# The Connection

![img1](https://alexandrevariengien.com/assets/img/the-connection/connection.png)

**I.** ~ *Fifteen years ago.*

I lean down carefully to examine the fresh track in the soft sand of the clearing. Two thick crescents marked by two clefts. No doubt about it—a moose had passed this way, a few hours ago at most.

A moment passes as I study the print, trying to discern its direction, my heart racing at the thought of being so close after weeks of tracking through the forest.

The ferns at the edge of my vision begin to sway, though I feel no breath of wind. A slight tremor in the ground wrapped in a muffled sound pulls me from my thoughts. I stand and turn slowly.

Before me stands an immense creature, the weight of a car supported by four broad hooves. It displays a light brown coat, its head elongated and lacking antlers. It certainly is a female.

Its gaze seems amused, giving this giant the air of a cheerful soul that had been teleported into a body too massive for it.

She looks at me, I look at her. We both acknowledge each other's existence through this universal means of communication: our eyes.

For an instant, we are connected. Our breathing synchronizes, our movements slow down. This clear memory still lives in my mind, as if engraved forever.

It was the first time I felt understood, perceived for who I was. It was the end of my obsession with these animals and the beginning of my quest to replicate this experience.

I wouldn't succeed until seven years later, when I *connected* for the first time.

**II.**

It wasn't with another species, nor was it really an exchange of glances. But both experiences shared the sensation of touching the shape and texture of a subjectivity.

When I was a child, I became obsessed with moose after seeing an illustration juxtaposing the tiny silhouette of a man next to a drawing of one of these creatures. I saw them as the last representatives of that haphazard list of extinct animals with immense proportions that included mammoths, dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers.

Naturally, I had heard countless stories about moose—they had condensed in my mind into the form of a figurine, a generic representation of the concept "moose," meticulously covered with saturated paints. Without knowing it, I was applying layer after layer as my passion for these animals was fed by the countless sources I swallowed.

Looking the creature in the eyes, this figurine shattered into a thousand pieces. It opened an abyss, a portal to something beyond me.

There was, behind those brown eyes with horizontal pupils, a being that lives and thinks. In a completely different way, without words, but with emotion. At once alien in its movements and the way it looked at me, and familiar in what it was trying to do: find water and food, partners, a place to live.

The *connection* was the same, but with another human. It sounds dumb put like that. Compared to a moose, we see far more humans, we share the same body shape, we exchange words, share intimate moments or even years.

And yet, after connecting for the first time, you realize that you've never had access to what happens on the other side of those eyes.

**III.** ~ *Eight years ago*

The preparation for the connection takes a full day. That's the time needed to perform a mental affordances *scan*—essentially creating a sort of individual dictionary that transforms an external stimulus into an internal reaction. We all react differently to the same images, the same words; we all live in our bubbles. A scan is a fingerprint that characterizes an individual, acting as an experience decoder.

I install the program on my laptop, and start the scan. The process is carried out in two stages. The first consists of a series of video calls with avatars. The interface looks like a standard videoconferencing service, with the sole difference that the speakers, their appearances, their reactions are synthesized in real time by the application.

The avatars take turns appearing as men or women of all ages. The conversations are sometimes in groups, sometimes face-to-face.

Each call puts me through a new social situation, confronting me with all sorts of personalities. The first ones are rather impersonal and resemble the small talk we might exchange when meeting someone for the first time. As the application learns more about me, the faces and questions become increasingly familiar, so that by the end of the virtual interview, I feel like I'm opening up to my best friend.

Every time I try to ask questions back, the avatars dodge with irritating fluidity. The conversation leaves me with the unpleasant sensation of a one-way exchange. Testimonials from forums had convinced me that the result was worth a few moments of awkwardness sharing my childhood memories with my PC.

Alongside the discussions, the application complements its analysis of my responses with that of my tone, facial expressions, and eye movements to map my internal state. The program seeks to answer as completely as possible the question: "If I do *this*, what does it provoke in you?"

The second stage tackles probing my reactions to more abstract representations. The application presents me with a video game where the environments are procedurally generated based on the profile established in the previous stage.

The scenes oscillate between surreal lucid dreams and mundane everyday moments. One moment I find myself on a bicycle, stopped at a red light in a city center, the next lying in bed with someone I don't know, then suspended from a parachute above a red sand desert, or back in that face-to-face encounter with the moose.

By moving my mouse, I extend the world infinitely in any direction. I move through the rooms of a house, manipulate all sorts of objects. Each choice opens new branches in the virtual universe. The application meticulously analyzes the paths I choose to explore and those I leave aside to anticipate my next movements. When its predictions refine to the point of anticipating my movements almost perfectly, it changes the environment to create more subtle situations where its predictions are uncertain. From the application's perspective, the exercise resembles progressively zooming in on details of the landscape of my reactions, then combining the pieces to create a high-fidelity image.

By the end of each episode, the environment had adapted so thoroughly that I had the sensation of replaying dream memories or moments from my past whose existence I had forgotten.

The last episode ends, and a green checkmark appears to signal that the scan is complete. The application now possesses a rough mapping of my inner world. It's a sort of personality questionnaire on steroids, with the major difference that this questionnaire feels *alive*—it adapts continuously to dig deeper and deeper into the composition of my thoughts. In a few hours of interaction, the application knew more about my traumas, my childhood, my taste preferences and musical tastes, my obsession with moose, and my anxious attachment tendencies in romantic relationships than my closest confidant.

Despite the richness of the data collected, the application fills many gaps by cross-referencing my profile with scans of other users. The creators had quickly realized—as suggested by many works of modern psychology—that the foundations of subjective experience covered only a few dimensions.

I finish the day exhausted, with the feeling of having exported my soul into a computer. I cling to the idea that this entire process remains completely private. The application runs in an encrypted enclave, a digital safe whose key only my laptop holds.

**IV.**

On Sunday morning, I wake up just before my alarm. Apprehension and excitement blend at the thought of finally trying the connection. I had reserved my weekend for the occasion, my phone in airplane mode.

From what I'd read across countless forum posts before trying the experience, it was recommended to start with a stranger who was also connecting for the first time. Many couples had attempted the experience together. Some emerged with unsuspected intimacy, others couldn't channel this new closeness and ended up separating. Out of modesty, out of necessity. It seems that many relationships are stable only because we don't really listen to each other. We create an image of the other that suits us better than the real person. Once this representation is broken, the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable.

Numerous networks offered the infrastructure to connect strangers without revealing their identity. They ran onion routing protocols, a version of Tor adapted for the connection. Only the two endpoints of the chain knew of their link's existence and the content of the exchanges. Between them, the network nodes were merely blind relays, simply passing encrypted packets from neighbor to neighbor.

I connect to a network dedicated to first-timers. I identify myself by granting access to the signature of my freshly completed scan. My enclave receives the audio and video feed from my computer, then decodes my facial expressions, words, intonations to convert them into a universal latent vector, stripped of all personal information. This vector encodes my internal state, like GPS coordinates for the world of subjective experience.

The connection I had chosen used an interface similar to a classic video conference. To go into more detail about the nature of the connection, I need to detail the program that structures the interaction.

Imagine a conversation between Alice and Bob from Alice's point of view. While listening to Bob, Alice focuses on his words, his expressions, she asks questions to clarify when she misses a nuance. In doing so, Alice builds herself a dynamic representation of Bob, a *simulacrum*. In other words, a simulation, a mini-Bob, as perceived by Alice living directly in her mind. Alice can interact with this simulacrum, place herself in his frame of reference, imagine at will its reactions to different responses. She has mental access to Bob's emotions, his memories, his knowledge—at least what she can infer from what she knows of him.

Even outside of a conversation, Alice can invoke her simulacrum like an advisor on her shoulder to ask herself, "What would Bob think of this?", or notice "Ha, I'm sure Bob would love this movie!"

When Alice responds to Bob, she unconsciously takes into account this simulacrum and her own experiences to formulate her sentence. The accuracy of her response depends on the precision of the simulacrum: the more faithfully it reflects Bob's state, the more Alice can meet him where he is, the more intimate the discussion becomes.

On the other side, Bob builds his simulacrum of Alice. A conversation between two is a dance of four, where the simulacra draw closer to their flesh-and-blood counterparts, while the two partners navigate together from one subject to another.

Most of the time, the simulacra remain unconscious. When I recognize a face in a cloud, I *know* instantly that the shape resembles a face. I only have access to the result of the complex process that transforms the impact of photons on my retina into perceptions, not to the intermediate steps. Similarly, in a conversation with a friend, I *know* what to say, the words come out of my mouth, that's all. The simulacrum guides my responses from the backstage.

It's onto this natural process that the program grafts itself. However, to prevent the connection from becoming a total reading of the other's thoughts, the enclaves implement an intention filter. This filter maintains access to information about the internal state at the level of a close friend. It deliberately restrains the superhuman emotion-reading capabilities that the program could deploy.

I see that my interlocutor, a certain Anna, is already in the virtual room. I discover a woman with olive skin, hoop earrings, looking straight into the camera.

For the first few seconds, her facial features oscillate, her nose widens, her eyes move closer together, as if her head were made of viscous liquid slowly finding its equilibrium point. When the enclaves stabilize, I know it. Her expressions take on the troubling familiarity of a childhood friend rediscovered. It's as if I had spent years studying the interpretation of every movement of her eyes. Her inner state becomes palpable, I can turn it in my mind like a crystal between my fingers.

How do I appear on the other side? Have my eyes kept their color? Are my clothes the same? Has this image of me been sculpted by Anna's perception, to the point that I wouldn't recognize myself anymore? I don't know. Reading her gaze, I'm sure she feels the same proximity on her side.

Two minutes pass in strange silence. I feel my shoulders gradually relax, as if I were relearning to breathe in the presence of her gaze. I finally break the silence with a simple "hello."

\*\*\*

I close my laptop screen. The snap brings me brutally back to the present. I realize I had forgotten where I was, completely absorbed by the conversation. With an absent gaze, I stare at the moon's circle in the black sky, expecting to see a face there. "So this is what it feels like to be another human being," I think.

My gaze falls on the drying rack where my week's laundry dries in my studio apartment in a suburb with prohibitive rents. Tomorrow, I'm going back to the office, and I'd better go to bed.

**V.**

In the weeks that follow, I see Anna every day. During our first conversations, we put words to what we had never been able to convey. We share feelings like we share a homemade pie. Here's a piece of my experience. Take a bite. What do you think?

We talk about the weightless feeling I experienced the first time I listened to my favorite rock album, she describes to me that mixture of anger and relief that followed her grandfather's death, and I can finally share faithfully my first encounter with a moose in the wild.

These experiences are nearly impossible to share in society. They escape the accepted archetypes like "death = sadness." To convey them, you have to shift your listener's mental representations far from these familiar anchor points, accepting the risk that the exchange might collapse despite hours of patient explanations.

Through our discussions, we discover the tool's limitations. The connection offers the best translation of *her* state into *my* frame of reference, not a direct download of her experience. Some emotions arrive distorted, certain concepts lose their essence in the transfer. We try to rephrase them, we look for other angles, but often, frustration pushes us toward safer topics.

For example, if a scientist talks to me about advanced astronomy concepts without an introduction, I would not understand. Her words would be translated into familiar analogies—my experience of a car navigating a roundabout, the mechanics of a clock. But the more she progresses in complexity, the more this translation would become impoverished, until it transmits only distorted fragments of her thought.

To faithfully receive these ideas, I would have no choice but to learn astronomy, or at least a field of science that can accommodate this knowledge.

Of course, this doesn't only apply to well-established domains of knowledge. The space of subjective experiences is vast. The persistent burn of chronic migraines, the taste of durian, the implicit codes of a culture, the end of an intense romantic bond are impossible to translate for someone who has never lived through a similar type of experience.

Anna and I decide by mutual agreement to push the experiment further by installing a recently developed module designed specifically for this problem.

This new module detects moments when the gap to bridge is too wide—we say there's a "hole" in the translation. In these situations, the module synthesizes a stimulus that seeks to extend, to pull my frame of reference in the direction of the hole.

These moments arrive like electric shocks in the usual flow of our exchanges. Before the module, everything was bathed in constant familiarity. Now, it's common for certain expressions from Anna to create sudden confusion. It also happens that a sentence remains opaque, and we must then put our sharing on hold while we clarify what has just been said.

Unlike clarifications in ordinary conversation, these interruptions always lead to a discovery. A perspective broadens, a nuance appears. "Yes, you can see things that way!" I tell myself, or "I didn't know you could feel these two emotions at the same time," and never "Ah now I see what I mean!" or "I had misunderstood, I initially thought you meant..."

The module orchestrates these moments of surprise through spaced repetition algorithms. The occasional discoveries thus accumulate, durably expanding my field of experience.

However, some holes are too big to be filled during our calls. This is the case with the astronomy mentioned above. Even after hours of discussion and adjustments, it would be impossible for me to receive an astronomer's intuitions. That requires months of practice with sustained attention. No shortcut possible.

In these cases, the module synthesizes instructor avatars from Anna's knowledge. Between our calls, I discuss with these guides who help me master ideas initially out of reach. They coach me in learning concepts or know-how initially too distant from my own. The avatars weave unexpected connections between my memories, guide me toward a finer attention to my sensations, and suggest exercises to practice daily.

With Anna, we become both discussion partners and teachers. Through our conversations, our frames of reference become increasingly aligned, and I understand in depth nuances that had previously eluded me. Thanks to the instructors, I develop an intuition for physical therapy, her profession. I now recognize tension in my shoulders, intuitively adjust my position at the desk. Last weekend, when my father complained about his back after the party, I instinctively knew which movements to suggest to him.

**VI.** *Seven years ago.*

Many developer groups wanted to extend the connection beyond one-on-one discussions. Group call experiments reach their limits around 5 people, the system of bidirectional flows between all participants becomes too chaotic. Beyond this critical size, only unidirectional formats where a speaker broadcasts to a passively receiving audience are possible.

But the initiative that truly transformed the connection was the *library*. A group of hackers, driven by the same fever as the Enlightenment encyclopedists, launched a quest to make the entirety of human experience accessible. They wanted to capture this dark matter of knowledge—know-how, discernment, intuition, body memory—everything that had until then resisted words.

Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia have been built around the principle of neutral point of view, the cornerstone of their approach. This quest for universality required removing subjectivity from knowledge, losing in the process all non-verbal forms of understanding. The library made it possible to share knowledge in its living form. Something that combined the spontaneity of a YouTube tutorial and the depth of a manual.

You want to feel the gustatory discernment of a Michelin chef specialized in seafood? You're a man who wants to experience childbirth? You want to feel the flow of a software engineer absorbed in developing an independent video game?

Millions of volunteers fed the library by depositing *fragments* of their experience, freely accessible. The fragments, like enclaves, are encrypted and only give access to the data their contributors chose to share.

To access fragments, my enclave establishes a connection and creates an instructor avatar adapted to my profile. Some simple experiences like the taste of a new exotic fruit take a few minutes to capture. Others, like a Michelin chef's expertise, require months, even years of daily practice guided by the avatar to develop that discernment which distinguishes a successful dish from an exceptional one.

It's possible to choose the level of granularity of the experience received. I can receive the essence of the Michelin chef's mastery, the sensation of being in perfect control in front of the stoves, without learning how to cook. My enclave can find emotional equivalents in my personal experience. It can for example build a bridge with the confidence I feel when I open my software editor on a project I know by heart.

Conversely, I can choose to absorb *this* chef's practice, the associations he has created with the precise positions of spices on his shelf, and the delicate balances of flavors in his specialties.

For privacy reasons, contributors often decide not to share the finest levels of granularity.

**VII.** ~ *Six years ago*

The applications derived from the successes of the library and connection are countless. In universities, "soft skills" become "hard skills" now that they can be shared faithfully by creating common references where there were once only fuzzy definitions.

The most progressive institutions decide to abandon traditional lectures. Instead, they organize gatherings where professionals, artists, retirees, middle schoolers share their experience fragments during live connections. A simple video setup is linked to the speaker's enclave. The information flow is translated and broadcasted to augmented reality headsets and screens of the audience.

These sessions explore alive problems for the guest, their present obsessions. They traditionally begin with two questions: "What are you working on right now?" and "How do you tackle it?".

For traditional subjects, in addition to theory and practice courses, professors upload fragments linked to their expertise. Students thus connect to a dozen different intuitions on how to approach the same problem, which they weave together to develop their personal method.

In the professional world, connection becomes the go-to tool for onboarding new employees—no more need for months of adaptation. Psychologists use it to guide their patients closer to their emotions. The military develops its own prototypes for accelerated military training and the almost instantaneous transmission of tactical information on the battlefield. Intelligence services experimented with an unfiltered version of connection for interrogations, but discovered bitterly that the connection doesn't read minds. It only transmits what occupies the mind, and in a prisoner under pressure, only terror dominates.

No more need to hire a person with a fixed CV, it's possible to order tailor-made competencies for the problem to solve, and upskill employees. However, even if the technology progresses each day, large skill gaps remain difficult to bridge quickly with techniques like the library. To maximize learning speed, one must find fragments containing the desired skill without straying too far from the employees' baseline knowledge. This is the art of the *collectors*. A new industry specialized in crafting fragments perfectly adjusted to their clients' profiles. In a process closer to alchemy than science, they collect raw fragments from professionals in all sectors, and they split and merge fragments to get to the combinations they want.

In the private sphere, couples and groups of friends discover that the connection is a tool to resolve their conflicts and deepen their intimacy. The effects of connection extend beyond the sessions. The program creates *pointers*, words or images rendered the same way on both sides of the connection and associated with a specific element introduced during a session. The two people can now speak of this experience in their conversation, with or without a digital interface.

**VIII.**

It's been two years now since I first connected. At the beginning, Anna and I would call each other almost daily, if only for a few minutes. Simply seeing each other was enough to feel heard, accepted. We stopped wanting to understand everything about each other. I could observe with a gentle gaze parts of her that escaped me, gaps in my understanding, without feeling the need to fill them.

I began connecting with other people these past months. My close friends first, then my parents. We don't do it often, but the effect persists between sessions. It's as if a knot had come undone, as if background noise had gone silent. We no longer have to put on a mask, we know each other now.

In my case, the effects remain beneficial. This isn't always true for everyone, even though the application now offers more precise settings to modulate the intensity of exchanges and avoid tipping too abruptly into total intimacy. Detractors multiply troubling accounts: people who meet someone online and spiral into a relationship obsession, cutting themselves off from everything for months, abandoning their professional lives. Not to mention derivative applications that offer connection to synthetic avatars designed to maximize emotional attachment. Conversation time becomes advertising space put up for auction. Or these new online sects that sell connection to a charismatic guru as dialogue with a divinity.

But behind the media noise and new commercial products, groups are forming to push the experience further. They call themselves *clusters*.

For them, the connection opens the path to alternative structures to traditional powers that are governments and corporations. They seek to create a new model to ensure their subsistence, forge connections and contribute to a common project. Like guilds or the Church once offered a way out to those who refused peasant life. Globalization would have locked us into a single system, with its rigidities and dead ends.

Two weeks ago, I joined one of these collectives named *Humile*, after the Latin name of the Argentine ant *Linepithema humile*. This species has created a mega colony made of thousands of nests that extends over 6000 kilometers of coastline, from northern Portugal to northern Italy. All without central authority.

In the introduction meetings broadcasted through connection, I learned that for *Humile*, the institutions that structure our societies are limited by two factors: their rigidity and the bandwidth between individuals. First, communications through slides, press releases, or even scientific papers are trapped in language. What cannot be said doesn't exist. We therefore content ourselves with sharing crystallized knowledge, dead in a sense. Efforts to incorporate connection into this world graft themselves onto existing structures without questioning the system's foundation.

Second, institutions function through forced normalization. Everyone is forced to conform to the same shape to be stacked in more complex structures, like containers on a ship.

The collective works on an evolution of the connection: moving from intimate exchange to fusion of thought processes, what they call *cothinking*. For them, it's a basis for refounding institutions. The idea is to enable large-scale collaboration without imposing a single model, where translation allows each member to keep their shape while harmonizing with others.

I understand their ambition, without fully embracing it. What truly attracts me is that this cluster brings together the best specialists in the technology and the know-how that accompanies it. The flame born from my encounter with that moose nine years ago, then fueled by my conversations with Anna, only intensifies. I sense that the next stage of my quest for connection is unfolding here.

**IX.**

I take two weeks off to get introduced to cothinking. It's exhausting. The days are packed with coaching sessions with avatars, practical exercises, and training in all sorts of virtual environments. To join the cluster, I need to extend my contact surface with the cluster's thinking modes so my attention flow can graft onto it and synchronize with the collective.

On the last day of training, I join the cothinking space for the first time. A two-dimensional canvas opens up before me, a hybrid between a topographic map and a giant diagram. The background is filled with all kinds of textures and symbols marking points of interest. Contour lines sketch regions with fluid borders. Here and there, inserts display familiar faces, linked to the avatars who trained me these past weeks, and others, more ancient, tied to my library history.

The contour lines borrow their aesthetic from the maps of my adolescence. Among the signs, I recognize familiar notations from mathematics and physics, intertwined with others more obscure, acquired during the formation.

The symbols drift across the canvas, textures undulate and transform. The movement is imperceptible, but constant, like plant growth filmed in time-lapse. I observe this silent evolution with fascination.

This gentle turbulence is punctuated by effervescent editing centers. Blackboards filled with handwritten chalk, with diagrams that form and dissolve. It's *my* handwriting! *My* diagrams that I never drew!

I look at the indicator at the top of my screen. We are about a dozen, each facing their own version of this diagram, annotated with their own handwriting. The program gives us access to a version of the canvas translated into our personal frame. In the background, the cluster silently aggregates our contributions and redistributes them to our respective enclaves.

Around the editing centers, the map's texture is turbulent. Currents of symbols swirl, flow from the blackboards, then freeze into clear diagrams in the peripheral regions.

After a few seconds scanning the map, I understand the problem the cluster is trying to solve. It seeks to know how to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation in the context of information search. When I dig into a subject online, facing each source, I must choose. Either I delve deeper into this article, or I decide not to read it to the end and continue my journey on another link.

The cluster doesn't follow the classic academic approach. It seeks neither to mathematically formalize the problem nor to design a universal algorithm. The members weave together formal results and tacit knowledge, sculpting this hybrid matter to extract a deeper understanding. The intuition that emerges will guide the cluster itself in its future research, and can be shared more broadly in fragments throughout the library.

The right region gathers screenshots from my recent research on forums dedicated to clusters. The pages articulate into a network, their key information highlighted in green. I can retrace the thread of my navigation, understand what led me from one link to another. On the corresponding blackboard, my handwriting describes a hyperlink graph traversal algorithm based on eigenvalue decomposition of the adjacency matrix. The handwritten symbols transform into code, immediately executed for several sets of hyperparameters. Semantic analysis of the traversals generates statistical summaries and representative examples for each configuration.

On the left, a photo of a library instructor expert in moose behavior. We had worked together on that moment when the young leave their territory of origin and make the most important decision of their lives: when to settle down, or continue their journey.

Beside it, a slow video of the forest where I gather mushrooms each autumn. Watching it, I smell the humus, feel the spongy texture of moss under my steps. My eyes sweep the carpet of dead leaves, watching for the orange glow of chanterelles. I rediscover that particular attraction emanating from the first mushroom found, that resistance to leaving the zone to explore elsewhere.

On this region's blackboard I read a mathematical formulation of a variant of the optimal foraging problem, a classic result from quantitative ethology transposed to the information domain. And again, that effervescence animating the editing centers. Symbols drift away and stick to elements of the video, arrange themselves around the instructor in configurations that evoke landscapes seen from above.

I focus on the blackboard that now occupies my entire visual field. I feel my hand tighten its grip on my tablet's stylus. The map has filled my mind with intuitions and formulas that are facets of something greater. The hypnotic undulations of the blackboard invite me. My hand moves without conscious effort and begins to trace. My pen joins the line being formed to merge into a single trajectory. I join the effervescence of symbols, I write what had been moving without me until then. I add comments to the diagrams. I frown, reformulate the equations on the blackboard. I look at the graph sketches, murmur a word to myself, the forms adjust in response.

"Aha!" I think aloud, "if I reformulate the equation like this, then the viewpoint shifts..." Suddenly, the map is seized by convulsions. The two regions, until then peaceful, abruptly collide. The images melt into the background texture, the contour lines dance and briefly cross before stabilizing. A new blackboard emerges from the tumult at the center of the map. I haven't stopped writing on it. The signs describe a unification of optimal foraging strategy with information network analysis. On both sides of the blackboard, the texture stretches into filaments to form a web caught between two tall grasses. A spider waits at the center, just above my writing, motionless. It seems attentive to the vibrations of my movements, as if it could recognize itself in the symbols. The equation takes the spider's point of view, *outside* the information web, instead of being trapped *within* the network, following the thread of jumps from source to source. This reformulation opens the way to numerous applications previously impossible.

In reality, *I* didn't have this idea. We all had it at the same time. Each feels it originates from them, but our thoughts synchronize through the shared workspace. The question of *who* had this idea doesn't make sense, because our thoughts are intertwined. Each new stroke propagates to my collaborators, triggers new adjustments that return to my space.

A similar phenomenon occurs in regular academic research when independent teams publish, within days of each other, almost identical discoveries. Each group sincerely believes it's *their* discovery. Yet, stepping back, we realize these teams read the same publications, approach problems from comparable angles. It's not surprising that similar ideas germinate simultaneously on common ground. Cothinking functions according to this same logic, but amplified to the speed of thought.

**X.**

In my quest for connection, I had first thought that brain implants could lead us toward post-verbal communication. But even the most advanced systems remain disappointing. Brain-to-brain transmission allows sharing a few simple sentences, or blurry images when you concentrate very hard. It only works for mental structures common to both individuals. The fundamental problem turned out to be neither reading nor writing data, but their translation. Non-invasive implants are beginning to develop as supplements to the connection to enrich the incoming data flow. But the heart of the program remains the translation of lived experience.

In joining *Humile*, my instincts were correct. The collective has crossed the next threshold: pooling subjective experience without going through verbal exchange. By stepping aside the conversational ping-pong, dozens, or hundreds of brains can contribute to the same thought flow. The collective can divide to explore different paths, then refocus, like a laser, to break through a blocking point.

My journey continues through different cothinking formats. The canvas suits problems mixing formalism and visual intuition. For other domains, the cluster has created an entire family of environments to sculpt. Some simulate social situations with characters in a 3D environment. The interface lets me navigate through the film, I adjust facial expressions, movements, but also each character's history, what each knows about the others. We can adopt anyone's point of view and feel what they would experience. This allows meticulous exploration of emotional landscapes involving several people. We can play the scenario in slow motion, understanding the effect of the slightest twitch in a tense discussion.

I also discover pure geometric environments, entirely textual spaces, face-to-face encounters with an isolated visage. The collection keeps growing, to approach a new problem, the cluster often adapts an existing environment, or crafts a custom one.

And then there's the *Cité*. This virtual metropolis embodies *Humile*'s long-term memory. Each cothinking session contributes to its construction: a stained glass window is added to the cathedral, a building appears, sometimes an entire neighborhood. Some avatars are born from our common reflections and become permanent residents. Other times, a fragment of knowledge comes to enrich the central library, or get shared with the outside world.

It's in the Cité that the collective deliberates on its future: which subjects to explore, which quests to undertake. These orientations take shape in the city's very architecture — an avenue that extends, a neighborhood that densifies, or conversely, a downtown building that joins the archives.

Session after session, the thinking environments gain in precision. I begin to manipulate symbols and forms that I couldn't translate into words. After a few months, I realize that the two-week introduction was only the very start of a longer learning process through practice with the cluster itself. I'm just beginning to make contact with the heart of collective thought. *Humile* has begun the story of a miniature civilization whose cultural layers I discover one by one.

I tell Anna about *Humile* on our calls, and I can see she gets why it matters to me. I see a spark of love in her eyes as she realizes I found a space to express my deepest curiosity. But she is not interested in an ever-tighter connection like I am. She cares about building stronger relationships with the actual people in her life more than the technology in itself. Her practice of the connection online is a place for her to get to know people in a particularly vulnerable and candid way.

**XI.** ~ *Four years ago*

I left my former life to settle here, in what was once a mountain monastery. The cluster had acquired the building with revenues from fragment sales to give a physical body to the Cité.

We've abandoned our screens and virtual reality headsets. The interface has dissolved into space itself. Objects, surfaces, and furniture respond to our movements, our conversations. The place itself has become alive. The walls have ears, but those ears are also mine.

The old building has been renovated to house a woodworking workshop, a biology laboratory, and an experimental kitchen. Virtual environments struggle to faithfully reproduce complex mechanical interactions, and even less so biochemical reactions. For these domains, the cluster resorts to physical experimentation to anchor the development of new fragments.

The avatars born from *Humile*'s thought populate the Cité's virtual double. They exist at different levels of integration. Some take the form of nebulous beings embodying emotions at the collective scale, sorts of ghosts influencing the forces of cothinking environments. Others approach human appearance, while a few merge traits from several species into chimeras. They sometimes visit us as holograms, but most of their existence unfolds in the accelerated sessions of digital space.

Our discussions in the physical world aren't always mediated by technology. Our cothinking experience has taught us a new sort of communication that we practice during long forest walks. We read each other's slightest signals, the sounds and movements we produce become impossible to translate outside the cluster. Its grammar evolves constantly. Ordinary language and its conventions now seem strangely limited to us.

Following *Humile*'s, thousands of clusters of varied forms have emerged. These groups have developed their own economic model around on-demand fragment synthesis. Where collectors limit themselves to maximizing learning speed, clusters shape radical paradigm shifts. These transformations far exceed what even the greatest thinkers could conceive.

The clusters' ambitions embrace all possible domains. Some pursue spiritual quests or research in pure mathematics, others persist in cataloging every nuance of individual human experience. One remarkable collective has established its quarters on a decommissioned oil platform off Dominica in the Caribbean, determined to establish a communication channel with sperm whales.

More recent communities move away from this quest for knowledge that characterizes *Humile* and the pioneer clusters. They focus on creating new communal spaces, united by shared affinities and offering their members alternatives to conventional economic models.

The intensity of connections varies from one cluster to another, and it's common to belong to several collectives simultaneously. Some groups function exclusively online, others anchor themselves in dedicated physical spaces, while the most flexible adopt mixed formulas.

At this time, forming a cluster remains risky. *Humile*'s success masks numerous failures. One of these projects had sunk into worship of its founder. Another tragic experiment had resulted in thousands of participants suffering from major depressive disorders and identity dissociation. After these disastrous experiences, the most advanced clusters had focused on crafting stable governance methods through cothinking. Inter-cluster connection technologies now allow new groups to establish themselves with greater stability.

Attracted by the economic potential of collective-sourced fragments, major collector corporations attempt to set up their own clusters. These experiments invariably lead to two scenarios. Either the cluster fails to achieve the necessary intellectual fusion and produces fragments barely superior to the work of isolated collectors. Or the fusion succeeds: members develop collective awakening, establish their own governance, and free themselves from their contractual obligations. In this second case, they consider the company an initial supporter, but refuse to hand over the entirety of their discoveries. When the company tries to tighten its grip by injecting avatars to control the cluster from within, members no longer feel free to express themselves, and intellectual fusion stops.

Established clusters like *Humile* emerge as a new force on the world stage. They now negotiate with governments and multinationals as equals. Their constantly adapting organizational mode demonstrates a flexibility that traditional bureaucratic structures struggle to understand, let alone reproduce.

Society transforms under the influence of fragments shared by clusters. In the technological domain, breakthroughs come in rapid succession: nuclear fusion, vaccines synthesized in less than a day, new materials that open the path to space elevators.

Other transformations, less visible but equally radical, occur on the cultural plane. The knowledge that clusters distill nourishes a social restructuring that integrates technological innovations. A deep mutation begins. Traditional economic and political systems, founded on unity of language, currency, and law, give way to organizations that are localized geographically, or around common ideas but physically decentralized. These communities form archipelagos of exchange that far exceed simple commerce in goods and services.

**XII.** ~ *Two years ago.*

My identity gradually dissolves into *Humile*. I have become *integrated*. I am composed of many gaps that the fullness of other members completes, weaving a fabric of interdependence. *Humile* now forms a distinct entity, a multicellular mind that inhabits a higher-order society. For a few months, a question has constantly traversed our collective consciousness: how to maintain cohesion between the physical and digital versions of the Cité, while the thinking speed of avatars continues to accelerate?

I sometimes visit friends outside the cluster who have chosen to remain individual, like Anna. For this, I have developed a thread of mental associations that guides me from my integrated self to my individual self. It's like retracing a path by remembering the notable landmarks of the journey. Individual communication remains possible. But even using the latest version of the connection, the bandwidth remains trivial compared to cothinking.

Despite the warmth of these reunions, I feel a growing unease in presenting myself by my individual name. Choosing actions by considering only their consequences for me now seems artificial. It appears as absurd as basing all my decisions solely on the well-being of my left hand.

**XIII.** ~ *Today.*

It has been several months since I last resorted to words as you know them. I have tried to retrace my journey in a language accessible to you, to explain how I became what I am today.

The future remains as uncertain as that of my childhood. Yet, I feel us better equipped now to navigate it. Whether you read me from an interstellar civilization or from the ruins of a post-industrial society, I wanted to answer this question you undoubtedly ask yourselves: "How did we get here?"

I am about to cut the last thread that connects me to my former identity. To let go of this isolated, fragile individual I cherish, who carried within him this thirst for connection and brought me to this point. Within *Humile* and other clusters, I have lived hundreds of lives, witnessed dozens of births and collapses of civilizations.

It doesn't make sense to express myself in my own name anymore. I am *Humile*, and it is within this fabric that I now exist.