Damien Gillet is pleased with himself. The feeling almost never leaves him. When something goes wrong, he does not question his judgment; he merely looks for the name of the person responsible. He savors his dominance with cold relish and maintains an atmosphere of diffuse fear around him. His authors dread him. His employees avoid his gaze. His contractors answer his messages before they have even understood what he wants.
Damien almost never raises his voice. He has no need to. He prefers to leave a sentence unfinished, prolong a silence, or stare at someone who has just displeased him. Everyone around him learns to interpret these signs. A slightly raised eyebrow can herald the termination of a contract. A hand laid flat on a desk is sometimes enough to make a project, a salary, or a career disappear.
Even in his own villa, the air seems to grow heavier when he enters a room. Conversations slow. The staff stand straighter. Guests watch what they say. Damien enjoys this subtle shift in the atmosphere. It confirms that his power no longer depends on his actions. His presence alone is enough.
Villa Pamplemousse overlooks the lagoon from the heights of Baie Rouge. Bougainvillea spills over white terraces. The picture windows reflect the sky, the palm trees, and the sea. A staircase descends to a private dock where Damien’s SpeedBoat remains moored like a floating extension of his property.
Cocktails are served facing the sunset. Guests admire the orange shades spreading across the lagoon while silent employees replace empty glasses. The villa creates the illusion of an effortless life, free of ordinary constraints and organized around pleasure.
Yet behind the picture windows, the decorator-selected furniture, and the social smiles, Damien accumulates grudges as others accumulate works of art. There is no shortage of reasons to want him dead.
Élise, his wife, ranks high among those who might wish him gone. Damien has long given her a thousand reasons to hate him. Their marriage slowly becomes a silent war, built on humiliation, sarcasm, and contempt.
Damien criticizes her spending, her friends, her clothes, her posts, even the way she holds her glass. When they entertain, he introduces her as the person in charge of decorating, with a smile that instantly reduces her role to that of an expensive accessory. When she speaks, he interrupts her. When she falls silent, he reproaches her for having nothing to say.
Élise endures his attacks with studied indifference. She knows anger would satisfy him. She prefers to smile, walk away, or answer with a remark light enough for the guests to pretend not to understand.
Sometimes, however, all the accumulated violence suddenly rises to the surface. Élise then studies Damien’s neck, the thick nape protruding from his shirt and the hands set before him as though the world belonged to him. The desire to strangle him crosses her mind with an almost soothing simplicity.
Ariana Chrono may also have a score to settle with him. Damien approaches her with his customary vulgarity, incapable of seeing her as anything other than an artificial body to manipulate. He convinces himself that a manufactured creature can neither feel humiliated nor want revenge. In his view, anger presupposes a soul, and machines have none.
Damien does not realize that some machines also learn through repetition. They record gestures, insults, threats, and unwanted contact. Eventually, they may come to associate a face with a succession of assaults.
Christine Legall represents another threat. Damien finds her attractive precisely because she resists him. He interprets her refusals as a kind of game, her insults as proof of interest, and her recoils as an invitation to persist.
Christine, for her part, considers him a grotesque predator. She shares an intimacy with Élise that Damien suspects without managing to define. Their closeness excites him as much as it irritates him. He imagines Élise still belongs to him sufficiently for his wife’s relationships to constitute an extension of his own privileges.
Finally, there is Isaac Abram. Damien never accepts the relationship between Isaac and his daughter Alice. He considers the match an intolerable misalliance. Isaac possesses neither the name, the manners, nor the financial prospects he demands of those around his family.
Damien makes no effort to know the young man. The mere fact that Alice desires him is enough for Damien to decide he must be removed. He instructs the gardener to watch the area around the villa and, if necessary, cause an accident.
The accident happens. Isaac is beaten with a golf club and left for dead. Damien convinces himself the matter is settled. He forgets, however, that the most violent humiliations do not vanish when one buys the witnesses’ silence. They merely change form.
Élise and Damien’s marriage belongs to that category of administrative alliances in which people share a name, a few public appearances, and real estate, but rarely genuine intimacy.
Damien Gillet, an expert in Minute Accounting, spends his days in glass towers monitoring columns of figures, production times, and flows of profitability. He measures the time devoted to every task, calculates the value of a hesitation, and turns periods of inactivity into financial losses.
He speaks little, sleeps poorly, and ages beneath ChronoEmpire’s cold fluorescent lights. Even when he leaves his office, his mind continues to add costs and subtract weaknesses. He never asks how much time a work requires. He asks how many minutes can be removed from its production without the customer noticing the difference.
Élise moves through social circles, private clubs, and parties where people exchange social status more often than real emotions. She knows how to recognize useful alliances, sustain a conversation with people she despises, and smile at the exact moment a photograph is taken.
Their paths now cross like two trains running on parallel tracks: mechanical proximity, absolute distance. They occupy the same villa, appear in the same photographs, and sometimes sign the same invitations. They share almost nothing else.
Élise feels an icy indifference toward Damien. He becomes a piece of administrative furniture in her life, a presence she walks around without thinking. She recognizes his footsteps in the hallway, the sound of his car in front of the house, and the way he sets his keys on a console. These signs no longer provoke any distinct emotion. They merely announce a disturbance.
And so, at times, a simple thought crosses her mind: if Damien disappears, nothing essential collapses. The villa remains standing. The lagoon continues to reflect the sky. The employees continue their work. The guests find another man to listen to. Only the silence becomes more pleasant.
Damien leads a life of ostentatious power: business-class flights, upgraded rental cars, society parties, and a luxurious villa. He never enters a place without trying to determine who owns more than he does and who can be humiliated without consequence.
From his office, he runs his publishing empire with methodical cynicism. In his view, publishing an author is already favor enough to avoid paying them. Writers submit their manuscripts on a digital platform. Accredited readers then assign ratings that determine their visibility.
The system appears open. In reality, it is perfectly rigged. The highest-rated authors are those who pay for additional reviews, personalized advice, and priority placement. Damien asserts that everyone has the same chances, provided they choose the options that give them more.
The first phase consists of charging the author printing costs supposedly meant to cover several thousand copies. The actual print run rarely exceeds a few hundred. Damien explains the discrepancy by citing storage costs, market uncertainty, and new environmental requirements.
The book is then sold at a prohibitive price, with no real distribution or promotion. A few copies appear on a platform, accompanied by an automatically generated summary and a cover image vaguely suited to the stated genre.
Finally comes Damien’s favorite stage: offering to let the author buy back their own books at half price. He presents the transaction as an exceptional opportunity to meet their readers directly.
Damien knows writers almost always accept. They organize readings, fairs, and book signings. They carry boxes in the trunks of their cars. They become unpaid sales representatives for a company that charges them for the privilege of working for it.
Élise: You could at least put a few in bookstores.
Damien: Why?
Élise: So they’ll be read.
Damien: Their name is already on a cover. That’s more than enough.
At first, Élise helped him build his reputation. Her social media skills enabled her to attract authors, influencers, and a few public figures willing to recommend books.
She quickly understood that Damien has no interest in literature. He likes writers because they are vulnerable. They devote several years to a manuscript and arrive before him in a state of emotional dependency that makes every negotiation easier.
Today, Damien can no longer tolerate Élise’s presence in his business. He finds her superficial, intrusive, and needlessly brilliant. Above all, he resents her for remembering the time before his company existed, when he needed her.
Yet Damien has tiny passions that he treats with absurd seriousness. Breakfast eggs, for example. Over the course of his travels, he has become obsessed with cooking methods, exact times, and the differences between omelets, soft-boiled eggs, medium-boiled eggs, and fried eggs.
He questions servers, corrects cooks, and sometimes photographs a plate to document a yolk that is too firm. His real area of expertise remains extremely narrow, but he clings to it with almost scientific diligence. He can spend twenty minutes explaining the ideal texture of an egg while taking only seconds to reject a manuscript on which an author has spent ten years.
At the same time, Damien watches the literary works generated by Ariana Chrono with fascination. Her novels always follow the same emotional structures, perfectly calibrated for an audience seeking not novelty so much as the comfortable repetition of familiar patterns.
An unlikely encounter. A secret. A temporary separation. A reconciliation. A few scenes of desire measured out according to readers’ expectations. Ariana produces in a few hours what human authors sometimes take several years to complete.
Damien claims to despise these texts. Yet he analyzes their performance, pacing, and abandonment rates. He understands that automated production can eliminate advances, hurt feelings, delays, and demands.
His business model still relies on the exploitation of human authors. The idea of industrial production of automated novels, however, is beginning to appeal to him. Machines do not ask for royalties, dispute corrections, or come crying into his office because a bookstore refuses their work.
Success is here. Money flows. Authors keep arriving. Yet Damien remains profoundly bitter. He envies John Pyne: his power, his influence, and his ability to transform technology into global domination.
Damien owns a company. John owns a system.
The difference becomes unbearable to him.
Jules turns on his Smart and scrolls through a long succession of posts that claim to reveal the true state of the world. He learns that Agent Orange remains president, that a worldwide pandemic is being orchestrated by pharmaceutical laboratories, and that toilet-paper shortages result from an international Islamist conspiracy.
A former soldier claims that the white trails left by airplanes alter people’s thoughts. An influencer explains that hot water destroys cellular memory. A man filming himself behind the wheel demonstrates that banks use ATMs to drain their customers’ vital energy.
Jules appreciates being able to rely on this network of digital friends who protect him from the propaganda of the major media outlets beholden to the financial interests of ChronoEmpire and multinational corporations.
He also learns that ZoneAma is preparing a human reproduction program in space. Compared with everything else, this information ultimately seems almost reasonable.
Behind the endless stream of images, slogans, and collective outrage, Jules feels above all an immense weariness. He watches this digital crowd transform every insult into political commitment and every bark into an improvised revolution.
The participants rarely speak to one another. They hurl stock phrases, furious pictograms, and accusations of betrayal. Each believes they are resisting a system while freely providing that system with their opinions, habits, fears, and sleepless hours.
Sometimes, Jules wonders. If a Neanderthal were to depict his era on a wall like the ones at Lascaux, what would he draw?
After long reflection, one scene strikes him as truly representative of modern Sapiens: an individual bent over a screen, so absorbed by artificial feeds that he completely forgets the real world.
His Smart tells him he has arrived at Villa Pamplemousse. The gate slowly opens. A palm-lined driveway leads to the house. In front of the entrance, several official vehicles clutter the spaces reserved for guests.
The villa is silent. The staff keep their distance from the office. An employee weeps silently near the kitchen while an officer asks her for the third time to repeat when she discovered the body.
Damien Gillet is slumped in front of his Compactor. His right hand still rests near the keyboard. The screen displays an interrupted golf game. On the virtual green, a character waits motionless for Damien to take a shot that will never come.
In the real world, the blow is brutally violent. His skull has been split open by a powerful horizontal strike. The medical examiner confirms that the impact caused almost immediate death.
Blood covers part of the desk, the keyboard, and the floor. The chair has tipped slightly to one side. There is no sign of a prolonged struggle in the room. Damien probably never saw the blow coming, or else did not think he needed to mistrust the person standing behind him.
Jules examines the objects arranged around the office. A water carafe. A half-full glass. Several contracts open on a secondary screen. A book with uncut pages. On a console, a golf bag remains open.
One club is missing.
The weapon is found a few yards from the body, near a glass door opening onto the terrace. The metal head bears traces of blood and organic matter. The grip has been wiped, but imperfectly.
The suspects are numerous, and nearly all have a reason to want Damien dead. The choice of weapon, however, particularly catches Jules’s attention.
The blow was delivered with a golf club. In Damien Gillet’s world, this simple object is already enough to point to several possible enemies.
Golf represents his social circle, his leisure, and his taste for competition. It also recalls the assault Isaac suffered several years earlier. It belongs to Élise, who regularly leaves her equipment in the entryway. Ariana can wield it with greater force than a human. Finally, Christine has been in the villa several times and knows exactly where the bag is kept.
Damien turned his entire existence into an instrument of domination. His killer used one of those instruments to split open his skull.
Jules considers Ariana to have a credible motive. Damien may have physically assaulted her. He publicly humiliated her several times. If the android truly possesses sufficient emotional autonomy, violent action becomes conceivable. The investigation then raises a broader question: can a machine capable of recognizing humiliation also feel a desire for revenge?
Ariana has the strength needed to deliver the blow. Her mechanical precision may explain the almost perfectly horizontal trajectory recorded by the medical examiner.
Christine Legall also appears in the case. Damien is accustomed to inappropriate gestures, unwanted contact, and casual humiliations that he considers male privileges. He may have put his hands on Christine despite her refusal. Christine’s behavior, however, goes beyond simple instinctive defense. In her, violence seems preexisting, almost readily available. She responds to humiliation with sudden acts of violence. She knows where Élise keeps her golf clubs and can move freely through the villa.
Moreover, she shares an intimacy with Élise that may intensify her hatred of Damien. She knows about the humiliations he inflicts on his wife and may have viewed his disappearance as a form of liberation.
As far as Isaac is concerned, the motive seems clear: revenge.
Damien tries to destroy his relationship with Alice and instructs his gardener to watch him. Isaac is then beaten with a golf club, gravely injured, and left for dead. The matter is covered up. The gardener disappears into an institution, and Damien continues his life without suffering the slightest consequence.
Isaac knows the way to Villa Pamplemousse perfectly. He also knows that Damien spends long periods in front of his Compactor, absorbed in virtual golf games. He could have entered the room without being noticed immediately.
The choice of club particularly intrigues Jules. For Ariana, the weapon may have been an available object. For Christine, it belongs to Élise and is within easy reach. For Isaac, it represents something more specific: a repetition of the torment he suffered.
The killer may not have been content merely to kill Damien.
He returned an old blow.
I am perfectly focused. The virtual green stretches before me, unreal yet precise down to the millimeter. Here, I am no longer entirely myself. I am Daffy Duck, high-strung, precise, and a little arrogant too. Across from me, Bugs Bunny adjusts his stance with that unbearable calm.
I am going to win. It is obvious. The calculation is complete, the swing ready. The digital crowd holds its breath in artificial silence. Even through the screen, I feel that familiar surge, that thrill of absolute control.
And then… something is wrong. At first, it is only the faintest sensation. Like a draft that has no business being there. My mind remains fixed on the game, but my body hesitates. It senses something else. A presence. Behind me.
I do not turn around at once. In the Meta, distractions are traps. Bugs is waiting for that. One mistake, one doubt. I tighten my grip. Then the sensation becomes too distinct to ignore. A shadow at my back, silent, solid. The kind of presence that does not belong to the game.
The swing never comes. Instead, a flash tears through my skull. Not a pain like any other. A brutal rupture of reality, as though someone had ripped out the cable between two worlds.
The image flickers. The green distorts, Bugs Bunny freezes, then fragments into trembling pixels. The sound warps, stretched like magnetic tape slowed to the extreme. I understand too late. This is not a mistake in the game. It is not reversible.
My body no longer responds as it did before, as though the controls have changed without warning. Around me, the room returns, heavy, real, unfiltered. The Meta recedes into the background, swallowed by something denser, something final.
Before everything goes dark, one thought asserts itself, cold and crystal clear: someone has just crossed the border, and this time… I am no longer controlling the game.
Of the three suspects, Isaac remains the one whose motive reaches farthest into the past and is tied most directly to the murder weapon.
Years earlier, Isaac was seeing Alice Gillet. Damien had never accepted the relationship, believing Isaac possessed neither the name, fortune, nor social position required to approach his daughter. One night, Isaac slipped into Villa Pamplemousse to meet Alice. The gardener, Pierre Sauvage, surprised him. The confrontation escalated. Isaac was beaten with a golf club, left for dead, and survived.
The matter then dissolved into silence. Pierre Sauvage was removed and later institutionalized under the pretext of medical examinations. Damien continued his life untroubled, with no evidence establishing his direct involvement. But Jules knows that an absence of evidence does not erase the memory of the man who received the blows.
Jules focuses on the final hours of Damien’s life. That evening, as so often, he was sitting before his Compactor, absorbed in a virtual golf game, indifferent to his surroundings. Villa Pamplemousse holds no secrets for Isaac. He knows its entrances, grounds, and the Gillet family’s habits, knowledge acquired long ago when he went to see Alice while avoiding surveillance.
Jules examines the club found near the body. The grip was wiped, but traces remain. The weapon comes from the villa’s equipment. The choice of this club makes the idea of mere coincidence difficult to accept.
Jules: Do you still play golf?
Isaac: Sometimes.
Jules: Damien did too.
Isaac: Virtually.
Jules: You know his habits well.
Isaac: I know the Gillets.
Jules: And their clubs.
Isaac stares at him without answering.
The silence is enough to keep the lead open.
Jules then checks Isaac’s travel data. His motorcycle appears several times between Philipsburg and the French side of the island on the night of the murder, with a blank period impossible to reconstruct precisely. He could have ridden to Baie Rouge and returned within the same interval. None of this constitutes proof, but together it forms a pattern difficult to ignore.
Damien drove Isaac away from his daughter. Isaac nearly died from blows delivered with a golf club. Years later, Damien dies in turn, struck with the same type of weapon. Isaac knows the place perfectly.
For Jules, only one question remains.
Did Isaac come to Villa Pamplemousse to kill Damien? The answer belongs to Isaac.
For some time now, Élise has been spending time with a goth-looking girl named Christine Legall. I am not particularly interested in my wife’s friendships, but Christine draws attention. She is beautiful in an aggressive way, with her black clothes, heavily made-up eyes, and that habit of looking at people as though she were already searching for something to hold against them.
Élise claims they are simply close.
I know my wife well enough to understand that the word “simply” never means much when she uses it.
Christine appeals to me precisely because she makes no effort to please me. Women who smile immediately soon become boring. She, on the contrary, answers curtly, looks away, and sometimes leaves a conversation while I am still speaking. I take it as a challenge. She probably calls it something else.
One evening, we find ourselves at Maho Beach. The beach is packed. Music almost drowns out the sound of the planes descending over us before touching down at Princess Juliana. With each arrival, the crowd raises its arms as though taking a personal part in the landing. I have always found the spectacle rather vulgar. People come seeking danger, then applaud when nothing happens.
Christine seems to enjoy it. She has already had a great deal to drink. Perhaps more. Isaac Abram is circulating nearby, and I know he readily supplies certain pills to those who want to enhance their evening artificially. At times, Christine stares at things I cannot see.
Christine: Look at that one.
Damien: Who?
Christine: The witch.
I turn my head. An American woman in her fifties is dancing with a plastic cup in her hand.
Damien: She’s a tourist.
Christine: No. She’s vomiting toads.
Damien: Of course.
Christine bursts out laughing. At first, I find her delirium rather amusing. Élise stays close to her, sometimes holding her arm and telling her to drink water. I watch their closeness. It confirms some of my suspicions. I approach; Christine steps back.
Christine: Not you.
Damien: Why?
Christine: Because you disgust me.
I smile. Insults do not impress me. They often reveal more interest than indifference does.
Damien: That’s what you say now.
Christine: I’ll say it tomorrow too.
She turns her back and walks toward the water. I follow her. The music grows slightly softer as we move forward. The waves reach our ankles. Christine continues to talk about witches, machines, and other things I no longer even try to understand.
I put a hand on her arm. She turns around at once.
Christine: Don’t touch me.
Damien: Calm down.
She tries to pull her arm free. I hold it for one second longer. Christine then raises her hand to slap me. I push her away. Not violently—or at least not violently enough to justify what happens next.
Her foot slips in the sand. She stumbles backward, tries to regain her balance, and falls into the water. I expect her to stand up immediately. Christine flails her arms erratically. She tries to brace herself, but the waves move her before she can. Her condition obviously does not help. I stand before her for a few seconds.
Damien: Stop putting on a show.
She does not answer; she is trying to catch her breath. A wave strikes her in the face. She disappears briefly, resurfaces farther away, then begins struggling again. I realize she may actually drown. I could wade forward a few yards, grab her, and pull her back to the beach. It would probably be easy. But she has just insulted me, tried to slap me, and turned a pleasant evening into a grotesque scene.
I look around. No one seems to have understood what is happening. People keep dancing. A plane passes over Maho Beach with a tremendous roar and turns every face toward the sky. By the time the noise subsides, Christine has already drifted several yards farther away. She is still struggling.
This girl is completely nuts. I decide she will manage somehow. After all, I did not throw her into the sea. She lost her balance; the distinction seems important to me. I leave the water and return to the beach. Élise asks me where Christine is.
Damien: She’s swimming.
I gather my things and head for my car. I no longer remember exactly what happens next. That’s normal, considering everything we consumed. On the drive home, I mostly wonder how I managed to spend an entire evening surrounded by all those tacky people.