LUX

[The Plagiarist]

"It's very early for this to be happening," he said.

 

[The Plagiarist]

"This looks like a hospital," I said.

 

[The Plagiarist]

They agreed.

 

[The Plagiarist]

"How did I get here?" I asked, thinking about the drunken party.

 

[The Plagiarist]

The man said nothing and the woman looked down.

 

[The Plagiarist]

Very little was explained.

 

[The Plagiarist]

It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality.

 

[The Plagiarist]

There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience.

 

[The Plagiarist]

Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane.

 

[The Plagiarist]

Did they mean me?

 

[The Plagiarist]

It was explained to me finally that "You have a new personality now." But this statement was no explanation at all. It puzzled me more than ever since I had no awareness of an "old” personality.

 

[The Plagiarist]

If they had said, "You are a new personality," it would have been much clearer. That would have fitted. They had made the mistake of thinking a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears.

 

[The Plagiarist]

But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

 

[The Plagiarist]

But who was the old personality who they had known and presumed I was a continuation of?

 

[The Plagiarist]

This was my first inkling of the existence of Lux, many years ago.

In the days and weeks and years that have followed, I've learned much more.

 

[The Plagiarist]

He was dead.

 

[The Plagiarist]

Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain. Approximately 800 mills of amperage at durations of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had applied on twenty-eight consecutive occasions, in a process known technologically as "Annihilation ECS."

 

[The Plagiarist]

A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since.

 

[The Plagiarist]

I have never met him.

 

[The Plagiarist]

Never will.