Fraud Complex

As Buck’s ship accelerated into the black hole, his unconscious perception of self-awareness decelerated, effectively stretching the duration of the dream he believed to be his real life to a point approaching infinity.

In short, Buck had become immortal, at least as a perceiver of events within his own mind. Naturally he was unaware of this as he slumbered in blissful ignorance in a state of suspended stasis, courtesy of his ship’s Lifenet system. He did not know that the supposed events of his life were in fact illusions fed to him by the system’s programming. Therefore he still believed himself to be an ordinary mortal and subject to the laws of nature as he understood them.

One of those laws went something like this: if you can produce at least one item of real work per day, then people around you will assume that you are working your ass off for the whole day and are highly productive. In accordance with that law, Buck had gone above and beyond the call of duty and performed a dizzying array of high profile tasks all before 10:30 AM. He had made several quick updates to the dreaded By-the-Nanosecond schedule, sent out numerous meeting invitations via email that suggested Buck was a more farsighted planner than he really was, and tackled a few testing issues in a manner indicative of someone who actually understood the true nature of the issues better than he really did. Perception was key, however, another natural law with which Buck was well accustomed. Today he was giving out that certain productive vibe that had historically resulted in clients asking for him by name and periodically attempting to persuade him to leave his parent firm and join them in the rank and file of the corporate hell known generically in this space as Cubopolis.

“Interestingly,” he typed furiously into his blog while avoiding a task he was loath to begin, “Buck classified himself as someone with a ‘fraud complex.’ A person with a fraud complex always assumes that someone is going to find out that he is really a fraud. The fraud does not believe that he is being fairly compensated for his work; instead, he feels he is being overcompensated. He worries that if people discover how exceedingly simple his job really is, they will fire him and replace him with a legitimate professional willing to do the same job for half the money.”

The irony that he had both a fraud complex and a chronic predilection for procrastination was not lost on Buck. That he was extemporizing on this irony during business hours was itself reinforcing the destructive fraud complex that gradually eroded his self-esteem and slowly filled a deep well of shame within him that threatened to spill over one day into every facet of his life. “If he could just let go of this blog for twenty minutes,” he wrote, “then he’d get the job done, feel a little better about himself, and be a real professional for a change, if just for a few moments, completing ahead of schedule a relatively simple task that others perceived to be challenging, time-consuming, and worthy of substantial financial compensation.”

With sudden inspiration and sense of purpose he decided to go for it, but first he had to actually publish the blog entry, further procrastinating the task at hand. After all, he rationalized, wouldn’t it be a waste to have captured these thoughts in the blog only to leave them forever to decay on some laptop hard drive? That the blog itself was a waste of time and would never be read by a single human being other than himself also occurred to him. But this realization and associated sense of waste would have been even more poignant had he understood the true context of his situation, i.e., that he was effectively immortal. “If you were immortal,” Buck asked rhetorically to the total of zero people who visited his blog site, “would you waste your time on writing a blog?”