"Every generation no doubt feels called upon to remake the world. Mine knows that it will not remake it. But its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from falling apart."
— Albert Camus, Discours de Suède, 1957
February, D-63, two months before the election
The Saint-Étienne market smelled of burnt coffee and reheated croissants. Gabriel Moreau had been shaking hands for two hours, his palm already damp beneath the blue canvas of the tent. The baker at stand 8 was talking to him about electricity prices: thirty percent up in a year, his bills doubling, his son looking for work in Lyon.
— I'm listening, Monsieur Roussel.
He said that to everyone.
I'm listening. Not I'll sort it out or I understand. Promises dug electoral graves. Listening, at least, was honest.
Roussel shook his head, his fingers still dusted with flour.
— They've been listening to us for twenty years. We want someone who'll talk.
Gabriel nodded. He'd heard that too, thirty-two times since this morning. He placed his hand on the baker's shoulder: a gesture worn smooth by ten years of rallies, but whose warmth, against all expectation, remained genuine. The two could coexist.
— Then I'll talk. But first, I'm finishing my pain au chocolat tasting. Do you still make them with butter?
Roussel smiled in spite of himself. That was something. The baker's daughter, six or seven years old, was tugging at her father's sleeve. Her fingers were sticky with strawberry jam. Gabriel crouched down in front of her.
— Are you helping your papa today?
The girl buried her face in Roussel's apron. The baker laughed.
— She's shy. But she recognizes faces. She saw you on television last night.
— And what did she think?
— She said you looked terrible.
Gabriel straightened up. The exhaustion, he felt it in his bones, in the hollow of his knees, in that dull ache between his shoulder blades that no longer disappeared even after a full night's sleep.
— She's right.
He bought three pains au chocolat, shook Roussel's hand once more, and continued along the stalls. The awnings snapped in the October wind. Someone was calling out the price of apples, two euros fifty a kilo, and an old woman with a wheeled shopping bag was counting out her coins one by one.
The microphone was cold. Gabriel stepped up onto the platform set up between the cheese stall and the fishmonger's. Behind him, the banner read:
MOREAU — FRANCE NEEDS TO BREATHE. The blue letters were beginning to flake at the R.
He waited for the crowd to settle. Fifty people, maybe sixty. Not bad for a Sunday morning in the Loire.
— I'll be brief, he said.
The crowd laughed. They knew it wasn't true. Speeches were never brief.
— France needs to breathe.
The words came on their own now. Thirty-first time. He had spoken them in a village hall in Chambéry, in a car park in Valence, in front of three retirees and a dog in Privas. The sentences followed one another with mechanical precision: administrative asphyxiation, fiscal suffocation, the breathlessness of the middle classes.
France is choking. I want it to breathe.
The metaphor worked. People nodded. A man in the audience applauded at the wrong moment: half a second ahead of the line. Gabriel noted it mentally. A partisan, someone who knew the text.
He continued. Three minutes. The key points: purchasing power, industrial sovereignty, the end of technocratic contempt. Nothing he hadn't said a hundred times. Nothing his opponents could contradict without appearing to defend the system.
Then he saw her. Third row, left side. A woman in her fifties, grey coat, short hair. She was watching him. Her lips were moving. She was reciting his speech. Not words of approval: the exact words.
She was saying them at the same time as him, with perfect synchronization. When he said "our countryside they are murdering," she said "our countryside they are murdering," a fraction of a second before he finished the phrase. Gabriel paused.
A void. In his head. In his chest. The words he was about to say: already in his mouth: he watched them emerge from her, as though she had taken them before him. A fraction of a second in which he no longer knew who was speaking. Who was listening. Who had written this text.
He resumed his speech. The sentences rolled on. He did not look for the woman again. The van smelled of cold tobacco and chemical air freshener. Marianne was already settled on the back seat, her laptop open, two external monitors plugged into the cigarette lighter. She was twenty-nine, with dark circles she no longer bothered to hide, and an efficiency that bordered on the frightening.
— Seventy-two, she said without looking up.
— What, seventy-two.
— Your emotional authenticity score.
Gabriel sat down beside her. A warmth rose to the back of his neck. He was suddenly aware of his breathing, of the position of his hands, of everything this machine had seen in him without his knowing. The driver started the engine; the van pulled into traffic.
— Show me.
Marianne turned the screen toward him. The dashboard was a mosaic of curves and percentages: attention peaks, emotional saturation, lexical coherence. His speech was transcribed in real time, each sentence coloured green, orange, or red. Most were green.
— Measured approval rate: sixty-eight percent. Projected rate: seventy-two. Key message retention rate: fifty-one. Not bad for a provincial market.
— Who measures this.
— You. Me. The team. The software.
— No. Who made the software?
Marianne shrugged.
— A company. I don't know. Lucien bought it. He says everyone's using it now.
Gabriel scanned the figures. The speech was broken down into segments: opening (duration: 47 seconds, score: 68), body (duration: 3 minutes 12, score: 74), conclusion (duration: 55 seconds, score: 71). Every word analysed, classified, judged.
— Seventy-two. That's better than last week, said Marianne. Last week you scored sixty-seven. The software said you were lacking "calibrated vulnerability."
— Calibrated vulnerability.
— Yeah. You need to talk about your father. About difficult moments. It raises the score.
— My father is dead, Marianne.
— I know. That's why it works.
He looked at her. She wasn't smiling. She said it the way she might say the unemployment rate is falling or gas prices are rising. A fact. A data point. Nothing personal.
— I'm not going to grieve for an algorithm, said Gabriel.
— Of course not. But if you could, you know, mention her a bit more in the speeches... The software says voters like it when you're vulnerable. It builds trust.
— The software says that.
— Yes.
He turned toward the window. The buildings of Saint-Étienne slid past, grey and low, with their shuttered windows and satellite dishes. Someone had tagged a wall: VIVRE SEES YOU. The company's slogan. Below it, a hand had added: AND YOU?
— Do you want to see the feeds? asked Marianne.
— Not yet.
— You need to see.
She handed him her phone. The screen showed his X/Twitter feed, updating continuously. The first post was a video of him: the same video, filmed thirty minutes earlier at the market. Someone had filmed it, edited it, published it. The caption read:
Moreau promises to CUT pensions in 2025.
— What.
— Scroll.
He scrolled. The comments streamed past:
traitor,
sellout,
another lying politician
Twelve hundred reactions in twenty minutes. Shares. Quote-tweets. The hashtag #MoreauWrecksRetirees was beginning to appear.
— I never said that, said Gabriel.
— I know.
— I said the system needed reforming. Not cutting. Reforming.
— I know.
— It's not the same thing.
— I know, Gabriel. But that's what's written.
He played the video. His face, his gestures, his voice. The words were different: not by much, just enough.
Reform become cut.
Adapt become eliminate. The meaning slipping, imperceptibly, like a shadow stretching at the end of the day.
He pressed Reply. Typed:
I never said that. The video has been altered. Here is the original speech.
Published. Nothing happened. No likes. No shares. His message floated in the void, drowned beneath the comments, invisible. Gabriel had the sensation of speaking in an empty room, of screaming under a glass bell jar: the certainty that the truth was there, in plain sight, and that no one would see it. He refreshed the page. His message was still there. No one had seen it.
— It's no use, said Marianne quietly. I tried yesterday. We tried last week. Corrections don't work. People see the first version.
— That's not the first version. It's a lie.
— Yes. But it's faster than the truth.
The van stopped at a red light. Outside, a man was crossing the street with a trolley full of shopping. He didn't spare a glance for the van. Gabriel set the phone down on the seat.
— Seventy-two, he said.
— Seventy-two, Marianne repeated. Not bad.
The hotel was called Le Terminus. It was a building from the nineteen-seventies, with a raw concrete façade and a lobby that smelled of damp carpet and instant coffee. The receptionist handed him the key without looking up from her screen. He went up to the third floor, pushed open the door of room 312.
The window looked out onto a car park.
And above the car park, a billboard. Élisabeth Vernet smiled in the artificial light. Her blonde hair, her navy-blue suit, her perfect teeth. Beside her, the VIVRE logo: two interlaced letters, a V and a V, forming a kind of infinity sign.
VIVRE. Technology in the service of France.
Gabriel drew the curtains. The fabric was too thin. The neon light passed through the cotton, casting the shadow of the billboard onto the bedroom wall: his opponent's face, enlarged, distorted, barely moving as the wind shook the blind.
He sat on the bed. The mattress was too soft. He took out his phone, searched for the altered video. He watched it all the way through. His face. His voice. His words, twisted. He scrolled through the comments. The anger rose in waves. People he didn't know, who had never met him, who now hated him for words he had never spoken.
He tried to post again. A thread, long and detailed, with screenshots of the original speech. He spent ten minutes writing it. He read it through twice. He published. Nothing. One like. Two likes. Then nothing more. He refreshed. The post was still there, but the algorithms weren't showing it. It existed without existing. Like a shout in an empty room.
He set the phone on the bedside table. The room was silent. The radiator ticked. Outside, a car passed, its headlights sweeping the ceiling. The billboard continued to glow through the curtain, casting Élisabeth Vernet's shadow on the wall, motionless and smiling.
Gabriel turned off the light. The shadow didn't disappear. It stayed there, on the white plaster, sharper than in daylight. The neon passed through the fabric, tracing the outline of the face, the shoulders, the VIVRE logo pulsing softly: an artificial breath, steady, infinite. He lay in the dark watching the shadow. The woman at the market. Her lips moving before his. The words he hadn't said. The score. Seventy-two.
Not bad for a Sunday.
Something was wrong. He couldn't have said what. But something was wrong. The ceiling was cracked. A long fissure ran from the corner of the window and snaked to the middle of the room, like a river on a map of unknown territory.
He followed it with his eyes until his eyelids grew heavy. Élisabeth Vernet's shadow was still smiling. He closed his eyes. The speech began again in his head, the words on a loop, thirty-one times, thirty-two times, until he no longer knew whether he had truly spoken them or whether they had always been there, written by someone else, waiting for him to give them voice.
France needs to breathe.
He opened his eyes.
The shadow had moved.
A shiver ran down his spine. Goosebumps. He knew it was impossible, that the billboard was fixed, that the curtain wasn't moving. But the shadow — the shadow of her eyes, the shadow of her mouth — was larger than before. Closer.
No. Impossible. The billboard was fixed. The curtain was still. But the shadow — the shadow of her eyes, the shadow of her mouth — seemed different. Larger. Closer.
He got up, pulled the curtain aside with a sharp gesture. The billboard was normal. Élisabeth Vernet smiled, frozen in her pose, the VIVRE logo beside her. Nothing had changed.
He let the curtain fall. The shadow returned.
He stood at the window watching it. The neon hummed. The radiator ticked. Somewhere in the hotel, a door slammed, muffled voices, the laugh of someone who didn't yet know that tomorrow would be the same.
He went back to sit on the bed. The phone vibrated. A message from Marianne.
Tomorrow, 7am. Strategy meeting. Lucien wants to talk about the video.
He didn't reply. He stared at the shadow until his eyes burned. Then he looked up at the ceiling. The crack. The river.
Seventy-two.
Not bad.
He couldn't sleep. Sleep wouldn't come. He lay there, eyes open in the dark, listening to the hum of the neon and enduring the weight of the night that would not end. Outside, the billboard kept watch. And somewhere in VIVRE's servers, his face, his voice, his words were turning in a loop, analysed, catalogued, ready to be used. He didn't know it yet. But he was going to learn.