Zaharah plucked an apple from the bowl of fruit and held it an inch from her face. Spots of orange and yellow bloomed over its otherwise red surface. Can I bite this? Would it have a taste? Tiny, black seeds in the middle? She pressed it against her nose, and it sure enough smelled like an apple. But it wasn't a real apple.

Who decides what's real? she wondered. It used to be 'god' or one of her iterations, but Zaharah didn't believe in her. The thought of some all-powerful creator playing humanity like a game of Sims gone horribly wrong made her giggle. 

Maybe it was up to the individuals to decide what was real for themselves. But not her, she didn't have that privilege right now. A few people behind screens were deciding what was real for her. She could imagine them sipping their shitty, watered-down coffee as they watched the monitors.

They'd shoved her into this virtual waiting room, which looked too much like a real waiting room, down to the overstuffed furniture and outdated magazines. She'd gotten into the habit of reminding herself that everything here was fake. Spending hours in the virtual world could convince even those of sound mind that a myriad of carefully arranged ones and zeros were reality.

Zaharah turned the fruit over in her hand, a collection of pixels carefully arranged to mimic reality. Just like the rest of this place. Just like her. The real her lied off in a metal coffin, while the fake her that was also a part of the real her—but not really—played around in the virtual land. Or waited around in this stuffy room while—

"Zaharah!"

She startled and snapped her attention to the screen beyond the apple. Dwight sat there—or his image, rather—eyes closed and fingers working circles over the crease between his brow. The tip of his e-cigarette glared as he sucked in a deep drag, no doubt to stop himself from flying over his monitors and strangling her unconscious form, as he'd threatened to do many times before.

Her eyes had glazed over when he went on a long spiel about some procedure or another. The stream of information had flowed into her head and short-circuited her brain faster than toaster dropped into a sink. Then her mind dove into the existential rabbit hole of reality versus fantasy. She could never listen to him for more than a few minutes at a time. Even the times she tried to pay attention ended with her standing and staring through his image with mouth agape and eyes glazed over like a dead fish.

And then he used his software engineering powers turn her reality into a nightmare. Like the time he dropped her into a room filled with flying cockroaches.

And then she put pickled goat peppers in his coffee. Tit for tat.

Dwight blew out a cloud of vapour. "We're testing something different today. No pocky."

"It's pocking, you uncultured swine," she smartass'd, wrinkling her nose as though she'd caught a whiff of something horrid. "Pocky is a snack."

"Zaharah, if you don't..." He took another, longer, drag from his cigarette, closed his eyes, exhaled the vapour through his nose. "Jori will take over now." And he vanished from the screen like an apparition.

Jori took Dwight's place, his smiling face a more pleasant sight. Zaharah had seen him around the lab, working with the engineers. He fancied himself a historian, and every other phrase out of his mouth was a random date accompanied by an equally random fact about a long dead person.

"Thanks for your help today, Zaharah." He leaned forward into the camera and a gold stud winked from his right ear. "I'll be walking you through the simulation. Don't worry about commentary. I'm more interested in your unfiltered reaction to what we've built. Alright?"

"Sure." Zaharah tossed the apple back into the bowl, and it settled amongst its brethren with a thump.

He nodded to someone off-screen. "Ready?"

The door, the lobby's only exit, clicked open, and bright yellow light poured in. Zaharah often compared it to diving into a piss pool, much to Dwight's annoyance. She walked through and stepped, barefoot onto a wooden dock, warmed by sunlight. Or programming rather. At one end, flat, blue ocean stretched to a horizon speckled with clouds, on the other, an island. Her lips parted.

An actual... She gave herself an internal kick before that thought could form. It's not real, she reminded herself. But that didn't stop her from swiveling her head every which way, drinking in every sight.

The door disappeared to reveal a passenger vessel, painted aqua and gold with Bo Hengy II emblazoned on the port side of the bow. It bobbed on the water alongside smaller freighters, empty and yet somehow alive, its darkened door gaped open and ready to swallow her.

A flock of seagulls passed overhead and belted out laugh-like calls. She followed their path from one end of the dock to the next, until they disappeared over the township. "What is this place?"

"This is Harbour Island, affectionately called Briland by the locals." Jori's voice came from somewhere over the water, a distant hollow sound, like he was speaking through an empty barrel. "Its only settlement is named after the governor... "

Zahara gave him and his historic ramblings her back and jogged down the dock. Warm wood gave way to hot asphalt lined with buildings. She stopped in front of one with golf carts lined off in neat rows behind it. Dunmore Cart Rental according to the sign. "You rebuilt the whole island?"

Jori cleared his throat. "Not quite. This is just a prototype. We still have a lot more things to add. But this project has been in the planning phases for years now. We want to rebuild every single island as they were before the Rise. Since Briland was pretty small, but filled with personality, were starting here."

Filled with personality, but not any persons. She passed by a restaurant, gave the church a cursory glance, and dodged a pothole large enough to swallow a full-grown man.

"We want to make this an experience, so we'll be filling the islands with people and fauna. You'll even be able to go into some buildings." Jori's excitement sent his voice into a soaring falsetto. "This part of town is almost complete. Why don't you head to the beach? Follow that road next to the church."

Beach? Zaharah held back a squeal. The Rise took away all the beaches ages ago. She'd seen some indoor ones on T.V. but they never stacked up to the real thing. Pixels probably couldn't either, but they could come close.

Her sprint came to a halt when she passed a colonial style building with hedges of hibiscus and trees hung heavy with clusters of yellow flowers. Palm trees two stories high stretched up like the pillars of an ancient monument. Zaharah took a few steps back and framed it with her hands. Jori said something about not getting distracted, but his words passed through her head like a fleeting thought. "Can you get me a picture of this?"

"No." It was Dwight, not Jori who had answered her.

Zaharah made an ugly face at the air and marched past the house, kept walking until resorts flanked her from both sides. Without any people milling about the grounds, they looked more like ghost houses. The dark, empty windows and abandoned golf carts didn't help on that front.

Asphalt gave way to a beaten path, and she followed the dirt road through a thicket of trees to the beach. The sand was like a plush carpet beneath her feet. A plush, pink carpet. She scooped up a handful, and it fell through her fingers like flour through a sieve. "Pink sand. A pink sand beach."

"I know right?" Jori's voice went from a falsetto to a girlish squeal. "This was my favourite part to build. Or watch the engineers build."

Bahamians of the yesteryears had it too good. Zaharah moved from the powdery dry sand, to where the waves moistened it into the consistency of wet clay. Turquoise waters rolled and stretched like a lazy cat and splashed over her bare feet. Her mind registered the cool wetness, but it was more of an echo of an old memory than a concrete sensation. Even the Virtua system had its limits.

She plopped down in the break zone and let the water and sand wash over her hands and drench her up to her waist. And she just sat there until her shadow shifted to stretch before her and the water barely touched her toes. And she could sit there for an eternity more, watching the water churn and swirl the sand, breathing the salty air that whipped her braids around her face.

"Time to go Zaharah," Jori said.

And just like that, her illusion of bliss went away, and she was reminded that she couldn't have this in the real world. No, her reality was a hunk of floating metal chugging along waters that resembled tar. Bitterness twisted her lips into a scowl. "But I just got here."

"Actually, you've been here for two hours. Dwight and his team need their lab back. We'll talk about your first impressions once you're up."

She kissed her teeth. "Fine." And waved a good-bye to the turquoise waters and pink sand. If only she could bottle some up to take with her.

Another thing she hated about the virtual world. It made her wish all its pixilated parodies were real.