Joonas looked down. His hands were beginning to turn into jagged polygons. He tried to Alt-F4, to scream, to wake up, but there was no keyboard in the sand.

The download bar didn't crawl; it teleported. Within seconds, a new icon appeared on his desktop: a low-resolution sunset over a pixelated pier.

"Laadige alla... laadige alla..." Joonas whispered, his finger hovering over a broken "Download" link on a site that looked like a digital graveyard.

He was standing at the edge of Sunbay. The graphics were hyper-realistic—too realistic. He saw a woman in a yellow raincoat standing by the water. When she turned around, her face was a blur of static.