(The website is primarily viewed by people who need to fill out forms to ask for things from a government program. She feels like if there were not multiple somewhat-state-funded organizations, some responsible for helping people fill in forms and some responsible for reviewing forms, it would free up enough funds to just restrict the program less.)

She does amateur sports, which are still fake, and tries running with those run-away-from-zombies audio tracks, which are also fake, and she climbs a mountain and that's at least almost not fake but it's quite expensive and she can't repeat it regularly.

She tries to get into hunting and it's not as fake as some things are, but she's still playing a game with rules that someone made up. She's always playing a game with rules that someone made up. She knows that it wouldn't really be possible for billions of people to coexist without these games but she just once for five minutes wants to do something that's actually real.

She daydreams about it, sometimes. She imagines being in one of those implausible bits of prehistoric fiction where there are cavemen and dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, all together, or of a zombie apocalypse, or of being some kind of nereid hunting kraken. She always wakes up from it.

One day it's just far too miserable in her dark cubicle, and she needs to be anywhere else, and she just leaves. She takes the shortest path out, which happens to be through an emergency exit. She doesn't care about the alarm. She doesn't quite know her destination but her legs seem to.

She feels more and more frustrated as she heads to wherever she's going and then suddenly she's in water, sort of. It's vividly red and there's a jellyfish and she grabs it, somehow, and tears it apart. The body releases some kind of cyan fluid and she feels good.

This is clearly supposed to be the fakest thing that has ever happened to her but it doesn't feel fake. It feels real.

It feels real but also she's not at her most emotionally stable and it's getting a bit tedious, and she's not really sure that any of this is safe to eat. She's also not really dressed for being underwater. She would like to go somewhere else now.

She could go back to where she left Earth from? It's not that far.

She is not going to go right back into her old life which notably includes all of her coworkers who are probably baffled by her spontaneously walking out and might want to ask her concerning questions even if she's already fired.

Does she want to go somewhere else on Earth? What about this big city with lots of canals and no humans?

Maybe if she can't do better. What are her other options here?

Tropical island with giant dragonflies and also dodo birds?

She'll take it!

She is going to hunt a dodo and eat it. Maybe she should re-establish a breeding population on earth at some point but she doesn't really want to do it right now and eating one dodo is probably not going to fuck it up.

The air is thick and humid. She can catch a dodo, but it is absolutely going to bite her.

Ow.

…she still wants to eat a dodo at some point but maybe she should look for some eggs or recognizable fruit.

She can find some, but she's going to get a lot of bug bites if she sticks around.

She will go somewhere else now and come back later with more preparation.

Would she like to go to this cramped studio apartment? It is very specifically hers and it is not on Earth.

Yeah, okay.

Now she's in a bathroom. The sink and the shower look like they can't be active simultaneously, the lighting comes from what looks like a gas sconce, and there's only one bath towel, but it is a bathroom. It even has toilet paper and soap and a clothesline over the bathtub. Its door is open and leads into a room with a cabinet, a waste chute, and two solid blocks approximating a chair and a table.

Huh.

She will set her food down, dump her clothes in the tub, wash her hands and rinse the food, and then eat it.

It's satisfying but eating a raw egg is kind of a mess and now she has wet eggshell. It can go in the garbage chute even though she's leaving wet footprints across the floor.

And now she is going to take a shower.

Sure, she can drip some cold water on herself.

She will simply unhook the showerhead and bring it close to various body parts to compensate for this abysmal flow rate.