My Name is Franck

— Rayau Station, terminus. Everyone off, announced an automatic voice.

As soon as I set foot on the platform, I felt like I was leaving a world that was too noisy for another that was almost too silent.

My cabin was only a thirty-five-minute walk away, but I had no desire to walk that evening.

I took the robot-taxi waiting in front of the station.

It sped between the pines, and I had that familiar thought, as I did every time I returned from Paris.

Sparrow Island was waiting for me. It was an island in name only. It was a large protrusion of land, more than a square kilometer of woods and meadows jutting into the lake. About ten families lived there year-round. My closest neighbors, the Morel, were farmers and cultivated most of the land.

Here, the seasons seemed to move at their own pace, slower, more respectful of things.

The forest, for its part, had never yielded an inch to technology.

Even the robot-taxis, which had become as commonplace as old city buses, stopped five hundred meters from the first cabins, deterred by the narrow, winding paths.

I liked to believe that Sparrow Island still resisted what I had come here to escape.

The vehicle dropped me off at the edge of the woods. I continued on foot, skirting the dam, then the lake, motionless under the trees, before reaching the cabin.

Inside, nothing had changed. The rowing machine, in its corner, which I used from time to time, more out of discipline than pleasure. The guitar, against the wall, still as patient, as if it still hoped I would remember a chord. The telescope, near the window, turned toward the lake by day, toward the stars by night. It awaited the next question more than the next answer.

On the bottom shelf, the old programming manuals had yellowed.

The margins were covered with pencil notes that I never reread, but that I couldn't bring myself to throw away.

The remnants of another Franck. The one who believed that systems always ended up revealing a logic, provided one observed them long enough.

I had loved my engineering studies. The structures, the algorithms, the discreet mechanics of things possessed a beauty that few people seemed to notice.

My Parisian career had extended this enthusiasm until the day I preferred to tell the world of new technologies rather than participate in its construction.

Journalism had come almost by accident. The newsrooms, the press conferences, the nights finishing an article while dawn whitened the roofs of Paris... I had loved that life too. Then, one day, I simply couldn't continue it that way.

Since then, I continue to write a few freelance pieces for newspapers patient enough to wait for my articles and delicate enough never to ask why I refuse to return to live in the city.

They had probably understood what I had never bothered to explain: Sparrow Island was not an escape.

It was the condition for continuing to see clearly.

Thomas heard me before I even closed the door.

He bounded down the stairs two at a time, a notebook still in hand, then stopped in front of me, as if he had suddenly forgotten how to greet someone he was happy to see again.

— Did you know Jupiter has a hundred and fifteen moons? he blurted without saying hello. A hundred and fifteen, Dad.

He continued without catching his breath while I set down my bag.

It was his way of telling me he was glad I was home.

I needed to settle down after the journey.

I grabbed my pack of cigarettes from the windowsill, my only real vice, before lighting one on the doorstep.

That's when I spotted Jean Morel, on the other side of the hedge, busy watering his rows of vegetables before nightfall.

— Hey, you're back! So, Paris? Jean asked me, without looking up much from his watering can.

He paused, wiped his hands on his pants, and approached the hedge as one approaches a conversation they already know will be long.

— Still as noisy, I replied.

— And otherwise, what are they saying over there? he insisted.

— A guy who wants to run the country with an artificial intelligence by his side. Rousseau, his name is. I still don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Jean nodded slowly, as if digesting the information with the same patience he reserves for soil that's just been turned.

— Do you know how long it takes for land to become good again once it's been exhausted? he finally said. Years. Sometimes more. There's no shortcut with the land.

He shrugged, almost amused.

— But people don't have the patience for that anymore. They want results, and fast.

That's why we invented intensive farming: we force the land to give more, faster, without caring what it will still have to give afterward.

And now, it's the same with politics: we haven't even taken the time to try a woman as president, and already we're rushing toward a machine. Faster. More results, right away.

He resumed watering calmly, as if the conversation could continue without him. I thought he was probably right.

I went back inside, pushed open the office door, turned on the small lamp, and took my pen instead of my computer.

People who don't know me well think it's an affectation, the somewhat theatrical gesture of a man who loves simple things. They're not wrong, not completely.

That evening, I needed the slowness of paper to put in order what I had seen.

Lia came to settle on the corner of the desk, with that affected indifference of cats who want you to know they haven't really been waiting for your return.

She had appeared on my windowsill a few years earlier and had let me know she intended to enter my home because it would now be hers.

Faced with such assurance and obviousness, we named her Lia, for Animal Intelligence.

I began to recount the conference.

Rousseau, standing on that stage too large for him, the initially restless room, then as if frozen at the announcement, then Cobot: no, Rousseau wasn't joking, he was really going to run with this flying brain.

The sentences came without too much trouble, factual, almost mechanical.

At the bottom of the last page, almost like signing a letter, I added: My name is Franck, as if to indicate to the reader that if they didn't believe what they read, they could always contact me to tell them in person what I had seen and heard.

Then I reread, and I understood that my text was not enough to convince.

On the real origin of Cobot, I had almost nothing: a vague allusion to a "municipal experiment," a mayor and a town never named.

Eva knew all this.

She had only promised me a callback, and I had neither her number nor any certainty that she would keep her word.

But I now had an excuse to try to obtain her contact information.

It's a professional deformation: I often think about the people I meet. But what I had felt upon seeing Eva was nothing familiar, it was clearer, more disturbing too, like a note played just right when you expected a wrong one.

It had been years since I had felt anything comparable. Since the death of my wife.

A wet road.

The accident.

A night like so many others, suddenly becoming the worst of my life.

A forced shift, a fate that decides to turn at a right angle, without warning.

My children, Thomas and Elise, had grown up with a single father, and I had never sought to change that.

The great love only comes once in a lifetime. I had mine, and I lost it.

Not wanting to lose anything more, I had decided not to want to gain anything either.

I lit a cigarette at the window. Lia was already asleep.

In the distance, the lake water lapped against the dam's barrier.

My phone remained silent.

I didn't yet know that the real story of Cobot wouldn't wait for me to come looking for it, but that it would come, itself, to find me.