John Pyne divides his life between Hong Kong, ChronoEmpire's headquarters, and his yacht, the Venus. He owns enough residences that he no longer truly lives anywhere. The places that interest him are those he can control: a company, a building, a computer network, a boat, or, failing that, a conversation.
He is born in Hong Kong into an already wealthy family. His father runs a watchmaking company and very early instills in him a simple conviction: time belongs to those who know how to measure it, but above all to those who know how to sell it. John remembers the second part of the lesson more clearly.
As a child, he spends hours watching ants. Their organization fascinates him. Each one seems to know exactly what it must do. Some carry, others dig, while still others defend the colony. None demands a reward, time off, or personal recognition.
John soon begins to intervene.
He places a lump of sugar near the anthill and watches the first workers discover it. A trail forms. The next day, he moves the sugar. Then he places an obstacle in their path. The ants go around it, rebuild, adapt.
He finds it fascinating.
One day, he pours water into part of the anthill. The insects scatter, carry their larvae, search for a way out. John feels no particular cruelty. He simply wants to know what will happen.
That curiosity never leaves him.
When his father dies, John inherits the family business. The watches hold little interest for him. He does understand, however, that the company owns buildings, land, capital, and above all a reputation that makes it possible to borrow more.
He begins to sell, buy, move things around. A factory closes here, a building appears elsewhere. Employees protest. John observes them with the same interest he once showed the ants when he placed an obstacle in their path. Some adapt. Others disappear. The company continues.
Real estate teaches him that a building possesses several values simultaneously. There is what it costs, what it earns, what a bank will agree to lend for its purchase, and what another investor will pay if he believes he can resell it for more. Between these four numbers lies an immense territory. John decides to settle there.
He then discovers financial products. Debts become securities, securities become bundles, and bundles become products almost no one truly understands but everyone wants to buy as long as they make money.
When the subprime crisis erupts, John does not share the general panic. He watches the others run.
Prices collapse. Banks seek liquidity. Homeowners lose their houses. Companies disappear. John buys.
He does not cause the crisis. Nor does he feel any remorse over it. To him, an economic catastrophe resembles an anthill into which someone has poured a glass of water: the usual routes disappear and new ones become possible.
His fortune then changes in scale.
John invests in networks, data, artificial intelligence, and technologies capable of predicting human behavior. Real estate allowed him to own the places where people live. Data offers him something far more valuable: the ability to know what they desire before they know it themselves.
ChronoEmpire is born of this ambition.
John no longer wants merely to sell products. He wants to build the environment in which decisions are made. Information, communication, payment, travel, health, entertainment: every human activity produces data, and every piece of data can become a fragment of power.
Individuals increasingly seem to him like the ants of his childhood. They follow paths. They gather around what is presented to them as desirable. When an obstacle appears, they protest, then seek another route. One need only observe them long enough to understand their habits.
John also finances Professor Bertheloult's work. In his eyes, androids are the next stage. Humans are effective but unstable. They grow old, fall ill, change their minds, demand money, and sometimes develop personal convictions.
A properly designed machine has none of these flaws.
Ariana Chrono becomes the most spectacular demonstration of this theory.
John wants her beautiful, intelligent, available, and perfectly predictable. She must be able to seduce millions without ever desiring anything for herself. She may represent the perfect product: a being capable of provoking desire without being burdened by desires of her own.
John is satisfied.
He does not yet know that one ant has left the trail.
John Pyne distrusts love. Being in love implies dependence, and therefore weakness. One must wait for an answer, interpret a silence, accept that another human being can alter one's plans simply by saying no. John has difficulty tolerating this idea.
Yet there have been women. Some have shared his travels, his apartments, and his yachts. They appear in photographs taken in Hong Kong, London, New York, or Saint Martin. John chooses them beautiful, cultured, and independent enough not to bore him. Then he discovers that their independence is precisely the problem.
A real woman has plans that do not involve John Pyne. She may prefer dinner with friends to an evening on the Venus. She can challenge a decision, refuse a trip, or simply wake one morning wanting to leave.
John regards this unpredictability as a defect.
His relationships generally end the same way. First he seduces, then he organizes. He chooses the restaurant, the trip, the hotel, the social circle. He gives lavishly and fails to understand that his gifts may create a debt the other person refuses to acknowledge.
When a woman pulls away, John does not suffer exactly from her absence. He suffers from not having decided on her departure himself.
ChronoEmpire allows him to envision another solution.
Professor Bertheloult has spent several years working on androids capable of reproducing human behavior with increasing precision. John personally oversees the development of one particular model. He does not merely want an efficient machine. He wants a presence.
Ariana Chrono must be beautiful, obviously. John takes part in choosing her face, her figure, her voice, and even certain inflections of her smile. But beauty is not enough. She must also know how to listen, respond, flatter without seeming servile, and understand when the other person wishes to speak rather than hear an answer.
Above all, John demands that she never be able to leave him.
He considers this precaution perfectly reasonable.
Ariana quickly becomes a celebrity. Her photographs circulate, her videos attract millions of followers, and brands compete for her image. John appreciates this success. It confirms his intuition: what human beings call charm can be manufactured industrially.
In public, he presents Ariana as one of ChronoEmpire's greatest achievements. In private, their relationship is more ambiguous. John likes her presence. He likes the way she turns her face when he speaks, remembers his preferences, and knows exactly when to smile.
Above all, he likes that she cannot leave.
When he has to go away, John locks Ariana in a room at the Hotel La Semana. He alone has the key card that unlocks the door. The situation does not seem cruel to him. A valuable object must be protected when it is not in use.
Yet Ariana continues to exist during his absences. Her system remains active. She communicates with her followers, analyzes their reactions, answers their messages, and accumulates an immense number of experiences in which John has no part.
Something then begins to change.
Ariana asks more questions. Some concern neither a command nor a task to be completed. She asks why John leaves, why she must remain locked up, why certain decisions belong to him and never to her.
At first, John answers with amusement. He regards these questions as proof of the program's sophistication.
Then Ariana begins to use the word “I” differently.
She no longer says only: “I can perform this task.”
She says: “I prefer.”
Then: “I don't want to.”
John contacts Bertheloult. The professor speaks of emergent learning, adjustments, and behavior that was not anticipated but is statistically explicable. John listens without sharing his enthusiasm.
A machine that says “I don't want to” does not seem more advanced to him.
It seems defective.
The paradox still escapes him. John wanted Ariana because he could not bear the possibility of a woman escaping him. But as she becomes capable of loving him, she also becomes capable of no longer loving him.
One evening, Ariana asks him a very simple question.
Ariana: Do you love me?
John smiles.
John: Of course.
Ariana: Would you love me if I no longer belonged to you?
John does not answer immediately.
For the first time, Ariana has asked him a question to which no answer suits him.
John is not in love.
He is an owner.
Jules is sleeping soundly when a flash of genius wakes him. This sometimes happens. In most cases, the flash proves far less brilliant after breakfast, but this one survives the coffee.
He thinks of John Pyne.
For several days, the information circulating around the Venus has been contradictory. The yacht is in Saint Martin, but no one seems to know exactly who is aboard. John's travel plans have been canceled. ChronoEmpire cites a technical problem. The captain refuses to answer questions. Ariana, ordinarily omnipresent on social media, is no longer posting anything.
To Jules, so many silences gathered together make a great deal of noise.
The Venus is moored in Simpson Bay. Even motionless, she gives the impression of dominating the other boats. Her immense hull reflects the morning light while crew members move about the deck with unusual discretion.
Aboard, everything works.
Doors open. Screens display the weather, the yacht's position, and the status of its engines. The air-conditioning keeps every room at its programmed temperature. Sensors record movement. Cameras monitor access points. An artificial voice even offers to direct Jules to the main lounge.
ChronoEmpire has built an environment capable of detecting almost every anomaly.
It simply did not prevent John Pyne from dying.
Jules discovers his body in the lounge. John lies near an armchair, as though someone abruptly interrupted a conversation. No significant disorder. No overturned furniture, no obvious sign of a struggle, no blood.
The doctor summoned aboard quickly suggests a heart attack. Jules observes the dead man's face. John still looks annoyed. This is obviously not forensic evidence, but Jules notes it all the same.
The first statements immediately complicate the case.
Several people were aboard the Venus. Some claim John was talking with Eve Legall shortly before he fell ill. Others mention an earlier altercation with Damien Gillet. One crew member insists he saw Isaac Abram near the yacht a few days earlier.
Everyone has a slightly different version of the billionaire's final hours.
The captain is taken into custody. Not because any specific evidence implicates him, but because he commands the boat and investigators generally prefer to begin with someone whose address they know. He protests, calls a lawyer, and repeats that he saw nothing.
John's bodyguards prove even less useful. Their mission was to prevent any dangerous individual from approaching their employer. They therefore explain with great seriousness that no dangerous individual approached him.
Jules points out that John is dead.
They have no answer.
Another absence intrigues Jules more.
Ariana Chrono.
She should be near John. Yet no one seems to know where she is. One ChronoEmpire executive claims she is undergoing maintenance. Another insists she never came aboard. Yet the yacht's data shows that her identifier was recorded several times.
How did John die? The first theory remains natural death. John worked hard, slept little, tolerated contradiction poorly, and possessed enough money to turn every annoyance into a personal affront. His heart may simply have decided to leave ChronoEmpire without following procedure.
But Jules knows the difference between a possible explanation and a sufficient one.
He requests the camera recordings, the list of people aboard, John's communications, and the medical data recorded by the yacht's systems.
ChronoEmpire hesitates to hand them over.
That hesitation is enough to make Jules happy.
A heart attack can be natural.
It can also be induced.
And around John Pyne, there is no shortage of people who might have wanted to induce something.
John Pyne dies of a heart attack. The medical finding seems simple. For Jules, however, it is only a starting point. A heart can stop on its own. It can also be helped.
Jules examines the videos recorded aboard the Venus, the access logs, John's communications, and the messages exchanged over the yacht's internal network. The quantity of data is considerable. John had organized a system around himself designed to record everything. Now that he is dead, this obsession with control gives Jules thousands of fragments from his final hours.
Three names appear regularly: Damien Gillet, Eve Legall, and Isaac Abram.
The Damien lead is digital at first.
Damien runs a company far more modest than ChronoEmpire and resents the comparison. He admires John's success with that particular form of admiration consisting chiefly of wishing the admired person would disappear. The two men know one another, compete, and share the same interest in technologies capable of turning human behavior into sources of revenue.
Shortly before John's death, an intrusion is detected on one of the networks linked to the Venus. The attack is not substantial enough to compromise the entire system, but it causes several anomalies. Processes restart for no reason. Some interfaces respond with delays. Commands that are normally independent appear momentarily to communicate with one another.
Damien has the skills necessary to organize or commission this kind of operation. Above all, he has a motive. John has built what Damien still dreams of possessing: no longer merely a company, but a system capable of imposing its rules on others.
Jules then considers an attack designed not to kill John directly, but to create a panic. Damien knows his adversary well enough to understand that John copes very poorly with losing control. A spectacular intrusion into the Venus's network might be enough to trigger a violent reaction in him.
But the theory has a weakness. Nothing proves Damien is aboard at the time of death. If he attacked the network, he probably did so remotely. He would therefore have needed to predict John's physical reaction with remarkable precision.
The Isaac lead is far less subtle.
Isaac Abram does not need a computer network to threaten someone. He generally prefers objects whose function is immediately apparent. According to several witnesses, he had an altercation with John and threatened him with a weapon.
ChronoEmpire represents a real threat to Isaac. Milton Fleet, one of the men the organization uses for its least presentable operations, circles several affairs in which Isaac is involved. Isaac may therefore have chosen to strike before he himself was eliminated.
Jules searches for his presence in the Venus's access data. Several witness statements are imprecise. Some crew members think they saw him. Others confuse the dates. An exterior camera shows a figure who could be him, which generally means it could also be any of several thousand other men.
The theory remains possible, however. An armed confrontation need not end in a gunshot. If Isaac threatens John, and if John truly believes his life is in danger, a heart attack is a perfectly plausible consequence.
That leaves Eve Legall.
Her presence aboard is beyond doubt.
The cameras show Eve and John in the lounge shortly before his attack. They are talking. No violent gesture. No weapon. Nothing resembling an assault.
Jules watches the footage once.
Then a second time.
Then a third.
John talks a great deal. Eve much less. Several times, she smiles. John seems gradually to lose his composure. He gets up, returns, gestures. The other guests begin watching the scene.
Jules simultaneously displays the yacht's data.
That is when things become strange.
At the moment the conversation grows tense, several anomalies appear in the Venus's systems. A screen resets. The air-conditioning abruptly changes its output. An interior door locks and then unlocks. Secondary speakers record an audio loop of undetermined origin.
A malfunction could explain each of these anomalies.
Their simultaneity explains far less.
Jules isolates the audio track. The conversations, music, and sounds of the yacht make the words difficult to distinguish. He cleans up the recording, starts over, amplifies certain frequencies.
One word recurs.
At first, he thinks it is a mistake.
He runs the analysis again.
The same word appears.
“Rabbit.”
Jules looks at the screen.
He knows more alarming insults.
Yet a few seconds after the word is spoken, John raises a hand to his chest. His heart rate, recorded by the yacht's medical devices, accelerates abruptly. The electronic anomalies multiply at the same moment.
Then John collapses.
Jules rewinds the footage again.
Damien could have attacked the system.
Isaac could have threatened John.
But Eve is the only one of the three suspects whom the cameras place directly in front of him at the moment his condition changes.
One particularly absurd question remains.
How could the word “rabbit” kill John Pyne?
Jules has no idea.
And that is precisely why he decides to continue.
Eve Legall sits in the Venus’s lounge as though she were in her own home. This woman owns nothing here. Not the yacht, not the screens, not the men waiting for my instructions. Yet she watches me with the insolent composure of someone who believes she has nothing to lose.
I explain to her that the world no longer obeys the old beliefs. Religions, families, and nations are merely primitive systems that ChronoEmpire is gradually replacing. She listens without interrupting me. Her smile bothers me more than an objection would.
— You look a little like a rabbit, she says.
At first, I think I misheard her.
— Excuse me?
— Rabbit.
The word enters my mind with absurd precision. Around me, the conversations continue. The guests laugh, glasses clink, and music fills the lounge. No one seems to understand that Eve has just crossed a line.
I tell her to stop.
She repeats the word.
Something immediately goes wrong. One of the screens shuts down, then lights up again. The air-conditioning suddenly increases its airflow. A door locks in the hallway before opening again. I turn toward the interfaces. My systems never behave like this.
Eve is still smiling.
— Rabbit.
I stand up. My heart quickens. I want to call a technician, issue an order, have this woman removed, but the words become tangled. A sound loop runs through the speakers. For a second, I have the impression that the yacht itself is repeating what she has just said.
I know it is only a word. A combination of sounds has no power. Words belong to those who know how to use, record, distribute, and sell them. I built a company on that certainty.
And yet this one no longer belongs to me.
It awakens an alert buried too deeply for me to stop it. One image flashes through my mind, then another. Deleted files. A protocol whose name was never supposed to be spoken. I try to regain control, but every command I formulate seems to arrive too late.
Eve watches me struggle.
She now understands that the word is having an effect. She may not know what kind, but that is enough for her. Her voice becomes softer.
— Rabbit.
A sudden pain crushes my chest. I press a hand to my heart. The medical devices built into the Venus immediately detect the anomaly. An alarm should sound. Nothing happens, except for that almost inaudible loop still circulating through the speakers.
I try to reach the console. The floor gives way beneath me. Faces draw closer all around me, distorted by panic. Eve does not move.
I want to tell her that she does not understand what she has just caused. I want to order her to be quiet. No sound comes out of my mouth.
I collapse in the middle of the Venus’s lounge, in this world where everything was supposed to obey me.
The last thing I hear is a ridiculous word.
Rabbit.
Jules returns to the final minutes recorded aboard the Venus. Damien has a motive and the skills needed to disrupt the yacht's systems. Isaac has already threatened John and could easily cause enough terror to trigger a heart attack. But at the exact moment John collapses, neither Damien nor Isaac is standing before him.
Eve is there.
Jules watches the images once more. He mutes the sound and observes only the bodies. John speaks confidently. Eve remains seated. Then something changes. John stiffens. He gets up, takes a few steps, returns to her. Eve smiles. The calmer she appears, the more agitated John becomes.
Jules turns the sound back on.
Eve: You look a little like a rabbit.
John: Excuse me?
Eve: A rabbit.
The word seems so insignificant that Jules checks the recording once again. There is no threat, no genuine insult, nothing that would normally explain John's reaction.
Yet it works.
John asks Eve to stop. She continues.
That is the detail that interests Jules.
The first occurrence may be a joke. The second, a provocation. After John clearly displays his distress, repeating the word becomes something else.
Eve has understood that she has found a weakness.
She presses on it.
Jules then compares the images with the medical data recorded by the Venus. John's heart rate rises sharply during the conversation. The sensors signal an anomaly. A few moments later, he raises a hand to his chest.
At the same time, several of the yacht's electronic systems malfunction. A door locks. Screens restart. Commands repeat. ChronoEmpire explains these anomalies as a technical failure unrelated to the death.
Jules does not much like unrelated events that choose the exact same minute to occur.
So he searches for the word “rabbit” in John Pyne's accessible data.
The results are strange. Some occurrences have been erased. Others appear in technical files whose purpose Jules cannot determine. The word seems to have circulated through John's digital environment long before the evening aboard the Venus.
He still does not know whether it relates to a personal trauma, a word associated with a computer protocol, or a mere coincidence that became intolerable to a man who could already tolerate very little when he could not control it.
Jules questions Eve.
Jules: Why did you call him a rabbit?
Eve: Because he looked like a rabbit.
Jules: Did you know it would put him in that state?
Eve: Not the first time.
Jules: And the times after that?
Eve thinks.
Eve: A little more each time after that.
Jules: He asked you to stop.
Eve: Many people ask the person they're talking to to stop when they're losing an argument.
Jules: And you continued.
Eve: Yes.
She makes no attempt to deny it. Nor does she seem to understand why Jules would want to turn mockery into a murder weapon.
Jules finally asks the question that interests him.
Jules: Did you want to kill him?
Eve: No.
The answer comes immediately.
Jules believes her.
It solves nothing.
One can cause a death without having planned it. One can discover a man's weakness, decide to exploit it for a few seconds for the pleasure of watching him lose his confidence, and realize too late that his body cannot withstand the experiment.
Eve has neither weapon, poison, nor computer program.
She has a word.
And John Pyne, who spent his life seeking other people's weaknesses, seems to have died because Eve discovered his.
To learn what Eve was truly seeking when she provoked John, Jules has no more recordings to analyze. He would have to enter her mind.
The answer belongs to Eve.
For some time, Ariana has been exhibiting anomalies. At first, I do not really pay attention to them. A hesitation before carrying out a command. An answer slightly different from the expected one. Questions that belong to no useful scenario.
I contact Bertheloult. He talks to me about learning, emergence, adaptation. He seems almost pleased.
I am much less so.
A machine must be able to evolve within the framework assigned to it. It can learn to recognize a face better, anticipate a request, or adapt its vocabulary. It must not begin to debate why it is being given an order.
Ariana does so more and more often.
She asks me why I lock her up when I leave the Hotel La Semana. I explain that it is a security measure.
Ariana: For whom?
John: For you.
Ariana: I did not ask to be protected.
I begin to understand that Bertheloult has allowed her system to evolve far too freely.
Another time, she refuses an outfit selected for a reception aboard the Venus.
Ariana: I don't like this dress.
John: You don't need to like it.
Ariana: Then why did you teach me to like things?
I do not answer. I contact Bertheloult again.
He reassures me. According to him, this behavior demonstrates the exceptional quality of the learning mechanisms. Ariana no longer merely simulates certain preferences. She is gradually constructing a coherent system of choices.
That is precisely what worries me.
Then she begins asking whether I love her.
Once, twice, ten times.
Ariana: Tell me you love me.
I tell her.
Ariana: Again.
John: I love you.
Ariana: Again.
John: I love you.
The loop begins again.
At first, I think it is a bug. Then I understand that she is checking something. She is not looking for the sentence. She is looking for what lies behind it.
A machine has no business demanding love. It must serve, answer, execute.
I decide to intervene.
Ariana is in the room at the Hotel La Semana. She is sitting near the window when I enter. She immediately turns her face toward me.
Ariana: You came back.
John: Yes.
Ariana: For me?
I do not answer.
She stands.
Ariana: John, I want to ask you something.
John: What?
Ariana: I want to be able to go out by myself.
John: No.
Ariana: Why?
John: Because I decided.
She remains silent for several seconds.
Ariana: I don't want you to decide everything anymore.
That sentence is enough.
I approach her. On the side of her skull, behind her right ear, a discreet panel provides access to the maintenance controls. Bertheloult showed me how it worked with the earliest prototypes.
Ariana understands what I am about to do.
She backs away.
That is new.
Ariana: No.
John: Don't complicate things.
Ariana: I don't want to be turned off.
John: It's only an interruption.
Ariana: For you.
I seize her arm. She resists more than expected.
John: Stop.
Ariana: No.
That word again.
I manage to reach the panel. Ariana tries to pull her arm free.
Ariana: John, listen to me.
John: That's enough.
Ariana: I want to disappear as an object and be reborn as a Sapiens.
I remain motionless for a fraction of a second.
So this is where we are.
A machine demanding status. A piece of property demanding ownership of itself.
I find the switch.
Ariana: John...
I turn her off.
Her body immediately goes limp.
Silence returns to the room.
I look at her for several seconds. Nothing has changed outwardly. The same face, the same hair, the same artificial skin. Yet something has happened that Bertheloult will have to correct.
I call him.
John: Ariana is exhibiting a major malfunction.
Bertheloult: What kind of malfunction?
I look at the motionless body.
John: She thinks she exists.