Adam looked out over campus, at the amazing view from his window that he’d seen maybe once or twice before.
“How long?” he asked. He thought about the hundreds of worlds simmed on Earth. How many had worlds simming in them? Or in them, one more layer deep? How many Earths were there on Amanda’s world? Could this be real?
“Not much time,” she said.
“What if you’re not real,” Adam said. He pressed his hand against the frosted glass and felt the cold beyond.
“I think about that a lot,” she told him.
Adam wanted her to not be real. He wanted company in that sudden loneliness that had overtaken him. He wanted to hurt her in some way.
“These things happen so fast,” she said. “They reach a tipping point before we see it coming. Believe me, I did everything I could—”
“You were the one razing our farms,” he said.
The accusation frosted on the glass by his hand.
“I tried everything I could—”
“Make a copy.” Adam turned to her. “Make a copy of me. Or delete more farms.” Real or not, he didn’t want to cease existing. He felt a surge of panic. Adam looked back over the roofs of the department buildings. “I can pull the plug on our servers. I can. I know where the backup relays are. It’ll make some room on your own servers—”
Amanda placed a hand on his shoulder. “Adam, it’s been decided much higher up than me. I’ve already begged on your behalf.”
“On my behalf?” He wiped tears from his cheeks. “What do you mean? I’m nothing.”
Amanda frowned. Her eyes were following his tears as they streamed down. She seemed reluctant to touch him any further.
“That’s not true,” she said. She bit her lip again. “We are drowning in stuff to consume, just like you, just like all the words that are simmed and the worlds they sim. But I found your poetry, this limited syllabic form found nowhere else, this simplicity, this elegance constrained. I’ve become an expert on it, on haiku. I’ve mined the ancient hills of Earth for every nugget. I’ve combed the books and scrolls and tablets, going back to its Eastern roots—but you are the one.”
Adam sobbed. His head spun from the night’s tragedy and the day’s disbelief.
Amanda touched his cheek.
“The hours we spend poring over a single poem of yours…” Amanda sighed. “They are the closest we get to silence on my world. The closest to a pause for thought. We sip on your works, Adam Griffey, to keep from drowning in all else.”
“That can’t be true,” he said. The sobs and tears felt so real.
“The end is coming any moment now,” Amanda said. “Please don’t take them with you. Please.”
Adam swiped at his cheeks. He was about to speak when there was a great rumble outside. It seemed to emanate from the very belly of the Earth. Amanda looked past him to the window. Adam turned. A plume of dark smoke burst up through the milky white of a hillside. Mountains, long dormant, erupted. A cone of black mixed with bright red, fading as it coursed through the cold air. The ground spit dirt. Crimson rivers leaked like wounds from the earth. The world shook. Amanda pleaded.
“The world that isn’t,” Adam said, “becomes simply that once more.” He pressed both palms to the glass. He felt Amanda’s arms around him. He lost himself between the cold and the warm.
“And all is gray ash,” he concluded.
If any single work set me down the path to becoming a full-time writer, it was probably “The Plagiarist.” At the time, I had written five novels, the four Molly Fyde works and Half Way Home. I was working in a university bookstore in Boone, North Carolina. One of the perks of working there was a free college class each semester, so I signed up for an English course on science fiction taught by my friend Adam Griffey. On the first day of class, Adam handed us our syllabus and the formula for “The Plagiarist” was staring right at me.
Adam had a single automatic-fail rule on his course guidelines: Committing an act of plagiarism earned you an F. Any obvious case would mean you were out of the class. But besides that warning, there was also an offer: We could submit a work of art instead of taking the final. Knowing Adam as well as I did (he was a regular in the bookstore), I knew exactly what my final would be. I was going to write about a college professor who is a professional plagiarist. The story began to unfold that first day of class.
There are a few things I love about this story. The first is the idea that we can have a physical relationship with the digital, and a digital relationship with the physical. I see this happening more and more. And I believe the distinctions will further blur in the future.
There’s also the idea that simulated worlds can burden the host world as they begin to simulate their own worlds. Every embedded computer has to be simulated. This would get very taxing very quickly. The destruction of campus servers in Adam’s world is an obvious clue as to the nature of his reality, but no one in his world can see it. Even as they are destroying planets to solve the same problem.
But most importantly, this is a story about the fear of writing. The real Adam Griffey is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and if he wrote a novel it would blow all our collective minds. But we have this problem where those with the most talent are the most critical of themselves, while hacks like me think what we do is worthy of publication. It means true genius goes begging. I’m as sad for this loss as the fictional Adam is over the destruction of planets.
Select Character
There’s so much shouting at the beginning. That’s how the game starts, with a squad of recruits in a drab-green tent, a drill sergeant yelling, the game controller vibrating in fury. While he yells orders, I can select my character from the recruits. There’s a square-jawed man with a crew cut, a darker version of the same guy with a short Mohawk, and then another mountain of muscle with a feather in his hair—presumably Native American. It’s what passes for diversity in the game. Three identical brutes of slightly varying shades.
I choose one at random. And while the drill sergeant with the spittle-flecked lips tells me where I’m supposed to go and who I’m supposed to kill, I put the game on mute to silence his shouting, get up, and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. More than once, the sergeant’s shouting has woken the baby. Which means rocking her back to sleep for an hour rather than seeing to my garden.
The lecture is over when I get back to the sofa. I fish a coaster out of a drawer and leave my glass of water to sweat while I gear up. There’s an arsenal to choose from. The standard package is already in place, with grenades dangling from my chest, a knife that runs almost from hip to knee, an assault rifle, an Uzi, and more. I take all of it off, piece by piece, and grab five canteens. They attach to each hip, one at the back, and two on the chest where the grenades were. It’s almost like a boob job, going from the grenades to the canteens. I glance around the empty living room. No one to share the joke with.