  The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; the central ~500 pc of the Milky Way) hosts
molecular clouds in an extreme environment of strong shear, high gas pressure
and density, and complex chemistry. G0.253+0.016, also known as `the Brick', is
the densest, most compact and quiescent of these clouds. High-resolution
observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have
revealed its complex, hierarchical structure. In this paper we compare the
properties of recent hydrodynamical simulations of the Brick to those of the
ALMA observations. To facilitate the comparison, we post-process the simulation
and create synthetic ALMA maps of molecular line emission from eight molecules.
We correlate the line emission maps to each other and to the mass column
density, and find that HNCO is the best mass tracer of the eight emission
lines. Additionally, we characterise the spatial structure of the observed and
simulated cloud using the density probability distribution function (PDF),
spatial power spectrum, fractal dimension, and moments of inertia. While we
find good agreement between the observed and simulated data in terms of power
spectra and fractal dimensions, there are key differences in terms of the
density PDFs and moments of inertia, which we attribute to the omission of
magnetic fields in the simulations. Models that include the external
gravitational potential generated by the stars in the CMZ better reproduce the
observed structure, highlighting that cloud structure in the CMZ results from
the complex interplay between internal physics (turbulence, self-gravity,
magnetic fields) and the impact of the extreme environment.
