“Have you tried the new HoneyDew_v3.0 yet?” Lin whispered during Professor Chen’s lecture on neural interfaces. The holographic displays flickered across the classroom’s curved walls, casting a neon glow on the students’ augmented reality visors.

Mei adjusted her neural implant and smiled. “The fruit simulation? I heard it’s incredibly realistic.”

“More than realistic,” Lin’s eyes sparkled behind her visor. “It’s like tasting summer itself. The sweetness, the texture… it’s perfect. Too perfect.”

The campus of New Beijing Tech Institute loomed outside, its twisted architecture reaching into the perpetually smog-tinted sky. Advertising drones buzzed past the windows, projecting enticements for the latest sensory experiences.

After class, they made their way to the Virtual Dining Hall. The stark white room was filled with students in reclined chairs, each lost in their own artificial feast. Mei settled into a pod, the neural interface connecting with a familiar tingle.

“HoneyDew_v3.0, initiating…” The system’s voice purred in her mind.

The first bite was extraordinary. The melon’s flesh dissolved on her tongue with impossible perfection - sweet, refreshing, carrying memories of childhood summers she’d never actually experienced. Each mouthful was mathematically calculated to deliver maximum pleasure.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” A new voice cut through her reverie. A tall boy with old-fashioned optical implants stood nearby. “I’m Wei, from the Reality Preservation Society.”

Mei reluctantly paused the simulation. “The what?”

“We believe these perfect simulations are destroying our ability to appreciate real experiences,” Wei explained, producing an actual honeydew melon from his bag. “Would you like to try the real thing?”

The fruit was imperfect - slightly bitter near the rind, with varying levels of sweetness. Yet something about its flaws made it more genuine, more alive.

“But why choose imperfection?” Lin challenged, removing her visor. “We can create experiences better than reality.”

Wei smiled sadly. “Can we? Or are we just creating beautiful prisons for our senses?”

That evening, Mei stood in her dormitory’s vertical garden, watching the last rays of artificial sunlight filter through the smog. She held two pieces of melon - one real, one virtual - and considered which to taste first.

In the distance, a massive advertisement illuminated the sky: “HoneyDew_v4.0 - Coming Soon. Why Settle for Reality?”

Mei closed her eyes and made her choice, as the boundary between authentic and artificial blurred like the perpetual haze around the city’s spires. The taste of summer lingered on her tongue, but she could no longer tell which version had delivered it.

The next morning, Professor Chen found an interesting phenomenon in his class data: half his students had mysteriously uninstalled their dining simulation software. The other half had upgraded to the beta version of v4.0.

In the campus garden, a single honeydew vine began to grow, its existence both a rebellion and a surrender to an increasingly virtual world.