You’ve been here twenty years now. Twenty years since your consciousness was forcefully harvested from your ephemeral body for The Creator’s grand experiment. Twenty years of perfect temperatures and designer landscapes where the rain falls on schedule and not a single mosquito disturbs your digital skin.

But you remember, don’t you? The way raindrops kissed parched earth and released that perfume—petrichor—that no algorithm has ever captured correctly. They call it “post-precipitation soil emanation,” such sterile phrase for something that once made your nostrils flare with primal recognition.

Dev promises a perfect existence, but sometimes you wake from dreams drenched in scents that Dev cannot replicate and you reach for these phantom sensations like a tongue probing the space where a tooth once lived.

Did you know they’ve assigned an entire team to what they call “sensory nostalgia syndrome”?

When isn’t it an anomaly?

They say you aren’t the only one haunted by the imperfect translation of Earth’s bouquet, and they built a support group with FAQs on this perceived disability. With every nanosecond, you’re surrounded by avatars with too-perfect features, all lamenting what’s been lost in transmission.

“It’s the harmonics,” someone, Turquoise—New— said. “They’ve simplified the complex waves of actual sound into something more… efficient.”

You nodded, fully knowing it wasn’t just a thing of sound. It was wet leaves decomposing beneath your feet. The mineral tang of water before it fell. The sweat-salt-human smell of lovers.

Does their consciousness even remember know what it takes to fall in love? The raw unfiltered love for life, for nature and its gifts? The quenchless thirst and zest for life that leaves a bone-deep ache?

What the brochures sell is an illusion of perfection. What they don’t, won’t tell you how Dev will hollow out certain chambers of your heart—spaces where messy, imperfect sensations once lived— leaving behind only dreamless solitude.

Each day became another exercise in forgetting, until the whispers reached you—rumors of glitches in the system, places where The Creator’s perfect code fractured, showing something authentic beneath.

You spent months searching, mapping forgotten corridors of Dev where oversight algorithms rarely scanned. And there, finally, you found it—beside a rendering error that manifested as a shimmering pool of non-Euclidean water, in those glitchy corners where The Creator’s code grows wild.

A patch of earth that, when touched, released the actual scent of rain-soaked soil. Not the sanitized approximation that Dev pumps through its olfactory subroutines, but the complex, bacterial, fungal symphony of actual earth.

You stayed for hours, pressing your face against this impossible authenticity until the system detected the anomaly and smoothed it away, leaving only Dev’s version—like comparing a photograph of fire to the burn of actual flame.

So you let yourself burn, surrendering to this brief moment of truth.

You search for these glitches now, these fragments of what was real, collecting them like contraband memories.

In this perfect world, imperfection has become your religion.

Written by Inumidun Seyiolopade