The ground was dry; the grass was long dead. The air crackled with a parched heat, and the sun beat down on the land like a boot crushing bones. There was not a sound but the chirping of crickets and the soft sizzle of the heat; there was a particularly large and noisy cricket near his head, but even that was hardly noticed by the starving person who rested on the dry and dusty ground. He couldn’t think of much from before the drought came and the heat hit hard; all he could think about was hunger.
It was hard to move. Everything hurt too much to move; he remembered trying to move, but he had fallen over. He was too tired and too pained and too hungry to get up. His head pounded. His tongue felt dry, but not as much as his stomach felt empty. It was just hunger, nothing but hunger.
He could feel a fly land on him, and then another, and another, and he could feel them biting. He tried to brush them off, but it was too hard to move, and far too painful; less painful than being eaten slowly. He could feel a small trickle of blood, which cooled him slightly before drying into a cracked and heat-dried red-brown line on his skin.
He stirred slightly; he had a last burst of strength. He couldn’t think straight; he crawled halfheartedly towards a dried clump of grass; it wasn’t like he could eat it, but some half-born thought in his hunger-addled mind pushed him forwards.
He clutched at it, before his hand went limp, and he slipped into sweet unconsciousness, at last free from the chains and thorns of hunger.
“Some people,” he thought, “like to watch horror movies to feel fear. Some people like to watch tragedies to feel sad.”
Well, that had remained the same in VR, and then when it transitioned to full-on whole-body simulations; you couldn’t tell it from the real thing.
There were rental places where you could buy romances, same as before; you could get the same old genres of horror and action and whatnot, or something more exotic.
Sadness, fear, love, adrenaline; well, why not hunger?