Twilight Journey

He came from out of the mists of the wasteland to walk the desolate streets of a city crumbling into decay. It was not a place he knew. He had never been there before and the people he met were strangers to him. Yet their names and faces were puzzlingly familiar – as if he had known them long ago… in some other setting… in some other existence. Dream or not, it was soon become a horrifying, spine-chilling nightmare from which there was no escape. Dr. Clayton Solan’s strange journey through the dark, tortuous places of his mind was of his own making – the result of a fantastic experiment pushed to the uttermost limits of control. It was a journey that was at one and the same time a self-inflicted penance and a desperate search for the solution to a life-and-death problem. * The protagonist, it turns out, is a 22nd-century scientist undergoing a form of virtual reality, called "senduction", which he's developed. The process was originally intended as an educational aid, but certain elements of the British government have less benign plans. This is, after all, science fiction. There is also a danger of "reversal", whereby a user of the senduction process may be brought back to the real world still believing themselves to be in a virtual one. The story moves between the outside world, where the scientist's colleagues & the men from the ministry are investigating the situation he's created; & the virtual reality, in which he eventually experiences a terrifying dystopian future as a result of his own beliefs about the uses to which the government will put his discovery. --Philip Challinor