and they mostly check late.
• Ask what day it was shot before you ask anything else. Raws go to a studio archive at the end of the shooting week, so a cartridge from this week is the only one there is and a cartridge from last week is one of two. The same intake is what reads your substitute and notices whose print isn't on it, so the date tells you both what the job is worth and how long you have.
• Never wear a rig on a job you don't want attributed. Recording yourself doing something is signing it, in a way no glove or mask helps with, and the signature is your body.
• Sim piracy is the best-funded content search on the continent, and the studios point it both directions: outbound at pirates, inbound at anything arriving on their lots.
• Chip shops and back-room pressing outfits are everywhere now, and they weren't twenty years ago. Pressing used to be done properly, somewhere else, by an industry that is no longer reachable. See Hollywood.
• A sim of something terrible is worth more than a recording of it, and everyone involved in that trade knows exactly what they are selling.