White Noise

"Use only original plots," is repeated every fifteen minutes on all radio stations. The same is reminded by the ticker on the television screen. In the city, there is strict monitoring of copyright compliance. Anything can be illegal: a print on a T-shirt, a street screen with a movie trailer accidentally captured in a photo, a incorrectly formatted quote on social media… Huge factory furnaces destroy counterfeit goods day and night. Klim is an inspector of the Intellectual Police. One day he is sent to interrogate Vera Lemeshova. A high school senior wrote a wonderful essay for World Intellectual Property Day. Her work took first place, but then it turned out that the text was pure plagiarism. Why did Vera do this? Who pushed her to such a blatant crime? And how is this connected to the urban legends about mysterious radio broadcasts that can sometimes be caught on shortwave frequencies? Pavel Shushkanov lives and works in Bryansk, teaching at the university. He writes fiction and documentary prose, studies local lore, travels, and maintains a blog. He is well known to the readers of "Five Fourths" for his science fiction novellas "Quarantine Zone" and "False Memory". In his new book "White Noise" he creates an equally atmospheric world that turns out to be not what it seems. For youth.