The Tides That Bind Us [AfroFuturism]

Pixelated Reality

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into this virtual waiting room, which looked too much like a real waiting room, down to the overstuffed furniture and outdated magazines.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?"