Image: Midjourney, Text: ChatGPT, Master of Prompts and Idea: Me
In a futuristic gallery buzzing with neon lights and expensive shoes, there stood a VR pod labeled “The Last Tree”. Curious visitors lined up, adjusted their headsets, and were transported—not to a lush forest, but to a cracked wall by a forgotten sea.
Inside the simulation, the tree waited.
Its branches were bone-white, veins of light pulsing like digital electricity. Its roots wove through broken pixels of bricks, glitching slightly, like they were refusing to load properly. This wasn’t nature—it was a memory of nature, reprogrammed.
The tree had thoughts, of course. Digital ones. It thought in poetic algorithms.
“I am code pretending to be life,” it whispered into the players’ minds. “I grow where there is no soil, I breathe where there is no air.”
Some gamers tried to climb it. The tree sighed and shifted, showing them flickers of forgotten coastlines and extinct birds they would never meet. Some tried to chop it down. The roots glowed brighter, quietly resisting like stubborn lines of unbreakable code.
It didn’t long for rain or earth—it longed for wonder. For players to stop rushing for achievements and simply… stand still.
At the end of the simulation, the players took off their headsets, blinking at the clean, artificial world around them. The tree remained in its virtual ruin, smiling to itself.
“At least here,” it thought, “I’ll never rot. I will always bloom in a place that’s almost real… which, ironically, is more than most people can say.”