"The new totalitarianism does not hide in camps, but in our interfaces and our networks."
— Asma Mhalla, Cyberpunk: The New Totalitarian System
April, D-12, twelve days before the election
Author's note. The "burning mirror" is a metaphor used by certain surveillance theorists to describe the moment when a system of control becomes visible to those it controls. Like a mirror that focuses sunlight onto a single point, surveillance concentrates attention precisely where it should remain invisible. When the mirror burns, it means the system has failed to hide itself.
The car stopped in front of a stone wall. Zara cut the engine. Silence fell like a shroud.
— We walk from here, she said.
Gabriel pushed the door open. In the air, the damp hay mingled with the turned earth. His legs trembled after six hours of driving, tight bends, car changes in deserted supermarket car parks. He slammed the door. The sound bounced off the hillside.
The first round had taken place on Sunday. The results had come in that same evening: he was second, behind Vernet. The polling institutes had buried him at nine percent. The undecided voters, that thirty-eight percent no one talked about, had voted differently. No one understood. Not even him.
Zara came around the bonnet. She was carrying a black backpack, the one she had pulled from the boot before abandoning the second car in a cornfield. She didn't spare Gabriel a glance. She walked toward the wall, found a gap, disappeared.
He followed. His shoes slipped on the wet stones. The grass was tall, soaked with dew. His calves burned.
On the other side of the wall, a farmhouse rose against the black sky. A sagging roof. Windows boarded up with planks. A dead tree in front of the door, its branches twisted like frozen lightning.
— This is it, said Zara. For tonight.
She pushed the door. It didn't creak: it had no hinges left. It fell inward, struck the beaten earth floor. Zara went in. Gabriel followed.
The smell hit him first: rotting hay, cold stone, dust. And something else, older: soot, ashes, as though the house had burned once and no one had ever cleaned it.
Zara pulled a torch from her bag. The beam cut through the darkness. A table. Overturned chairs. A fireplace black with grime. Footprints in the dust: recent, several pairs.
— The others are coming, she said. We have two hours before dawn.
Gabriel dropped to the floor. The ground was cold. The damp soaked through his trousers. He didn't move.
Zara lit a candle. The flame wavered, threw shadows across the walls. She set the candle on the table, then pulled a map from her bag: a paper map, folded, the edges worn. She spread it out.
— Tomorrow we'll have to move. Far. Out of France, maybe.
— Why?
— Because Malik knows all our safe houses.
The name fell between them like a stone.
The image of Malik came back to him. The last time he had seen him was in the tower. He had been hunched over a laptop, fingers running across the keyboard, his face lit by the screen. He had said: I'm staying. You go.
— He was taken? asked Gabriel.
— Yes.
— Will he talk?
Zara raised her head. The candle flame danced in her pupils.
— Everyone talks, Gabriel. It's only a matter of time.
Day broke, grey. Light filtered through the cracks in the roof, drawing shafts through the dust. Gabriel hadn't slept. He had sat with his back against the stone wall, listening to the sounds of the night: wind in the trees, Zara's footsteps as she circled the farm every hour, the scratching of an animal in the loft.
The others arrived at dawn. Étienne came in first, shoulders hunched, eyes red. He was carrying a sports bag and a walkie-talkie. Behind him, Solène, hair dishevelled, hands stained with grease. And two others Gabriel didn't know: an older man, around sixty, with a grey beard, and a younger woman, perhaps thirty, who was carrying a baby in a sling.
The baby was crying. A sharp, steady sound, like an alarm.
Étienne sat down at the table. He propped the walkie-talkie in front of him. He stared at it for a long time.
— It's not responding anymore, he said.
— Malik? asked Gabriel.
— The walkie. Malik stopped responding three hours ago.
Solène crouched by the fireplace. She rubbed her hands together, blew into them.
— He held out longer than expected, she said.
— That doesn't mean anything, Étienne replied. He'll talk. Not because he's weak. Because they have ways of making people talk that don't look like torture.
Gabriel waited. No one spoke.
— How?
Étienne looked at him. His eyes were blank.
— You know what hurts more than a blow? he asked. Uncertainty. They put Malik in a cell. They don't touch him. They give him food, water. They're polite. They tell him: We know you're going to talk. It's only a matter of time. The longer you wait, the harder it gets for you. For your family. And they let the silence do the work.
— Does he have a family? asked Gabriel.
— A mother. In Nice. They know where she lives. They won't tell him that. But he knows.
The baby was still crying. The young woman rocked it, murmuring words Gabriel couldn't hear.
— We have forty-eight hours, said Zara. Maybe less. Every location is compromised. The tower. The Lyon flat. The garage in Bordeaux. The warehouse in Toulouse. All of it.
— And the worm? asked Solène.
— The worm is running, said Zara. For now. But if Malik gives them the access credentials, they can disable it. Clean it. Roll everything back.
— They can't, said Étienne. Not completely. Once the model is corrupted, it stays corrupted. It's like a stain. You can wash the fabric, but the mark remains.
— That's not enough, said Zara. We need to keep going. Hit harder.
— With what? asked Solène. We have three computers. Two cars. And people sleeping on the floor of an abandoned farmhouse.
She gestured broadly at the room. The dust. The planks. The crying baby.
— That's all that's left.
Gabriel was watching the planks, the rusted nails, the light filtering through the gaps.
He was listening.
Solène and Zara were arguing. Their voices rose, crossed, clashed.
— We need to go abroad, Zara was saying. Switzerland. Italy. We have contacts in Turin.
— We have nothing in Turin, Solène replied. Some guy who's been promising fake papers for six months. We give him money, we get nothing back.
— It's better than nothing.
— It's worse than nothing. It's a waste of time.
— And what do you suggest? Staying here? Waiting for them to come and get us?
— I suggest we strike. Now. While they're busy interrogating Malik.
— Strike with what? With your bare hands?
— With what we have. We launch everything. All the worms. All the backdoors. We blow up everything we can.
— And then? We'll have nothing left. We'll be blind.
— We're already blind.
Étienne didn't intervene. He stared at the walkie-talkie. He turned it between his fingers. He set it down. Picked it up again.
— We can't decide now, he said at last. Not like this. Not on empty stomachs. We need to eat. We need to sleep. Then we decide.
He stood. He left the room. The door fell shut behind him.
Silence returned. The baby had fallen asleep.
Gabriel remained seated by the window. He watched the dust dancing in the shafts of light.
He saw the tower again. The server room. Malik who had stayed behind to wipe the logs. What he had said: You go. I'm staying.
He thought about his name. His face. His mother in Nice.
His mind drifted to himself. His campaign. The rallies. The interviews. The articles. The photo of him on the posters, with the confident smile, eyes looking straight ahead.
He had believed it meant something. That his name, his voice, his story — that all of it mattered.
Now he was sitting on the floor of an abandoned farmhouse, listening to people argue about what was left to do.
What had he brought to this?
Nothing.
He had blown their cover. He had drawn attention. He had given his speech in the public square, and all the while the cameras had filmed him, the algorithms had tracked him, the agents had followed him.
And now Malik was in a cell somewhere, and his mother in Nice was perhaps already receiving a phone call.
Gabriel looked at his hands. They were trembling slightly.
He found Étienne outside, sitting on a dry-stone wall. The old man was smoking a cigarette.
— I thought you'd quit, said Gabriel.
— I had quit. I started again.
Étienne took a long drag. The smoke rose into the cold air. The landscape around them was vast, empty: hills covered in holm oaks, fallow fields, a grey sky pressing down on everything.
— I need to leave, said Gabriel.
Étienne didn't answer straight away. He finished his cigarette. He crushed it against the stone.
— Why?
— Because I make you visible. I'm a target. My name, my face — everyone knows who I am. Before me, you were in the shadows. Now they know you exist.
Étienne laughed. A dry laugh, without joy.
— You think they didn't know before you?
— I think they didn't know where you were.
— They didn't know where we were. But they knew we existed. For years. We were a nuisance. Background noise. Not important enough to justify an operation.
— And now?
— Now we're important enough. Because you came. Because you spoke. Because people listened to you.
— That's exactly why I need to leave.
Étienne studied him. Beneath his heavy eyelids, his eyes remained sharp.
— We've always been targets, Gabriel. The question isn't whether we're visible. The question is whether we're targets that matter.
He paused.
— You still matter. But only if you stop thinking like a candidate and start thinking like a weapon.
Gabriel said nothing. The words slid off him like water off stone.
— I don't know what that means, he said.
— You'll learn.
Étienne stood. He went back inside the farmhouse. The door closed behind him.
Gabriel remained sitting on the wall.
The hours passed. The grey sky didn't change. No sun. No rain. Just that flat, uniform light that seemed to come from nowhere.
Gabriel walked. He circled the farm. A blocked-up well. A collapsed barn. Abandoned beehives, the frames empty, the wax hardened. A field ploughed long ago, the furrows half-erased by weeds.
He settled on a rock. He scanned the hills.
Nothing. No cars. No planes. No sound of engines. No distant hum of a data centre. Just the wind. Just the stones. Just the trees bending in the breeze.
He had grown up in Paris. He had always lived in noise. Sirens, horns, conversations in the street, music drifting from open windows. Silence had always made him uneasy.
But here, the silence was different. It wasn't an absence. It was a presence. Something that was listening.
His grandfather came back to him.
The printing workshop, rue des Francs-Bourgeois. The smell of ink and paper. The mechanical press, heavy, black, that thudded against the floor with each impression. His grandfather working in silence, hands stained, eyes fixed on the page filling with type.
He had printed leaflets. Posters. Newspapers no one read. Pamphlets against the government, against the banks, against the data centres being built in the suburbs. Texts that said things no one wanted to hear.
And then one day the press had stopped. His grandfather had died. The workshop had been sold. The leaflets had been recycled.
But the words had remained. Somewhere. In the minds of the people who had read them.
Gabriel wondered what his grandfather would have done, in his place. Whether he would have spoken in the public square. Whether he would have drawn attention to himself. Whether he would have agreed to be a symbol.
Or whether he would have stayed in the shadows, printing words no one would read, because it was the only thing he could control.
The sun began to sink behind the hills. The sky turned copper, then violet, then black.
Gabriel didn't move.
He watched the stars appear one by one. First the brightest. Then the others. Then all of them.
He hadn't seen the stars in a long time. In Paris they were invisible, drowned in light pollution. Here they were everywhere. Thousands. Millions.
Lucien's words echoed inside him. The game no longer exists.
Perhaps that was true. Perhaps the game had never existed. Perhaps all of it — the campaign, the rallies, the interviews, the posters — had been nothing but a distraction. Background noise. A way of keeping him occupied while the real work was being done elsewhere.
And now the real work was coming undone. Malik was a prisoner. The network was compromised. The worms were running in the void, with no one to guide them.
And he, Gabriel, was sitting on a rock, looking at the stars.
What are you doing here? he asked himself.
He had no answer.
Something moved in the darkness. The sound of footsteps on stones. Zara approached. She sat down beside him, without speaking.
They stayed like that for a long time. The wind blew. The stars turned slowly above them.
— Are you hungry? Zara asked at last.
— No.
— You should eat anyway.
— I'll eat later.
Zara didn't reply. She pulled something from her pocket: a cereal bar, the wrapper crumpled. She held it out to Gabriel.
He took it. He examined it. He didn't unwrap it.
— Do you want to know what I did before? asked Zara.
Gabriel turned to look at her. In the darkness, he could only make out her profile, the line of her jaw, the curve of her shoulders.
— Yes, he said.
— I told you I worked at Capgemini. Not what I really did. Recommendation algorithms.
She paused.
— Do you know what that means?
— Not really.
— It means I made people buy things. I made people watch things. I made people vote for people. And I was good at it. Very good.
Her voice was flat, without emotion.
— I could predict what you were going to buy in the next three days. I could predict what you were going to watch. I could predict who you were going to vote for. With a margin of error of less than five per cent.
— That's a lot, said Gabriel.
— It's enormous. People think they're free. They think they choose. But they choose inside a box that we built for them. And we can move the walls of the box. Slowly. Without them noticing.
She fell silent. The wind blew.
— I stopped, she said. When I understood what they were doing with the data.
— What were they doing?
— Selling it to insurance companies. The algorithms predicted mental health crises. Depressions. Burnouts. Suicide attempts. And the insurance companies bought those predictions to adjust their premiums.
Gabriel felt a cold creeping up his spine.
— They could predict that?
— Yes. With browsing data. Google searches. Facebook likes. Private messages. All of it was signals. Indicators. And the algorithms read them better than any psychiatrist.
— And no one said anything?
— No one knew. It was in the terms and conditions. No one reads the terms and conditions.
Zara stood. She looked at the stars.
— I left. I took the data with me. I gave it to journalists. No one published it. Too risky. Too complicated. Too much pressure from the lawyers.
— And then?
— Then I met Étienne. He was looking for someone who knew the systems. I knew the systems.
She turned to face Gabriel.
— Now you know.
She went back inside the farmhouse. The stones crunched under her footsteps.
Gabriel remained alone. The cereal bar in his hand. The stars above him. The wind blowing.
He tore open the wrapper. He bit into it. It was dry, sweet, flavourless.
He chewed slowly. He swallowed.
Zara's words came back to him. The algorithms. The predictions. The insurance companies.
He thought about everything he had done online. Every search. Every message. Every like.
Someone had read them. Someone had sold them. Someone had known things about him that he didn't know himself.
And now Malik was in a cell, and his mother in Nice was perhaps already receiving a phone call, and the algorithms were running, running, running, and no one could stop them.
Gabriel finished the bar. He crumpled the wrapper. He put it in his pocket.
He looked up at the stars for a moment longer.
Then he got to his feet. He went back inside the farmhouse.
The candle was still burning. The others were asleep, wrapped in blankets, the baby pressed against its mother's chest. Étienne slept with his mouth open, the walkie-talkie clutched in his hand.
Zara was sitting by the window. She wasn't sleeping. She was staring into the dark.
Gabriel sat down across from her. He pressed his hands flat on the table.
— What do we do tomorrow? he asked.
Zara held his gaze for a long time.
— We keep going, she said.
— And if it's pointless?
— It's pointless. But we keep going anyway.
She blew out the candle.
Darkness fell.
Gabriel remained in the dark, hands flat on the table, listening to the breathing of the sleepers, the wind in the trees, the silence of the hills.
Somewhere, in a cell, Malik was perhaps already talking.
Or perhaps not.
Gabriel would never know.
But it no longer mattered.
What mattered was what he was going to do now.
And he still didn't know what that was.