Sensorium

"A silent alarm throbs in Mia's sensorium, like a snake coiling around her wrist. Down in the residential blocks, one of her citizens has lifted one too many boxes and manifested presymptoms of a heart attack. EMTs are on the way, so it probably won't be the day's first death. Probably. Life burns so easily. It's her job to stand up to those who forget that."

— Last Days on Kraken Mare

A sensorium is a personal augmented reality technology developed during the Golden Age that uses induced, hallucinatory sensory perceptions (including sight, hearing, and touch) to deliver information to its user. Sensoriums continue to be produced, and are installed in certain pieces of City Age armor, and utilized by the Awoken of the Reef. Sensoriums can also be used as control interfaces, such as for piloting starships or synthetic proxy bodies, or simply for transmitting messages. A properly modified sensorium can even directly affect the brain: one palliative treatment for the Bray family's "Clovis Curse" of fatal insomnia was using a sensorium altered in this way to induce unconsciousness and "emulate sleep", though this would only slow the disease's progression.

Sensorium telemetry can be recorded, allowing users to re-experience a given moment in time with all their senses, even another person's. Mara Sov, in her time as a crew member aboard the Yang Liwei, developed a cult following for distributing sensorium recordings of herself experiencing near-death by exposure to open space without a spacesuit, allowing other crew members to vicariously experience the same. After her transfer into an Exo, Elsie Bray used sensorium reconstructions of her memories to compensate for her post-upload amnesia.

Electromagnetic fields could interfere with sensoriums, reducing sensory inputs to static. When the Reef Awoken exited the Distributary, the transit through the wormhole destroyed the sensoriums they had brought with them.