Sales talk

A reluctant client meets two smooth representatives of a company offering Electronic Living, a service that feeds recorded physical sensations and internal brain voltages into a person's mind to reproduce other people’s experiences. He tries a helmetlike simulator and briefly inhabits the sensations and emotions of a professional athlete, though his own perceptions remain layered over them. The salesmen outline a menu of programmed milieus—sports, manual labor, elegant social scenes, creative vocations—while the narrator confronts the implied bargain that accessing these vivid alternate lives requires surrendering his ordinary existence.