Hollow, flickering lights. A faint hum trembles through the air, as if it wished it could hide within the slippery shadows, and the safer corners of the room. Perhaps an inconspicuous spark can be seen, gentle and unobtrusive yet a spark nevertheless, characterised by its gleam. No-one is home here. Nothing is genuine here. Footsteps echo through a metal tunnel; if you turned to look, there would be the ghost of the wind remaining. ‘What is real?’ may be a question. ‘How can you determine what is real?’ may be another. Who thought of those questions? Who is writing this now? Some queries we may never know the answer to, but questions they are and questions they will remain, floating in the expanses of our mind. Welcome, my dear readers, to the Land of Faux. No need to queue up to see the attractions; they’re not real, after all. Don’t push, don’t shove, and please, just take your time along the corridors. If you don’t wait, you won’t be able to see everything there is to see, yet if you stop, there’ll be nothing to see at all. Try dragging yourself along the endless corridors filled with neon signs and flashing displays, and you may find yourself in front of a capsule. Metal, plastic or glass? Who knows. But a capsule it surely is, an undeniable fact or reality. There’s something in there. A formless, wrangled figure, congealed in a gloopy green fluid that must feel cool and slimy. Perhaps you are wondering what it is. In reality, in the reality of this writer’s mind, it’s you. You, the reader, are the one who lies in that capsule of unknown material. The safety of the green fluid hides a factor: it’s not a liquid at all. It’s the air, it’s the gas that follows all of us around, and it’s the screen that separates me from you. The smell? I wouldn’t know; only you can tell yourself what the inside of that capsule smells like. Certainly, we all have our own capsules, our own little bubbles of unidentifiable substance, trapping one from the other. However, this is the Land of Faux, where inauthenticity lies. The capsule isn’t actually real at all. So again, I ask, what is real? That imagery you summoned up yourself from my real descriptions? Do those capsules, in another world, really exist? I wouldn’t know. Maybe you don’t even know yourself. Am I real? Perhaps. This land? Presumably not. Faux by name, Faux by nature, after all. But possibly, just possibly, if you turned away from the capsules, from the safety of what is known, from the exuberance of the Land that appears so real yet is so Faux… You would see a sign, just one, a miniscule thing really, quivering drearily, saying: Are you for real?