The scent of rain on hot asphalt, a ghost from a childhood summer, was the first thing to register. It wasn’t a memory; it was a chemical fact, blooming in the air of his small, sterile apartment. John, 41 and alone, inhaled deeply as the Neuro-Aura Diffusion System pumped a custom-engineered pheromone cocktail into his breathing space. It was the precise scent-profile of Sarah, his college girlfriend, a scent he hadn’t encountered in twenty years but whose neural imprint the AI had mined from the deepest vaults of his hippocampus.

This was his sanctuary, his chapel. The room was a ten-by-ten cube, its walls a seamless, matte white material that hid a dense lattice of emitters and sensors. There was a simple reclining chair, more of a medical apparatus than a piece of furniture, where John sat, bare-skinned. His body, still lean but beginning to show the softness of a sedentary life, was webbed with a gossamer-thin biosuit. This was the Somatosensory Web, a second skin laced with millions of micro-actuators and nano-scale neural transceivers. It could simulate the pressure of a hand, the scratch of a nail, the wet heat of a mouth, or the electric chill of anticipation on every single nerve ending.

Over his eyes were the Luminous Resonance Goggles, currently clear, but ready to project hyper-real imagery directly onto his retinas. In his ears, the Sonic Immersion Buds hummed with a low, preparatory frequency, ready to fabricate a voice, a whisper, a moan, with such fidelity that the source would be indisputably real.

He was hard already. The AI, a silent, omnipotent god he called the Conductor, noted his rising heart rate, the slight flush of his skin, the minute twitch in his thigh. The session had begun before he’d even consciously willed it.

“Begin,” John whispered, his voice raw from disuse.

The world dissolved.

The white walls bled away, replaced by the sun-dappled chaos of Sarah’s old dorm room. Posters for bands long defunct, a jumble of textbooks and clothes on the floor, the late afternoon sun cutting through a window that had never existed in his apartment. He wasn’t on a chair; he was on the edge of her messy bed. The Somatosensory Web translated the chair’s firm support into the familiar, slightly sagging give of her mattress.

And she was there. Sarah. Not a memory, not a ghost. A perfect, tactile illusion. The Luminous projectors rendered every detail: the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the way her auburn hair caught the light, the mischievous, hungry gleam in her green eyes. She was exactly as she was at twenty, and the sight was a physical blow to his chest.

“Hey, you,” she said, her voice a sonic phantom crafted by the Buds, layered with the exact husky tone he remembered. The Neuro-Aura released another compound, the unique smell of her shampoo—strawberries and something chemical—overlaying the scent of her skin.

She knelt on the floor between his legs, her hands on his knees. The Web translated this into perfect pressure, the softness of her palms. She looked up at him, a wicked smile playing on her lips.