The VR work Turpin's Cave (2018) began as an account of the author's childhood memories of a chimeric cave in Bostall Woods, South East London. That part of London is subject to dramatic sink holes and subsidence, which in this work are a metaphor for unreliable memory, but also, as the project unfolded, became a potent symbol for the increasingly precarious nature of contemporary employment. In creating this project, the author found herself engaging with a gig economy of actors operating within a creative precariat, in which the ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ of deregulated work arguably creates a veneer of individual freedom. Through this project the author seeks to deconstruct some of the rhetoric of empathy, choice and immersivity that has grown around VR, evaluating whether the ontological instability of the form has non-trivial connections to the increasing precarity of global employment (Wall, Lesley, Matthew Revie, and Tim Bedford. 2018. Risk, Reliability and Safety: Innovating Theory and Practice. London: Taylor & Francis).