IHe is free, Bussi. Impossible to lock it in a box. From goat jumps in his thrillers to sidesteps in youth novels, he embarked on solving the enigma of the death of Saint-Ex this fall (Code 612. Who killed the Little Prince?) and wakes up winter with a novelty: a science fiction novel, New Babel. We could tell his story, double. On the one hand, an investigation into the assassination of retirees, which we follow from French Polynesia, even if this “from” geographical location no longer makes much sense in this book. On the other side, Cléo, a teacher – the profession of Bussi’s mother –, a young woman with desires for independence stuck by maternal dictates.
But what matters, as in 1984 of Orwell, it is the world that Bussi offers us. No more flying cars – Franky Zapata out, space has been abolished by the development of quantum teleportation. A dystopian thriller, if you will, but above all a plot steeped in the fascinating questioning of a former academic and research director at the CNRS. It is the trained geographer who speaks here. Each individual is free to teleport with their GPS bracelet. Time zones no longer exist, cities have become useless, but one challenge remains: the security of private space. The Earth has shrunk: the cartographer has taken his revenge.
Nonew Babelby Michel Bussi (Presses de la Cité, 446 p., €21.90).Michel Bussi, exceptional guest of the “Live polar”
After the stars Michael Connelly, John Grisham, or Guillaume Musso, find Michel Bussi in the “Live Polar” on Thursday February 10 at 6 p.m., on the Facebook page of the Point or Quais du thriller.
The extract that kills
Hong Kong Port
Kids, what are we celebrating this year?
In front of Cleo, twenty-six little hands went up. The teacher hesitated before choosing one of the outstretched fingers.
Go ahead, Kenny.
The centenary of teleportation, ma’am!
Good, Kenny. Very well.
Cleo had voluntarily chosen Kenny, one of her most rambunctious students, to give this answer that none of the twenty-six children, even at the age of nine, could ignore. She had been talking to them about it in class, every morning, for a week: the centenary! She had carefully prepared her school trip. She avoided as much as she could, unlike many teachers, spending her time taking her class to the four corners of the planet. She wanted to teach children to sit on a chair, to stay focused for an hour on a grammar lesson, and for an outing all together to be an exceptional event, prepared, integrated into a long and slow educational program.
And it worked! Even this Kenny, more agitated than a hummingbird, had understood! On the other hand, Cleo moderately appreciated that he called her madam. Cleo, Kenny, call me Cleo, or Miss, if you like.
Some students still kept their arm raised, others waited for the next question.
Great answer, Cleo insisted, smiling at Kenny.
The first teleportation in history, it was then called by its full name, quantum teleportation, was performed exactly one hundred years ago, in 1997, by Professor Anton Zeilinger, in Innsbruck. He managed to teleport, over a distance of a few centimeters, grains of light called photons.
The feat seemed to impress his students only moderately.
And now children, Cleo went on, who can tell us where we are?
The students rolled their eyes in all directions, squirmed, twisted their necks. They saw nothing but a gigantic room that could have held thousands of people. A huge brick and iron warehouse. Empty. Cold.
Uh…
All the children let their arms hang down, not one daring to risk an answer. Cleo winced. She had tried to make them understand, several times, with supporting diagrams, what a hub was. They had retained nothing! The notions of position in space, of latitude, longitude, center, periphery, were one of the most complicated apprenticeships for his students, a kind of mathematical abstraction: there existed for them only places, without any relationship between them. Places that fell into only two categories: either at home or somewhere else. Here, in this warehouse, it was elsewhere. Elsewhere and ugly!
We are in Hong Kong, children, Cleo explained patiently, in southern China. It was one of the biggest hubs in the world, it was built in the early 2040s, when we started knowing how to teleport bigger objects.
Cleo pointed to the ideograms painted on the walls, half-erased, but the designs of which could still be guessed. The students widened their eyes, intrigued by these strange symbols.
These are the traces of the old Chinese alphabet, specified the teacher, an alphabet that only the Chinese could read.
She realized that this simple explanation was too abstract: no nine-year-old child could imagine that less than a century ago human beings spoke and wrote different languages without being able to understand each other. Don’t mix it all up, Cleo thought. She tried to concentrate on the objective of the first stage of her school outing: that the children remember this short parenthesis in the history of the world, the hubs, forgotten moreover by a large number of adults themselves. same.
She motioned for the students to gather around her.
Children, it took many years for us to go from the first teleportation of invisible grains of light, a century ago, to that of larger objects. The first successful experiments date from the 2030s, to situate you, it’s about the time when your grandparents were your age. Progress this time has been rapid. In less than ten years, we have gone from teleporting small objects, coins, pens, books, to very large ones like tables, beds, freezers, over longer and longer distances. It didn’t change the technique of quantum teleportation, it just required a lot more energy. But what is important to understand is that as soon as it was reliable, quantum teleportation replaced all the other means we had before to transport objects from one part of the world to another: trucks, airplanes and especially ships. Anyone know what a boat is?
The children nodded in confirmation, but Cleo wasn’t sure if everyone had ever seen what a container ship, an ocean liner or a sailboat looked like. The concept of a boat boiled down for most of them to an object that floats on water.
Before we invented teleportation, Cleo tried to specify, we transported everything we needed to live, food, clothes, furniture, toys, in big boxes that we stacked on boats, very big boats, which crossed the seas and the oceans to arrive in cities which one called ports, so that all is then distributed to the factories, to the stores and to the people who lived around. You understand ?
Less than a third of the students followed it. She had lost the others, Kenny the first. They were beginning to show signs of agitation and dispersal. She insisted valiantly.
With the invention of teleportation, these boxes, which were called containers, could be sent directly from one end of the world to the other, without going through the roads, the sky, or the oceans. They were, for example, shipped from America and reappeared in Asia or Australia. But beware, children, you have to imagine that at the time the means of teleportation were not as miniaturized as today. The last attentive students observed the TPC strapped to their wrist. From 2042, about twenty of these large centers have been built around the world, most often in place of the old ports, like here in Hong Kong. We called them hubs (only two students, the most serious, Sarah and Dorothée, wrote down the word). Port-cities were already huge before the invention of teleportation, but they continued to sprout like mushrooms around hubs, and some reached as many as a hundred million people. It wasn’t until the 2050s, which is around when your parents were born, that teleportation began to be miniaturized and hubs were built in smaller cities.
Cleo had almost lost her entire class. Only Sarah and Dorothée were still listening to him. The others were playing in the dust, running from one wall to another, and, as soon as they were far enough, shouting to cause an echo in the gigantic empty hangar. The teacher sighed. From now on (it was one of the data provided by the reports of the World Organization of Education), as soon as a child remained more than ten minutes in a place without teleporting, he was bored.
Cleo intervened, raising her voice.
The children! Children, look around you! Observe the height of the walls and imagine crates stacked more than a hundred meters high, appearing, disappearing, all day long.
The kids didn’t care. It meant nothing to them… Nor to her either, Cleo had to admit. She was not born in 2050. These images of paralyzed sprawling cities, of trucks and cars jamming around hubs to distribute consumer products to people gathered as close together as possible, traveling in underground trains, living in towers too taller than the stacks of containers, yes, all these images of the apocalypse resembled, for her as much as for her students, a kind of distant prehistory… and unbearable! How could people have lived like this?
A vibration at her wrist snapped her out of her thoughts.
One message.
She mechanically looked down at her TPC.
A message from his mother!
All that was missing was her! As if mom didn’t know her daughter was in class at this hour! Cleo tried to hide her annoyance, she would read his message after school. If she thought about it.
Children, regroup.
Cleo clapped her hands several times, ordered them to assemble again, and quickly a once again docile circle of twenty-six students surrounded her. Everyone had guessed that we were finally going to leave this warehouse without windows, without light and without interest.
And then, after the hubs, who knows what happened? This time all hands went up. Even Kenny’s.
Yes, Sarah…?
Cleo had decided to reward one of the two students who had remained attentive until the end of her explanation. Poor Sarah didn’t have time to speak, a dozen of her classmates shouted their response before she even opened her mouth.
Yuki! Yuki!
Yuki, miss, still managed to slip Sarah. A white mouse. Yuki was the first teleported animal, on September 29, 2051.
Students confirmed, others got excited, all knew this story, had seen it on television, had read it in a book, had slept with a stuffed Yuki or worn her pink muzzle on a T-shirt. Yuki was as popular today as Mickey was in the last century!
Cheers kids, now stick around me, I’ll set your TPCs on the second leg of our ride. Open your eyes wide, we’re all going to teleport to the Locomotion Museum.