The Stimulus Age

Terse Bullbuck was born at the beginning of the Stimulus Age. He was born March 3rd, 2024. The Stimulus Age had actually begun a decade and a half before when cellphone companies realized that an alloy they used in creating the receiver in the phone was both versatile and resilient. Anyone using a cellphone, at the time, would have never guessed that in a little over a decade, their entire perception of reality would begin to shift drastically as it had in previous eras. Sometime in 2012, the important discovery of this alloy was beginning to show itself as if the blinders to this discovery were suddenly taken away. Researchers from various regions of the world, not all of them working together, began to see this shocking ability of this alloy to create simulated motion when placed near the ear of a test subject. Early research showed that through transmission of a combination of audio frequencies, you could create a physical hallucination in the test subject. Test subjects said they could experience the sensation of a rain shower without getting wet. They could be cooled down or have their temperature raised without it being present on a thermometer. Eventually, they would be able to feel the sensation of a past situation they would trigger themselves. Then they could create any situation and, there is no other word for this, just begin to riff. Of course this all happened with a black screen and without sound, so the person would have to fill in the blanks for their other senses. This was very scary to many of the test subjects and they would often call the experiment to an abrupt halt.

In 2024, they finally had their first success in creating a somewhat unsatisfying but real seeming body/mind hallucination. These hallucinations, would however, come and go without warning, again mostly causing panic in "The Receiving POD". That is People Over-Driven. If you owned a simulating device you became known as a POD. Most PODs at this time were still only feeling a somewhat half baked repertoire of body hallucination.