The Plagiarist

3

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—?”

“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.”