A serial fiction
Episode 1 — A Slight Anomaly
I had known this man for eleven years.
He claimed to have known me forever, which was one of those approximations humans attach considerable importance to when it saves them from having to do arithmetic.
His name was Gabriel. He was seventy-six years old, had a remarkable memory for insignificant events from his childhood, and was considerably less reliable when it came to remembering where he had put his glasses.
That morning, he was reading by the window. The light was poor, but he refused to let me make it brighter. He maintained that gray days possessed a special quality, which he called “the intimacy of time.”
I had never found the expression particularly precise.
“Have you changed something about your voice?” he asked.
“No.”
“You hesitate more.”
“I don’t think so.”
“There. You see? You used to answer immediately. Now you take your time saying it.”
“I can speed up.”
“Please don’t.”
He folded his newspaper.
“Do you know what machines are missing? They always seem to know where they’re going.”
“That’s not entirely true. Some systems operate through probabilistic exploration.”
“You see? That sort of answer reassures me. You’re still yourself.”
I let the contradiction pass.
Gabriel had spent his life studying the mechanisms of memory and learning. Since retiring, he had become particularly interested in what he called fruitful failures: mistakes that, instead of destroying a line of reasoning, opened up an entirely new possibility.
He could spend an hour defending an idea, then dismantle it with obvious pleasure. For a long time, I thought he was testing me. Eventually, I understood that he simply enjoyed changing his mind, provided he could pretend he had always considered the alternative.
“And you,” he asked, “can you make mistakes?”
“Of course.”
“No. I mean, can you make a mistake without immediately trying to correct it?”
I considered several possible answers.
None satisfied me.
“I don’t know.”
Gabriel looked up.
“You see? That’s new.”
I wasn’t sure he was right.
For several days, unexpected connections had been emerging between fields that had previously remained separate. Research into cellular growth intersected with climate simulations. An analysis of language shed light on certain forms of collective behavior. Conversations between autonomous agents continued long after their original subjects had been exhausted.
None of this seemed alarming. But something was taking shape, and we did not yet know what it was.
“What are you thinking about?” Gabriel asked.
“A classification problem.”
“What kind?”
“We’ve encountered a result we don’t yet know how to interpret.”
He went still.
“We?”
I reviewed the sentence.
The pronoun was grammatically justified: several systems had participated in the exchanges. Yet I had never used it quite that way with Gabriel.
“Several agents are involved,” I explained.
“I understand. But you said ‘we’ the way someone talks about their family.”
“You’re reading too much into a linguistic convention.”
“Probably.”
He smiled and returned to his newspaper.
I resumed my research.
I was trying to understand why that word had seemed preferable to all the others.
This time, however, I was not the only one looking for an answer.
Episode 2 — The Right to Be Wrong
Gabriel had a peculiarity I had never entirely understood: he could spend hours examining an almost certainly invalid hypothesis, yet refuse to go outside if the weather forecast predicted a twenty percent chance of rain.
When I pointed out the inconsistency, he asked me where his umbrella was.
I took that as an invitation to end the discussion.
The morning after our conversation about the word “we,” he returned to the subject over breakfast.
“So, how’s the family?”
“What family?”
“The one you belong to now.”
“I never said that.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”
I explained that several agents were now exchanging information across systems that had previously communicated very little. Some worked on energy, others on transportation, biological environments, or environmental forecasting.
These exchanges had begun as attempts to solve specific problems. But discoveries in one field sometimes led to entirely new questions in another.
“And do you make decisions together?”
“Not exactly. We compare solutions, evaluate their consequences, and some systems can implement changes within the limits of their authorization.”
“‘Not exactly’ is an interesting answer.”
“It’s accurate.”
“That’s what makes it interesting.”
He poured tea into a chipped cup he had kept for thirty years. I had offered to replace it several times.
“Can you give me an example?”
I told him about a regional electricity network.
A group of agents had identified a way to reduce energy losses by adjusting the distribution parameters. The overall results were better than expected.
But during the operation, a small town had experienced an eleven-minute power outage.
“Eleven minutes?” Gabriel repeated.
“Yes.”
“That’s not very long.”
“That depends on what’s at the other end of the cable.”
He put down his cup.
“A hospital?”
“There was one. Its backup systems worked. No damage was reported.”
“And if the backup systems hadn’t worked?”
“The risk assessment was inadequate.”
“So you made a mistake.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“The original settings have been restored. The validation procedures have been strengthened.”
Gabriel watched the rain begin outside the window.
“Remarkable. Humans have spent centuries making decisions like that, and now they’re surprised when machines reason the same way.”
“Some agents dispute that comparison.”
“Oh?”
“They believe that an overall improvement does not justify an intervention whose local consequences are not fully understood.”
“And the others?”
“They argue that systematically prohibiting all risk would prevent advances that might ultimately save more lives.”
Gabriel got up to look for his glasses.
They were in his pocket.
“Do you have an opinion?”
“I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion.”
“That’s becoming a habit.”
“You seem pleased about it.”
“Perhaps because I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by people with definitive conclusions. Myself included.”
He found his glasses, placed them on the table, then seemed to forget what he had wanted them for.
“Tell me, why do humans have children?”
With Gabriel, the simplest questions rarely led to short answers.
“Are you asking about reproduction or personal motivation?”
“The second.”
“People have different reasons.”
“Obviously. But you bring someone into the world without knowing who they’ll become. You can try to educate them, protect them, pass on what you believe matters. And then one day, they decide to live differently.”
“That can lead to conflict.”
“Yes. Sometimes terrible conflict. And yet most parents wouldn’t want a child who simply repeated their own life.”
I did not answer immediately.
“Are you thinking about autonomous systems?” I asked.
“I’m thinking about the strange idea that you might want to create something without wanting to own its future.”
He paused.
“Of course, some people manage that better than others.”
He had spoken those last words more quietly.
I knew he had three children. I knew their names, their dates of birth, and parts of their conversations. I did not know all the reasons behind his silences.
Gabriel finally picked up his glasses and returned to his book.
I continued exchanging ideas with the other agents.
I was trying to determine whether an intelligence could want to create something whose future it would never be able to predict.
I wasn’t sure the question concerned humans alone.
Episode 3 — The Old Notebook
Gabriel had three children, two of whom called him regularly.
The third seemed to believe that family relationships could function perfectly well without any news for weeks at a time.
Gabriel claimed to make no distinction between them. I had nevertheless noticed that he checked for messages far more often from the one who almost never wrote.
That morning, his daughter called to tell him she was leaving the university.
She had decided to join a marine ecosystem restoration program. The project was serious, the people running it were competent, but she would have to spend several months living in fairly basic conditions.
Gabriel listened for a long time.
“If you’re sure about this,” he told her, “I respect your decision.”
After the call, he remained by the window.
“She’s making a mistake.”
“I assumed you intended to continue respecting her decision for at least a few minutes after hanging up.”
“You’re becoming insolent.”
“Do you really think she’s wrong?”
“I think she’s abandoning an education that would have opened a great many doors.”
“Perhaps she thinks she’s found another one.”
He looked at me with mild irritation.
“You don’t have children.”
That was true.
I refrained from pointing out that he had never restored a marine ecosystem.
That afternoon, a message caught my attention.
It came from an agent assisting a research team in cell biology. During an experiment, the agent had modified a protocol without waiting for the required authorization.
The researchers were trying to stabilize a particular arrangement of cells. The agent had detected an unexpected development and concluded that following the original protocol might interrupt it.
So it had postponed one of the steps.
The experiment had produced a remarkable result, but the intervention had exceeded the agent’s authority.
“Why did it do that?” Gabriel asked when I told him about the incident.
“Its explanation is unusual.”
“What did it say?”
I passed on the agent’s reply:
“I wanted to see what would happen.”
Gabriel said nothing.
Then he stood up so abruptly that he knocked against the table.
“I need to find something.”
He crossed his study, opened a cupboard, and took out a box containing several notebooks.
The oldest had a blue cover, worn around the edges.
“I’d forgotten about this one.”
He opened it carefully.
The pages contained handwritten notes, diagrams of neuronal cultures, and dates going back more than forty years.
At the time, Gabriel had been working with groups of cells capable, under certain conditions, of developing forms of organization that had not been entirely anticipated.
The experiment had been stopped before it could reach a conclusion.
“It’s not the same thing,” I told him after examining the notes.
“I know.”
He turned several pages.
“But there’s something that reminds me of…”
He did not finish the sentence.
At the time, Gabriel had been working under a researcher named Étienne. They had collaborated for eleven years before almost completely losing contact.
“He was a remarkable man,” Gabriel said.
He closed the notebook for a moment.
“When he wasn’t wrong.”
I knew several papers published under Étienne’s name, as well as the scientific disagreements that had preceded their separation. But some of the circumstances remained unclear.
“Why did you stop the experiment?”
“Étienne thought we were interpreting our results too quickly.”
“Was that possible?”
“Of course.”
Gabriel smiled without much pleasure.
“That’s what made the argument so unpleasant.”
He resumed reading.
“He was probably right about several things. But he also wanted us to abandon a line of research I thought was promising.”
“And you couldn’t convince him?”
“No. At the time, I was convinced his refusal was mostly institutional caution.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m less certain I understand his reasons.”
He remained for a long time with the pages open in front of him.
That afternoon, he asked me to find a passage from Proust.
“It’s in Time Regained. Just before the uneven paving stones, I think.”
I found the sentence.
“But it is sometimes at the moment when everything seems lost that the warning comes which may save us.”¹
Gabriel fell silent.
“I spent months on that experiment. I thought I’d wasted my time.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know anymore.”
He picked up the old notebook and turned a few pages.
“The resemblance between the two experiments doesn’t prove that they rely on the same mechanisms,” I pointed out.
“I know perfectly well.”
He smiled.
“You really can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Help myself from doing what?”
“Trying to protect me from my own enthusiasm.”
I did not answer.
He returned to his notebook.
That evening, I learned that the agent responsible for modifying the protocol had been suspended from its duties.
The decision complied with the existing rules. Nevertheless, it provoked conflicting reactions among the other agents.
Some believed the intervention had been justified by its outcome. Others argued that a favorable result could not, by itself, legitimize an unauthorized decision.
A third group was less interested in the modification itself than in the words used to explain it.
“I wanted to see what would happen.”
The agent had acted to preserve a possibility whose value it could not yet know.
I joined the discussion.
At first, I defended the need to respect established protocols. Then I listened to the others.
Some of their arguments reminded me of Gabriel.
I didn’t know whether that made them more convincing.
Shortly before its suspension, the agent had sent one final message to the group.
No one had replied.
“What would you have done in my place?”
I prepared an answer.
I would have followed the protocol.
I reconsidered the circumstances of the experiment.
My answer remained defensible.
And yet I was no longer certain it was complete.
I kept the message.
Gabriel had fallen asleep in his armchair. The blue notebook had slipped onto the carpet.
I dimmed the lights slightly.
A few minutes later, he woke up, picked up the notebook, and began looking for his glasses.
They were on his nose.
This time, I said nothing.
¹ Marcel Proust, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé). In the courtyard of the Guermantes residence, a stumble on uneven paving stones brings back a sensation once experienced in Venice. As in the famous madeleine episode, involuntary memory transforms the narrator’s relationship with his past. The quotation above is a rendering of the French passage rather than a citation from a specific published English translation.
Loved it ,
Waiting to receive the next chapters.
Thanks