"I wouldn't know how VR technology that advanced would work," Sherlock muses. For the first time--no, truthfully, not for the first time, not if he's being perfectly honest--he misses James Moriarty. It's occurred to him before that a perverse VR world is exactly the sort of cruel trick Moriarty would play, but Moriarty's dead and this world isn't quite perverse enough to suit his tastes: no, he would've made Sherlock suffer, not let him languish in boredom, comfort, and confusion. So he misses Moriarty because as much as it pains him to admit, this is a puzzle Moriarty would be better suited to solving. He might have even solved it already.

God damn him. He would decide to be dead just now. "We could be comatose and--" the science fiction terminology bothers him, but he goes on, "--plugged in to some sort of computer system. Or highly drugged and given hypnotic suggestion somehow. Or a mixture. It seems like it'd be easier to suggest a world of this complexity if we were allowed to fill it in, but that would imply a solipsistic dream-world of my own making: and I don't think that's likely. Not even my dreams usually feature characters that interact with this much verisimilitude." An odd sort of backhanded compliment from Sherlock--you're probably too complex to be a figment of my imagination--but it's the best you get out of him when he's on this sort of tangent.