The sky’s all wrong tonight. Oversaturated blue, it pixelates at the horizon into streaky seawater, and is hole-punched by the sun sinking towards its bloated reflection. The tide beats against the shore. One, two, three up the sand. One, two, three, four – leaving a sine wave of foam.

Tao-Yi sits with her legs folded beneath her, rotating a nearly empty beer bottle in her hands. Long shadows drip from the sandstone formations around her. In this tucked-away cove, shielded by ruddy cliffs, she can’t see the others, but she can hear them laughing and shouting as they gather driftwood for a bonfire.

She has let Navin drag her here, a little out of obligation, but mostly out of habit. It’s just what happens every New Year’s Eve – Zach throws a party. It would feel wrong to miss it.

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The bottle stays ice-cold against her palms, impervious to her body heat. She lifts the rim to her lips. The last gulp slices down her throat. The ocean ruffles like a silk skirt in a breeze, creased and opaque. She waits for the gust to roll into shore, to lift tendrils of hair from her neck, but it never comes – the air in Gaia is as stale as a subway tunnel.

A rustle of sand grass heralds Navin’s approach. He’s almost a stranger – tall and lean in his short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, black fringe falling choppily across his brow, a vulnerable smile. He holds out another bottle of beer.

“It tastes like shit,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s better than last year’s.”

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She manages a smile, thinking of Zach’s experimental brew.

“Come back,” he insists, touching his fingers to her hairline. “Help us start the fire.”

Tao-Yi lets him pull her to her feet. She follows him out of the cove, skirting a cluster of boulders, and back along the shore. His shirt hangs loose on his frame, catching the bottom corners of his shoulder blades. She wants to touch those out-turned brackets, to assure herself of their realness.

Between the dunes and the sea, the others have filled a shallow pit with driftwood. There are a dozen or so capstone-educated twenty-somethings like herself and Navin, all sharp glances and witty repartee. Gen Virtual. They’re the lucky generation – born into motion, soaked with potential, cresting a wave of change.

Zach moves through the group easily, the others drawn to him like mosquitoes to shallow water. In an orange T-shirt and a knee-length sarong, he looks especially boyish. He leans over the driftwood, a lit match extended like a conductor’s baton between long brown fingers. The others whoop as flames blossom. There are no second attempts, if you follow the formula.

Tao-Yi summons her live interface. In the corner of her vision, a countdown glimmers neon: 9:00pm, 31 December 2087. 3 hours to go! A steady scroll of status updates overlays the beach scenery. Mostly snips, four-second video fragments dissolving as soon as she absorbs them into her attention: friends dancing at open-air concerts, go-karting under electronic fireworks, clinking stim shots to a backdrop of pounding beats.

Evelyn is walking over to her. Tao-Yi wills away the countdown and the snips. Tonight, her petite friend looks a little different. Although she’s wearing a pastel dress from her typical wardrobe, her dark brown hair is arranged in braids and her cheeks are decorated with gothic decals. It’s endearing, like a puppy trying to be edgy.

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Evelyn bumps her hip against Tao-Yi’s. “Are you flash?” “I’m fine. Why?”

“You just seem quiet.”

Tao-Yi wraps her hands around her elbows, feeling the symmetrical indentations behind the bony joints. “Yeah, I’m just a bit spent. Busy day at work.”

“Oh yeah. Of course. You’re a hot shot Authenticity Consultant now.” Evelyn drags the syllables out and chuckles.

The title still sounds weird to Tao-Yi’s ears, even though she’s been at her job for half a year. She’s still getting her head around moving from a marketing gig, manipulating people into buying more stuff, to a place like Tru U, guiding lost souls back towards their true selves.

“People are just obsessed with their avatars. They want to make sure they look as unique as everyone else, you know.”

“Usoo, Tao-Yi, don’t pretend to be a cynic. I know you’re really a softie underneath,” Evelyn says. “Give it a few more months, and you’ll be spreading feel-good virus like your boss. What’s his name again? Andy? Gary?”

“Griffin. Not even close.”

“That’s right. You know what he said to me at that party you dragged me to last month? Wide eyes, straight face. You need to find your path.”

“Oh, yeah. He spouts that about ten times a day. My brain just filters him out now.”

“I told him I use Google Maps. He didn’t even crack a smile!”

Tao-Yi laughs. “He’s good at his job, though. Come in for an appointment?”

“No thanks – you lot can stay away from my virtual bits.”

Tao-Yi laughs again and turns towards the fire. Evelyn’s gaze wanders to Zach and stays there. The bonfire’s glow warms his tanned complexion, illuminating his gleaming black eyes and expressive mouth.

For a while, Tao-Yi watches Evelyn watching him. Then she slips away.

by Grace Chan (Verve Books) is the November 2025 read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.

The movie Ready Player One introduced us to the futuristic idea of a fully immersive virtual world where meaningful human interactions transcend borders. Now, VR technology has moved beyond science fiction, becoming embedded into our daily lives. Reporter Linda Rodriguez-McRobbie took a trip for New Scientist to a virtual nightclub and immersed herself in a subculture where social identity can be as expressive as your imagination.

Guided by club organiser and VR researcher Karl Clarke, we explore the technology underpinning these virtual experiences. We see how applications in movie production, military training, rehabilitation and health are driving innovation. We also reveal its use for training AI models and how it is being used to better understand social interaction. And, in groundbreaking new VR research, our team members join an experiment in which every aspect of their social presence is manipulated, with dramatic and profound implications. Ready Player One, it would seem, is much closer than we think.

An electronic tongue that can replicate flavours like cake and fish soup could help recreate food in virtual reality, but can’t yet simulate other things that influence taste, such as smell.

at The Ohio State University and his colleagues have developed a system, called e-Taste, that can sample a food and work out how to partly recreate its flavour in someone’s mouth.

This involves using chemicals that correspond to the five basic tastes: sodium chloride for salty, citric acid for sour, glucose for sweet, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami. “Those five flavours are already accounting for a very large spectrum of the food we have daily,” says Jia.

The system uses sensors to detect the levels of these chemicals in food, converts them to digital readings, and then sends these values to the pump, which pushes small amounts of different flavour-containing hydrogels into a small tube under a person’s tongue.

First, the researchers tested the system for single flavours, asking 10 people how well the device reproduced sourness on a five-point scale, compared with real samples of sour tastes. They gave the same number for the reproduced and real sourness 70 per cent of the time.

The team then tested whether the system could replicate more complex tastes — lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup and coffee — and asked a group of six people whether they could distinguish between them, finding that they could more than 80 per cent of the time.

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However, focusing only on flavours like this isn’t very useful, says at the University of Warwick, UK, because other senses are also involved in how we taste. “Next time you have a strawberry, close your nose and eyes. A strawberry is very sour, but it is perceived as sweet because of its aroma and the red colour. So if you send just sour across with their device, you will never know that it is actually from a strawberry.”

“An e-tongue such as this is able to extract the amount of sweetness [and] sourness, but not taste as a human tongue perceives them,” he says.