I was driving through a virtual landscape with one of my closest friends, trying to impress my passengers. It could have been anyone's car. It wasn't mine.

The landscape was digital and verdant, live oaks drooping and strange southern birds whooping from invisible gaps in what must, somewhere, behind it all, have been a code.

At some point, if you peel enough layers off a dream, you surely end up with something resembling binary, far less human.

Perhaps that's not the case. Perhaps you just roll back endless bales of dream webbing. Impossibly fertile fields, impossible to harvest, welting with life.

At some point in the midst of our drive, the landscape turned arid. The edges of sycamore trees browned and grew sick. At the same time, pixels started to appear. The resolution of the landscape sank gradually down to a pre-2010 level, and then pre-Milennium, and then we were barely holding on, just a few squares of colour letting us know where we stood. There was no panic, just a recogition that our dreamland was coming apart, returning to its monochrome roots.

I forgot about driving. Nothing lasts.