The Plagiarist (3 page)

“
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—?”

“
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.”

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.

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.

“
Damn,” Samualson said, seeing the crowd. “Is there a rally tonight?” He glanced over at the scheduling board where groups signed out clusters of terminals for virtual meetings. One of the bigger groups on campus was the cycling club, a habit more loathsome than jerking off in Adam’s opinion. These people actually simmed bicycle riding. They spent their time on foreign worlds, riding bikes, their brains flooded with endorphins from simulated exhaustion. Adam could always sense when he was interfacing right after a cyclist. The seat would remain warm for hours, the stench of sleep-sweat in the air. It was disgusting. The fact that most of them were grossly overweight didn’t help.

“
There’s two over in that corner,” Samualson said.

Adam flipped his backpack around and dug for his temple patches. He followed his friend through the busy room.

“
What’re you searching after tonight?” Samualson asked. He sat down in front of one of the terminals and squeezed gel from a tube and onto his finger. “That elusive Shakespeare?”

Adam laughed. “I’ve given up on finding him.” He plugged his temple patches into a pair of cords dangling from outlets on the wall. “There’ll never be another Bard of Avon.”

“
That children’s series you picked up last year seems to be doing pretty well.” He dabbed gel onto his temples, checking the placement in the small circular mirror mounted on the wall in front of him. Adam did the same; they looked like performers getting ready for a show, an apt illusion.

“
That series is drivel,” Adam said. He smiled at his friend’s reflection. “Don’t get me wrong, the royalties are good, but I’d rather have the hours back I spent memorizing them.”

“
Or the brain cells.”

Both men laughed as they began pressing the interface pads into the dabs of gel. Adam tried to ignore the blue crescents under his eyes as he secured the connection. Sleep had become as virtual, as ephemeral, as his work.

“
So whatcha after, then?” Samualson wouldn’t leave the line of questioning alone. The machines at their feet hummed to life, leaving thick seconds to fill with banter.

“
I’m dabbling in art, actually.” He glanced at Samualson and hoped the shame of the lie would adequately mimic the shame of the truth he was hiding.