Plagiarism Checker, or the Entrance to a Labyrinth

No one quite remembers the exact date, perhaps it was at the end of an unusually damp plum rain season, or maybe just some unremarkable afternoon forgotten in the dust of time, but in any case, the news about Dr. K and his legendary thesis spread quietly, like a silent mold, through the ancient and solemn corridors of the university. Three months, merely three months, and he had completed a doctoral thesis running to one hundred and forty thousand words. This in itself was nearly miraculous, enough to make seasoned scholars, those who had spent lifetimes poring over texts, feel unease and envy. However, what was truly dizzying was the report spat out by the cold machine—Plagiarism Rate: 0.1%.

In the modern Babel built of numbers and text, the plagiarism detection system is the final gatekeeper, the sentinel of rationality. It possesses an almost infinite memory, storing every fragment of human knowledge, from Aristotle to the latest internet memes. A similarity rate below 5% is already rare, but 0.1%—the number itself seemed like a typographical error, a tiny yet glaring flaw in the cosmic order. It almost perfectly proclaimed the thesis's "originality," an originality so absolute as to be unsettling.

K, a young man usually taciturn and possessing almost no presence, his supervisor recalled those three months with a tone full of bewilderment. K hardly appeared in the library or lab; he locked himself in his cramped dormitory like a modern alchemist. He didn't have mountains of books, nor were there sounds of all-night keyboard clatter. Some claimed to have seen a light in his room late at night, not a bright incandescent bulb, but a strange, faint bluish glow, as if from the deep sea or starry sky. He grew thinner, his eyes vacant, as if part of his soul had been extracted to fill the void of those one hundred and forty thousand words.

The thesis title itself was full of ambiguity and suggestion: Topological Structures of an Imploding Universe and Their Recursive Mappings in Dream Fragments. The professors on the review committee, sages steeped in their respective fields for decades, experienced something unprecedented while reading the first draft. It wasn't the transmission of knowledge, but more like a slow, irresistible vertigo. The language of the thesis was precise yet alien; the cited literature was either obscure and hard to find, or pointed simply to unknown "anonymous manuscripts" or "private correspondence collections." Its logic was as tight as a crystal's structure, yet the entire system was built upon a premise that could neither be falsified nor proven—that the essence of the universe is a constantly self-consuming, self-replicating dream, and human consciousness is merely an accidental, transient ripple in this grand reverie.

After the plagiarism report came out, the initial shock quickly turned into a hidden fear. The 0.1% similarity rate, this minuscule overlap, became the focus of everyone's attention. Technicians reran the program repeatedly, ruling out machine error. What exactly was that 0.1%? Some unavoidable common vocabulary? A few sentences bearing a startling resemblance to some ancient text? Or something else?

A young lecturer with a keen interest in semiotics spent weeks trying to trace the origin of this 0.1%. He discovered that these scattered, seemingly random fragments of repetition did not point to any known text, but subtly formed a pattern. When he arranged these fragments according to their order of appearance in K's thesis, removing logical connectors and punctuation, he obtained a string of unintelligible characters. This string revealed different faces under various decoding systems: sometimes like a fragment of an ancient sacrificial prayer, sometimes like a complex mathematical formula, and once, it is said, it pointed to the call number of a non-existent library.

The lecturer eventually abandoned his research. He began to suffer from insomnia, often waking startled in the middle of the night, feeling as though he had glimpsed some vast and indifferent structure, and K's thesis was merely a tiny portal through which this structure projected itself into our world.

K himself seemed indifferent to all this. At his thesis defense, he was like a marionette, answering questions in a monotone voice. His answers were clear yet hollow, as if reciting a language he did not understand. When asked about the 0.1%, a faint glimmer flickered in his eyes for the first time, and he said, almost blankly: "Perhaps that is... the marker at the entrance to the labyrinth? Or maybe, its signature."

No one understood this sentence. The committee ultimately passed his thesis unanimously, granting him his doctorate. This decision was based less on an affirmation of the thesis's value than on a collective, unspoken agreement not to delve too deeply. Acknowledging the thesis's "greatness" was easier to accept than admitting it might not belong to the realm of human intellect at all. The system needed closure, rationality needed boundaries, even if these boundaries were maintained by silence and forgetting.

K disappeared after graduation. Some said he went abroad for further study, others that he became a hermit in the mountains, and still others whispered that he never truly left, merely transformed into an imperceptible phantom in some corner of the university, or perhaps, he had fully merged into the "imploding universe" described in his thesis, becoming part of the dream itself.

That one-hundred-and-forty-thousand-word thesis was carefully stored in the university library's special collections, cataloged as arcane-001. It was rarely checked out, more like an unsettling relic. It's said that the digital backup was mysteriously corrupted during a server migration and could not be recovered. And the plagiarism report, marked with its 0.1% similarity rate, remains locked away with the original manuscript, like an undecipherable riddle, a signpost pointing towards an infinite abyss.

Sometimes, late at night, the library staff hear faint whispers seeming to emanate from the direction of the special collections. They prefer to believe it's the groaning of the old building, or the sound of wind passing through the window lattices. Because acknowledging other possibilities means admitting that the reality we depend on might just be the outer wall of some vast labyrinth, and K, the silent doctoral student, inadvertently found the entrance, leaving behind the key to vertigo and nothingness in that 0.1% crevice. The world continues to turn, the sun rises as usual, but for those who know the story of K and his thesis, a fine yet profound crack remains forever on the solid shell of reality.