Chapter 26: Plagiarism.

I'm beyond proving my innocence. It will be the last time that I write it: I didn't do it. I had no prior knowledge that those studies were undergoing —despite the publication of some related papers.

I know it may seem unbelievable that someone would start researching something incredibly specific without exhaustively surveying for related studies. Unbelievable because most people in the field apparently knew that there was some research in the exact same direction as mine. Or so they claimed, a posteriori —many months after I published. As for my other papers and the other accusations... meh.

I swear I used to talk to fellow scholars about it, and nobody mentioned anything. Were they intentionally hiding information from me? or were they just uninterested?

Ok. Maybe I must come clean: I did become aware of the other papers, but only days before releasing mine. That realization brought a hellish, scathing nightmare into my life —one that may have shoved the awareness of the similarities into my subconscious.

It's impossible to accept that you have sunk so much dedication in something so valueless. Something which would allow you to leave some imprint in the world. Something grand that had appeared, after seeking it for a thousand hours, in front of you, as novel and meaningful, as beautiful and intelligent in form and soul. Something that had become part of you, and you of it.

I did a few changes and went on with the publishing.

I did not plagiarize my thesis.

Every person I pissed off in the slightly authoritatian streak during my last months as a professor acted as fuel when the case for plagiarism was presented and the torches were lit.

For all I know, maybe the whole stack of accusations was triggered by someone I pissed off in the same period of time. Or before. Profoundly pissed. There's no way this happened without someone very motivated and persistent in bringing me down. Someone with power.

I became sick and tired of publicly defending my case —I can't provide further evidence or keep suggesting how coincidental the offending points were. You see, to put an example, the RSA cryptosystem was published in 1977 —and no one accused them of copying the very similar cryptosystem by the British GCHQ years before. Of course, there's a bit of a difference in that I actually had access to the papers that I was accused of copying —they weren't precisely top secret.

Logically fallacious comparisons aside, there was a point in which I should have been done defending myself: at the hearing, with a defense that was victorious. That hearing came after sustaining many weeks of stress and withstanding veiled insults to my career.

I kept my doctorate and the tribunal deemed the similarities among the papers —even if existing and discernible— could be coincidental and even outside the consideration of unintentional plagiarism.

In spite of that decision from the tribunal, a lot of damage had been done. Damage to my reputation by hearsay had spread like the flu. I felt I had still to explain myself every single time.

How had they stolen my life.

Maybe I could have rebuilt my career. I could still find companies interested in my work, and I kept telling myself that people would forget the whole thing.

Yet it didn’t stop. The shadow of plagiarism was revived every now and then, with papers under my name that I never published. I had already left academia when those started to spread, reminding me not to ever come back.

Or remember publishing. Was I going crazy? Some where variations of ideas I had long discarded. How could I forget publishing a paper? Absurd, it was clear that someone was playing tricks on me. However, they were powerful enough to fake timestamps of publications. And more than powerful, they were rancorous. Ferocious and ceaseless. I never had offended anyone so much to deserve that.

Was it... Shaftum? It made no sense.

I couldn't forget. Gaslighting or not, I would feel the shadow of disreputation following me everywhere —was it my imagination, or was it true? Did everyone know?

And where were my enemies? There was nobody I could trust. Those cowards would forever remain hidden.

At least most people know who ruins their lives. I only had suspicions that led nowhere.

The shadow of the doubt —paired with the immoral aspects that I had seen in him— would impede me to ever talk to Alain again. The shadow of doubt that made vengeance alluring.

People around me would say not to understand why I had to leave: I had so much done, so many years dedicated to it. I was already halfway to tenure. They saw the accusations of plagiarism as a minor inconvenience.

But I had to leave. Even if only temporarily. And so, I asked for a temporarily leave without pay.

I found myself driving away from San Francisco, heading South.