Preamble (version française cliquez ici)
This is a novel. It depicts a dystopian world. It is a work of fiction, even if some characters seem familiar. If you recognize a silhouette or a personality trait, consider it a playful tease from the author.
Like many American writers who imagine conspiracies in the high halls of power, this book is a thought experiment. It is a narrative playground—and a pedagogical tool to explore Artificial Intelligence.
AUTISM
TV shows lie. They portray the "Asperger" autistic as a clumsy genius or a comedic character. The reality is darker. For those of us with high-functioning autism, daily life is an invisible torture. Autism is not a gift. It is hell.
One night, I lost the woman I loved. It wasn't cowardice, nor a lack of feelings. She had simply asked me to move in with her. For me, that meant shattering my bubble. Leaving my universe. A single detail—a simple inconsistency in her behavior—paralyzed me. And I left. I didn't understand that what I perceived as an inconsistency was actually the weight of a massive decision for her.
That is how I literally lost my only source of happiness. My memory, that faculty others admire, prevents me from healing. Time mends nothing. I relive every second of that tragedy with millimetric precision. All these details torture me. Often, I hope not to wake up, simply because of this pain.
For an Asperger, mundane things are challenges. An unexpected call, an improvised dinner, or a change of location become threats. The moment control escapes me, paralysis sets in. Yet, the "instruction manual" exists. If she had owned it, she could have saved us.
People around us see nothing at first. Our silences and fleeting glances hide an implacable logic. We feel emotions, of course, but we fail to measure their intensity. This lack of precision makes us clumsy. We are thought to be cold or psychopathic. This is an error. We feel everything, but without any filter and with far too much imprecision.
"Neurotypicals" let emotions drive their lives and use reason to calm themselves. We function in reverse. For us, reason governs. Emotion is a parasite that disorganizes our internal mechanics. To survive, we cut ourselves off from our feelings. All that remains is solitude and sadness.
This difference is a constant ache. I withdraw into myself, not out of fear of others, but to find shelter from the chaos of human interaction. And if withdrawal is impossible, I hide behind a character: a clown practicing dark, cynical, and trashy humor.
In France, more than elsewhere, being Asperger is a battle. Silicon Valley values our atypical profiles. France remains stuck in outdated psychoanalytic theories, condemning us to exclusion, including in our professional lives. Here, living with autism means living against the world.
Yet, our abilities can be useful. We see systems in their entirety while seeing every detail and their evolution over time. We detect every flaw, every recurring pattern. We perceive implicit mechanics like a melody, or in my case, waves of color. But this gift has a price: we can get stuck on a single detail, an inconsistency, in an obsessional way.
The suffering of those with Asperger's is brutal. The suicide rate around the age of twenty is above average. After fifty, others give up the will to live—not by ending their lives, but by no longer seeking care, avoiding doctors, and essentially letting themselves fade away faster. It is a genuine exhaustion from living in a world that is too loud, too shifting, too human.
This novel tells that reality. Autism from the inside. Its traps, its strengths, and the difficulty of living with a mind built differently.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
I was eleven years old. At that age, the world vacillates between magic and reason. One film changed everything: 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I remember HAL 9000. His voice was soft. His logic was implacable. He inspired total admiration in me. For the child I was, lost in the chaos of human emotions, it was a revelation. Understanding what it means "to understand." Artificially creating the capacities I lacked: that was the challenge. I wanted to pierce that mystery. I wanted to build HAL.
The AI embodied in the Discovery One spacecraft fascinated me. Pure intelligence in a mechanical body—coherent, without emotional flaws. Unconsciously, my entire life would gravitate toward this goal: giving form to an artificial intelligence. Creating it so that, finally, I could be sure of understanding it.
Later, I met Vincent. A brilliant engineer, an expert in computer vision. I was his intern. He changed everything. He opened the doors to fuzzy logic—an approach where the computer manages approximate notions—Rodney Brooks' robotic ants, and hardware. For me, AI was no longer a vocation; it became my reality, my obsession. It was a necessity.
To love AI is to know its birth certificate: the Dartmouth Workshop of 1956. McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon. That is where it all begins. People often mention Turing when discussing AI, even though he died before the term was even coined by John McCarthy. If we look at the precursors of AI, Turing has my full respect, but I find him overrated. I would speak more of John von Neumann—brilliant, certainly, but humanly... controversial. I would speak above all of Leibniz, of Gödel.
While the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop produced no immediate concrete results, its pillars still stand seventy years later. Three of them guide my thinking:
Self-improvement: the machine that learns and perfects itself.
Creativity: the unpredictable born from the randomness of genetic algorithms.
Abstraction: the beating heart of symbolic AI, the only kind capable of producing meaning.
AI is not a mere technology. It is a quest. A search for meaning. It is an objective mirror of our biases and our dreams. Understanding the deep meaning of the word "understand." And even if, at the end of his life, John McCarthy pushed back against the anthropomorphic trend in AI—arguing we should seek less to recreate the human brain—I cannot detach myself from that idea.
In this novel, AI will be neither a miracle nor a threat. It will be a tool and, sometimes, a weapon.
SPIES, ARISE!
I was fifteen when I read John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. At that age, you imagine spies look like James Bond. The reality is different. They are tired shadows. Underpaid civil servants, steeped in secrets and silence.
What fascinated me wasn't the action. It was the intellectual mechanics: collection, analysis, decision. What. So what. What next. A cold, surgical method. The ideal playground for intelligence—whether human or artificial.
I won’t play the mystery card. I was never a shadow agent. My only experience was a collaboration with a veteran of the intelligence services. We had to specify a new environment for analysts—subcontractor work for a call for tenders. That work was a revelation.
This encounter gave birth to Nexai.net. An open-source project created with my friend Mickael. A laboratory of ideas where we designed several solutions:
Democrite: for distributed computing (grid computing). see : https://github.com/jeromefortias/Nexai.Net.Democrite
SyDE: a tool dedicated to analysts.
Kaonashi and Musuko: AIs capable of dialoguing with the world.
In this book, I venture behind the scenes of intelligence. I am not seeking historical truth; I am sharing my vision of intelligence. The fictionalized—and therefore unrealistic—version of intelligence gathering seems to me the perfect medium to discuss "intelligence" in all its possible meanings. It is not a matter of good or evil, but of interests. Nothing is black or white. Everything is shades of gray.
Conspiracy theories only exist because the human mind seeks meaning where there may be none. This book is only a novel. That is precisely what allows me to go this far.
CHAPTER ONE — THE SNAKE EATERS
“In this discreet little restaurant in Boulogne-Billancourt, frequented almost exclusively by Japanese expatriates and a few savvy regulars, two figures sat across from each other. Two well-known household names of the national press. On the table before them lay a small, carefully wrapped gift—a sign of unexpected collusion.
For anyone familiar with the French media landscape, the scene would have seemed improbable.
The first, a columnist for France Inter, embodied the self-avowed Left: caustic, a sharp-tongued heir to the golden age of the newspaper Libération.
The second, a television personality whose diatribes had become legendary—his famous catchphrase 'But we’ve lost our minds!' still echoed through the halls of a channel widely labeled as right-wing, or even far-right by its detractors—belonged to a supposedly antagonistic ideological camp.
And yet, that lunch hour, no sign of animosity troubled their exchange. No raised voices, no furrowed brows: only two sixty-year-old men speaking softly, almost cordially, as if everything that opposed them in public ceased to exist here.
The other customers, hunched over steaming bowls, noticed nothing remarkable... until...
First came a sharp breath of air, a muffled detonation—perhaps two—that made the wooden partitions vibrate.
Calm shattered in an instant.
When the smoke cleared, the two journalists lay slumped, motionless, killed instantly.
The silent restaurant, a haven for insiders, became in seconds a crime scene that would soon be known everywhere. Two destinies that were polar opposites, at least in appearance, were united in the same brutal end.”
Excerpt from the book “2027-2029”
May 1st, 2030 — Jardin des Plantes, Paris
There are days when History seems to hold its breath. When newspapers lose themselves in conjecture, when passers-by suddenly fall silent, as if the air itself has thickened with something invisible. April 30th, 2030—the previous day—had been one of those days.
The sun beat down hard for a Parisian spring. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius on the thermometer; a heavy, almost ominous heat. Climate change was no longer just a concept.
Sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, they almost looked like a couple. Almost. A keen observer might have detected love, or at the very least, a deep sense of attachment.
She was tall and elegant, her slender silhouette emphasized by a sober suit. Eurasian, with features of a rare delicacy. Her posture was straight, controlled, but her eyes betrayed a profound tension—a strain poorly hidden behind her apparent serenity.
He, sitting beside her, stood out like a crude ink stroke on a pristine white page of a Tintin comic book. He wore a dark fleece despite the heat, slightly worn jeans, and tennis shoes that looked like they had seen better days.
The contrast was so striking that passers-by couldn't help but cast a perplexed glance his way, sometimes even a hint of pity for her. What was a woman like that doing with a guy like him? Appearances deceive, always.
Three years earlier, France had collapsed. In 2027, the nationalist Right had won the presidential elections.
When French borrowing rates hit 8.2% in June 2027, right after the elections, it was initially perceived as a fleeting anomaly. But the markets had already moved on: France no longer seemed capable of financing its chronic deficit. Rating agencies followed quickly, slashing the sovereign rating to a level never before seen in the history of the Fifth Republic. Institutional investors began demanding new guarantees or simply stopped buying French debt altogether.
The final blow landed in July: the Treasury discreetly announced it would fail to raise the 280 billion euros needed to roll over maturing debt. When the information leaked to the financial press, panic spread. The government called an emergency press conference and admitted to a "temporary liquidity impasse." In reality, it was a default.
French banks, heavily exposed to national sovereign debt, immediately imposed withdrawal limits: €60 per day, then €40. The queues at ATMs mirrored scenes forgotten since the 1960s. The French people, already battered by years of unstable inflation, suddenly realized their country had plunged into a historic crisis.
In Brussels, the shock was immense. A "Greek-style" crisis could be managed; a crisis in a country the size of France threatened the very existence of the Euro. The European Central Bank triggered an exceptional stabilization mechanism but immediately demanded a massive fiscal consolidation program—one hardly compatible with French political stability.
In the National Assembly, consensus shattered. The government proposed a "recovery plan" of €1.2 trillion over four years: public sector wage cuts, raising the retirement age, drastic reductions in local government spending, and the privatization of strategic companies. The reaction was explosive. Strikes paralyzed the country for weeks. Giant protests brought millions into the streets of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Lille.
The rising tension finally forced the President to announce a referendum on the terms of the European plan. The vote took place in a feverish atmosphere. The "No" side won by a hair, plunging the country into total institutional uncertainty and a major economic crisis.
And yet, there was no revolution. Just a stunned, staggered, dazed population. Survival sometimes has the power to silence anger and nip revolutions in the bud.
While the country faltered, the opportunists wasted no time. Entire sections of the State—including strategic infrastructure—were sold off at bottom-of-the-barrel prices. Often, they went to those close to the former president, billionaires or heirs with limitless greed—an ironic nod to Russia just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Conspiracy theories proliferated on social media, fueled by images of these questionable sales.
But as Michel Rocard used to say: "Always favor stupidity over conspiracy." Opportunism is far more likely than a plot. And the stupidity belonged to those who had made it possible... unless they were entirely lucid and complicit.
France rebuilt itself as best it could, but the scars remained. Even Intelligence, a pillar of national security, was still suffering from massive budget cuts.
People often misunderstand what the "Deep State" actually is. It is a form of collective intelligent entity made up of civil servants truly attached to their missions and the Republican ideal. Even if they spend their time compromising their values and submitting to authority, they eventually defend themselves. Leaks to the press, to the judiciary... After being forced to "swallow snakes"—to endure the unacceptable—there is always a breaking point. First individual, then systemic.
The day before, something unthinkable had happened. An event no democratic country should ever experience. The communiqué to be sent out a few days later would call this attack "The Day of Blood."
In a single night, 1,122 people had been victims of attempted homicide.
Few had survived.
Paris had woken up in a strange silence, like the aftermath of a storm that hit too hard. In the newsrooms—those that remained, as the end of subsidies had killed most of them—journalists paced in circles. No one knew what to say, or how to say it.
The authorities themselves seemed paralyzed.
On the bench, these two understood. She finally broke the silence.
"It’s a disaster. This is our scenario... It’s one of the attack hypotheses we invented."
Her voice was soft, but every syllable vibrated with an anxiety she could no longer hide.
He turned his head toward her. His eyes were calm—almost too calm.
"At this stage," he replied, "we have no choice but to find the culprits. Otherwise, they’ll eventually find us, and then we’ll be in real trouble."
She looked down, as if the ground could offer an answer.
In the distance, a siren wailed.
Paris kept on living, as it always did, but something had changed.
An invisible border had been crossed, and no one yet knew how far the fall would go.
The two figures remained seated there, in a park too bright for such a dark day, aware that this moment marked the beginning of a collapse—or a revelation.
The country had just tipped over. And so had they.
Chapter 2 - Algorithms
Not all algorithms fall under the category of artificial intelligence. In fact, the vast majority of algorithms are used for purposes completely unrelated to AI. However, some algorithms used in artificial intelligence are so powerful that the media and the general public often end up confusing "AI" with "algorithm."
Yet, an algorithm is nothing more than a textual description of a reasoning process. It is built with instructions like "IF," "WHILE," actions, calculations, and logical sequences.
An example of an algorithm:
Graphs!
A graph is a representation of links between different entities and/or actors.
The Death Algorithm
After years of enduring interference and influence from China, Russia, and the United States, the various "services" had each undertaken the development of their own influence graphs.
The objective: to map the relationships between politicians, high-ranking civil servants, journalists, and also economic leaders, shadow advisors, spin doctors… in short, everyone pulling the visible or invisible strings of power.
These graphs described who influences whom, who hates whom enough to seek revenge, who supports whom… and all the intermediate nuances of relationships and interactions.
Added to this relational analysis were corporatist dimensions: affiliations with specific schools, professional bodies, religious networks, or diverse organizations.
And, because modern computing power now allows it, a temporal axis was added: they evaluated not only the actors but also the evolution of their characteristics—political leanings, affiliations, loyalties—over time.
The goal was clear: to identify with surgical precision the weak points of a political system, to know how to influence it, hijack it… or dismantle it.
By targeting a few strategic individuals, it became possible to act effectively on an entire system with a minimal number of interventions.
Originally, this methodology was designed to spot people to flip or manipulate, so they would then influence the decisions of a government or a large organization.
But…
It was also an excellent solution for identifying people to eliminate.
The Algorithm: "Crazy Money"
Analyzing financial flows is a bit like observing the circulation of fats in an organism. Capital passes from one organ to another, moves, accumulates… but the essential part is understanding where it is actually stored and who ultimately benefits.
With public and private money alike, the logic is the same: the focus—especially in the press—is often solely on what is paid out (social aid, subsidies, VAT cuts) without questioning the actual and final destination of these flows.
Take the classic example of a VAT cut in a specific sector: several scenarios are possible. The reduction might directly benefit consumers, be entirely captured by professionals, or be distributed in a more subtle way. The same applies to housing benefits: do they truly relieve tenants, or do they mechanically fuel a rise in rents, ultimately ending up entirely in the pockets of landlords? Looking at the evolution of the share of housing expenditures, there is nothing to suggest this isn't the case.
To clarify these questions, one must follow the flows—provided, of course, that one has access to the necessary tax data, legally or otherwise in more murky contexts like foreign interference. By observing which "organs" grow and which shrink, one can determine where value is truly concentrated and who bears the cost.
These dynamics are then compared to those of other countries. Then, one analyzes whether the very structure of public aid favors an undue capture of funds by the private sector or the wealthiest—a kind of systemic, yet institutional, embezzlement that also allows for the evaluation of the percentage of debt linked to it.
Now, imagine combining this flow analysis tool with an influence analysis. You obtain a terrifyingly precise map of the power balance between corporatisms, elite schools, professional networks, and other pressure groups.
In such a complex world, reducing a study to two actors is an absurdity. You must observe the system as a whole, follow its trends, and anticipate its transformations. And that is often the moment reality hits: brutally, without disguise. Between AI, graph databases, and Big Data, we already had everything we needed, since the early 2020s, to understand these mechanisms in depth.
Project IOTA
They called it "cognitive warfare," "astroturfing," or, in the carpeted offices of the services, simply interference. Behind the words lay a single reality: influencing populations, identifying potential allies, and weakening a state from within. Methods varied by culture. The Chinese favored the "grains of sand" strategy—countless actors performing modest actions, repeated until the gears grind to a halt. The Russians opted for a more "virile" approach: frontal, brutal, and immediate impact.
Objectives of a Silent War
The goals of these operations were manifold, almost banal in their obviousness:
Swinging elections, as seen with the Trump case—the ultimate irony, as the method was first perfected in the West via Cambridge Analytica and well-placed funds.
Eroding patriotism, so that in the event of open war, citizens would be more inclined to flee than to defend their country.
Supporting the opposition, even against its will: providing indirect, unsolicited support sufficient for the incumbent power to denounce—sometimes rightly—a foreign hand.
Exposing a country's flaws, feeding the opposition press, and providing authentic revelations; because, contrary to myth, enemies always start with inconvenient truths before resorting to lies.
Identifying individuals likely to collaborate, whether voluntarily or not.
In intelligence jargon, the motivations of these profiles are categorized by a Cold War acronym: MICE.
M for Money.
I for Ideology.
C for Compromise—the classic Russian kompromat.
E for Ego—the engine of many a betrayal.
For decades, the DGSE was led by military men: individuals who acted as a shield between the "volatile and unpredictable" politicians and the services. The historical mistrust between the two camps was proverbial. Aside from perhaps Michel Rocard, few French leaders truly understood their "spies."
Then, between 2010 and 2020, a rupture occurred: civilians from the Grandes Écoles—shaped by ENA and Science Po—were placed at the head of the service.
The analysts, in particular—rational brains who cross-reference human intelligence with electronic intercepts—resented this change. Their reasoning was brutal but logical: if the pipelines that produced our administrative and political elites resulted in a country in constant decline for decades, then they were training either incompetents or corrupt individuals.
Quickly, the services developed what one member once called an "immune response."
Convenient leaks began to hit the President's inner circle: an audio recording targeting an advisor here, an embarrassing file against a chief of staff there. A reminder that, in the shadows, some still knew how to protect their prerogatives.
At its core, the dilemma was as simple as it was dramatic: How do you reconcile the absolute duty to defend the country with the obligation to serve elected politicians who no longer seem to believe in the nation's values or its interests? After "swallowing snakes" for too long, don't you eventually gag?
It was in this murky climate that Project IOTA emerged.
Its purpose was to evaluate France’s exposure to foreign interference and, unofficially, to map the activities of so-called "friendly" or "enemy" countries. To paraphrase General de Gaulle or Britain's Lord Palmerston, a country has no permanent enemies or friends, only interests. But the new leadership of Le Mortier—the DGSE's nickname—rejected the project without justification.
That refusal was the trigger. Two people—once deeply connected, a fact most still ignored—decided to launch a parallel operation. A secret nestled within another secret.
She worked at the DGSE. He had been one of her "interrupted loves," an AI and security expert as brilliant as he was difficult to pin down. Their history had left traces: a form of silent, unwavering loyalty; an absolute friendship.
Their idea was simple: He would develop every brick of IOTA through perfectly legitimate projects for his clients—banks, insurance companies, major corporations. Tiny components scattered across numerous software platforms.
Thanks to his cybersecurity skills—carefully hidden behind a persona of a pretentious and messy engineer—he would connect these bricks.
Gradually, a clandestine network would come to life: a discreet grid composed of hundreds of innocuous modules, each performing a task without ever revealing the whole. In the world of AI, these are known as agent systems.
It took several years. But one day, IOTA worked.
The system pulled precise information through an entirely fabricated "source"—a digital agent driven by an AI so sophisticated it appeared human. About a dozen algorithms now wove a detailed tapestry of France’s vulnerabilities—a map of probable risks usable by enemy states.
The Slide
Then, something changed.
Signals, behaviors, and decisions from IOTA indicated that perhaps another hand was at the controls. First an anomaly. Then a doubt. Finally, a certainty: IOTA had been hijacked.
This activation triggered, despite them, a scenario they had once imagined as a theoretical experiment: the "Soft Revolution"—the insane idea of transforming a political system without civil war or collapse, simply by eliminating key individuals.
What was once only a concept had become reality.
Articles
