“Have you received the book yet?” Haufei asked.

“No!” Sarah replied, “you asked me just 10 minutes ago.” she continued.

The doorbell rang, Sarah took the small, flat parcel from the postman. She held the book in her hand, took a selfie with it, and sent it to Haufei. 

“Yea finally!” Haufei replied, “when will you read it?” 

Sarah put the phone down on the sofa next to her, she flipped open the new book, the fresh ink and paper perfume compelled her to read.

“... I started this book project when I was 3, it’s not been easy but certainly very rewarding, that I have been able to summarised the essence of life, death, love and war into a story that I feel, really does justice to illustrating humanity, in such a way that a Martian would be able to comprehend.” The excerpt read.

Sarah raised an eyebrow, “this is such a generic claim by so many authors.” she thought to herself, “and, hasn’t Haufei just turned 31? That’s barely a third of one’s life nowadays.” However, since the book was written by her good friend, she flipped to the first chapter.

She read a few paragraphs, and a few more paragraphs; from the first page, the story was captivating, she was already sucked into the story line, following every twist and turn of the story, smiling, gasping, sweating, shedding tears, heart beat raising …

Suddenly she stopped, she turned back a couple of pages, and re-read slowly again. Some of the words sounded very familiar to her, so familiar, that she began to be able to recall the plot of the story. She stretched to reach the coffee table for the few books laying on it, she propped open as many as she could reach, trying to get some hints about which book may be similar to what she was reading from Haufei.

Sure enough, one of the books she was reading not too long ago, she recalled, had almost exactly the same plot. She picked up the book “The beautiful ugliness of living” by Jasmine Joans, holding it open with one hand, reading some of the quotes she marked when she read it. She turned to the book by her friend, she found the first quote, then the second, and the third … in fact, word by word, sentence by sentence, the two books were identical. 

Sarah couldn’t quite believe what she saw, she picked up the phone, but did not know what to ask Haufei. “There’s no way Haufei would copy a whole book from such a well-known author, it doesn’t make sense!” she thought to herself. 

“How is it so far?” Haufei messaged again. 

“It’s very interesting.” Sarah replied, “do you know Jasmine Jones? It reminded me of one of her stories.”

“Of course I do!” Haufei wrote in all caps. “Hasn’t she just released a new book? I have been so busy polishing my book that I still haven’t read it.”

Sarah got up from the sofa, carrying Haufei’s book on her left hand and Jones’ on her right, juggling them as if to weigh them, pinching them to gauge their thickness, squaring one on top of the other, while taking long strides towards the study. She sat the books on the desk, unsure what exactly she wanted to do.

Sarah flipped open Jones’ book, 420 pages, 9 chapters, laid out in a familiar style to her as she is a big fan of the acclaimed writer. She then put Haufei’s book right next to it, 425 pages, 9 chapters.

Sarah frowned, puzzled, “how can the books be so similar!” she muttered, finding it hard to comprehend. 

“It was Jack’s second year in school, he couldn’t wait to see his friends. As soon as Silva opened the school gate, Jack ran inside, skipping, leaping, waving at, hugging anyone his arms could reach. Silva stood and watched with a big grin, the display of innocent and pure friendships was so infectious that Silva felt like her morning coffee was unnecessary.” Sarah read randomly from one of the first pages from one of the books. She then flipped all the way to the end pages:

“Fred was sitting in the same bed that he was born in, he insisted on spending his last days at home no matter how much Jack tried to convince him to have proper medical care in the city. Silva sat next to the bed attentively, they did not speak for hours, Silva still couldn’t look Fred in the eyes. Suddenly, Fred sat up straight, as if he was in a hurry to go somewhere. “It’s okay, Silva, it’s okay.” Fred spoke for the first time in a long while.

“I can’t forget what I saw, when I opened the bathroom door, I almost couldn’t see your body, just your legs hanging out from the side of the bathtub, the two of you almost passed out.”

“Please Fred, I am really sorry.” Silva held his hand; either Fred did not have any more strength to pull his hand away or he did not want to do so.

“But I do remember so many other things too.” Fred continued without acknowledging what Silva was saying.

“How you surprised me with a birthday party every year, until I eventually told you that it ceases to be a surprise when that happens; The look on your face when I suggested that we should go round the neighbourhood to collect unwanted Lego for the orphanage, but you went with me anyway;”

As sudden as Fred started talking, his elbow that was propping him up gave way, his mouth was still half open, and he was gone.”

Sarah found the same paragraphs in the other book, drew a circle with an equal sign in it at the top left of the paragraphs in both the books. She held the pen in her hand, kept on reading slowly to compare the books, eventually she stopped and put a mark at the bottom right of what she had read.

Sarah calmed herself down, she wanted a more systematic way to find out what happened. “Either: Haufei copied Jasmine’s book, or Jasmine copied Haufei’s book.” she wrote on a blank piece of paper, out of desperation to make a start, soon realised what a pointless statement it was.

She flipped over the piece of paper, turned it sideways, and made a timeline at the top for Jasmine and bottom for Haufei. She began to fill in the timeline with facts that she could gather. Sarah also felt the need to know whether the books were exactly the same; she came up with a novel idea to play the audio version of the books at the same speed at the same time, and listen out for differences. With this, the afternoon was set, the audiobooks read by an artificial intelligence generated voice were playing in the background, while Sarah looked on Instagram for where Haufei and Jasmine had been in the last six months, picking up any clue on places they could have been together by chance, what they were writing about…

The neighbour’s cat was basking in the evening Sun outside Sarah’s window, some kids were on their scooters going around the neighbourhood, looking for anything and everything to entertain themselves with; the frail old man who lived alone in the opposite house was sitting outside, desperately trying to catch a conversation with anyone who walked pass, as if to reassure himself that he was still alive.

Sarah paused the audio books; she pushed open the window a little wider, the cat looked up, but laid back down almost immediately; A bee flew into the room, along with a waft of air that smelt so strongly of fertiliser; The music from the ice cream van was playing intermittently as customers were served; Sarah couldn’t resist the call from the ice cream van any more, some fresh air seemed like a good excuse to step out.

As Sarah walked towards the front door, she saw a shadow of someone standing outside, she warily approached the door, peeped through the peephole, to her great surprise, Haufei was standing outside.

Haufei was not wearing any makeup , her hair was messy, she was still wearing her pyjamas bottoms with a jacket covering her top.

The music from the ice cream van, coupled with the warm Summer Sun, drew almost everyone in the village out of their house, “Where is it?” an old man said to his excited grandson, listening and trying to locate the van. Sarah followed them, and another family followed Sarah from not too far behind.

The kid caught a glimpse of the excitement and skipped ahead, there was a small happy crowd gathering near the van, chatting, gossipping, telling stories that that the whole village had heard numerous times; but the listeners didn’t care whether the stories were repetitive, and the story-tellers didn’t care whether anyone was listening. 

Sarah reached into her pocket, it was completely empty. She frowned, and let the family behind her walk pass. As she was turning back to her house to get some money, the crowd slowly zoomed out behind her. All of the grandparents began to look the same, all the children began to look the same, all the families were the same, their voices, even their stories, sounded the same. “When I was your age” Sarah overheard a man, “I’d hold the ice cream in one hand, and piggyback on your granddad!” the child felt obliged to try, making a mess on the dad’s bald head with the ice cream.

Sarah found Haufei sobbing on the sofa, “Why are you so upset!” she reached out to comfort her. 

“No one will read my book now, I put so much into it, it’s my baby, it’s taken me much more than ten months.” Haufei would not stop sobbing. “Everyone will think I copied her book.” she paused, a little abruptly.

They looked at each other, they knew what each other was thinking, Haufei wouldn’t have copied the book as it just didn’t make logical sense, at the same time her book could not have been copied as she did not share it with anyone.

Sarah flipped open the books again, “how remarkable that they were the same!” she muttered. She looked up at Haufei, her long dark hair, her smooth, pinkish cheeks, her youthfulness, contrasted sharply with the grey hair, the wrinkles in Jasmine Joans’ picture printed on her book. 

“This is such an art!” Sarah declared finally, “If you can prove to the world that neither of you copied each other.”

So they tried, they made a plan, they set out to record every step of their journey, to prove that neither Haufei nor Jasmine Jones copied from one another. Soon after they started, the question of what constituted such a proof came to the fore. There can be evidence that some did something, but the opposite can only be that there’s lack of evidence that someone did something - an exhaustive lack of evidence would be very hard to obtain. Nevertheless, they were undeterred, they went through the full list of people Haufei contacted for proofreading and advice, they went through the list of people those proofreaders might have contacted and so on. Eventually, they contacted Jasmine Jones about this, the author was just as surprised but also quickly saw it as an art, thus joining their endeavour to prove that neither of them copied one another’s work.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months … Haufei did her research to prove that she could not have copied Jasmine’s work, likewise Jasmine conducted her research to do the same, independently. One day, Haufei was feeling exhausted from all the research, she slumped on the sofa, reading and organising her notes which meticulously detailed the lives of everyone around her. 18 people who went to the same critical writing class she went to where she conceived of the book idea, 42 people who were the immediate family of the 18 people who might have heard of the idea, 336 friends of the family who remotely might have known about the idea … and so on. She physically laid the notes down on a long table, organised them by the job these people did, the connections they had, and she tried to zoom out to abstract the essence of what all these people did, in order to summarise and aggregate the probability of Jasmine having known the book idea from any of them. For example, Of the 1063 people she interviewed, 11 were receptionists, 15 worked in advertising, … 551 never heard of Jasmine Jones and the probability of them passing the book idea on was 0. She abstracted, condensed, remarkably distilled 1063 lives into 1 page of unremarkable life experience. 

Her phone rang, it was Jasmine at the other end. “Haufei,” Jasmine said, sounding equally as exhausted. “If you are free, can we talk in person?”

Haufei was so deep into abstracting the essence of life, so to speak, that she found a lot of energy to carry on. When Jasmine jolted her back to the problem at hand, she got up from the sofa, read the summary she abstracted again. She felt satisfied, and slotted the summary at the back of the book so as to not lose it. At any rate, the summary was so short that it was impossible for her to forget.

Haufei met Jasmine at a quiet cafe, it was in fact the first time ever that they met face to face, since they lived in different cities. Jasmine explained that she happened to be travelling, intentionally or unintentionally, Haufei felt that she overemphasised that she did not plan to meet, but since she was in town and they had been investigating for so long, it was a good time to meet. Whatever her motive was, Haufei was very at ease with Jasmine, and it was reciprocated. They trusted each other, they had to trust each other. 

Jasmine pulled out a big folder from her bag, thumping it down hard on the table as if to make the point that it was heavy, without opening it. In a way it was easier for Jasmine to do the investigation to prove that her book idea did not reach Haufei, in another way it was harder. Easier because she was an established artist, her circle of friends just didn’t overlap with the acquaintances Haufei had. It was harder because Jasmine had many more acquaintances to investigate. 

“It has not been easy, but I just cannot think of anything else to do to show that the probability of you knowing about my book idea is next to zero.” Jasmine said matter of factly. Haufei said something to a similar effect, and they agreed that it was an amazing piece of art, that they both wanted to write about the story of lives, that they somehow ended up writing the same book. They decided that they would publish their book on the same date at the same time at the same place, and it would be an affair more about the art than the story in the book itself. 

On the day, they were excited and nervous. They thought a lot about what kind of challenges people would throw at them to ask them to prove that they did not in fact coordinate everything as a stunt. They prepared and rehearsed very well, they were ready to demonstrate from when they first contacted each other all the way till now. 

The reaction from the book lovers and the art critics were largely positive; they were amazed, curious; many people were seen weighing the two books, measuring, comparing, reading the books side by side, reading in pairs. Then it was question time from the audience. “It’s really very remarkable that the two books are exactly the same from start to finish.” a member of the audience began. “Did you have very similar life experiences?” he continued.

Haufei took the mic, her face blushed like a child having done something wrong and got caught, “I actually have a little confession to make before I answer.” she said. The audience, including Jasmine, all turned towards her, the room fell silent. 

Haufei picked up the book as she spoke, “during the investigation, I interviewed 1063 people. I had a revelation when I summarised my findings, which was so interesting that I added a secret paragraph at the back of my book!” Haufei paused, she looked at the audience, and tried to avoid Jasmin’s eyes. The audience was confused, Jasmine was in disbelief. Haufei felt a sense of shame that she might have ruined the perfect art of life, her hands trembling. 

“Where?” the audience murmured, those who had the books flipped to the back to read. Haufei found the paragraph and began reading. When she finished, she closed the book, and her eyes. Jasmine who was standing next to her gasped, and the audience was getting more confused. Finally, the noise of confusion woke Haufei up, and she dropped the book that was still in her hands when she saw that the author of the book she was holding was in fact Jasmine.