"Power is now bicephalous and mutagenic. Leviathan has two heads, one orchestrating the heat while the other codes the system."
— Asma Mhalla, Cyberpunk: The New Totalitarian System (Seuil, 2025)
March, D-45, a month and a half before the election
Author's note. The term Dileviathan is borrowed from Asma Mhalla, Cyberpunk: The New Totalitarian System (Seuil, 2025). In her essay, Asma Mhalla coins this portmanteau to describe the fusion of the authoritarian state (Hobbes's Leviathan) and Big Tech giants (digital) into a single entity of control: a hybrid power, faceless, whose sovereignty is exercised through data and algorithm rather than law and force. This novel draws directly on her analytical framework.
He had been in Lyon for three days. The campaign was passing through the Rhône department: a rally, two constituency offices, meetings with local elected officials. The team had booked a room in a hotel near Place Bellecour, a stone's throw from Rue de la République. He had not come to sleep.
Gabriel counted the cracks in the ceiling.
One. Two. Three. The fourth branched toward the corner of the room like a river on a dry map. He had already counted this ceiling three times since midnight. The numbers never added up. He fell asleep before finishing, or lost the thread, or a car passed in the street and broke his count.
This time, he had reached thirty-seven when the light on his phone came on at the bedside table.
He hadn't touched it in three days.
The notification was a personal loan offer. Need money for your campaign? Preferential rates. He had never spoken to anyone about campaign financing. He hadn't opened his browser. He hadn't searched for a loan. Nothing.
He picked up the phone. Opened the app. The offer was signed by a bank he didn't recognize, with a logo too bright, colors too vivid. He held his thumb suspended above the screen.
In the bathroom, the day before, he had spoken in a low voice with his assistant. We're going to need funds for posters, travel, the campaign offices. A thirty-second conversation, window closed, tap running.
He set the phone face-down on the table.
He counted the cracks up to forty-two. Then he got up, pulled on jeans, a jacket, shoes without laces, and left the room.
The street was empty. The streetlamps cast pools of orange light on the pavement. A cat crossed, stopped, stared at him, moved on. Gabriel walked toward Place Bellecour. His footsteps echoed off the shuttered facades. He passed a man walking a dog, face bent over his phone. The man didn't look up.
The tabac on Rue de la République was open. It was one of those places that never close, with grimy windows and a smell of burnt coffee. The woman behind the counter was reading a magazine with a pink cover. She looked up when he came in.
— We close in ten minutes.
— I want a phone.
She set down the magazine. — We have some. How much do you want to spend?
— The cheapest. With a prepaid card. Cash.
She looked up at him. Not for long. Just long enough for Gabriel to feel the weight of that gaze: the silent calculation people make when they see a man buying a burner phone at two in the morning. She put the cardboard box on the counter and tapped something into the register.
— Seventy euros.
He slid the bills across. She pushed the box toward him. He didn't open it. He slipped it into his pocket and left, heading back up the street.
In the doorway of an apartment building, he tore open the cardboard, unwrapped the phone — a black rectangle, no brand, no frills — and turned it on. The screen lit up, displayed a generic logo, then a blank home screen. No notifications. No messages. Nothing.
He slid his SIM card into the slot, closed the phone, waited.
Thirty seconds.
One minute.
Then a vibration.
A message.
He unlocked it. The text was short, no signature, no emoji, nothing that could identify its author.
You are being watched. Not by people. By the machine. If you want to understand, come alone. 11 p.m. Brasserie du Nord, Rue de la République.
He stood motionless, phone in hand, staring at the words that wouldn't stop turning.
How did they know?
The number didn't exist. He had just activated it. No one could know it. No one except — he didn't know. That was the problem. He could no longer tell who was capable of what. He could no longer make out what was possible.
He read the message again. Breathing short. Pulse rising and he couldn't stop it.
He studied the number. He dialed. The tone answered him: a short beep, cut off, then the recorded message: The number you have dialed has not been assigned.
He turned off the phone. He put it in his pocket.
He stayed in the room all day. The cracks in the ceiling. The hours passing. The message in his pocket, and the question it carried: to go, or not to go.
He checked the time. Ten forty-seven.
The message said Brasserie du Nord, Rue de la République. He could not go. Nothing obliged him to. But the questions kept turning in his head, and the hotel room was too small to contain all the answers he didn't have.
He put on his jacket, slipped the new phone into his pocket, and left the room.
The brasserie had been closed for months. The frontage was dirty, the windows covered in a film of dust and dried rain. The chairs were stacked inside, the tables upturned, the counter bare. A yellowed notice stuck to the door read Permanently Closed.
Gabriel went around to the back.
A smell of urine and wet cardboard hit him. An overturned bin half-blocked the passage. He skirted it, found the service door — grey metal, flaking paint, a lock hanging like a broken tooth.
He pushed.
The door swung open.
The interior was black. Gabriel waited for his eyes to adjust. A faint light came from the main room, filtering under a door left ajar. He moved forward, hands in front of him, knocking against a table, a chair, something metal that fell with a sharp clatter.
— Don't touch the light.
The voice came from the right. Deep. Calm. A man.
Gabriel stopped. — Who are you?
— Sit down.
A shadow moved in the dark. Gabriel heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back, then the sound of a body settling into it. He felt around for a chair, found one, sat down.
— Do you have the phone?
— Yes.
— Turned off?
— Yes.
— Give it to me.
Gabriel hesitated. Then he pulled out the phone and held it out into the dark. Fingers met his — rough, calloused, warm. The man took the phone, felt it over, set it on the table between them.
— Good.
There was a sound of plastic. A click. A blue light came on — a small battery-powered lamp, placed on the table, angled toward the wall. The light was indirect, just enough to reveal the outlines of the man's face.
He was old. Sixty, perhaps more. A hollowed face, deep lines around the eyes, a grey beard badly trimmed. His hands lay flat on the table, palms open, thick fingers, short nails. Hands that had worked. Not with words. With things.
— My name is Étienne.
— Gabriel.
— I know who you are.
— How did you find me?
Étienne didn't answer right away. He studied Gabriel, eyes steady, face still. Then he said: — We found you because you did something no one does anymore. You opened a door that was closed. And you looked inside.
— What door?
— The door to the system. You saw your score. You saw the map. You saw the names.
Gabriel felt his stomach tighten. — How do you know that?
— Because it's the same door I opened, four years ago. And because when someone opens it, the system flags it. You're not the first to see what you've seen. You're just the first not to close the door again.
Étienne leaned forward. The blue light hollowed his eye sockets, threw shadows across his cheekbones.
— Do you know what you saw?
— Data. Probabilities. Scores.
— No. You saw a map of control. Not a plot. Not a conspiracy. Something simpler, and more terrifying.
He paused. His fingers tapped the table, once, twice.
— I worked at Dassault until 2021. Embedded systems. Network architecture. I spent fifteen years building bridges between databases that weren't supposed to communicate with each other. Social security. Tax authorities. Transport. Schools. The police. Every time, the contract said the same thing: optimization of public services, better citizen experience, cost reduction.
He laughed. A dry sound, without joy.
— Nobody ever said: we're building a surveillance system. Nobody ever wrote that in a specification document. But that's what the result is. A network that knows everything. That calculates everything. That predicts everything.
— The Dileviathan?
Étienne looked at him. A long look. Then he nodded.
— You found the name.
— It was in the data I saw at VIVRE headquarters. The profiling screens. The columns with names and scores. At the very top, the name of the system.
— Of course it was in the data. It's the heart of the system. The name no one speaks aloud, but that everyone knows, underneath. The great body. The machine that digests everything.
He straightened up, took a few steps in the dark. Gabriel could hear him breathing, could smell his jacket — damp wool, cold tobacco.
— Nobody planned this, Gabriel. That's the most frightening part. There's no secret room with villains in suits. There's no meeting where someone decided: let's turn France into a digital prison. No. It happened gradually. The state needed surveillance. Companies needed data. They fed each other until they merged. Now there's no longer any difference between logging into your bank and voting. It's the same network. The same surface of control.
Gabriel clasped his hands on his knees. His palms were damp.
— And me? What do I have to do with any of this?
— You're an anomaly.
— An anomaly how?
Étienne came back and sat down. The blue light caught his face from the side. His eyes were red, tired, but something burned in them — an intensity that had no age.
— The system is designed to smooth things out. To bring everyone back toward the mean. To identify those who step out of line and pull them back in. You stepped out. You opened the door. You looked. You weren't afraid.
— I was afraid.
— Not enough to close it.
Gabriel didn't answer. He thought about the notification on his phone. The map. His name. That number, 0.92.
— What do you want from me? he asked.
— Nothing. For now.
— Then why am I here?
Étienne reached into his pocket. His fingers drew out a small black object, rectangular, the size of a matchbox. He set it on the table between them. The blue light slid across its smooth surface — no buttons, no screen, no port.
— It's a dead drop. No network connection. No Bluetooth. No radio. Nothing. If you need to contact us, you press the button.
— There is no button.
— It's on the inside. You have to press hard. Hard enough to break the casing.
Gabriel picked up the object. It was heavy for its size — heavier than the plastic, heavier than the battery. There was something dense inside, a sealed secret, a small piece of courage in a black box that couldn't be forced open.
— And then?
— Someone will come. Within the hour.
— Who?
— Someone who knows who you are. And who knows why you pressed it.
Gabriel turned the object in his hands. He looked for a slot, an opening, a seam. Nothing. It was a perfect block, with no visible joint.
— You only use it once, said Étienne. After that, they'll know the channel exists. They'll find it. They'll shut it down.
— Who, they?
Étienne looked at him steadily. He didn't answer.
— You have questions, Gabriel. Real ones. But you're not ready to ask them yet. When you are, you'll press it.
He stood up. The chair scraped the floor. Gabriel did the same.
— How do I get out?
— The way you came in. The alley. Don't take the main street. Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow, act as if nothing happened.
Gabriel slipped the box into his pocket. He felt its weight against his thigh, a small black stone in the immensity of the night.
— Why are you doing this? he asked.
Étienne stopped. He turned his head, just enough for Gabriel to see his profile in the blue light.
— Because I built this system. And I didn't have the courage to destroy it.
He turned off the lamp. Darkness fell all at once, absolute, without nuance.
— Go.
Gabriel moved through the dark, hands outstretched, knocking against a table, a chair, the door frame. He found the alley. The cold air struck his face. He walked quickly, without looking back.
The streets were empty. The streetlamps kept casting their orange light on the wet pavements. Gabriel walked, hands in his pockets, the black box against his thigh.
He passed under a streetlamp.
The light flickered.
He stopped. Looked up. The streetlamp was ordinary — a grey metal tube, an LED bulb, a plastic housing. Nothing unusual. Nothing broken.
He walked on.
The next streetlamp flickered too.
Then the one after.
He stopped in the middle of the street, turned around, scanned the row of streetlamps stretching behind him. They were all burning normally. Orange. Steady. Still.
Ahead of him, a streetlamp blinked. Went out. Came back on.
He couldn't have said whether it was a coincidence.
He had lost all certainty.
He walked on, faster, shoulders drawn in, gaze fixed straight ahead.
Back in his hotel room, he set the black box on the bedside table, next to the turned-off phone. He sat on the edge of the bed. The cracks in the ceiling were still there. He counted them. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.
He stopped.
He picked up the box. Turned it in his hands. Felt for the invisible button, the one that had to be broken to activate it.
He didn't activate it.
Not yet.
He set it back down. He lay down. He stared at the ceiling.
The cracks formed a map. A map he couldn't read. A map that showed paths he hadn't taken, directions he hadn't seen.
He closed his eyes. Sleep didn't come — but it wasn't the usual insomnia. It was something else. A new vigilance. As though, for the first time, he was truly opening his eyes.
Outside, the streetlamps burned.
Inside, something was changing.
He was no longer alone.