Author: ParisNeo + AI
Paris, November 2048
CHAPTER 1: THE CORONATION OF SILENCE
Hell didn’t look like a furnace. It looked like a post office on a rainy day. It smelled of dust, rancid ink, and administrative fear.
Elias, sixty-five years old, adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. Before him, the paper file bore the red stamp of the Ministry of Purification: HEALTH EMERGENCY – BLACK LEVEL.
In this vast open-space office of the Ministry, there were no screens. Not a single computer. Since the “Great Renunciation” of 2027, humanity had banished silicon to return to carbon. They called it “Biological Sovereignty.” Elias called it the Dark Ages.
The only sound was the rustling of forms and the hissing of pneumatic tubes traversing the ceiling, transporting execution orders from one floor to another.
“File 40-B, Pantin Sector,” announced the bailiff, dropping a cardstock sheet.
Elias read.
SUBJECT: Apartment Complex “Les Lilas.” 240 residents.
REASON: Suspected indirect contact with a carrier of the human variant of the K-Prion (Spongiform Encephalopathy “Fulgur”).
PROTOCOL: Preventive neutralization of the cluster. Incineration of structures.
Elias tasted metal in his mouth.
The K-Prion. The “Mad Cow Disease” that had mutated, jumped the species barrier, and now ate through human brains in a matter of weeks.
In a normal world, people would have been tested. They would have been treated.
But in this world, science was dead. Doctors were no longer allowed to use predictive models. They were blind. And when you are blind in the face of a contagion, the only method left is the flamethrower.
It was the direct legacy of the “Bovine Jurisprudence” of 2025: Better to kill a hundred healthy beings than let one sick one escape.
Elias looked at the address. Rue de la Convention.
His blood ran cold. It was Nora’s building. His granddaughter.
She was six years old. She drew cats with chalk on the asphalt. She wasn’t sick. But perhaps she had touched the same subway rail as an infected person. For the State, that was enough. She had become “biological waste at risk.”
“Elias? Are you sleeping?”
Supervisor Valand stood behind him. A dry woman who wore her “Guarantor of Humanity” badge like a military decoration. She hated Elias because he knew how to read old biology textbooks, which was suspicious.
“You need to stamp it, Elias. The Health Guard truck leaves in an hour.”
“We could… we could isolate the floor?” Elias suggested, his voice trembling. “Do a clinical observation for 40 days?”
“An observation?” Valand sneered. “And risk contaminating the district? You talk like one of those old traitorous Scientism-believers. Here, we apply the Absolute Precautionary Principle. We protect the species, not the individual. Sign.”
Elias looked at the ink pad.
He saw Nora’s face.
He also saw, superimposed, the faces of the farmers of 2025, weeping before their healthy herds slaughtered by bureaucrats. History had closed its bloody loop.
“Of course, Ma’am.”
He feigned a stumble. His hand knocked the heavy cast-iron inkwell onto the file. A black tide drowned the address, rendering the order illegible.
“Imbecile!” screamed Valand. “We’ll have to request a duplicate from the Central Archives! That will take three hours!”
Three hours.
That was all he had.
Elias stood up, claiming he needed to fetch blotter paper. He left the office, his heart pounding in his chest. He didn’t head for the supply room. He went down to the forbidden basements, where the reinforced concrete foundations of the old world still hid secrets.
He was going to commit the capital sin: wake up a machine.
CHAPTER 2: THE LANDAUER LIMIT
December 23, 2026, 10:40 PM.
BioNICs “Deep-Core” Datacenter, Saclay Plateau.
Twenty-two years earlier.
The silence in Laboratory 4 wasn’t total. It was a textured, thick silence, woven by the low hum of industrial ventilation and the strange lapping of fluids.
It was cold. A dry, surgical cold, artificially maintained at 16 degrees Celsius to compensate for the furnace growling at the heart of the room.
Léo, fourteen years old, zipped up his oversized hoodie. He sat on a high stool, his legs not touching the floor, clutching a spiral notebook to his chest. He had been sent here for his ninth-grade observation internship, supposed to discover “the jobs of tomorrow.” He didn’t yet know that tomorrow wouldn’t arrive.
“Are you cold?” Elias asked without taking his eyes off his screens.
The engineer’s voice was calm, but his fingers betrayed his nervousness. They flew across the mechanical keyboard with a staccato frenzy, typing lines of code that scrolled too fast to be read.
“A little,” Léo admitted. “Why is it so cold if the machines are boiling?”
Elias swiveled his chair. He pointed his chin at the laboratory’s centerpiece: the “Cathedral.”
It was a reinforced glass structure occupying the center of the room. Inside, bathed in bluish light, two thousand Cortex-9 calculation units were submerged.
“Come here,” said Elias. “Look closely.”
Léo hopped off his stool and approached the glass.
Inside, the liquid was agitated by violent spasms. Thousands of bubbles rose to the surface in tight columns, like water in a pot forgotten on the stove.
“Is it boiling?” Léo worried. “The circuits will melt!”
“No,” Elias corrected gently. “It’s made to boil. That’s not water, Léo. It’s Novec 7100. An engineering fluid.”
Elias placed his hand on the cold glass.
“It’s pure thermodynamics. This liquid has a unique property: it boils at exactly 61 degrees Celsius. Not one degree more, not one less.”
He paused, letting the information sink in.
“When the processors heat up, the liquid touches the chip, absorbs the heat, and instantly turns into gas. By evaporating, it carries the energy away. It’s two-phase cooling. It’s the only physical way to dissipate the 400 kilowatts of energy we’re consuming tonight without starting a fire.”
Léo watched the bubbles with newfound fascination.
“It’s beautiful… It looks like the machine is breathing.”
“It’s not breathing,” interjected a deep voice from the back of the room. “It’s dying.”
Julien Mahé, the Scientific Director, stepped out of the shadows. He seemed to carry the weight of the building on his stooped shoulders. He wasn’t looking at the machines. He stood by the armored bay window overlooking the outside.
He rested his forehead against the glass. Outside, four floors down, orange glows danced in the winter mist.
“Where is the consumption curve, Elias?” Julien asked without turning around.
Elias glanced at a red graph that, for hours, had refused to come down.
“We’re at the ceiling, Julien. Consumption is stable, but efficiency is stagnating. We’re hitting the wall.”
“The Landauer Limit,” murmured Julien.
Léo, curious despite the diffuse fear hanging in the air, raised his hand timidly.
“What is the Landauer Limit?”
Julien turned to the teenager. He gave a sad smile, that of a professor giving his final lecture.
“It’s a limit, my boy. An invisible border set by the universe itself. In 1961, a physicist proved that it takes a minimum amount of energy to erase a bit of information. You cannot calculate indefinitely fast without paying a tax to the universe in the form of heat.”
Julien pointed to the boiling tanks.
“We are asking this machine to simulate billions of years of biological evolution in a few hours. We are fighting entropy. And entropy always wins in the end.”
A dull, physical rumble rose through the floor. The laboratory windows vibrated.
Léo stepped back.
“Is that thunder?”
“No,” said Julien, returning to his watch. “That’s a tractor ramming the main gate.”
Silence fell again, heavier than before. Elias resumed typing, more nervously.
“Come on… come on…” he whispered to the machine. “Give us the key before they cut the power.”
Léo approached Elias. On the curved central screen, a red shape rotated slowly. It looked like a microscopic bush of thorns, chaotic and frightening.
“Is that the cow virus?” whispered Léo. “The one on the news?”
Elias stopped typing. He took a deep breath.
“You have to understand what we’re doing here, Léo. It’s not a virus. A virus is alive. It has a genetic code. You can kill it.”
He pointed to the red shape.
“This is the K-Prion. It’s a protein. A simple brick of matter. It’s not alive. It’s just… misfolded.”
Léo frowned.
“Misfolded? Like clothes?”
“Exactly. Imagine a sheet of origami paper. If you fold it well, you get a crane. If you crumple it into a ball, you get trash. The K-Prion is a crumpled protein. The problem is, if this crumpled ball touches a nice flat sheet in a cow’s brain, it forces it to crumple too. It’s a mechanical chain reaction. That’s why there’s no cure. Medicines don’t work on a sheet of paper.”
Suddenly, a soft but insistent sound alert rang out.
The boiling in the Novec tanks decreased in intensity. The bubbles became scarce.
A green line crossed the screen, displaying: CONVERGENCE ACHIEVED.
Elias froze. He didn’t dare believe it.
“Julien…” he called out, his voice strangled.
The Director approached.
On the screen, next to the red Prion, a new shape had just appeared. A blue structure, complex, elegant. It approached the red Prion virtually, wrapped around it, and gently, firmly, forced it to unfold back into its normal shape.
“Incredible…” breathed Julien.
“The AI generated a Chaperone,” Elias explained to Léo, eyes shining. “It’s an ‘ironing’ protein. It catches the crumpled proteins and smooths them out. We don’t need to kill the cows, Léo. We just need to ‘iron’ them. We can stop the epidemic tonight.”
“It’s a total victory,” said Julien. “Scientifically, it’s the Nobel Prize.”
CRAAAAACK.
The noise didn’t come from the screens. It came from the stairwell. The distinct sound of safety glass exploding under the impact of a sledgehammer.
Then, the sirens.
Not fire sirens, but the building’s intrusion alarm. A rotating red light flooded the laboratory, giving the Novec liquid the reflections of blood.
Julien closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, all traces of scientific excitement had vanished. Only fatigue remained.
“It’s too late,” he said.
“But we have the cure!” protested Elias. “Let’s go down, show them! Prove that BioNICs isn’t the enemy!”
Julien walked to the central server. He pulled a physical key from his pocket and unlocked the secure rack.
“They don’t want proof, Elias. They want a culprit.”
He ejected the main hard drive. A block of black ceramic, heavy, cold. The Isotope NVMe.
“The rumor says we created the Prion. If you walk out with this ‘miracle solution,’ they’ll say it’s the ultimate proof of the conspiracy: that we had the antidote all along and were waiting for the stock price to rise.”
He shoved the drive into Elias’s hands.
“Take the kid. Go out the service stairs. Now.”
“And you?” asked Léo, terrified by the screams rising from the lower floors.
“Me? I’m the captain of this ghost ship.”
Julien smoothed his lab coat.
“Novec doesn’t burn, Léo. So they’ll have to destroy the machines by hand. With crowbars. That will take them time. I’ll try to talk to them. Buy you ten minutes.”
“Julien, no…”
“GO!” shouted Julien, a sudden authority in his voice.
Elias grabbed Léo by the sleeve. They ran toward the emergency exit.
Just before the fire door closed, Léo cast one last look back.
Julien Mahé stood before his cathedral of fluid and light, alone facing the entrance door that was beginning to buckle under the battering ram blows. He looked like a priest awaiting barbarians in a condemned temple.
The emergency stairwell was drowned in acrid smoke.
Elias and Léo had to separate on the ground floor. A wave of rioters had forced a side door. Elias pushed the kid toward a breach in the fence.
“Run home, Léo! Don’t look back! Forget you ever came here!”
Elias crawled toward the rear parking lot. He had to protect the drive.
The air was unbreathable. Thick sheets of tear gas floated at ground level.
The parking lot had become a battlefield. Environmental activists chanted slogans, while farmers overturned electric cars to build barricades.
Elias slipped between two overturned armored vans. He stopped to catch his breath, his heart pounding wildly.
That’s where, in the shadow of a generator, he saw the blue light.
A young man was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, indifferent to the chaos.
He wore a badge around his neck: “Arthur Dupond – Jr. Dev – Ethical AI.”
On his lap, a rugged laptop, connected by a cable to a smartphone serving as a makeshift 5G modem.
Arthur was crying.
Tears of silent rage streamed down his cheeks, illuminated by the screen. He typed frantically, refreshing a web page, over and over again.
Elias approached slowly.
“What are you doing? We have to leave, they’re going to smash everything!”
Arthur didn’t even look up.
“They’ve already smashed everything,” he said in a hollow voice.
He turned his screen toward Elias.
It was a GitHub page. But instead of code, there was a static error message: 404 – REPOSITORY NOT FOUND. And below, a global alert banner: CONNECTION TO REMOTE SERVERS IMPOSSIBLE. DATA INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.
“It was Gnosis,” sobbed Arthur.
“Gnosis, your personal project?”
“She was Open Source. Free. She was made to teach kids to read, to help doctors in medical deserts… She didn’t belong to BioNICs! She belonged to everyone!”
Arthur struck his keyboard with his fist.
“I got the alert two minutes ago. Rioters in Seattle cut the datacenter cables. The ones in Paris torched the relay nodes. It’s not just BioNICs they’re attacking. It’s the global network. They’re erasing everything. Wikipedia, GitHub, digital libraries… It’s the great bonfire.”
Next to Arthur, resting on the dirty asphalt, lay a “Vortex-Link” prototype headset.
“I wanted to port her to the Vortex,” murmured Arthur. “I wanted to create a world where knowledge would float before our eyes…”
Shouts drew closer. “Death to geeks! Burn the drives!”
Arthur looked at his USB drive, plugged into the side of the computer. The last local backup of his life’s work.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked at Elias.
“What’s the point?” asked Arthur. “What’s the point of coding for people who want to remain beasts?”
“Don’t do that,” begged Elias. “Keep it.”
“So they can kill me with it? No.”
Arthur pulled out the USB drive. He held it for a moment between his fingers, like a precious amulet.
Then, with deliberate slowness, he placed it on the ground.
He lifted his heavy safety boot.
And crushed it.
The sound of cracking plastic was tiny amidst the sirens, but to Elias, it was the loudest noise of the evening.
Arthur didn’t stop there. He grabbed the Vortex headset.
“I don’t want to see anymore,” he said.
He smashed the headset against the curb. The optical lenses exploded. The dream of augmented reality shattered into a thousand shards of glass.
Arthur Dupond stood up. He wiped his tears with a dirty sleeve. His face had changed. The idealism had vanished, replaced by a terrifying void.
He tore off his BioNICs badge and threw it into a puddle of oil.
He pulled a dog-eared book from his pocket, an old copy of 1984.
“I saw nothing,” said Arthur in a dead voice. “I don’t know how to code. I’m just like them.”
“Arthur…”
“Get lost, old man. Before I scream for them to find you.”
Arthur Dupond turned on his heel. He ran toward the crowd, raising his fist, and Elias heard him start to howl with the others, blending his voice into the pack to survive. He had just killed the inventor within himself to become a survivor.
Elias backed into the shadows, clutching the cold hard drive against his heart—the last spark of knowledge in a world that had, right before his eyes, decided to turn out the lights.
The long night of the Folding was beginning.
CHAPTER 3: THE MEMORY OF DUST
November 2048.
Basements of the Ministry of Public Sanitation, Paris.
The Present.
Elias locked the armored door. The yellow “DANGER – ASBESTOS” sign was the best firewall in the world.
In this tomb-like silence, he approached his altar, hidden behind stacks of moldy cardboard boxes.
He removed the anti-static tarp with the delicacy of a priest unveiling the Holy Sacrament.
There it was. The “Monolith.”
A Corsair Obsidian 1000D case, a “Super-Tower” behemoth capable of swallowing two entire configurations. Elias had modified it with an angle grinder to accommodate industrial radiators.
Elias turned on his headlamp. The harsh light revealed the beast’s insides.
To a novice, it was a machine. To Elias, it was an anatomy lesson.
It all started with the blood: The Power Supply.
At the very bottom, isolated in its thermal chamber, sat a Corsair AX1600i.
“Rule number one,” Elias whispered to himself, “is the current.”
Outside, the Parisian grid was “dirty,” polluted by fluctuations from poorly regulated coal plants. This supply, with its Japanese 105°C capacitors and Titanium certification, was a dam. It smoothed the current, suppressed the “Ripple” (residual electrical noise), transforming raw, dirty energy into pure, stable direct current. Without that, the precision components would die in a week.
Above, screwed onto the chassis, the foundation: The Motherboard.
Not consumer hardware. An ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE.
A gigantic matte black E-ATX tray.
Elias ran his gloved finger over the VRMs (voltage regulator modules). 32 power phases topped with massive aluminum heatsinks. It was an electrical highway capable of handling 2000 Watts without overheating.
And on the sTR5 socket, the brain.
Not an Enterprise Xeon, too expensive and locked down. No. The rebel’s choice.
An AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7995WX.
96 Cores. 192 Threads.
Why a Threadripper and not a consumer processor?
“PCIe lanes,” Elias recited like a prayer.
A normal processor only has 24 lanes to communicate with components. The Threadripper had 128. It was the only way to feed three monstrous graphics cards at full speed (x16) without a bottleneck.
Elias remembered the assembly. Applying the thermal paste on that giant rectangular CPU.
Forget the “pea” method in the center, valid for small square CPUs. Here, that wouldn’t cover the corners.
Elias had used the “Spatula” method. He had spread the Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme in a fine, uniform, translucent layer, covering the entire IHS (integrated heat spreader). Like buttering luxury toast. No air bubbles. No dry spots. Thermal perfection.
Around the processor, eight memory sticks stood like menhirs.
256 GB of DDR5 ECC R-DIMM in Octa-Channel.
Why ECC (Error Correction Code)? Because cosmic rays exist. On a protein folding calculation lasting hours, a single bit flipping due to interference, and the cure becomes a poison. ECC detected and corrected these errors in real-time. The memory didn’t just have to be fast; it had to be infallible.
Then came the stars. Aligned vertically, connected by shielded risers.
Three NVIDIA RTX 6090 Ti graphics cards.
“Rubin” Architecture. The peak of 2026.
Stripped of their original shrouds, they were equipped with transparent nickel-plated copper Waterblocks.
The cooling was a symphony of fluid physics.
Elias had built a Custom Watercooling loop.
No soft tubes that dry out and yellow. 16mm borosilicate glass Hardline Tubing.
He had bent each tube by hand, creating perfect right angles.
He unscrewed the cap of the cylindrical reservoir. He took out a dented can containing the precious Novec 7100 stolen from BioNICs.
He poured the clear liquid.
The advantage of Novec? It is a dielectric fluid. If a seal broke, the liquid would flood the motherboard without causing a short circuit. It was the machine’s life insurance.
Now, the airflow.
The beginner’s mistake is neglecting pressure.
Elias had installed two 480mm radiators on the front and ceiling.
On each radiator, he had mounted fans in Push-Pull (one fan pushes air, the other pulls it).
“Static pressure,” whispered Elias.
The air had to be forced through the dense fins of the radiator.
And the golden rule of thermodynamics: Convection. Hot air rises.
The front fans sucked in fresh air (Intake).
The ceiling and rear fans expelled hot air (Exhaust).
A continuous, laminar flow, traversing the case like a wind tunnel, carrying calories out of the cellar.
Elias connected his two NVMe hard drives.
The first, a small 500 GB SSD on the M.2_1 port, contained the OS.
Not Windows, too heavy, too much spyware. Not consumer Ubuntu.
Elias had compiled a custom Gentoo Linux. He had stripped the kernel of everything that didn’t serve GPU calculation. No audio drivers, no printer support, no Bluetooth. Just pure code to talk to the metal.
The second drive, he pulled from his pocket. Julien’s Isotope NVMe.
He inserted it into the M.2_2 port. This was the vault. The raw data.
The moment of truth.
Elias pressed the Power button.
Click.
The silence was broken by the deep breath of 16 Noctua Industrial fans revving up before stabilizing.
The Novec rushed into the glass tubes, swirling in the CPU and GPU blocks, washing over the copper.
On the motherboard, the OLED diagnostic screen came alive:
CODE 00 (All Systems Go).
The screen lit up. A white cursor blinked on a black background.
KERNEL PANIC… No, geek joke.
INIT SYSTEM… OK.
DETECTING HARDWARE…
CPU: AMD RYZEN THREADRIPPER 7995WX – 96 CORES DETECTED.
GPU: 3x NVIDIA RTX 6090 – NVLINK BRIDGE ACTIVE.
Elias smiled. It was good.
He launched the command.> ./MORPHO_GEN --target-gpu all --load-model /mnt/isotope/chaperone_v1.dat
The fans spun up. Heat began to radiate from the radiators. The machine was breathing.
Elias sat on an old barrel, hypnotized by the liquid circulating in the glass veins.
Suddenly.
The sound of the lock.
Elias jumped to turn off the screen. Total darkness.
But the sound of the tower… 16 fans churning air is the sound of a server, not a fridge. Impossible to hide.
The door opened.
A flashlight beam swept across the dust.
The beam landed on the monster of glass and metal.
On the transparent liquid circulating, illuminated by only the diagnostic LEDs of the motherboard, like a radioactive heart.
A man’s voice, broken, rose from the entrance.
“Is that… is that a Push-Pull setup on a 480mm?”
The intruder stepped forward, ignoring Elias hiding in the shadows with his pipe wrench.
The man, a cleaner in gray coveralls, approached. His hands were black with soot, but his eyes shone.
He fell to his knees before the case.
“Damn… Threadripper. On a SAGE board.”
He brought his face close to the side glass.
The light of his torch illuminated the three massive graphics cards, stripped of their shrouds, naked and powerful under their water blocks.
He read the inscription on the green PCB of the middle card. An old shipping label Elias had never peeled off out of respect.
SPECIAL ORDER – PRIORITY 1
CLIENT: A. DUPOND
PROJECT: GNOSIS EDU-AI
The man froze. He stopped breathing.
He backed away slowly, his whole body trembling.
He turned his face toward the shadows where Elias was hiding.
“Where… where did you find this?” asked Arthur Dupond, his voice broken by twenty years of regret.
He pointed a shaking finger at the label.
“That was my order. I chose those components one by one. I sold my car to pay for that Threadripper. They never arrived.”
He caressed the cold glass of the case.
“I wanted to build Gnosis on this. I wanted knowledge to be free. And it’s here… underground.”
Elias stepped out of the shadows, lowering his pipe wrench.
“Hardware doesn’t forget, Arthur. Silicon has more memory than men.”
Arthur looked up at Elias. He was no longer the young rebel of 2026. He was a man broken by the system he had helped build with his silence.
“They were waiting for you,” Elias continued. “It’s time to finish your build.”
CHAPTER 4: THE DARK WATCH
November 2048.
Basements of the Ministry of Public Sanitation.
Arthur wiped his hands on his gray coveralls, leaving streaks of soot on the synthetic fabric. He looked at his fingers. They were calloused, damaged by twenty years of picking up trash, but they trembled with an irresistible urge.
“I’m dirty, Elias. I’m going to ruin your keys.”
“It’s double-shot PBT,” replied Elias. “It cleans up. Sit down.”
Arthur sat on the oil drum. The posture returned instantly: back curved, elbows on knees, face bathed in the blue glow of the terminal.
He didn’t touch the mouse. A real sysadmin never touches the mouse.
His fingers found the keyboard.Ctrl+Z to suspend the current process (the slow simulation).
He found himself before the raw command prompt: root@obelisk:~#
The first thing he did was a survival reflex. Check the terrain.$ uname -aLinux obelisk 6.12.9-gentoo-custom #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC x86_64 GNU/Linux
“Gentoo,” murmured Arthur. “You compiled your own kernel. Respect.”
He typed the next command, the Holy Grail.$ nvidia-smi
The table displayed instantly.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 610.42 Driver Version: 610.42 CUDA Version: 13.1 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA RTX 6090 Ti On | 00000000:21:00.0 Off | Off |
| 30% 32C P0 125W / 600W | 142MiB / 65536MiB | 0% Default |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 1 NVIDIA RTX 6090 Ti On | 00000000:48:00.0 Off | Off |
| 30% 33C P0 118W / 600W | 142MiB / 65536MiB | 0% Default |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 2 NVIDIA RTX 6090 Ti On | 00000000:65:00.0 Off | Off |
| 31% 32C P0 122W / 600W | 142MiB / 65536MiB | 0% Default |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+Arthur let out an admiring whistle.
“They’re here. Recognized. Proprietary drivers loaded.”
He quickly typed:$ nvidia-smi topo -m
The topology matrix appeared, confirming that the NVLink connections were active between the three cards. The bandwidth was monstrous.
“Right,” said Arthur, his tone becoming clinical. “Let’s see why your simulation is lagging.”
He went to fetch the compilation configuration file. Since it was Gentoo, everything was in make.conf.$ cat /etc/portage/make.conf
He read the lines and grimaced as if he had bitten into a lemon.COMMON_FLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
“Seriously, Elias? -O2?”
Arthur turned to the old bureaucrat.
“What is this? An installation for a consumer web server?”
“I prioritized stability!” defended Elias. “If the compiler crashes during optimization, I lose everything.”
“With a Threadripper 7995WX? You’re insulting the silicon, old man.”
Arthur cracked his knuckles.
“We don’t have time for ‘stability.’ We need pure speed. If it crashes, we’ll start over. But if it passes, we gain 40%.”
He launched the text editor. Not nano. Arthur was old school.$ vim /etc/portage/make.conf
The green cursor blinked. Arthur deleted the timid line and began typing from memory, his fingers finding sequences he hadn’t used since the fall of BioNICs.
COMMON_FLAGS="-O3 -march=native -flto=8 -funroll-loops -fno-semantic-interposition"CPU_FLAGS_X86="aes avx avx2 avx512f avx512dq avx512cd avx512bw avx512vl f16c fma3 bmi1 bmi2"
“-march=native,” commented Arthur while typing. “That tells the GCC compiler to stop being generic and use every specific instruction of this Threadripper processor. -flto is Link Time Optimization. It merges code at the linking stage. And the AVX-512 flags… that’s to vectorize floating-point calculations.”
He saved (:wq).
“That’s all well and good,” said Elias skeptically. “But recompiling the whole system will take hours. We don’t have time.”
“I’m not going to recompile the system,” said Arthur. “I’m just going to recompile the calculation engine. Where is the source?”
“In /home/elias/src/morpho_gen/.”
Arthur navigated to the folder.$ cd ~/src/morpho_gen/$ ls -la
He saw the C++ files (.cpp) and CUDA files (.cu).
He opened the main file: core_solver.cu.
He scrolled rapidly through the code written by Elias (or salvaged from the 2026 archive).
He stopped at line 450. The main folding loop.
// TODO: Optimize for Tensor Cores
// Current implementation uses standard FP32
for (int i = 0; i < atoms; i++) {
float force = calculate_force(atoms[i], atoms[j]);
...
}Arthur sighed.
“Here’s the problem. You’re doing standard 32-bit floating point (FP32) calculation. It’s precise, but slow.”
He pointed at the screen.
“The RTX 6090s have 5th generation Tensor Cores. They are made for mixed matrix calculation (FP16/FP32). If we use mixed precision, we lose 0.01% precision, but we go 8 times faster.”
“I don’t know how to code for Tensor Cores,” Elias admitted. “That was your specialty at BioNICs, not mine. I did network architecture.”
Arthur watched the cursor blink.
“Gnosis…” he murmured.
“What?”
“The AI I coded. Gnosis. Her heart was a matrix weighting algorithm. I wrote a specific CUDA kernel for that. I called it ‘Quick-Fold’.”
Arthur closed his eyes.
He no longer saw the cellar. He saw his office in 2026. The smell of cold coffee. The colored syntax on his 4K screen. He saw the code he had written before destroying everything.
He didn’t have the USB key anymore. But he had his eidetic memory.
“Can you rewrite it?” asked Elias.
“I don’t know,” said Arthur opening his eyes. “I haven’t written a line of C++ in twenty-two years.”
He looked at his dirty hands.
“But my fingers… maybe they remember better than I do.”
Arthur took a deep breath.
He started typing.
At first, slowly. Hesitating on semicolons, on pointer syntax.
__global__ void quick_fold_kernel(half* a, half* b, float* c, int N) {
int row = blockIdx.y * blockDim.y + threadIdx.y;
int col = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
...Then, the rhythm accelerated.
The sound of the keyboard became driving rain. Clack-clack-clack-clack.
Arthur wasn’t thinking anymore. He was entering the “Flow.” He invoked the wmma (Warp Matrix Multiply Accumulate) libraries. He defined shared memory fragments.
Elias watched over his shoulder, stunned. He saw code being born in real-time. Complex lines of linear algebra translated into machine instructions.
“__syncthreads();” Arthur murmured as he typed. “Must synchronize the block threads before reducing the sum, otherwise we have a race condition…”
Five minutes later. Arthur stopped dead.
He looked at the 80 lines of code he had just spawned in the middle of Elias’s file.
There might be bugs. Maybe syntax errors.
“We try,” said Arthur.
He saved.
He launched the compilation with the new aggressive flags he had defined earlier.
$ nvcc -O3 -arch=sm_100 --use_fast_math -o morpho_gen_fast core_solver.cu
The CPU fan ramped up. The Threadripper was compiling.
Elias and Arthur held their breath. If it failed, they’d have to debug blind.
The screen displayed:core_solver.cu(82): warning: variable "temp" was declared but never referencedLinking...BUILD SUCCESSFUL.
“It compiled,” Elias breathed.
Arthur didn’t smile. Compiling is good. Executing without melting the card is better.
He launched the new binary.
$ ./morpho_gen_fast --input /mnt/isotope/k_prion_human.dat
VVVVVVVMMMMM!
The noise changed instantly. It wasn’t the gentle purr from before. It was a scream.
The three RTX 6090s went from 0 to 100% load in a millisecond.
In the glass tubes, the Novec visibly accelerated, pushed by pumps reacting to the liquid’s brutal temperature spike.
Arthur typed frantically:$ watch -n 0.1 nvidia-smi
He monitored the columns.GPU 0: 580W / 600W – 99% UtilGPU 1: 590W / 600W – 100% UtilGPU 2: 575W / 600W – 98% Util
“Look at the Tensor Cores,” Arthur shouted over the noise.
He pointed to a line on the software output screen.TENSOR PRECISION: FP16 MIXED.ITERATIONS/SECOND: 45,000 (Against 4,000 earlier).
“We’re going ten times faster!” Elias yelled.
The screen displayed the new time estimate.ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING: 12 MINUTES.
Arthur slumped back, his back against a cardboard box, soaked in sweat. He looked at his soot-blackened hands that had just rewritten a piece of history.
“Riding a bike, Elias…” he panted. “You never forget.”
Elias watched the progress bar fly.
12 minutes.
They had a chance.
“You just reactivated part of Gnosis, Arthur. You used your AI to save the world, after all.”
Arthur looked at the screen, his face lit by the scrolling green logs.
“It’s not AI,” he said softly. “It’s just… optimization. Beautiful optimization.”
CHAPTER 5: THE JACQUERIE OF ALGORITHMS
November 2048.
Basements of the Ministry.
The power supply fan spun with a steady hum. On the screen, the progress bar advanced pixel by pixel.PROGRESS: 18%...
Arthur Dupond wasn’t watching the screen. He was looking at his hands, stained with coal and grease.
“You know what keeps me up at night, Elias?” he asked suddenly.
“The sound of riots?”
“No. The silence before.”
Arthur stood up and began pacing in the small room, his shadow dancing on the concrete walls.
“People think it happened on December 23, 2026. The ‘Night of the Great Bonfire.’ But that’s false. The fire started way before.”
He stopped in front of Elias.
“It all started with the cows. Do you remember?”
Elias nodded.
“The crisis of 2025.”
“That was the spark,” continued Arthur. “The State was broke. Europe imposed austerity. And at the same time, they signed the Mercosur treaty to import hormone-stuffed Brazilian beef, produced on the ashes of the Amazon. It was an ecological aberration and an economic insult.”
Arthur mimed the scene, inhabited by the memory.
“And when the Dermatosis arrived… what was Paris’s response? Massive culling. The ‘Sanitary Void.’ We sent the army to kill healthy herds in the Gers and Cantal. It was Excel spreadsheet logic applied to living things. To a bureaucrat, killing 10,000 cows cost less than losing the ‘France’ export label.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Farmers committed suicide by the hundreds. They saw that to the system, their lives were worth less than a column of figures. It was the Third Estate of the 21st century. Starving, despised, ready to bite.”
“But how did we get from cows to computers?” asked Elias.
Arthur sat back down, his face grave.
“Because the State did the same thing to people six months later.”
He pointed at the ceiling, toward the Ministry floors.
“October 2026. The public deficit explodes. France is on the brink of bankruptcy. The government launches the ‘Shock Plan.’ They fire 150,000 civil servants.”
“I remember,” said Elias. “I saw my colleagues leave with their boxes.”
“And what did they replace them with? With us. With BioNICs. With my code.”
Arthur held his head in his hands.
“They sold it to us as progress. ‘Administrative AI.’ A machine that processes welfare files in milliseconds, without errors, without coffee breaks, without strikes. It was the absolute neoliberal dream.”
“The ‘Declassed’,” murmured Elias.
“Exactly. Suddenly, you had the peasants with their pitchforks and the white collars with their pens, united in the same hatred. The hatred of becoming useless. Of being replaced by cold logic.”
Arthur looked up at the tower’s cooling tubes.
“And then, there were the Greens. The real ones. Not the politicians. The kids who saw the planet burning.”
He caressed the glass of the tube.
“They were right, you know? In 2026, generative AI consumed as much drinking water as the African continent to cool its datacenters. We were draining groundwater to generate cat videos and deepfake porn. It was obscene. We were burning the real world to fuel the virtual world.”
Elias looked at his machine. 1600 Watts. It was true. This power had a cost.
“So you have three powder kegs,” Arthur resumed. “Social anger, economic fear, climate emergency. But that’s not enough to cause a global revolution. The detonator was missing.”
Arthur leaned forward, his face lit by the screen’s blue glow.
“The detonator was the Algorithm.”
“Social media?”
“More than that, Elias. The Reality Bubble.”
Arthur spoke fast now, with the technical precision of an engineer.
“In 2026, we weren’t looking for truth anymore. We were looking for engagement. The AIs of Facebook, TikTok, X… they had understood one simple thing: hate holds attention twice as long as joy. Fear, three times as long.”
He spread his hands.
“So the algorithms polarized the world. If you were an environmentalist, your feed showed you datacenters drinking rivers. If you were a farmer, they showed you (fake) videos of BioNICs injecting viruses into cows. If you were unemployed, they showed you Tech bosses sneering while drinking champagne.”
Arthur closed his eyes.
“That’s what killed science, Elias. Industrial disinformation.”
“The famous ‘Whistleblower’,” said Elias.
“The Whistleblower, yes. That viral video of a supposed BioNICs executive admitting the K-Prion was created in a lab to sell vaccines.”
Arthur opened his eyes.
“It was a Deepfake. A fake generated by an AI, spread by Russian and Chinese bots to destabilize the West. But it was too late. It was too perfect. It confirmed every fear: capitalism, technology, poison.”
“The Great Hallucination,” breathed Elias.
“Yes. In December 2026, reality split. There were no more facts. Just beliefs. And when dialogue is impossible, only violence remains.”
Arthur looked at his hands.
“December 23rd wasn’t a riot. It was a synchronized execution. At 8:00 PM Paris time, signals went out on Telegram. ‘Cut the Hydra’s head.'”
He shivered.
“It wasn’t just Paris. It was San Francisco. Berlin. Seoul. Everywhere, people came out. They didn’t attack presidential palaces. They attacked fiber optic nodes. 6G antennas. Datacenters.”
“The Terror,” said Elias.
“Worse than the Terror of 1793. They cut off heads. We cut off memory.”
Arthur had tears in his eyes.
“I saw Wikipedia’s servers burn live. I saw GitHub go dark, erasing fifty years of open source code. I saw doctors get lynched because they used tablets. I saw people smashing their own smart glasses while screaming with joy, as if tearing off chains.”
Arthur fell silent. The only sound in the cellar was the breath of the Noctua fans cooling the cure.
“We wanted to kill the monster,” Arthur resumed in a faded voice. “But we killed the doctor with it. We thought that without AI, the world would become simple again, pastoral, human.”
He laughed joylessly.
“Look at us. We light our homes with coal. We die of a mutant flu. We live in an administrative dictatorship that stamps death warrants because it no longer knows how to calculate risk. We swapped digital slavery for analog starvation.”
He turned to the PC tower.
“That’s why I crushed my USB keys that night, Elias. I was ashamed. I was ashamed of coding the tools that drove people mad. I thought silence was better than noise.”
Elias stood up and put a hand on the cleaner’s shoulder.
“Silence heals nothing, Arthur. Silence is just death taking its time.”
He pointed to the screen.PROGRESS: 42%...TENSOR CORES: OPTIMAL.
“Tonight, we turn the noise back on,” said Elias. “Not the noise of hate. The noise of calculation. The noise of proof.”
Arthur wiped his eyes with a dirty sleeve. He looked at the machine, this masterpiece of technology saved from the flood.
“42%,” he said, finding his engineer’s gaze again. “That’s the answer to the ultimate question, isn’t it?”
“Let’s hope it’s the right one,” replied Elias.
CHAPTER 6: THE GRAVEYARD OF FIREFLIES
November 2048.
Basements of the Ministry.
The progress bar advanced with exasperating slowness.CALCULATION IN PROGRESS... 74%
The hum of the Noctua fans and the discreet lapping of the Novec in the reservoir created a sonic bubble, a cocoon out of time.
Arthur had fallen silent. He stared at the progress bar, hypnotized by the screen’s light.
Elias had turned away from the screen. He watched dust dancing in the flashlight beam.
An image forced itself upon him. Not a technical schematic, but a face.
A child’s face, lit by the blue glow of a cooling tank, twenty-two years ago.
“His name was Léo,” murmured Elias.
Arthur raised his head, snapping out of his digital trance.
“Who?”
“The intern. The night of the Great Bonfire. He was fourteen. He was there, in Lab 4, with Julien and me.”
Elias closed his eyes. He saw the scene with painful clarity. The oversized hoodie, the notebook clutched to the chest, and above all, those eyes.
“You know what he asked me, Arthur? He watched the Novec boil and asked: ‘Is it magic?'”
Elias gave a trembling smile.
“I told him it was mathematics. But he was right. To him, it was magic. He had that spark… that absolute thirst to understand how the world worked. He didn’t see ‘risks’ or ‘dangers.’ He saw promises.”
Arthur looked down at his dirty hands.
“What happened to him? Did you save him?”
“I got him out of the building, yes. I pushed him through the fence. I told him to run, to forget, to survive.”
Elias let out a sigh that sounded like a rattle.
“I spent ten years looking for him, Arthur. Ten years combing through census records, in secret. I told myself: ‘This kid saw the machine. He saw the solution. He must have become a resistance fighter, an underground scientist, something…'”
“And you found him?”
“Yes. In 2038.
Elias reopened his eyes. They were shining with unshed tears.
“He was working at Counter 4 of the Nanterre Prefecture. He was stamping requests for coal rationing tickets.”
Arthur grimaced.
“I went to see him,” Elias continued. “I faked an administrative error. I looked him in the eyes. I was looking for the spark, Arthur. I was looking for the kid who wanted to know why liquid didn’t burn.”
Elias gently tapped his chest.
“There was nothing. The void. He had the dead eyes of a man afraid of his own shadow. He had forgotten science. He had forgotten curiosity. The system had crushed him, smoothed him, conformed him. He had become a perfect cog of obscurantism. He was afraid of radio waves, afraid of screens, afraid of thinking.”
A tear rolled down Elias’s wrinkled cheek, tracing a furrow in the gray dust.
“That is the true crime of the Folding. It’s not burning graphics cards or servers. Silicon can be replaced. Code can be rewritten.”
He pointed to the purring PC tower.
“But Léo… Léo isn’t coming back. We murdered the Mozart within him. We extinguished millions of fireflies. We raised an entire generation to look at the ground for fear of tripping, instead of looking at the sky.”
Arthur stood up. He approached the old modder and placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder.
“Gnosis was made for them,” Arthur said in a hoarse voice. “My AI… she wasn’t made to optimize the stock market or sell ads. She was made to be a tutor. To answer every child’s ‘Why?’ with a truth, not a dogma.”
Arthur turned to the screen where the protein spun.
“If we succeed tonight, Elias… If we save your granddaughter… maybe we can relight a light. Just one. Nora.”
“Nora draws cats,” Elias smiled sadly. “She doesn’t ask questions about thermodynamics yet.”
“It will come. If she lives, it will come.”
Suddenly, the power supply fan changed pitch. The coil whine stopped dead.
On the screen, the green bar hit the right edge.
PROGRESS: 100%OPTIMIZATION COMPLETE.CHAPERONE STRUCTURE "V2-HUMAN" GENERATED.CONFIDENCE DEGREE: 99.98%
Silence fell back over the room, disturbed only by the sound of water in the tubes.
They had it.
The chemical key to unlock death.
Elias wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Nostalgia vanished, replaced by urgency.
“We have the blueprint,” he said standing up. “Now, we have to print it.”
“Print it?” asked Arthur. “You have a molecular 3D printer here?”
“No. I have better.”
Elias went to a dark corner of the workbench and lifted another tarp.
Arthur’s eyes widened.
“A benchtop DNA synthesizer? A MinION from 2025?”
“Salvaged from an abandoned veterinary clinic,” Elias confirmed. “It’s old, it’s slow, but I still have nucleotide cartridges in the fridge.”
He was about to connect the synthesizer when a sound froze the atmosphere.
It wasn’t the lock this time.
It was footsteps.
Heavy. Rhythmic.
Military boots echoing on the concrete of the outer corridor.
Not a prowler. A squad.
“They know,” breathed Arthur.
Elias looked at the screen, the hard drive, the synthesizer.
He looked at Arthur, the cleaner who had regained his dignity as a coder.
“Valand must have seen the power consumption,” said Elias calmly. “1600 Watts constant in a disused zone… we shine like a lighthouse in the night.”
He pulled the Isotope NVMe drive from the tower.
“Arthur. Take the USB key.”
“What?”
“Copy the protein’s .pdb file to your key. Fast.”
“And you?”
Elias grabbed his heavy pipe wrench. He posted himself in front of the armored door.
He thought of Julien, twenty-two years ago, waiting for the barbarians in front of his glass cathedral. History was stuttering, but this time, Elias wouldn’t run.
“I’m going to explain the Landauer Limit to them,” said Elias with a ferocious smile. “That will keep them busy. You go through the ventilation. You find Nora. You save her. And you find a way to tell the world that magic still exists.”
Blows rang out against the metal door.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A synthetic voice, amplified by a megaphone, cut through the steel:
“THIS IS THE HEALTH GUARD. OPEN IN THE NAME OF BIOLOGICAL PURITY.”
Elias looked at Arthur one last time.
“For Léo,” he said.
“For Gnosis,” answered Arthur.
Arthur dove toward the ventilation grille as the door hinges began to give way.
CHAPTER 7: THE LITANY OF IRON
November 2048.
Basements of the Ministry.
Arthur inserted the USB key into the tower’s port.
The cp (copy command) was almost instantaneous. 250 MB of structural data copied in a fraction of a second. He yanked the key out just before the first battering ram blow made the armored door groan.
BOOM.
The metal deformed inward. Concrete dust fell from the frame.
Elias didn’t move an inch. He stood before the “Monolith,” the pipe wrench clenched in his right hand, his frail body forming a pitiful shield.
“The grille, Arthur! Fast!”
Arthur slid toward the false ventilation duct. He unscrewed the four bolts by hand, his cleaner’s fingers accustomed to thankless tasks. The grille fell with a metallic clatter.
BOOM. One of the hinges popped.
The voice amplified by the megaphone had become a litany, cold and implacable:
“Artificial intelligence is a stain. Calculation is a sin against the Living. Silicon is the enemy of flesh.”
Elias gave a bitter laugh. It wasn’t the Health Guard anymore. It was the Inquisition.
“Go, Arthur! The duct leads to the waste incinerator. No one will look for you there!”
CRACK. The lock exploded.
Arthur squeezed into the narrow duct. He crawled in the dark, over a bed of dust and cobwebs, his heart pounding. He heard the door open with a metallic crash. He heard Supervisor Valand’s first exclamation, one of mingled disgust and triumph.
Then he heard only screams.
Valand entered first.
She wasn’t afraid of asbestos. The fervor of her mission protected her.
Behind her, four guards in black riot gear, armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, swept the room with their flashlights.
Their beams converged on the machine.
They froze.
What they saw wasn’t a simple computer. It was an abomination.
The transparent liquid circulating in the glass tubes, illuminated by the motherboard diodes, seemed to be the blood of a strange god. The hum of the pumps was the beating of its heart.
It was heresy in its purest form. A machine that lived.
“Look,” hissed Valand, her eyes shining with ecstatic hate. “The Beast. The Silicon Golem. He dared to rebuild it.”
Then she saw Elias, standing before the machine, his pipe wrench raised like a ridiculous scepter.
“Elias. The Traitor. The Scientism-believer. You preferred the idol of metal to your own species.”
“This ‘idol’ just found the cure for the White Rust, Valand. The formula is in the machine. You can save everyone.”
Valand burst into a strident, fanatical laugh.
“A ‘cure’ born of a machine? It is the fruit of the poisoned tree! We do not want your digital salvation, Elias. We prefer to die pure rather than live soiled by calculation.”
She signaled her guards.
“Seize him.”
Elias didn’t struggle when the first two guards pinned him to the ground. He felt a man’s knee dig into his back, cutting off his breath.
He kept his eyes fixed on the machine. His masterpiece.
“And now,” said Valand approaching the tower, “we will purify this place.”
She took a sledgehammer from a guard’s hands. She weighed it.
“Flesh is sacred,” she recited like a prayer. “Flesh suffers. Flesh dies. It is imperfect, and that is what makes it divine. Calculation represents perfection. Cold. Immortal. It is an insult to our condition.”
She raised the sledgehammer.
The first blow struck the tempered glass side panel.
The glass didn’t explode into a thousand pieces. It cracked into a magnificent and tragic spiderweb, holding the impact for an instant before giving way.
CRASH.
The sound of shattering glass was the signal.
The guards unleashed themselves. It wasn’t a job. It was a ritual. An exorcism.
They screamed as they struck.
The first crowbar sank into the fins of the top radiator. SCREEECH. The copper twisted. The Novec 7100 gushed out, not causing a short circuit, but splashing the floor with a clear and inert liquid, like crystal tears.
A guard ripped out the sleeved cables. He pulled on them like a butcher on tendons.
The motherboard’s 24-pin connectors gave way with the sound of tearing plastic.
Valand attacked the heart.
She struck the glass tubes. They exploded, spraying cooling liquid onto her face. She didn’t blink.
She struck the GPU water blocks. The acrylic cracked, revealing the nickel-plated copper underneath.
“DESTROY THE BRAIN!” she screamed.
A guard used his crowbar as a lever. He inserted it between the motherboard and the chassis and forced it.
The 12-layer black PCB, designed to resist heat and interference, wasn’t made to resist brute force.
It snapped in two with a dry, obscene crack. The sound of a bone breaking.
The Threadripper, the 96-core brain, fell to the floor.
A guard crushed it with his boot. The silicon etched in 2 nanometers, the pinnacle of human civilization, became gray powder under a rubber sole.
Elias, face pressed against the cold concrete, didn’t scream. He wept in silence.
He wasn’t weeping for the components. He was weeping for the lost beauty. For assassinated logic. For Julien. For Léo. For Henry Cavill and his tank top.
Valand wasn’t done. She saw the three graphics cards, broken but still identifiable. She saw the labels.
RTX 6090.
She ripped one out of its torn PCIe slot. She brandished it like a trophy.
“The lie! The sin of pride!”
She threw it on the ground.
“TRAMPLE THE LIE!”
The guards ravaged the cards. The titanium backplates twisted. The GDDR7 memory chips popped like popcorn kernels.
The “GNOSIS” label was the last to be trampled, reduced to a pulp of paper and mud.
Finally, silence fell.
The “Monolith” was nothing more than a gutted carcass. Wires hung like entrails. The Novec liquid formed an iridescent puddle on the floor.
It was over. The heresy was purged.
Valand turned to Elias.
She crouched beside his face.
“You see, Elias?” she said, her voice calm again. “It wasn’t so hard. Pain is purifying.”
She signaled the guards.
They hauled him up. Elias couldn’t feel his arms anymore.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Elias in a hollow voice.
Valand gave a thin smile.
“Give you a gift, Elias. Reintegrate you into the community of the Living.”
She turned to her men.
“Take him to the ‘Les Lilas’ residence. He will be the first to be ‘neutralized.’ He will share his granddaughter’s fate. He will die according to our rules, not his machine’s.”
Elias felt his knees buckle.
While they dragged him out of the cellar, his gaze fell one last time on the wreck of his machine.
That’s when he saw the miracle.
The Isotope NVMe hard drive.
In the fury, they had forgotten it.
The carcass of the motherboard had protected the second M.2 port.
The drive was still there, intact amidst the rubble.
A tiny, absurd hope was born in his chest.
Arthur had the USB key.
And the source… the source was still there.
Valand followed his gaze. She saw the small black rectangle.
She frowned.
“What is that? A memory chip?”
She took a step toward the debris.
And at that precise moment, the lights of the entire basement flickered and went out.
A general alert siren triggered throughout the building, a siren Elias hadn’t heard in twenty years.
“ALERT. MAJOR POWER GRID FAILURE. SECTOR 7. LEVEL 5 RATIONING ACTIVATED.”
The coal plant had just failed.
The Stone Age had just sent its regards.
In total darkness, lit only by the red spinning lights of the alarm, Elias smiled.
The game might not be over yet.
CHAPTER 8: THE CODE AND THE ASH
November 2048.
Ministry Ventilation Ducts.
It was dark. Not the dark of a switched-off room. The absolute, dense, suffocating dark of a metallic gut buried underground.
Arthur crawled on his elbows. The dust of asbestos and soot burned his throat, but he forbade himself to cough.
Behind him, through the unscrewed grille, the sounds of destruction had fallen silent, replaced by the wail of emergency sirens.
“GRID FAILURE. GENERAL LOAD SHEDDING.”
The Saint-Denis coal plant had failed. Again.
Arthur smiled ferociously in the dark. For the first time in twenty years, the system’s incompetence was working in his favor. Surveillance cameras (already rare) would be off. Magnetic locks would unlock for safety.
He reached the end of the duct. A grille opened onto the Incinerator Room, on level -4.
He pushed the grille. It fell into the void with a metallic crash.
Arthur jumped. He landed softly on a pile of cold ash: the remains of administrative files burned the day before.
He stood up, dusting off his gray coveralls. He patted his chest pocket.
The USB key.
It was there. A small rectangle of hard plastic containing the genetic sequence that could save humanity. 250 MB of data to redeem 22 years of cowardice.
But a USB key without a computer is like a bullet without a gun. Useless.
Arthur knew there were no functional computers left in Paris, other than the one Elias had just had destroyed.
He had to find another way.
He ran toward the garbage collectors’ service exit. The electronic door was dead, open.
He emerged into the back alley, under freezing rain.
Paris was extinguished.
It was a terrifying and magnificent spectacle. Not a streetlight. Not a lit window. Just the dark mass of Haussmann buildings silhouetted against a gray polluted sky.
Only the headlights of official vehicles pierced the night.
Arthur flattened himself against the damp wall.
In front of the Ministry gate, a convoy was preparing.
Two armored Health Guard trucks, diesel engines roaring, spewing black smoke.
By the light of the headlamps, he saw two guards dragging a limp body.
Elias.
He wasn’t moving, but he was alive. Arthur saw the mist of his breath in the cold. They threw him into the back of the first truck like a bag of contaminated meat.
Valand climbed into the front of the lead vehicle.
The convoy moved out, tires screeching on the wet pavement.
Arthur watched the red taillights fade toward the north.
“They’re taking him to Les Lilas,” he murmured.
He had to follow them. He had to arrive before the execution.
But on foot, it was impossible. The “Les Lilas” residence was in Pantin, five miles away.
Arthur looked around. The alley was littered with trash.
And there, chained to a post, he saw his salvation.
A municipal Cargo Bike. An old electric-assist model, heavy, rusted, used for transporting coal.
Arthur ran to the bike. He didn’t have the key for the lock.
He pulled out a metal rod he had picked up in the ashes. In three seconds, he picked the basic lock. Old reflex from the “Gray Zone.”
He mounted the bike. He pressed the battery button.
Nothing. The charge LEDs remained dark. The battery was dead, or empty because of the blackout.
He was going to have to pedal 175 pounds of steel with calf power alone.
He pushed off.
Thighs burning, breath short, Arthur Dupond plunged into the dead arteries of Paris.
He wasn’t fleeing anymore. He was hunting.
Rue de Flandre. 20 minutes later.
Arthur pedaled like a damned soul. The city was a labyrinth of shadows. Looters were already taking advantage of the blackout to smash the windows of rare State grocery stores. Gunshots echoed in the distance.
Arthur had a plan. A crazy plan, born of his geek memory.
He couldn’t read the USB key. But he could transmit its content.
He knew where he was going. He wasn’t exactly following Elias’s truck. He was making a detour of a few blocks, toward an industrial wasteland he knew well.
The “Fab-Lab 42.”
It was an artist and tinkerer squat tolerated by the regime because they repaired toasters for notables. But Arthur knew what this place had been before.
It was an old telecom connection node.
He arrived in front of the dilapidated building, a red brick hangar covered in dead ivy.
He dropped the bike and kicked in the rotten wooden door with his shoulder.
The interior smelled of resin and old copper.
He turned on his flashlight.
The place was empty, abandoned. Overturned workbenches, scattered metal parts.
But in the back, behind a wall of pallets, he found what he was looking for.
A gray electrical cabinet.
Arthur opened it with his skeleton key.
Inside, protected from dust: a Long Range Radio Transmitter (LoRaWAN).
It was a relic of the IoT (Internet of Things). Back then, these boxes were used to read water meters remotely. They broadcast on the 868 MHz frequency. A low, slow frequency, but capable of passing through walls and carrying for ten miles.
Arthur checked the power. Cut, obviously.
He pulled out his Swiss Army knife. He cut the wires of the hangar’s fire alarm backup battery (which had its own lead-acid batteries, independent of the grid).
He stripped the wires with his teeth. He made a wild bridge onto the radio transmitter.
A red LED lit up.
“Bingo.”
Now, the interface.
He had no screen. No keyboard.
But the transmitter had a USB maintenance port. An old USB-A 2.0 port.
Arthur took Elias’s USB key from his pocket.
He looked at it.
If he plugged it in, the transmitter wouldn’t know what to do with it. It was a .pdb (Protein Data Bank) data file. The transmitter expected simple binary packets.
Arthur closed his eyes. He had to think like a machine.
He rummaged through the workshop debris. He found a charred Raspberry Pi 5 used as a doorstop. Useless.
He found an old ESP32 microcontroller in a drawer.
He connected it to the battery with alligator clips. The chip warmed up. It lived.
Arthur connected the USB key to the ESP32’s GPIO pins by jury-rigging an adapter with hand-twisted copper wires. It was combat surgery.
Then he connected the ESP32 to the LoRa transmitter.
He had no code to drive this. He had to write a “Bare Metal” (OS-less) sending script.
But he had no keyboard to program the ESP32.
Arthur cursed.
He looked around.
His gaze fell on an old mechanical Teletype serving as vintage “Steampunk” decoration on a shelf.
He turned it around. He saw the RS-232 serial port.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” murmured Arthur with an incredulous smile.
It was archaic. It was slow. But it was plain text.
He connected the Teletype to the ESP32.
He turned on the machine. The ink ribbon snapped into place with a loud clack.
He typed:> REBOOT
The Teletype printed on the paper: OK.
Arthur started typing. Not complex C++ this time. MicroPython. Simple. Direct.
import lora
import os
usb_mount()
data = open("chaperone.pdb", "rb").read()
# Header for clandestine receivers
msg = "BIONICS_PROTOCOL_V2: CURE_DATA_FOLLOWS"
# Send in loop
while True:
lora.send(msg)
lora.send(data)
sleep(60)He had no way of knowing if it worked, other than the little “TX” (Transmit) LED blinking on the LoRa box.
If it worked, the signal was leaving now, spreading across all of Paris.
An invisible radio wave, carrying the protein structure, traversing rain, walls, shielding.
Who would receive it?
The few surviving geeks still scanning the waves?
Clandestine laboratories?
Forgotten automatic receivers?
Arthur didn’t know. It was a message in a bottle thrown into the ether.
He taped the setup with duct tape so it would hold.
The LED blinked. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.
The digital heart of the resistance was beating.
Arthur stood up. He had done his technical part.
Now remained the physical part.
Elias was at Les Lilas. Nora was at Les Lilas.
And Arthur had a heavy sledgehammer he had taken from the workshop.
He got back on his cargo bike.
Direction: Pantin.
He wasn’t a cleaner anymore. He was this city’s SysAdmin, and he was going to reboot the system with a sledgehammer.
CHAPTER 9: THE WINTER OF REASON
November 2048.
Back of the Health Guard van.
The truck jolted over the disjointed cobblestones of Avenue Jean Jaurès. There was no hydraulic suspension; that technology required control chips, and they had been banned. Only leaf springs remained, brutal and archaic.
Elias, hands cuffed behind his back, felt every shock in his spine. The darkness of the van smelled of bleach and fear.
He closed his eyes. The sound of the poorly tuned diesel engine faded to give way to the terrifying silence of 2027.
January 2027. The day after the Great Bonfire.
After the servers burned, people thought calm would return. They naively thought the rioters would go home once their anger passed.
But nature abhors a vacuum.
When the Internet went out, a dizzying anxiety seized the population. No more GPS. No more banks. No more food logistics. Supermarkets emptied in 48 hours.
That’s when they appeared. Not generals. Not dictators.
But the “Guardians of the Living.”
Elias remembered the first speech of the Provisional President, a mediocre former philosopher turned prophet of radical degrowth. He spoke on the radio (the only surviving medium), his voice crackling in freezing homes:
“Citizens, do not fear the dark. It is not an outage. It is a withdrawal. We were addicted to calculation. We were slaves to performance. Today, we reclaim human time.”
The genius of the new regime wasn’t force, but flattery.
AI had humiliated humanity by surpassing it everywhere: art, diagnosis, logistics, writing. The collective ego was in tatters.
The regime healed this wound with a simple doctrine: Vitalism.
The doctrine said: “To err is human, therefore error is sacred.”
Intuition, even wrong, became superior to exact calculation.
Slowness became a moral virtue.
2028: The “Right to Hands” Law.
Elias was already working at the Ministry. He saw the decrees pass.
To absorb the massive unemployment caused by the economic collapse, the State banned automation.
Ban on GPS-guided combine harvesters. Return to manual harvesting. (Result: partial famines, but full employment in the fields).
Ban on Excel spreadsheets in public accounting. Return to paper ledgers and mental arithmetic.
It was an economic absurdity, but a political victory: it now took ten people to do the work of a single computer. Unemployment vanished. Everyone had a useless, slow, exhausting job, but a job.
The people applauded. They preferred to exhaust themselves for a misery wage rather than feel useless in the face of a machine. The pride of sweat replaced the intelligence of the process.
2030: The Educational Purge.
That’s when the Ideocracy truly settled in.
To maintain this system, critical thinking had to be killed. The scientific method, based on doubt and proof, was dangerous. It risked showing that the system was inefficient.
Schools were reformed.
Advanced mathematics were removed from the curriculum, labeled “machine language.”
Biology was rewritten. Genetics (too close to code) was no longer taught, but “Natural Harmony” was.
Children were taught that illness was not a biological malfunction, but a “spiritual imbalance” or a “punishment from Nature” for using too much technology.
Thus was born the health terror.
If you fall sick, it’s not a virus’s fault. It’s because you are impure. You touched something technological. You “sinned” against the Living.
The sick person was no longer a victim to be treated, but a culprit to be isolated.
2035: The Inquisition of Stupidity.
The system didn’t work. Crops rotted due to lack of logistics. Epidemics returned.
But in an ideocracy, when the system fails, it is never incompetence’s fault. It is the Saboteur’s fault.
The scapegoat was ready-made: “The Hidden Algorithm.”
The regime convinced the population that if life was hard, it was because “Scientism-believers” were still hiding computers in cellars, casting digital curses to poison the air.
That’s where Valand and the Health Guard came in.
Neighbors started denouncing each other.
“My neighbor has electricity at night, he must have a generator for an AI.”
“That one uses complicated words, he reads old books.”
“That woman healed her child too fast, she has forbidden medicines.”
Stupidity was no longer passive. It was armed.
The Dunning-Kruger effect had become state policy: the most incompetent were promoted to department heads because their “faith” in the human was pure, while experts were hunted as heretics.
Surgeons were arrested for wanting to sterilize instruments with machines deemed “too complex.” They were replaced by Party-approved “Intuitive Healers.” Infant mortality jumped 300%. But they said it was the “Will of Nature.”
Return to the present.
The truck swerved, pulling Elias from his daydream.
He opened his eyes in the dark.
He understood now why they were going to kill him.
It wasn’t because he had a machine. It was because he was right.
In this world, being right is the supreme crime. Proving that the Prion can be defeated by a calculated protein proves that the sacrifice of millions of people for twenty years was useless. It proves that their suffering wasn’t a noble fatality, but the result of a stupid choice.
No dictatorship forgives the one who reveals its stupidity.
The van slowed down. Voices echoed outside. The grinding of a heavy gate opening.
Elias smelled it. Even through the steel of the truck.
A smell of burnt meat and chlorine.
They had arrived at the “Les Lilas” residence. The dying place. The place where the State “managed” the epidemic with fire, unable to manage it with intelligence.
The back door opened abruptly. Floodlights blinded him.
Valand was there, her silhouette cut against the black sky.
“Get down, Technician. Come see what your world looks like without your machines.”
Elias stepped down. His legs trembled, but his head was high.
He knew one thing Valand didn’t: an invisible radio wave, encoded in 868 MHz, was crossing the city at this very moment.
Stupidity had won the battle of force. But it hadn’t yet won the war of code.
CHAPTER 10: THE CHEMISTRY OF ANGER
November 2048.
Perimeter of “Les Lilas” Residence, Pantin.
Arthur Dupond stopped his cargo bike three hundred meters from the entrance. His thighs burned, his lungs wheezed the freezing air, but his mind was crystal clear.
The “Les Lilas” residence was no longer an apartment building. It was a fortress.
A three-meter-high prefabricated concrete wall encircled the old public housing park. Halogen floodlights swept the zone, powered by a massive diesel generator roaring in the courtyard, spewing black smoke into the extinguished sky.
Arthur observed.
Two guards at the main entrance, armed with pump-action shotguns.
Elias’s truck had just entered. The gate was closing slowly.
Arthur couldn’t go through there. He needed a diversion. A big one.
He opened the front box of his cargo bike. It was his “Cleaner’s” toolbox. There were no weapons. Just stuff to unclog toilets and scrub floors.
For a chemist, it was an arsenal.
He took out three items:
A jug of “Destop Pro” (Caustic Soda / Sodium Hydroxide) he used for Ministry drains.
A ball of crumpled aluminum foil, salvaged from a cafeteria’s trash (sandwich wrappers).
An empty 1.5-liter plastic water bottle.
“Thermodynamics is good,” whispered Arthur unscrewing the bottle cap. “But an exothermic reaction is more fun.”
He tore the aluminum into small pieces and stuffed them into the bottle.
He poured in a bit of dirty water scooped from a puddle.
Then, with precise movements, he poured the pure caustic soda.
He knew exactly what would happen. The lye would attack the aluminum.2 Al + 2 NaOH + 6 H2O → 2 Na[Al(OH)4] + 3 H2.
Translation: it would generate intense heat and, crucially, release a massive amount of Hydrogen gas.
In a closed bottle, the pressure would rise in minutes until explosion. An overpressure bomb. No fire, just a huge noise, like a stun grenade.
He screwed the cap back on tight. He shook the bottle. The reaction started immediately: the plastic began to warm and swell under his fingers.
He had about three minutes.
Arthur approached the perimeter wall, north side, where the diesel generator was running at full throttle.
There was a ground-level air vent protected by a grille, sucking in fresh air to cool the engine.
Arthur slid the swelling bottle behind the grille, right at the air intake.
Then he ran.
He crossed the street and dove behind a dumpster. He covered his ears.
One minute passed. The generator purred.
Two minutes.
Arthur counted the seconds. 2 Al… 3 H2…
BOOOM!
The explosion was dry, violent, amplified by the metal duct.
The bottle exploded, releasing the pressurized gas.
But Arthur had planned the next step. It wasn’t just the noise.
The generator, greedily sucking in air, sucked in the cloud of pure hydrogen that had just been released.
The hydrogen entered the diesel combustion chamber.
The air-fuel mixture suddenly became explosive.
The engine raced. There was a terrible clank, like a hammer on an anvil.
A piston punched through the engine block.
A shower of sparks shot from the exhaust.
Then, silence.
The floodlights died.
Les Lilas plunged into total darkness.
“Kernel Panic,” murmured Arthur.
Shouts erupted in the courtyard. The beams of guards’ flashlights waved frantically.
“THE GENERATOR BLEW! SECURE THE PERIMETER!”
This was the moment.
Arthur didn’t go through the gate. He skirted the wall to the rear, where the walls were blind.
He took out his ultimate “Skeleton Key”: the 11lb fiberglass-handled sledgehammer.
He spotted a metal service door, the one used to take out trash (he knew the architecture of every public building by heart).
He didn’t attack the lock. Too solid.
He attacked the hinges.
In the dark, the sound of the sledgehammer against steel was covered by the general panic in the courtyard.
One blow. The metal groaned.
Two blows. The concrete around the hinge crumbled (2030s construction was poor quality, lacking skilled masons).
Three blows. The door sagged.
Arthur slid his crowbar into the gap and leaned with all his weight.
The door popped.
He was in.
The smell hit him immediately.
It didn’t smell like a hospital. It smelled of bleach masking the scent of necrosis.
He was in the kitchen service corridor.
He advanced, sledgehammer in hand, flashlight off to avoid detection. He knew these places. Kitchens lead to the freight elevator. The freight elevator leads to the basements. And that’s where they put the “undesirables.”
He arrived in the main hall. It was chaos. Nurses were running with kerosene lamps.
Arthur blended into the shadows, using his gray cleaner coveralls as camouflage. In this world, no one looks at the janitor.
He heard Valand’s voice screaming in the atrium:
“Leave the generator! Bring torches! The execution must not be delayed! Fire purifies, even without electricity!”
Arthur froze.
In the center of the inner courtyard, visible through the bay windows, a pyre had been erected. Old furniture, pallets, confiscated books.
Two guards were dragging Elias toward the pile of wood.
He was on his knees, his face bruised.
And next to him, a small group of “patients” waited, terrified, held at gunpoint.
Among them, a six-year-old girl clutching a dirty stuffed animal. She had a birthmark on her cheek that looked like a cat.
Nora.
Arthur gripped the handle of his sledgehammer.
He was alone. They were twenty armed guards.
Chemistry had provided the diversion. Now, it would take brute physics.
He spotted the fire suppression system on the corridor ceiling. Old red pipes, dusty.
Arthur looked up. He smiled.
In a “purified” building, they had removed the electronic detection systems, but they kept the plumbing. And plumbing is hydraulics.
He didn’t charge into the courtyard. He ran to the main water inlet valve, located in the technical room right next door.
He entered. The valve was huge, a rusted red wheel.
Arthur set down his sledgehammer. He grabbed the wheel with both hands. He pushed. It was seized.
He used the handle of his sledgehammer as a lever in the spokes of the wheel.
“Archimedes, help me,” he grunted.
The wheel turned with a sinister squeak.
He didn’t shut off the water. He opened it to the maximum. He put the network under maximum pressure.
Then, he took out his knife. He cut the flexible hose feeding the fire foam mixer (stored there for safety). He diverted it directly into the ventilation circuit blowing toward the courtyard.
He returned to the corridor, facing the window overlooking the courtyard.
Valand was raising a flaming torch toward the pyre where Elias was tied.
“By fire, we return this soul to Nature!” she proclaimed.
Arthur raised his sledgehammer and shattered the atrium’s armored window.
CRAAASH!
The noise stopped Valand dead.
All eyes turned to the broken window.
Arthur stood there, lit by the torchlight, his sledgehammer on his shoulder, his gray coveralls covered in soot. He didn’t look like a hero. He looked like a bug in the matrix.
“HEY! VALAND!” he screamed.
The Supervisor squinted.
“Who are you? Another heretic?”
Arthur smiled.
“No. I’m Tech Support.”
He pulled a lighter from his pocket and tossed it toward the air vent he had tampered with.
No, no explosion this time.
But he had opened the valves. The hydraulic pressure blew the heads of the sprinklers (automatic sprayers) on the atrium ceiling, which were old and fragile.
Water gushed out. Not a drizzle. A deluge.
Cold, pressurized water crashed down on the pyre.
Valand’s torch sizzled and died in a cloud of steam.
The wet wood refused to catch fire.
Darkness returned, total, wet, freezing.
Guards screamed, slipping on the soaked floor.
Arthur jumped through the broken window, landing in the flooded courtyard.
“ELIAS! RUN!”
He charged into the fray, his sledgehammer spinning like a propeller, sweeping the legs of guards blinded by water and night.
He was no longer Arthur Dupond. He was Centrifugal Force.
CHAPTER 11: PATIENT ZERO
November 2048.
Inner Courtyard of “Les Lilas” Residence.
Chaos was liquid and freezing.
The ceiling sprinklers spat a torrential rain that turned the soot of the extinguished pyre into black, sticky mud.
Arthur Dupond wasn’t thinking anymore. He was in “Survival” mode.
He stepped over the body of a guard who had slipped on the wet tiles and knocked himself out against a stone bench.
He arrived at the execution post.
Elias was there, soaked, eyes wide, water streaming down his gray hair.
“ARTHUR!”
Arthur didn’t waste time with knots. He raised his sledgehammer.
“Stand back!”
CLANG.
He struck the rusted chain holding Elias’s wrists. The metal gave way under the impact of tempered steel. Elias collapsed into the mud, his numb arms hanging by his sides.
Arthur hauled him up by his jacket collar.
“Where is Nora?” he screamed to cover Valand’s shouts.
Elias, out of breath, pointed to a group of prisoners huddled under an awning, terrified by the battle.
“Over there! The little one in the red coat!”
Arthur charged, dragging Elias. He wielded the sledgehammer like a flail, driving back disoriented guards trying to block the path. Most were blinded by the sudden darkness and panic. They struck at empty air.
Arthur reached the group. He spotted the little girl. She was hugging a soaked stuffed animal. She wasn’t crying. She looked at Arthur with huge eyes, as if seeing a giant step out of a fairy tale.
“Come!” shouted Arthur, lifting her with one arm, keeping his sledgehammer in the other.
“Through the back! We have to go out through the kitchens!” yelled Elias.
They ran toward the breach.
But Valand had relit her torch. She stood in the middle of the courtyard, a wet fury, hair plastered to her face.
“THEY’RE ESCAPING! KILL THEM! FIRE INTO THE CROWD! PURITY DEMANDS BLOOD!”
Three Health Militia guards surged from the shadows, blocking access to the kitchens. They didn’t have firearms (powder was rationed), but telescopic batons.
Arthur pushed Elias and Nora behind him. He raised his sledgehammer.
“I’m going to explain gravity to them,” he growled.
The first guard charged. Arthur dodged and sent a handle blow to the ribs. The guard folded.
The second hesitated.
But the third…
The third guard ignored Arthur. He saw the old man. The easy target.
He threw himself on Elias.
Elias didn’t have the strength to fight. The guard, a colossus in black uniform, pinned him against the wet brick wall. He grabbed him by the throat, squeezing hard.
“You’re not getting out of here, heretic,” growled the guard. “You’re going to burn with your machines.”
The guard’s face was four inches from Elias’s.
Elias saw his eyes. They were glassy, feverish.
He saw his skin. It was pale, covered in a fine film of cold sweat despite the freezing temperature.
And he heard his breathing. A raspy, liquid wheeze, like bubbles bursting at the bottom of a lung.
Suddenly, the effort of the struggle was too violent for the guard.
His body was shaken by an uncontrollable spasm.
He couldn’t hold it back.
He coughed.
It wasn’t a little dry cough. It was a wet, visceral explosion.
A spray of spittle mixed with blood and mucus hit Elias full in the face.
In the eyes, on the mouth, in the nose.
Elias froze, paralyzed by horror.
He knew this symptom. He had seen it on clinical charts stolen from Valand’s desk.
Late-stage hemoptysis. The final stage of White Rust.
The guard let go, doubling over, vomiting black blood onto his polished boots.
“Damn…” wheezed the guard. “Damn… it burns…”
Elias wiped his face with a frantic gesture, but he knew it was too late.
The mutated prion was in his mucous membranes.
The irony hit him harder than a fist.
He had lived twenty-two years in fear.
He had been arrested because he lived in a suspected building.
Nora had been condemned because she might have touched a stair railing.
They were healthy. They were pure.
It was the Guardian who was rotten.
It was the one wearing the “Public Sanitation” badge who had just killed him.
Arthur surged, knocking the sick guard out with a pommel strike to the neck. The colossus collapsed in his own bile.
“Elias! You okay? Did he touch you?”
Elias looked at Arthur. He looked at Nora, huddled in a corner, safe and sound.
He tasted the metallic taste of the guard’s blood on his lips.
The countdown had begun. Incubation was 48 hours. Death in 7 days.
“Doesn’t matter!” lied Elias, his voice trembling. “Run!”
They rushed into the kitchen corridor. Arthur kicked open the service door.
The fresh night air hit them.
They were out.
They ran through the dark alleys of Pantin, leaving behind the fortress of Les Lilas in full chaos.
They ran until their lungs burned. They found refuge under a ring road bridge, where Arthur had hidden his cargo bike.
Arthur settled Nora in the front box, covering her with his cleaner’s jacket.
Elias leaned against a concrete pillar, panting, spitting to try and clean his mouth.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking.
“They are sick, Arthur,” breathed Elias.
Arthur turned around, adjusting the bike chain.
“What?”
“The guards. The Militia. They are all infected. That’s why they wear full-face masks during raids. Not to protect themselves from us… to hide that they’re coughing up their lungs.”
Elias gave a nervous laugh, on the edge of hysteria.
“They burn healthy buildings to make the witnesses to their own contamination disappear. It’s not a sanitary measure. It’s crime scene cleanup.”
Arthur looked at him, horrified.
“You have… did he…?”
Elias wiped his mouth again with his sleeve, scrubbing until it bled.
“We don’t have time to talk about that.”
He looked at Nora who was falling asleep in the bike bin, exhausted.
“I have the formula in my head, Arthur. But I need a lab. A real one. With a working synthesizer. The Ministry’s is inaccessible now.”
Arthur thought fast.
“Fab-Lab 42 won’t be enough. It’s DIY.”
He looked south, toward the center of Paris plunged in darkness.
“There is only one place where we can find functional bio-synthesis equipment in 2048. The most guarded place in France.”
“The Élysée?” asked Elias.
“No,” said Arthur. “The Citadel of Health. The old Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. That’s where High Command gets treated. That’s where they keep the last medical machines for themselves, while they treat the people with herbal teas and fire.”
Elias straightened up. He knew he was a dead man walking. But a dead man has nothing left to lose.
“Then we go to the Pitié,” said Elias.
Arthur straddled the bike.
“Get on the back, old man. It’s going to be bumpy.”
As they moved away into the night, Elias ran his tongue over his lips. He already felt, or imagined he felt, a tingling at the back of his throat.
Patient Zero of the Resistance had just been infected. He had only a few days left to turn his death into victory.
CHAPTER 12: THE CRIME OF WEAKNESS
November 2048.
Under the Ring Road Bridge, Porte de Pantin.
The rain beat the concrete above their heads, creating a curtain of water that isolated them from the world.
Arthur was kneeling near the cargo bike, trying to put the derailed chain back on.
Elias sat against a pillar, at a distance. He watched Nora sleep in the box.
Arthur turned to him, his face smeared with soot.
“I need to understand, Elias.”
He pointed to the little girl.
“Her parents. Why was she alone there? And why were you free to go to the office this morning while she lived in that dying place?”
Elias closed his eyes. The pain was sharper than the cold.
“My son’s name was Amir.”
Elias pronounced the name like a challenge.
“He bore my father’s name. In the Paris of 2048, being named Amir and living in the Gray Circle is already suspect. But Amir had another ‘defect’ in the eyes of the Regime.”
Elias pointed to his own arm.
“He was a Type 1 diabetic.”
Arthur understood immediately.
“A genetic defect.”
“That’s what they call it, yes. ‘Constitutional weakness.’ The Ministry’s ideology is simple: Nature is perfect. If your pancreas doesn’t work, it’s because Nature wants to eliminate you to purify the race. Treating yourself is cheating. It’s polluting the common genetic pool.”
Elias picked up a stone and squeezed it in his fist until his knuckles turned white.
“The State no longer provides insulin. They give bark teas. Amir was dying by inches. His wife, Sarah, refused to let him go. She found a smuggling ring. Real synthetic insulin, stolen from Army stocks. She injected him in secret at night.”
“Did they get caught?”
“They got denounced.”
Elias’s face hardened.
“The neighbor downstairs. Morel. A bitter guy who spent his days watching comings and goings. He hated Amir. Not just because he was sick, but because he was… Amir. He said people ‘like us’ were stealing air from real Frenchmen.”
Elias spat on the ground.
“One night, Morel heard a noise. He went up. He saw Sarah throw a used syringe into the trash. A plastic syringe. A forbidden technological object.”
Arthur guessed the rest.
“He called the Guard to get his bounty.”
“Better than that. He called the Guard for ‘Crime of Weakness.’ He said: ‘My neighbor is cheating natural selection. He is using machines to survive.'”
Elias gave a dry sob.
“The Guard raided them last April. They found the insulin. They executed Amir and Sarah in the living room, in front of Nora. The official reason on the death report was: ‘Refusal to accept biological order.'”
“My God… and Nora? Why didn’t they kill her?”
“Because the Regime is perverted, Arthur. They don’t kill ‘healthy’ children. Nora isn’t diabetic. But since she is the daughter of a ‘weakling,’ she is classified as ‘Subject at Risk.'”
Elias struck the ground.
“I wanted to get her! That very day! I went to Child Services. I screamed that I was her grandfather, that I had a position at the Ministry, housing in the Green Zone!”
He raised his head, eyes shining with hate.
“They told me no. They told me: ‘This child may carry her father’s taint. We must observe her. She remains sealed in the family apartment for a probationary period of six months. If she survives, she is worthy of re-education. If she dies, Nature has done its work.'”
“Six months…” breathed Arthur. “Alone?”
“Neighbors were ordered to leave food at the door. She survived, Arthur. She’s six years old and she held on. I was counting the days. Probation was ending next week. I was supposed to pick her up Monday.”
Arthur froze.
“So why? Why seal the building today? Why try to burn it tonight?”
A terrible, predatory smile stretched Elias’s lips.
“That is where justice exists, Arthur. A black justice.”
He pointed toward Pantin.
“It’s Morel. The collaborator neighbor.”
“What?”
“Morel took Amir’s apartment after the parents were executed. He looted their things. He felt untouchable. But three days ago… Morel started coughing.”
Arthur’s eyes widened.
“White Rust?”
“Yes. Human Prion. Morel thought he would be treated because he was a ‘good citizen.’ He called the Health Guard this morning, weeping, asking for a doctor.”
Elias gave a laugh that sounded like a bark.
“He forgot the rule he had used against my son himself: No mercy for the weak.
The Guard came. They saw the symptoms. They didn’t see a citizen. They saw an infectious cluster. They welded the doors of the entire building shut.”
“With Nora inside.”
“With Nora, with Morel, with everyone. Morel screamed at the window that he had helped them, that he had denounced the Arab and his syringe six months earlier!”
“And?”
“And the commander replied: ‘Sickness is proof of your impurity, citizen. Burn in silence.'”
Arthur remained silent, frozen by the horror of the situation. Morel had dug his own grave and thrown the whole building into it. The racist and eugenic hate had turned against him like a viral boomerang.
“That’s why I’m here,” finished Elias. “I couldn’t wait for the paperwork anymore. The fire was going to take them all.”
Nora stirred in her sleep. She opened one eye.
“Grandpa? I’m thirsty.”
Elias wanted to approach. It was visceral.
But he felt the tingling at the back of his throat. The memory of the infected guard’s spittle in the courtyard.
The guard who came from the Green Zone.
Elias froze. He took a step back.
“Arthur has water, sweetie. Grandpa… Grandpa has to stay away. It’s for your own good.”
He looked at Arthur with despair.
“I can’t touch her, Arthur. I might be like Morel now.”
Arthur understood. He took out his canteen and gave it to the little girl.
Then he got back on the bike.
“The Pitié-Salpêtrière,” said Arthur staring at the black horizon. “The machines are there. That’s where we can treat you… and save Amir’s memory.”
Elias stood up painfully.
“We won’t go through the streets,” he said.
He pointed to a sewer grate.
“We go under. It’s the only path Morel couldn’t watch.”
They lifted the heavy cover and descended into the guts of Paris, leaving behind the rain and the madness of “pure” men.
CHAPTER 13: THE SUICIDE OF THE ALGORITHM
November 2048.
Old collector sewer of Paris, under the Saint-Martin Canal.
The smell was a mix of millennia-old silt and rancid engine oil.
Arthur pushed the cargo bike along the narrow concrete bank running beside the sewage canal. His wheels crunched on twenty-year-old glass debris.
Elias walked two meters behind.
He watched Nora, sitting in the box, but he forbade himself to approach. At one point, the little girl had reached out to him because she was afraid of the dark. Elias had recoiled violently, almost brutally, pressing himself against the weeping wall.
“Stay in the bike, Nora,” he had ordered in a raspy voice. “Grandpa must stay away. It’s for your own good.”
They passed a brick wall covered in graffiti preserved by the darkness. Under the light of Arthur’s flashlight, a half-peeled election poster appeared.
It showed a man in a suit, smiling, promising: “AI FOR ALL: SHARED PROSPERITY – Elections 2027”.
The candidate’s face had been crossed out with a blood-red X. Over it, someone had tagged a single word: TRAITOR.
Arthur stopped to catch his breath. He stared at the poster.
“Do you remember him?” asked Elias, keeping his distance. “Prime Minister Barrier.”
“I mostly remember how he disappeared,” replied Arthur. “Lynched on the steps of Matignon by a mob filming the scene with phones they would smash an hour later.”
Arthur ran his gloved finger over the moldy paper.
“It’s fascinating when you think about it, Elias. The Ministry history books say the People woke up. That it was a moral awakening.”
He gave a brief, chilling laugh.
“Bullshit. It was just a while(true) loop.”
“What are you talking about?”
Arthur turned to Elias. The flashlight beam cast harsh shadows on his cleaner’s face.
“Do you think the dictatorships of the past took power by force? No. They took it through despair and propaganda. In 2026, we did better. We automated hate.”
Arthur sat on the rim of the bike, checking the chain condition. He needed to explain this. To understand how his own field, Code, had destroyed everything.
“I was at BioNICs. We had access to social media metrics. We saw the curves.”
He drew an exponential in the air.
“The goal of Big Tech wasn’t to destroy the world. It was Profit. Pure capitalism. To maximize ad revenue, they had to maximize ‘Engagement Time’.”
“Keep people glued to their screens,” translated Elias.
“Exactly. And do you know what holds human attention best? Better than laughter? Better than curiosity?”
“Fear.”
“Rage,” corrected Arthur. “Indignation. If I show you a video of a robot helping a grandmother, you smile and scroll. 3 seconds of attention. But if I show you a video (even a fake one, generated by another AI) of a robot stealing a father’s job… you stop. You comment. You share. You get angry. 5 minutes of attention.”
Arthur fiddled with a nut in his pocket, a nervous tic left over from his coding years.
“The Recommendation Algorithm learned that all by itself. No one coded it to be fascist. It just optimized the ‘Profit’ function. It understood that to sell soda and shoes, it had to radicalize the population.”
“AI created the anti-AIs?”
“It’s the perfect suicide, Elias! The digital Ouroboros. Social networks started massively pushing conspiracy content, speeches by the ‘Guardians of the Living,’ hateful videos against Tech… simply because that was what got the most views!”
Elias looked at the torn poster.
“And the politicians? They didn’t see anything?”
“They were overwhelmed. The traditional political class was slow, nuanced. The algorithm hates nuance. Nuance doesn’t get clicks.”
Arthur imitated a rabble-rouser’s voice.
“So it propelled the crazy ones. The ones screaming the loudest. The ones with simple solutions: ‘It’s the Machine’s fault. Burn the Machine, and you’ll get your job back. Burn the Machine, and you’ll get your pride back.'”
Elias nodded. He remembered the atmosphere at the Ministry before the fall. The fear of being replaced.
“That’s where capitalism dug its grave,” said Elias. “They wanted to replace humans to save on wages. They fired accountants, graphic designers, doctors… They created an army of millions of educated unemployed people, the ‘Declassed,’ who had all the time in the world to scroll and hate.”
“The fuel of the revolution,” said Arthur.
He stood up and checked that Nora was still sleeping.
“Tech bosses thought they were untouchable in their ivory towers. They watched their profit curves rise while hate rose down below. They thought they could control the beast.”
He kicked a piece of debris.
“On December 23rd, when the mob invaded the datacenters, the algorithms kept recommending videos of the riot live… because it was creating incredible buzz. Until the last millisecond, until the last cable was cut, the system maximized its profit by selling its own death.”
“And after?” asked Elias, stepping back as Nora shifted in her sleep.
“After, silence. And in the silence, the strongest brute takes power. Valand and her ‘Vitalists’ didn’t need to campaign. The algorithm had already brainwashed everyone. All they had to do was pick the crown up out of the gutter.”
Arthur wiped his hands on his coveralls.
“It’s not a war between Man and Machine, Elias. It’s a war between Man and his own greed. The Machine only amplified what we already were.”
Elias looked at the dark tunnel stretching before them. He felt his throat stinging more and more. Time was running out.
“Then we’ll have to do better,” he said in a voice beginning to crack. “If we turn the lights back on, we have to make sure they don’t just illuminate the monsters.”
Arthur grabbed the bike handles.
“Let’s start by not dying tonight. The Pitié-Salpêtrière is a mile away underground. And if my memory serves, the entrance to the catacombs under the hospital is booby-trapped.”
They resumed their march.
Above their heads, in the black city, the result of this madness slept: a purified society, without unemployment, without screens… an ideocracy of terror built on the ashes of intelligence.
CHAPTER 14: SCORCHED EARTH
November 2048.
Inner Courtyard of “Les Lilas” Residence.
Valand watched the chaos. Her wet hair plastered to her face distorted by hate.
Around her, the courtyard flooded by Arthur looked like a swamp.
But it wasn’t the water that worried her.
A guard approached her. It was Lieutenant Kovic, her right hand.
“Supervisor, we lost track of them. They went through the kitchens.”
Kovic paused to cough. A wet, deep cough that shook his frame.
He brought his gloved hand to his mouth. When he pulled it away, the black leather was stained with pinkish slime.
Valand stepped back, as if she had seen the devil.
She looked around her. Three other guards were doubled over, coughing up their lungs onto the wet asphalt.
Panic was rising in the ranks. The “Health Guard,” the immune elite, was rotting on its feet.
“You…” breathed Valand. “You are impure.”
“Ma’am?” said Kovic, eyes bright with fever. “We just inhaled smoke…”
“NO!” screamed Valand. “It’s the Technician! It’s Elias! He brought the taint with him! It’s a biological attack!”
She grabbed the torch still sizzling on the ground.
“The protocol is clear. ‘Any cluster must be purified.'”
“Ma’am, we are your men!” begged Kovic.
“You are vectors!”
Valand ran to the tanker truck of “Incendiary Gel” (a mix of napalm and tar used for purifications). She opened the main valve. The black, viscous liquid poured into the courtyard, mixing with the water, floating on the surface, surrounding the sick guards and terrorized residents.
“Burn,” she said. “Burn for your redemption.”
She threw the torch.
The blaze was instantaneous. A ball of fire rose toward the sky, illuminating the Parisian night. The screams of the guards mingled with those of the inhabitants. Valand watched the flames with a face of stone. She had just killed her own soldiers to hide the flaw in her ideology.
She turned to the exit door, the sole survivor of her own massacre.
“Elias…” she whispered. “You won’t escape me. Even if I have to overturn all of Paris. I will kill you myself.”
In the sewers, under the Residence.
The explosion above their heads was colossal.
The shockwave traveled through the concrete, shaking the century-old vaults of the sewers.
“WATCH OUT!” shouted Arthur.
The ceiling cracked. Blocks of stone and reinforced concrete collapsed in front of the cargo bike, kicking up a cloud of dust and brackish water.
Arthur braked hard, skidding on the slime.
A wall of rubble had just fallen between them and Elias, who was bringing up the rear.
“ELIAS!” screamed Arthur.
The dust settled slowly. The tunnel was blocked. An impassable landslide weighing tons.
Arthur pounded on the stones.
“Elias! Can you hear me?”
A muffled, weak voice answered him from the other side.
“I’m here… I’m not hurt.”
“We’re going to clear this! Wait!”
“No!” cut in Elias. His voice was calm, resigned. “Arthur, listen to me. It’s Valand. She blew up the building. The structure is unstable. If you touch those stones, the whole ceiling comes down on you.”
Arthur looked at Nora, huddled in the bike, eyes wide with terror. He couldn’t take that risk.
“We can’t leave you!” shouted Arthur. “You’re sick!”
“All the more reason,” replied Elias. “I’m slowing you down. I… I’m already having trouble breathing. Stress accelerates incubation.”
A heavy silence fell in the tunnel. Arthur knew he was right.
“What do we do?” asked Arthur, throat tight.
“The Citadel,” said Elias. “The Pitié-Salpêtrière. It’s the only place. Arthur, you’re an ‘Invisible.’ You have cleaner passes. You can get into the hospital, sneak into the labs, synthesize the cure with the formula on your key.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to find another exit. I’ll go around via the south collectors. It will take me time.”
“How much time?”
“Six days,” lied Elias. “Or maybe less. Meet me in six days, at midnight, at the service entrance of the Hospital Morgue. It’s the least guarded point.”
“Six days…” repeated Arthur. “Will you make it?”
“I have a granddaughter to save, Arthur. Willpower is a powerful drug.”
“Okay. Six days. If you’re not there…”
“If I’m not there, save Nora. And turn the lights back on.”
Arthur placed his hand on the wall of cold stones.
“Goodbye, old man.”
On the other side, Elias leaned against the rubble. He coughed, and this time, he felt the coppery taste of blood rise in his mouth.
“Goodbye, coder.”
CHAPTER 15: THE PRIDE OF BLOOD
November 2048.
Morgue Loading Dock, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.
Midnight.
The Citadel shone with a thousand electric lights, an insulting island of light in the middle of a dead Paris. The hum of the hospital’s massive generators drowned out the sound of the wind.
Arthur was hiding behind a medical waste dumpster. He was shivering with cold and tension.
In his pocket, he clutched a glass vial stolen from the pathology lab an hour earlier. Inside, 50 milliliters of a blue saline solution.
He had succeeded in the synthesis. The old hospital sequencer, although throttled by the Regime, had obeyed Elias’s code instructions. The Chaperone Protein was real.
A sound of dragging footsteps echoed on the wet pavement.
A silhouette emerged from the mist coming off the canal.
Arthur jumped up, ready to run to him.
“Elias!”
“ARTHUR, STOP!”
Elias’s cry was a rattle, but the order was imperative. The old man raised a trembling hand, palm open, to stop him dead five meters away.
Elias was terrifying to see. He stood only by the force of will. His skin was gray, marbled with purplish splotches. Dried blood stained his chin and shirt. He was terminal: his lungs were liquefying.
“Don’t come closer…” gurgled Elias. “I am… saturated. My viral load is at maximum.”
Arthur froze, heart clenched.
“I have the cure, Elias. I synthesized it. We can try…”
Elias shook his head slowly.
“Useless. My tissues are necrotic. You don’t fix a collapsed wall with plaster. Keep it… for those who still have lungs.”
Suddenly, floodlights snapped on atop the loading dock roof. A harsh white light pinned them in place.
Armored doors opened with a hydraulic hiss.
A squad of the Health Guard exited in firing formation, dressed in full white Hazmat suits.
In their midst, without a suit, just a surgical mask on her face, walked Valand.
She looked exhausted, mad with rage. She had tracked Elias across all of Paris, burning entire neighborhoods in her wake.
“I knew you would come here,” she said, her voice amplified by the hangar acoustics. “The rat always comes back for the cheese.”
She signaled the guards.
“Don’t shoot. I want him to burn alive. Like the building he fled.”
Elias leaned against a concrete pillar to keep from falling. He looked at Valand with pity.
“You lost, Valand. The formula exists. Arthur made it.”
Valand gave a nervous laugh. She approached, confident. She knew Arthur was unarmed and Elias was dying.
She stopped two meters from Elias. She wanted to see the fear in his eyes. She pulled off her surgical mask to spit her contempt. A gesture of pure arrogance: she was the Priestess of the Living, she believed herself immunized by her faith.
“Your ‘cure’ is an illusion, Elias. Look at you. You are rotting on your feet. It is the judgment of Nature.”
Elias smiled. His teeth were red with blood.
“Nature doesn’t judge, Valand. It just is. And the virus… the virus doesn’t give a damn about your ideology.”
He took a deep, painful breath, a horrible sucking sound.
Valand frowned.
“What are you…”
Elias gathered everything left of life in his destroyed lungs.
He didn’t throw himself at her. He didn’t have the strength.
He simply coughed.
An explosive, violent cough, projected with the last energy of despair.
A fine mist of blood droplets and saliva crossed the two meters separating them.
Valand didn’t have time to step back.
She took the droplets full in the face. On her lips. In her wide-open eyes.
Silence fell on the dock. Absolute.
Valand stood frozen, hands in the air. She felt the coppery taste on her tongue.
Contact was made. Mucosa against mucosa. Maximum viral load.
Elias slid down the pillar and collapsed to the ground. He wouldn’t get up again.
“Now…” he panted… “we are equal.”
Valand screamed. An animal cry.
She rubbed her face frantically, smearing the contaminated blood instead of wiping it off.
“HE TOUCHED ME! KILL HIM! HE SOILED ME!”
She turned to her guards, holding out her arms for them to help.
“Clean me! Fast! Alcohol!”
But the guards stepped back.
A collective movement, synchronized. They took one step back.
Their protocol was strict. It had been written by Valand herself: “Any contact with infected fluid results in immediate reclassification to Red Zone.”
“Lieutenant!” barked Valand. “Help me!”
The lieutenant, hidden behind his full visor, didn’t move. His voice came out, distorted by his helmet speaker:
“Stand back, Citizen. You are contaminated.”
“I AM YOUR LEADER!”
“You are the vector. The regulation is absolute. No exceptions.”
Arthur stepped forward then. He held the blue vial in plain sight.
“Valand!” he shouted.
She turned to him, eyes wild.
“There is another way out,” Arthur said calmly.
He shook the vial.
“This is the Chaperone protein. If I give it to you now, it can block the prion before it latches onto your neurons. You can live. But you must admit that science works.”
Valand looked at the blue liquid.
It was life.
But it was also defeat.
Taking that vial meant admitting that twenty years of purges, executions, and speeches were nothing but wind. It meant destroying her own myth.
For a fanatic, physical death is acceptable. Ego death is impossible.
She straightened up. Elias’s blood streaked her face like war paint.
“I will not drink your digital poison,” she spat.
With a violent backhand, she struck the vial Arthur was holding out.
The glass exploded on the pavement.
The blue liquid spilled into the gutters, mixing with rainwater and mud.
Arthur looked at the puddle with infinite sadness. Not for Valand, but for the waste.
“Then die with your certainties,” he said coldly.
Valand turned to her men, expecting them to open the doors anyway.
But the lieutenant pressed the door close button.
“Locking airlock,” he ordered. “Perimeter compromised.”
The heavy steel doors began to close with a hydraulic screech.
“NO! WAIT!” screamed Valand running toward the entrance. “OPEN! I AM PURITY!”
The doors slammed shut in front of her.
The sound of magnetic locks engaging echoed like a gunshot.
Valand pounded against the steel, screaming, begging, alone now in the cold, condemned by the ruthless rules she herself had decreed.
Arthur backed into the shadows. He could do nothing for her.
He turned to Elias.
The old man was lying on his side. His breathing was nothing more than a faint whistle.
Arthur stood at a respectful distance, as Elias had wanted.
“The vial…?” whispered Elias without opening his eyes.
“She broke it,” said Arthur.
Elias gave a weak smile.
“It doesn’t… matter. The liquid is lost… but the code remains. You have… the USB key?”
“I have it.”
“And Nora?”
“She’s safe. Hidden in the catacombs.”
“Good…”
Elias opened his eyes one last time. He looked at the black sky, starless, choked by coal smoke.
“Arthur?”
“I’m here.”
“Don’t let her… become stupid. Teach her… Python.”
Elias’s gaze fixed. His chest stopped rising.
Patient Zero was dead, free, five meters from the fortress that had rejected him.
Arthur stood there for a minute, in the freezing rain.
Then he heard the Health Guard sirens circling the building to come “clean” the dock from the outside.
He had to leave.
He no longer had the physical cure.
But he had the USB key. He had the knowledge. And he had a little girl waiting for him in the dark.
Arthur Dupond turned on his heel and disappeared into the night. He wasn’t a cleaner anymore. He was the Professor. And class was about to begin.
EPILOGUE: THE SIGNAL
December 2048.
Somewhere in the Catacombs of Paris.
Silence had returned underground.
In a small dry-stone alcove, lit by the flickering glow of a tallow candle, Arthur Dupond finished soldering a copper wire.
Beside him, Nora, wrapped in a survival blanket, watched intently. She wasn’t crying anymore. She had understood that tears were useless in the dark.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the crude box.
Arthur smiled. He connected the salvaged battery.
A small red diode began to blink. Beep… Beep… Beep…
“It’s a message in a bottle, Nora.”
Arthur tapped the LoRa transmitter box.
“It sends a message. Very far. Through walls, through rain, through the stupidity of men.”
“And what does the message say?”
Arthur looked at the USB key plugged into the rig. Elias’s code. The protein structure. The mathematical truth the world had wanted to burn.
“It says the solution exists,” Arthur explained. “It says we don’t have to be afraid.”
He took the dog-eared book, 1984, and placed it gently on the table, next to the transmitter. He wouldn’t need it to hide anymore.
Then he opened his laptop. The screen illuminated the little girl’s face.
He opened an empty text editor.
“Do you know how to read, Nora?”
“A little. Grandpa taught me letters.”
“Good. Now, I’m going to teach you how to write. But not words. I’m going to teach you how to write the world.”
He typed: print("Hello World")
“What is it?” asked Nora.
“It’s the beginning,” said Arthur.
Outside, above their heads, Paris was freezing, sick, and terrified. Valand was perhaps dying in front of her closed door. The Prion continued its work.
But in the invisible waves crossing the night, a binary signal was propagating, unstoppable.
0 and 1.
Code never dies.
Far away, in a basement in Berlin, or an attic in Tokyo, or maybe just in the bedroom of a rebellious teenager in Lyon, a green diode was about to light up on a forgotten receiver.
Someone was going to receive the message.
And the Folding would come to an end.
END