She crooked an eyebrow.
“In fact,” Wes said, “the system subverts advertising, at least in the current sense of the word. What’s the more powerful argument for the value of a product: a manufacturer-financed image or video for how great it is, or the clear evidence that it’s selling two to one over the competition?”
“Value is subjective,” Professor McGregor said.
“Of course it is,” said Wes. “That’s the whole point of Pocketz.”
She huffed. “OK. Let’s move on. The project itself is fine—totally adequate for the purposes of an honors thesis.”
“Adequate,” Wes echoed.
“Adequate,” Professor McGregor repeated. “But the Review of Literature is quite poor. You only mention five economists specifically—Smith, Mill, Veblen, Krugman, and Odhiambo. It reads a bit like an EncycloFeedia entry. In fact, when I conducted a search of some of the sentences in your Review of Lit, I found that you had cut and pasted whole paragraphs from your source materials, including EncycloFeedia.”
Wes waited calmly for her to make her point.
“That’s plagiarism, Mr. Feingold.”
“So?”
She laughed disbelievingly. “You wrote in your Significance of Project section about ‘Societal Values’ and how those compare to value in a more general sense. Or, rather, how ‘values’”—she made exaggerated air quotes—“influence value.” She sipped from a mug of coffee like an actor using a prop. “Academic honesty is a Societal Value. Perhaps it’s one that doesn’t have much capital in certain circles of life, like the world of web feeds that you seem to want to be a part of, but here, at this school, it has premium worth. This place cares if you plagiarize your sources. And since this place has the task of determining whether or not you graduate with a high school diploma, which determines whether or not you will be able to go to university, our value becomes your value, at least temporarily.”
“So what are you saying?” Wes asked.
“I’m saying that I want you to rewrite the Review of Literature and the Theoretical Framework portions of your thesis. You need at least ten more sources, and you certainly need a refresher on how to properly cite your sources. Here’s a hint: if you didn’t write the sentence, you better put it in quotation marks.” She synced her tablet so that a calendar appeared on the wall beside Wes. “I’m thinking five months should be sufficient time, though I can give you longer if you think you need it. So . . . August fifteenth. You send me the doc by no later than noon that day. I read and get back to you by mid-September. And maybe we can still have you walking the line by the December ceremony. What do you think?”
“I think,” said Wes, “that it’s bullshit, and I could give a rat’s ass about a high school diploma.”
Her face and neck bloomed with red heat. “Excuse me?”
“What possible value could a certificate declaring me a high school graduate have if a person like you has the power to withhold it from me? I just brought you a system that’s going to revolutionize the world, and you’re concerned about whether or not I pulled some quotes from EncycloFeedia. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
Professor McGregor was practically shaking now with rage. In later years, Wes would register some guilt over this meeting. Not over the fact that he had, as she called it, plagiarized; the Review of Lit was bullshit busy work, he knew it and so did she, and the fact that she would delay his graduation over it revealed an appalling lack of vision. But he shouldn’t have cursed, and he shouldn’t have raised his voice. He should not have said, as he went on to, “In a few years’ time I’m going to be rich and famous, and you’re still going to be sitting in this room lording yourself over kids who are smarter than you are, because you know it’s your last chance to do it. So keep your stupid degree. I’m out of here.”
And, in the time it took him to gather his tablet and turn his back to her blotchy, ugly, shocked face, he was. When Pocketz went live the next year, and when the stock went public four years after that, the news stories always began with a version of the same theme: “High school dropout Wes Feingold,” “Unlikely CEO Wes Feingold.” It was a part of the myth now, and Wes thought sometimes that it would have been worth doing the revision, which would not have been all that hard anyway, just to live without hearing those qualifiers before his name. He wasn’t some lucky idiot who screwed up his life and later stumbled upon success; he was simply beyond Professor McGregor’s petty moralizing and worthless degree. But that didn’t make for a good headline.
—
Ten years later and here he was, doing this crazy thing, this OLE Fall Color Tour, a trip valued at one hundred thousand credits. Now this was an expenditure that defied most rational theories about relative value. In a society that placed safety at its highest premium, that had withdrawn itself into zones, each with its own strategies for fighting or deflecting the advances of an epidemic of aggressive parasites, what did it mean for rich men and women like him to spend extravagantly on a trip right into the midst of that epidemic?
He had more credits than he could spend in his lifetime. Pocketz, as he anticipated, was operating now mostly on its own momentum, and the innovations he periodically made, such as refining the stock market Projectionz interface, gave him none of the thrill of engineering the system’s initial structure. Nor had Pocketz changed the world in exactly the ways he had imagined it would. As a teenager he had theorized that systematizing conspicuous consumption would reduce the cultural capital of spending. Remove the mystery, make it so that his parents could have known before going over to the Duncans what was for dinner and exactly how much it cost, and maybe the credits spent wouldn’t matter as much. Maybe, just maybe, the friendships would matter more, and value would be derived not from the selection of fish and booze but from the quality of conversation, the number of genuine laughs. That had been his hope. No, his premonition.