Tomorrow Begins at Fontenys

Gare Montparnasse, two minutes to seven. Eva was already on the platform, two cups of coffee in hand. She handed me one without a word, as if this gesture had been decided even before my arrival.

We settled side by side, on the same bench, in a carriage still half-empty, and the train began to move.

— The last time I went to Fontenys, Eva told me, it was the day of the launch. The first day of the experiment.

— How did it go?

She smiled.

— Badly, at first. About fifty residents were waiting for us at the entrance of the town hall with signs. We were on the verge of packing up Cobot and returning to Paris, pretending nothing had happened.

I watched Paris fade behind us. The buildings gave way to suburban stations. A few tunnels, then wastelands, and the first lines of trees. April still had that discreet cold that delays spring, despite the timid buds along the tracks.

Eva took out her phone.

— Do you want to see? We filmed everything that day for my research archives. It was six months ago, in November.

She scrolled through her files until she found the video, then handed me the screen. The video opened on the hall of a town hall: about thirty residents squeezed between the doors, some with improvised signs. No robot in our place. Fontenys decides, not a machine.

In the middle, a gray-haired man, in a coat too thin for the season, waited alone in front of a half-full room.

— The mayor, Eva clarified, pausing the video. He was the one who launched everything, without telling anyone other than his municipal council. He had loved my presentation at the Mayors' Fair.

She resumed the video. The mayor entered the room, to the whistles of a few, and sat alone behind a small table, on which was placed a small humanoid-shaped robot, emitting a pale blue light amid the general tension.

— Cobot, I said, recognizing the ventral screen Eva had told me about. Its first public appearance?

— The very first time it had to respond to people, live, without a safety net, Eva replied.

— Hello everyone, and thank you for coming, said the mayor on the screen. From today, Fontenys welcomes an artificial intelligence as a town hall assistant. I know many of you oppose it. I also know why. Unemployment, the factory closure, the promises already made to you that were never kept: all this has taught you to distrust progress when it arrives with grand words and leaves with jobs.

He had both hands flat on the table. His voice still held, but you could feel he was weighing each sentence.

— But I believe this tool can give our town hall time and resources. I am not asking you to believe me today. I am asking for six months. If, in six months, nothing has changed, I will end the experiment myself. And I will come to tell you in person, here, in this room.

A man stood up. The chair scraped the floor behind him. The microphone squeaked in his hands.

— Our young graduates are already leaving for Paris to find work, he said. And there, artificial intelligences replace juniors to gain productivity. To go faster. To cost less. And you want us to welcome the same thing here?

A few heads nodded in the room. A woman in the front row clutched her sign to her.

— The phone, the computer, all that has already become an extension of our bodies. We no longer leave home without our mobile. We can no longer wait two minutes without looking at a screen. We don't even know how to think alone without asking a machine to finish our sentences. Screen time is exploding, and part of what we consume there has only one purpose: to burn our brains slowly enough to call it entertainment. I call it alienation.

The mayor hadn't moved.

— We are losing confidence in ourselves, the man continued. And you first, Mr. Mayor, since you install this machine here to think for you. And in the end, it always comes back to the same thing: productivity. This obsession with producing more, with fewer people. It's what closed the Fontenys factory. It's what left us with the highest unemployment rate this city has ever known. And today, you ask us to push this logic even further?

A silence followed.

A heavy, almost hostile silence. In the video, you could only hear the microphone's breath and, somewhere at the back of the room, someone coughing.

The mayor, motionless, said nothing.

Eva paused the video on this image.

— There, I thought we had lost the room, she told me. And maybe him too.

She resumed the video.

The light on Cobot's screen changed hue, shifting from pale blue to a softer yellow. Almost soothing.

— Dear Sir, said Cobot, I do not deny what you say. Unemployment is real. Addiction to technology is a reality. The feeling of abandonment in small French towns too.

In the room, no one moved. Even those still holding their signs seemed to wait for the rest despite themselves.

— You are right to distrust a tool presented to you as progress, especially here, in Fontenys, where the word progress has already cost dearly. A factory closed. Families left. Others stayed with anger, bills, and the feeling that their future was always decided elsewhere.

The mayor had lowered his eyes.

— Automation can destroy jobs. It can further isolate people. It can give everyone the impression of being replaced, corrected, optimized, until they no longer know what still belongs to them. So I will not ask you to trust me because I am a machine. That would be absurd.

A murmur passed through the room.

— But maybe we can decide together what this machine should handle, and what it should never take. The forms. The delays. The repetitive procedures. Everything that steals time without creating a connection. And leave to humans what they do better than me: listen, choose, contradict, invent, make mistakes, start over.

The yellow light gently pulsed on the screen.

— You talk about productivity. You are right: when it becomes an end in itself, it makes people unhappy. But if it allows an overwhelmed town hall to respond faster to a housing request, a pension, social aid, then it does not replace the community. It can give it back time.

A few faces turned towards the mayor.

— So no, I do not deny your concerns. I take them as a starting point. Society changes, with or without Fontenys. The real question might be this: do you want these tools to be decided far from you, by companies or ministries, or do you want to be among the first to say what you accept, what you refuse, and where you draw the line?

A silence followed.

Then Cobot added:

"Better to be actors than spectators. Especially when it comes to your own city."

A murmur ran through the room. Eva stopped the video there.

— Not an ovation, huh, don't imagine that, she clarified, putting her phone back on the table. No one stood up to applaud a machine. And fortunately. That would have been almost worrying. But for the first time in years, some seemed to feel understood. Heard, at least.

She put away her phone, then added:

— The distrust hadn't disappeared, far from it. But at the end of the meeting, people stayed. Not all. Not for long. But they stayed. On the chairs, in the hall, in small groups. They were no longer just talking against Cobot. They were talking about it. It's not the same thing.

— And since November, I asked, has it held?

— That's exactly what we're going to check.

She slipped her phone into her bag.

— Today, we ask nothing of Cobot. We ask Fontenys.

The train slowed as it approached the station. Eva had warned me, in the carriage, that the city had known its splendor during the Renaissance, had been very important at the time of the Revolution and remained a recognized cultural place, and had managed to preserve very good values. Economically, the last decades had not been easy, especially since the closure of its large factory, which had been relocated to Asia.

Upon leaving the station, I understood what she meant.

Fontenys had the patinated beauty of cities that had been important too early. A Republic Street crossed it from east to west, a river cut it from north to south, and the Notre-Dame church, with its massive facade, gave this small sub-prefecture the appearance of a forgotten cathedral in the middle of a too-calm setting.

Along the quays, half-timbered houses leaned against each other, remnants of a time when Fontenys was the capital of its region. Some facades leaned slightly, as if they stood out of habit. A little further, the arcades of the main square still sheltered a few shops. Some windows were lit. Others already bore that gray dust of shops closed for too long.

Eva walked slowly, without taking notes. She looked at the storefronts, the doors, the benches, the faces. As if the city itself was an interview to conduct.

We had no set appointment. Eva preferred to walk, let encounters come, and see who would agree to talk.

Our first stop was the town hall itself. Eva wanted to greet the reception team. Inside, the smell of paper, lukewarm coffee, and old radiators gave the place something familiar, almost reassuring. A woman had been working there since Cobot's installation. She told us, while sorting files, how laborious the beginnings had been.

— In the first weeks, for an identity card, Cobot responded with an exhaustive explanation, full of legal references, she told us. People left before the end. Some returned to the counter saying: "I prefer to ask you, at least you speak French." Then it finally understood. Now, it responds in three sentences, with a direct link to the right form. The number of visits to the counter has decreased.

— It's not really "all by itself," Eva whispered to me. It's reinforcement learning: each exchange feeds the system, which adjusts its responses at regular intervals. But it remains limited to the configured perimeter. The procedures. The residents' questions. Nothing else.

The woman nodded, without stopping sorting her files.

— As long as it doesn't come to sort in my place, I'm fine with it.

Leaving the town hall, Eva suggested we sit on a bench, facing the river. The sun had broken through between two clouds. The light glided over the brown water, the old facades, the worn stones of the quay. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, her face turned towards the warmth.

— Do you do this often? I asked.

— What?

— Stop in the middle of work.

— Never, she replied, without reopening her eyes. Maybe it's you giving me bad habits.

She reopened her eyes and looked at me a little longer than necessary, with that smile she had on the sidewalk, after Rousseau's conference. A smile that seemed to say something, without ever taking the risk of formulating it.

Then she suddenly stood up.

— Come on, let's go. We're not done.

A little further, a butcher was tidying up his stall. The reception was quite different. He had his sleeves rolled up, an apron stained at the waist, and this way of behaving that indicated he had already decided not to make our task easy.

— You're from Paris, aren't you! he said to us.

— Yes, hello. We're trying to understand how the town hall experiment is going.

He snorted through his nose.

— If it's again to ask us if we're happy with your machine, I don't really have an answer. My customers no longer know who they're talking to when they have a problem with their papers, that's for sure. They come here, they complain between two slices of ham, and deep down no one really knows if Cobot helps them or just gets them used to not seeing anyone anymore.

He wrapped a piece of paper around a piece of meat, then continued:

— But at the same time, we're the only city in France where this exists. People here talk about it to their family, in Bordeaux, in Nantes, everywhere. Everyone asks how it is. So we don't really know what to answer. We know it changes our lives, yes. On small things. Appointments, procedures, delays. But what is it really, this thing? An assistant? A counter? A faceless elected official? No one here could tell you.

Eva didn't respond immediately. For once, she wasn't trying to fill the silence. She let it work.

— I think that's exactly why I came, she finally said. To try to understand, too, what we really did here.

The man looked at her differently. Not with trust. Not yet. But with a little less distrust. He nodded, almost satisfied, then resumed his tidying.

We continued on our way. As the afternoon progressed, Fontenys revealed pieces of itself without ever forming a complete answer. A reassured employee. A worried shopkeeper. Residents relieved not to wait on the phone anymore. Others offended that a machine responds faster than a human town hall. I understood that this day would not resemble an investigation with a clear conclusion, but a long collection of contradictory fragments that would later need to be assessed.

It was late afternoon when we met the mayor of Fontenys in person. He was leaving the town hall in a hurry, a file under his arm. Without his tricolor sash, he suddenly seemed more concerned, his face marked by a long day. He recognized Eva and stopped.

— You came to see if I'm still standing, he said, with a forced smile.

— I came to see what the residents of Fontenys really think.

— And?

— Mixed opinions, Eva replied. But less anger than in November.

The mayor looked at the square, the shop windows, the few passersby.

— That's what I see too. People have gotten used to it.

He didn't seem reassured.

— But getting used to it is not understanding. And sometimes, I wonder if that's not worse. I don't know if we'll look back on these six months as a beginning, or as the moment we let in something we no longer controlled.

Eva didn't respond.

— When are you returning to Paris? he asked.

— Tonight.

— Ah. Already. I hope you had a good day in Fontenys.

— We walked a lot, said Eva; and tasted one of your local pastries in a bakery. It's a lovely city.

The mayor briefly lowered his eyes, as if the compliment hurt more than expected.

— It deserves to be talked about for something other than Cobot, he replied, almost to himself.

Then he pulled himself together.

— Safe travels.

He nodded, greeted us, then walked away at a pace too fast for someone who apparently had nowhere to flee.

On the return train, I realized that the real question was no longer whether Fontenys was convinced. The city was neither conquered nor revolted. It had adapted. And perhaps that was the most troubling.

The mayor had launched this experiment alone in his town, without knowing that Rousseau would make it the argument of an entire campaign. Fontenys had six months to worry, protest, discuss, get used to it. Six months to give a name, a place, a utility to this new presence.

The country, however, might not have that time.

— What are you thinking about? Eva asked.

I watched the night begin to swallow the fields behind the window.

— What it would be like if, tomorrow, it wasn't just a city, but the whole of France.

Eva didn't respond. She simply rested her head on my shoulder.

Her reflection in the window no longer showed me the brilliant researcher nor the woman capable of reading others' silences. I saw someone who, for the first time since morning, seemed no longer to want to search or understand.