The Plagiarist

by Hugh Howey

  “Seamonsters and Mist is opening up at the cinema this weekend.” Belatrix took a loud sip and looked at him over the rim of her bowl. “You wanna go see it?”

  “Love to,” he said. It felt amazing to make plans for his avatar’s time, knowing he wouldn’t have to go—but that he would. He drank as much wet dirt as he could take, set the bowl aside, then plopped down on one of the floor cushions. “I’m feeling kinda horny,” he said with a grin.

  Belatrix smiled and set aside her bowl.

  Adam could get away with saying such forward things—he could rush the moment with her—because he didn’t do it often.

  He did it every time.

  3

  Even these false worlds

  with their oceans and vast plains

  can't hold all my lies

  Adam arrived late to his eight o’clock class. His students were already there, sitting like powered down robots, gazing ahead, awaiting commands from him. He closed the door—too loudly—and felt annoyed by the quiet. He would’ve preferred the film cliché: balled paper flying; kids sitting on desks swinging their feet; boys with bravado and girls with batting lashes twisting in their seats. In all his years of teaching, he’d never seen such a scene, not once. It was always the blank stares, the lethargy, the sense among them that the first who moved or uttered a word would be eaten by the others—or worse, be made unpopular.

  Adam dumped a stack of papers on his desk and made a show of arranging them, anything to disturb the thick silence of the room. He resented his eight o’clock class. He knew they felt the same way, but what were they missing? More sleep? Escape from their hangovers? He was missing an entire other life he preferred to live, a life that was daily truncated by a day job he wished he didn’t need. He thought this as he scanned their faces, all a weird mix of wide eyes and boredom. If it weren’t for the access to the University server farms and their sims, he wouldn’t put up with the kids at all. Well, the sims and the health care. The health care was nice.

  He shuffled papers around and tried to glean from graded assignments which class this was. He had nothing planned for the day. He rarely did of late.

  The hypocrisy of Adam’s new existence, the layers and layers of hypocrisy, were always right at the surface, staring back at him. He had become a master of procrastination. Like the students he had long mocked, he had honed the art of putting things off until they were simply never done. He lived under a heavy blanket of shirked responsibilities; they weighed on him every moment, this great pile of many things that needed to be done. He no longer knew where to start. It was all about getting through each moment, getting through the day to enjoy the nights, faking his real life so he could live his fake one.

  More hypocrisy: Adam used to mock his kids for their addiction to video games—now he lived in one of his own. He remembered his disgust at virtual marriages between players who had never met, stories about trolls and paladins exchanging digital vows. Now he had one girlfriend he had never met, and he discussed marriage and kids with another person who didn’t really exist.

  Then there was the plagiarism—his greatest hypocrisy of them all.

  “Does somebody want to pass these out?” Adam gathered up the graded assignments and waved them with one hand. He hadn’t actually taken the time to read them, just verified that they existed. A student he particularly loathed, seated to Adam’s left, was the first to volunteer. The boy took the papers eagerly. Adam rubbed his palms over his eyes and his fingers through his unwashed hair. The plagiarism was his greatest hypocrisy by far. If any of his students plagiarized, they would be flunked. They knew that from the start. It was the greatest sin as a student, as a thinker, and it was a temptation they struggled to avoid. Adam, meanwhile, did it for a living. His second job, the one that paid most of his bills, was to steal the words of others. But lately he hadn’t even been able to summon the motivation to do that. While the papers, marked with their red checks and little else, fluttered their way through the room, an old conversation with his mother came back to Adam. He remembered the first time he had tried to explain his new vocation, and how unimpressed she had been.

  ****

  “I’m just so proud of you honey!”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Adam held the phone under his chin, the speaker angled away from his face. The extra distance dampened the ear-splitting scream of his mother’s voice, who seemed to think her words needed extra force to cross the two time zones between them.

  “My own son, an author.” Adam could picture her gingerly lifting each page of the book as she skimmed through it. “Cindy from my bridge club bought a copy. We’re racing each other to the end, but not so fast I can’t enjoy it.”

  “That’s great, Mom, but you do know—”

  “I really love the Marsha character. When she tells Reginold to get out of his own house—”

  “Hey, Ma?”

  “I love that part. Yes, Dear?”

  “You’re not telling people that I wrote the book are you?” Adam nuzzled the phone against his ear and pulled on the silence. He could hear his mother’s exhalations on the other end, breathless from excitement. He didn’t call as often as he should.

  “Your name is on the cover,” she said. “Adam Griffey. And you dedicated it to your mom. That’s me.”

  “Mom, I discovered the book. We’ve talked about this. It says it right there with the copyrights.”

  “But this is your book.” The pain in her voice was gut wrenching.

  “Yes, and the royalties are mine, and I get a lot of credit with some people for discovering it, but it wasn’t written by me. Please don’t tell Cindy or any of your other friends that I wrote the book. I don’t want to have to explain it on holidays—”

  “So who wrote it?” Her voice had gone quiet. Adam could hear her flipping through pages, could almost picture her weathered fingers quivering as she did so. He had told her about this. He remembered telling her about this.

  “Mom, do you remember the worlds I told you about? The simulated ones where people here at the university study the weather, and the way the plates of the crust move, and how stars and moons form and all that?”

  “The video games?”

  Adam sighed. He looked from a pile of dirty laundry to a moldy mound of stacked plastic dishes rising out of the sink. He had none of the time for this.

  “It’s similar to video games, Mom, but a lot more complex and a lot more useful. People do real good research in there. That cure for testicular cancer that’s been all over the news? It came from one of these worlds.”

  “They cure cancer there?”

  Adam felt like he was teaching his mother to perform brain surgery over the phone. Keep your index finger extended along the back of the scalpel, like so, but a little bent. You’ve got the cordless drill charged up? Make the first incision—

  “They do a lot of things on these worlds, Ma. They’re a lot like this world. People get up and drive to work. It rains and things get wet. They erect buildings, and the windows need washing after a while. And people write books and plays and poetry and what-not.”

  “And someone on this world wrote this book?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you just took it?”

  “Ma, you know these people aren’t real, right?”

  “So they don’t mind? Do you tell them?”

  “No we don’t—” Adam thought about it. They would mind, wouldn’t they? “Mom, we can’t exactly tell them that they aren’t real, that we created them and we really like their work so we’re gonna share it in the real world.”

  “Why not?” His mother grunted, sounding disgusted with him. “I thought I raised you better.”

  Adam slapped his palm on his chest. “It isn’t up to me, Ma! I don’t make the rules. Besides, I don’t think you could convince these people. They think they’re just as real as you and me. They’d probably lock you up in a padded room until you logged off.”

  “Logged off—?”

&
nbsp; “Forget it, Ma.”

  “What am I supposed to tell my friends?”

  “Tell them I’m really good at what I do. Tell them that I can memorize fifteen pages in a single session, word for word. Tell them there’s no way we can copy stuff straight out of the quantum drives, Mom. Say that. Tell them “quantum drives.” Tell them that there’s hundreds of thousands of people trying to do what I do, to find that one great work of art in a sea of tripe, and most of them can’t. Tell your friends that I’m really good at seeing the true genius among the piles of plain stories. Tell them that I’ll be the one to find the next Shakespeare, Mom.”

  “But you won’t tell him?”

  “Tell who?”

  “This new Shakespeare. You’ll memorize his stuff, and you won’t tell him.”

  Adam cradled the phone to his ear and let out his breath. “He wouldn’t believe me, Ma, even if I did. These people aren’t real. It’s like a video game, just like you said.”

  “So Marsha and Reginold—”

  “Those are characters in a book written by a virtual person.” Adam said it slowly.

  “But they’re in love with each other.”

  He sighed. “I suppose they are. In their own weird way.”

  “How did a video game write about that?”

  “Hey, Ma? I gotta go. I’ve got a class in an hour.”

  “Does your girlfriend, does Amanda know this is what you do?”

  “Yeah,” Adam lied.

  “And she’s okay with it?”

  “Of course.” He rubbed his temples.

  “When am I going to meet her?”

  Not before I do, Adam thought.

  “Soon,” he said.

  “Okay. Well, I still like the book.”

  “Thanks, Ma.”

  “Even if you did steal it from some poor person.”

  4

  The ones and zeros

  like snow, descend and blanket

  my eyes, forming all.

  Adam patted his pockets as he left his apartment, making sure he had his keys. It was winter; the days were short. A blanket of black hung over the campus, and a blanket of white covered the ground. He shut the apartment door too hard, rattling the windows. Of late, all doors seemed to close too hard for him or not at all. They were slammed or left wanting. It was about motor control, and Adam was losing his. He looked back to the shuddering window and saw his reflection. The scruff on his jaw measured the long nights, nights such as these when he should sleep but couldn’t. Despite his fatigue, he remained awake, a diurnal creature in the opposite of day.

  “Griff?”

  Adam turned to find his friend standing at the bottom of his apartment’s stoop, freshly falling snow gathering on his knit cap like stars shaken from the darkness overhead.

  “Hey, Samualson.”

  “You ready?” Samualson asked. He had a look of concern on his face, a look Adam was getting used to seeing. His friend was a decade older than him and half a foot taller. A neatly trimmed beard and fitted coat lent him a professorial look. He seemed more the English scholar than Adam felt, even though he was a member of the hard sciences. The two of them had become friends after seeing each other in the labs every night. They found there was something less pathetic about coming and going to the sims with another real person.

  Adam shrugged his bookbag over his shoulder and followed Samualson down the walk. The campus arranged across the valley below was illuminated by tall night lights and the sliver of a waning moon. The snow on the ground and in the air seemed to gather and magnify the light. The shallow impressions of footsteps littered the ground, already half full again with falling snow. Adam hurried up beside Samualson, their boots crunching and squeaking in the wet pack.

  “Hey, did you hear?” Thick smoke streamed out with Samualson’s voice, the moisture of his breath crystalized in the cold night air.

  “Did I hear?” Adam tugged his gloves on and patted them together. “Did I hear what? I hear tons. I hear too much.”

  “Virginia Tech.” Samualson turned his head as a gust of wind brought cold and a flurry of blown snow. “Their farm got razed.”

  “Razed? As in gone?”

  “Every single server got deleted. Formatted.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.” Adam tucked his scarf into his collar. “When? Last night? Today?” He couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard.

  Samualson groped in a pocket and drew out an orb of light, the glow of his phone dazzling the snow. “Just now.” He flashed the screen at Adam. “Read about it on the walk over. They think the Writer’s Guild might be responsible, but again, nobody’s taking credit.”

  Adam shook his head. “How are they doing this? That’s three farms wiped out this month.”

  “Yeah.” They turned a corner around the administration building, entering its lee and escaping the bitter wind. “Three farms went online this month and three others got hosed. That’s pretty weird.”

  Adam’s exhalations billowed in the air in front of him before trailing off behind. He pulled his scarf over his mouth. “How many worlds was Tech simming?” His voice was muffled and wet against his nose.

  “Sixteen. Four Humanoid and the rest Xeno. I work with a guy who had remote access to some of them. He’s gonna be crushed. Was in the middle of some good research there.”

  “Sixteen worlds. Fuck me, that’s a lot to lose.” Adam glanced up at the sliver of a moon hanging over campus.

  “They’re saying something close to eighty billion sentients are gone. No telling how many lesser critters.”

  “Or works of art,” Adam reminded him.

  Samualson shrugged and stuffed his phone away. His hands were pale blue from the cold. He dug in another pocket and pulled a pair of gloves out, then wiggled them on. “That’s your domain,” he said.

  They shuffled in near silence across the campus. Adam could hear the tinkle of invisible sleet hitting the crust of snow around him. It was a small campus, which kept the jaunts short, but it was hilly and prone to gasping and wheezing. The university was kept small by necessity, nestled down and crowded in by three rising slopes, like two bosoms and a great belly, all perched on the thin sternum of a high mountain valley. It was a place that caught snow and gathered high-flying and lost souls. Griffey considered that as they reached the Madison Mitchell Jr. Computer Science building. He stamped snow off his boots while Samualson fumbled through his ring of keys. Adam watched a snowflake fall on the back of his glove, the white standing out on the black for a moment before the edges of the fragile crystalline structure folded up into a drop of water. The clarity of the transformation was stunning.

  “Look how real all this is,” he said aloud, not meaning to.

  Samualson turned and studied his friend, a shiny key pinched between the padded fingers of his glove.

  “You feeling okay? You look like shit, man.”

  Adam glanced up from the falling, melting stars. “How does it feel this real when we’re in there?” He jerked his head up at the building. Samualson turned back to the lock, inserted the key and opened the door, which squealed on frozen hinges.

  “I take it you don’t dream much.”

  Adam laughed and stomped snow off his boots. “I don’t even sleep much anymore.”

  “Well if you slept more, you’d dream more, and you’d see how good your brain is at making something out of nothing.” He held the door open for Adam, who shuffled through, followed by a dusting of snow. “You know there’s a spot in the center of your vision where you can’t see, right?”

  “Where the retina goes through.” Adam nodded. He didn’t see the connection.

  “Your brain fills in that blank spot perfectly.” The door clanged shut behind them. “I was talking to a professor in the bio department about this a month ago. You know what he said? He said roughly thirty percent of everything we see is hallucination. It’s our brain smoothing things over so the world’s not so pixelated.” Samualson nodded down the hallway. �
��That’s how everything in there feels just as real as this, as real as our dreams.” He patted Adam on the back, letting loose a small avalanche of clinging snow. “Seriously, man, you’ve gotta get some sleep. Why don’t you take a night or two off? These worlds aren’t going anywhere.”

  “That’s what Virginia Tech thought.”

  Samualson laughed. “Ours are a pittance compared to that. Nobody’s gunning for us.”

  Adam shrugged, and the two of them fell silent save for the squeak of their wet boots. He imagined—or hallucinated—that he could hear the collective roar of billions of tiny whispering, virtual souls as they approached the interface room. He thought about the server farm nearby with its tall cabinets of computer equipment adorned with blinking lights. Hundreds of busy little mechanical arms clicked back and forth somewhere inside the quantum hard drives, like the arms of miniature gods waving over a dozen digitized worlds, creating and destroying all the time.

  5

  The connected few.

  Billions of neurons and souls.

  So few connected.

  The interface room was packed. Adam had rarely seen it so full during a night shift. Usually they would find a lone professor or technician in the room working late. Adam preferred it like that, preferred it more when he had the place to himself. He worried his facial twitches or some uttered word would give away his romantic trysts. He’d never gleaned anything from Samualson that made Adam think his friend suspected, but still he worried. The two of them often mocked those who jacked in to jack off. It was no secret lots of professors did. Regular porn had nothing on virtual whores who didn’t even know they were virtual, and tenure had been revoked over particularly exotic sprees. Adam justified what he did because he was in love, or thought he was.