Polygon Sand

The man looked over the shore, his bedraggled dog panting next to him. The seagulls on the black rock belted out noises that no man should ever have to hear. The wave slammed against the wet rock.

The man adjusted his sun hat as he looked at the navy waves. He grabbed the suitcase laying next to him and opened it up, pouring the seeping pink sand inside into the water. The water began to flash different colors, as if the man had cast some strange incantation on it. The waves went all through the color spectrum, changing to colors like green, red, yellow, blue, purple… a dizzying array of fluid colors. The ocean became a flat cube. The world around the man became sharper, more cubical, the sky nothing but a mere illusion. The dog became nothing but a barking brown pyramid.

“They call it polygon sand, Jenna,” said the man to an unknown observer. The man had not changed into a low resolution jumble of pyramids of cubes unlike the world around him. “It tells you if you’re in a virtual world or not.” He looked at the briny cube that was once water.

Well, he knew now, didn’t he? Jenna stared at the screen as the man tapped the low resolution ground which was near cubical. She tapped at the microphone.

“I’m still not letting you out,” she stated. “You haven’t learned anything.”

“It’s still prison,” he shrugged. “Although I suppose your experiment was a failure in that case.”

“I wanted to help you Peter,” Jenna started. “They wanted to put you on death row.”

The man kicked at the ground and began to walk off in silence on this flat, near featureless landscape. Jenna sat back in the chair, watching a white pyramid making seagull noises. Why did she bother helping him when he clearly didn’t want any? She didn’t understand him or herself at all. She looked at the computer maybe it was time to end it.

“Brother, I’m sorry she said as she pulled the plug, a sudden blip on the computer as everything turned off. Everything gone in that little computer world. She felt a twinge in her heart as she walked out of the room.