The Plagiarist

the prose to memory. Selecting from the top writers of several worlds, he had translated their genius into his own, word for word, colon for colon.

Adam felt a tingle at the base of his skull, then a buzz like electric zippers pulling back over his crown; his skull seemed to split in half. He shivered with the out-of-body experience, the sense of his self floating out the top of his head before it was sucked back into his gut. He grunted, heard an utterance by Samualson get cut off by the transfer, and then he was gone. He was joining the legions of plagiarists who had followed in Dylan Pyle’s wake, soaring down to artificial worlds, scraping them dry of their great art before the scientists were otherwise done with them.

There should have been an uproar, Adam thought. There should have been controversy over what Pyle had done. There should have been outrage. Those would have been normal human responses to having been duped. But a stronger impulse seized the popular imagination: the ability to be great overnight. It was a new type of lottery, one where fame and talent were won rather than simple money. The heyday of the sciences came to a sudden close. Discoveries were still made, of course. Real progress was won in astrophysics, biology, psychology, and other fields. But suddenly, the science wings and computer science centers were overrun with talentless hipsters who thought they had an eye for genius. Courses on memorization were invented. Adderall replaced coffee as the recreational drug of choice. Server farms groaned under the stress. Temples were seared. Tubes of adhesive gel were rolled dry.

The Anti-Renaissance ensued. As Adam logged into his account, he shivered at the memory of it. Hell, he was still living it. The outpouring of stuff, of crap, was so intense, nothing could be seen or heard. The variety and quantity were too much. It was a repeat of what YouFilm did to cinema, what AutoTune did to the music industry, what genetic splicing had done to sports. The bar wasn’t raised so much as buried under the pile of crap.

And offline talent, actual talent, rebelled. Farms were attacked, physically, by supposed bands of marginal musicians and writers. The artists and the avant garde became the new bomb- chuckers. And meanwhile, consumers were pulling away from it all, paralyzed by the sudden confusion of too much choice and novelty. Entire industries suffered.

The interface lab fully dissolved, and an entire universe of simmed worlds appeared before Adam. Here is where he would’ve, a year ago, agonized over the choices available to him. So many worlds full of so many pages of written words, all of them open to his perusal. But it had been a long time since he’d really chosen. He was now more an automaton than the sims he lived among. He moved his virtual self, shifted his awareness, and went to select the planet where his loved one resided—

And that’s when Adam Griffey saw the deletion notice hovering above the planet.

6

It may be erased,
all that is written. Destroyed,
all that’s created.

The deletion notice loomed massive over Hammond. Large white numbers on a red background flicked as they slowly counted down the planet’s final moments. Adam felt his real stomach drop, back on Earth. He felt all the emotions of shock and rage and sadness, even as he floated bodiless through the void. His plans for the night were over. His plans for the week were over. He didn’t have any plans else. Adam’s existence had suddenly become as vapid as this simulated consciousness in the black. He was death.

As he floated closer to the planet, he saw that there were just over two hours left, sim time. Two hours for Belatrix to live and breathe. Two hours for him to do nothing for her. It was around eleven thirty when he’d logged on, so the deletion must be slated for midnight, Earth time. The end of the day. The end of all days for the people of Hammond.

Adam had a sudden and strange urge to log out and tell Samualson, to let him know that this was the reason for the packed interface room. It was Hammond. He imagined the remote access groups would be going nuts as well, logging on from universities and access points all over Earth. It would be a free-for-all, grabbing what data they could, performing wild experiments that would break the suspension of disbelief for the planet’s inhabitants. Adam had watched from a distance once while meteors rained down on a planet where lived some decent playwrights. He hadn’t even had time to finish memorizing a work he’d been in the middle of, one with quite a bit of potential. That play took up half a notebook in his apartment; the too- hopeful idea was that he’d finish it himself one day.

Despondent and not knowing what to do, Adam drilled into the countdown’s menu to look for the slated reason for the planet’s deletion. It made no sense to log off and tell Samualson; his friend would see for himself, or he’d find out later. Besides, he suspected there was some other reason he wanted to log off. He felt as if he were dangerously close to coming clean about his affair. He had the urge to make Belatrix real by dragging her name back to his planet; he wanted to yell and scream at someone to not do it, to call off the erasure.

Adam felt all this—he felt anxious and desperate as he continued to drift ever nearer to Hammond. The truth of it began to fully set in. The woman he loved, virtual or not, would cease to exist in two hours. She’d be gone forever. She had been diagnosed with something terminal and sudden.

Adam read the deletion report:

With the advent of their own simmed worlds, planet Hammond has placed undue stress on our server farms. Planetology research will be suspended, to be resumed once the world re-accretes around the star Beatrice Bondeamu Gilbert III, as per the Astronomy department’s request. All sociological studies will be terminated forthwith. Deletion is slated for midnight, February 21st, 2022.

Adam’s dimensionless body sped past the message, his mind absorbing it numbly as he went. Why did they have to delete the entire planet? Why not destroy the server farms on Hammond? Why not just delete those? They can rebuild a planet, but not the people. The people would be different. Their writing would be different. Their food and names and language would be different. Their bookstores and the people who worked there would be different.

Adam didn’t want different.

He slid into his usual avatar with the shiver of numbness turning to sensation, like new skin pulled over unfeeling muscle. The clouds of Hammond parted as Adam chose his arrival destination; bright sunlight winked out, replaced by the dark interior of the bookstore’s bathroom. Adam fumbled for the light, then the doorknob. They were in the same place as before, but it took him a moment. He had become uncentered from himself. As he stepped out into the smell of fresh pulp and horseshit tea, the tiled floor below him seemed closer than it should be. His mind was spinning; he wondered what he would say, what he was even doing here. His shameful and wonderful trysts were over. His love was gone. He wouldn’t have to think of anything to tell his mother. He wouldn’t have to worry about his father spinning in his grave, or his sister finding out and being humiliated for him. He didn’t have to lie to Amanda or Samualson. He didn’t have to burn with embarrassment under the unknowing glare of his students.

As he weaved through the stacks of books, Adam became dizzy with all the implications and outcomes. He wanted none of it, not even the relief from this burden. He would gladly lie for another year, another month, another week, just one more day. At least a full day to process it. A day to sit in the park with Belatrix and break the news, maybe even let her think he was crazy. There was so much of her world she had never seen, places Adam had flown over, invisible, and wanted to take her. He hurried down the line of registers, looking for her. She wasn’t