Hugh Howey: The Plagiarist

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.

“Art?” His friend chuckled softly as he pressed the pads to his temples. “Good luck with that.”

“It’s all luck,” Adam admitted. “Are you still working on that same protein?”

Samualson flipped open a pad of paper and touched a pen to his tongue, a nervous tic more than a functional act. The woman interfaced on the other side of him twitched, her head leaping up from her folded arms then crashing back down again. “Yup,” Samualson said. He slid pages up the spiral bound pad to find his place. Adam saw line after line of four letters repeated: CTTGACATGCA… It seemed like mind-numbing work. He imagined his friend peering into a virtual microscope, or cyclotron, or whatever biologists used, and memorizing a few hundred letters at a time—jacking out—writing them down—jacking back in. It gave Adam a headache just thinking about it and made him appreciate his own work. If they transcribed a few letters the wrong way, a cure for liver cancer might instead turn a poor kid into a glow stick. If Adam got a word or two wrong, nobody knew or really cared. Unlike his brief haiku, the sheer mass of a full length piece of writing could absorb a handful of mistakes.

The machine at Adam’s feet beeped, letting him know he had a connection to the school’s server farm. Adam liked that it was called a “farm.” He smiled at the thought of worlds springing up from plowed rows of dirt, cloudlike shrouds unwrapping to reveal blue and spiral-green planets of life. The word farm, of course, was a holdover from the clusters of computers, the server farms, used at places like Pixar, where virtual worlds were created for entertainment. It took a while before the productive uses of such worlds were understood. Once they were, the result was often referred to as the third great agricultural revolution. Sim farms, in just the last decade, had sprouted all over the place. Government owned, university owned, even a few private ones. The flood of research from these farms drowned out all the work done in the real world. A theory would be published in the morning and overturned by mid-afternoon. Planetary formation and plate tectonics; punctuated equilibrium and mass extinctions; arsenic-based lifeforms and exoskeletons. If you weren’t jacked in, you weren’t playing.