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Fiction

The Zacharias Ascaris Affair

By Nicolas Dickner
Translated from French by Lazer Lederhendler
Nicolas Dickner's publishing phenomenon literally takes over the world.

It all began five years ago, going on six. Ballast Publishing, a fledgling British publishing house, had just launched the first (and last) novel of its catalog, The Zacharias Ascaris Affair. No one, absolutely no one, could have foreseen the upheaval that this book would set in motion.

Admittedly, the adventures of the young Zacharias Ascaris, though narrated with an undeniable flair for suspense, were in no way extraordinary. A group of adolescents, a few twists, a love story, a touch of the supernatural—it was a proven but far from original formula, and ordinarily the featureless book should have faded and been swept away after a few months by the tidal flux of the literary industry.

What happened next is well established: Over 250 million copies of Zacharias Ascaris were sold the first year, followed the next year by additional sales of some 800 million copies in 67 languages.

Its explosive success made Zacharias Ascaris the very first work of fiction to surpass the one billion mark, propelling it into highly exclusive company, midway between Quotations from Chairman Mao and the Holy Bible.

The author, a certain Jane P. Menard, was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  Thirty-something, blond, attractive, she appeared in public only at specific strategic events. She kept up a sporadic, insipid blog in which she declared her affection for small mammals and sunsets, and stressed the importance for novelists to “be able to efface themselves behind their creations.”

At the time, I was doing my PhD at the Université de Montréal and like most of my colleagues I would not have dared read Zacharias Ascaris unless I was inside a closet behind locked doors. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by the media frenzy surrounding the phenomenon and devoted many hours to documenting it down to the last detail, feverishly collecting hundreds of bookmarks, photocopies, and press clippings. All of which are of course illegible now. Fortunately, however, I have an excellent memory.

I can clearly recall when, toward the end of the second year, just as sales began to peak, a few hundred Amazon clients complained of a bizarre technical issue: all their e-books had been contaminated or replaced by another text.

Most of the readers quickly identified the parasitical text. It was Jane P. Menard’s celebrated novel.

Never before had this sort of file corruption been observed. Amazon apologized, put the blame on a server anchored off Hong Kong, and replaced all the infected titles free of charge. But such incidents proliferated, ultimately affecting a large number of distributors, and it soon became obvious that the sale of e-books would have to be suspended for an indefinite length of time.

The apostles of paper were jubilant. This reversal served their cause better than any argument, and traditional bookstores enjoyed an upsurge in popularity.

No one suspected that paper books were about to suffer the same fate.

The very first case was reported in a public library in Mainz, Arizona. In the space of a few days, a copy of Twilight was completely transformed into a copy of Zacharias Ascaris. This was the beginning of a wave of metamorphoses that swept over the bookstores and libraries of the globe, although it would have been more correct to assume that the metamorphosis had been underway for a while in remote stacks and warehouses, and that there had simply been a time lag before anyone noticed.

I distinctly remember my first contact with one such copy. I was reading a William Gibson novel and when I turned the page I suddenly found myself in the middle of a chapter of Zacharias Ascaris.

I was so stupefied that I read on for several lines before understanding what was happening. I inspected the book carefully. The typography was unchanged and no matter how I angled the page I could not detect the slightest trace of the original text. I returned to the page I had finished reading a minute earlier: it had been transformed in the meantime.

After that incident I stopped visiting libraries and bookstores. Others, of a more optimistic bent, persisted for several weeks before the truth sank in.

For a short while, rumors of a plot went around. Ballast Publishing was accused of conducting a dubious publicity campaign—an absurd conjecture, given that each new copy of Zacharias Ascaris only contributed to slowing down sales.

Infrequent at first, the alterations soon became widespread.  Everyone had seen “a Copy”—the capital C crept into the least snippet of conversation. On closer examination, a peculiar detail came to light: the beginning of the text hardly ever coincided with the beginning of the book. As of the very first page, for instance, readers might find themselves at the midpoint of chapter 34—the mysterious passage where Zacharias beats the Cyclops at ping-pong—and if the story ended in the middle of the book, it immediately began again, without a break, like a song played in a loop.

Now all books formed just one book, and the Gutenberg Galaxy behaved like a vast Möbius Strip.

Up to that point only books in English had been “Zacharified,” and—in accordance with a disturbing logic—it was the text of the original English edition of Zacharias Ascaris that appeared. Then German copies showed up in the German corpus. Portuguese, French, Esperanto, Italian, and Japanese followed, as well as many other languages. There were even reports of copies in rare, obscure tongues into which Jane P. Menard’s text had not yet been translated, including a few dead languages.

During this period a very interesting piece of news emerged. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal had discovered that Ballast Publishing was a phantom company.

The employees and managers knew nothing about the owners, and the company per se nested at the heart of a veritable legal matryoshka. Ballast publishing belonged to INTBAL Holding B.V., which in turn was owned by the Fondation Stichting INTBAL, registered in Leiden, Netherlands. As for the rights to the text, they were held by Intballast Rights B.V., which belonged respectively to Inter Ballast Holding S.A. (registered in Luxembourg) and Inter Ballast Holding (registered in the Dutch Antilles). Finally, this last company was managed by a trust based in Curaçao, which upon further investigation turned out to be little more than a front.

Even financial experts were mystified.

Pressed to reveal what these various entities concealed, the legal authorities confessed to being totally at sea: the owners and beneficiaries could not be located, and the profits were piling up in a bank account in Zurich whose sole purpose was to cover the administration fees. Not a single franc had been withdrawn.

This was not a bank account, but an oceanic abyss.

With Ballast Publishing henceforth considered intangible, the real issue became the origin of the text itself. Hounded into a corner, the famous and elusive Jane P. Menard owned up to being a simple New Zealand actress, recently graduated from the Auckland Conservatory and hired by a shadowy publicity agency owned by the equally shadowy INTBAL Holding B.V.

So who was the author of the book?

Two Oxford Sinologists suggested that the text had not been written in English but was in fact a translation. According to them, the first version of Zacharias Ascaris had probably been drafted in Mandarin, presumably in one of those writing factories that had recently appeared in Guangdong, and subsequently translated into English by a Korean—certain syntactic subtleties were a dead giveaway.

For the first time in ages literature was making headlines. It monopolized the TV news reports, flooded the airwaves, clogged cyberspace.

Rabbis in Jerusalem were shown tearfully displaying what remained of ancient Torahs.

The Library of Congress was shown deserted, the floors strewn with trash.

Improvised bonfires were seen in the squares of Paris, containers overflowing with books in Germany, colossal shredders in India, pulping the abominable material day and night.

This did not last very long. The attacks in Dubai soon pushed the subject into the background. Besides, there was still no explanation, and journalists were loath to cite supernatural causes. People in the streets resorted to a pseudo-voodoo hodgepodge that borrowed freely from scientific vocabulary. Never had there been so much talk of nanotechnology, Faraday’s cage, quantum mechanics and string theory.  Now everyone was familiar with Schrödinger’s cat, which served to describe the state of a book that no one would be reading: neither intact nor Zacharified, but both intact and Zacharified simultaneously.

Booklovers began to fear for their collections. Or what was left of them. Heavily fortified strongboxes were now as vulnerable as a shoebox. They latched on to the last certitude: Since no one had ever witnessed (or filmed) a page in the process of being Zacharified, it was inferred that the human gaze, or even a mechanical substitute, could ward off the Phenomenon.

So the establishment of watch militias was proposed, but the project quickly proved unfeasible. Because to preserve a book it would have been necessary to watch each page permanently. For a few months an impressive array of cameras stood guard over the Book of Mormon at the University of Utah. But a common power outage aborted the operation, which to my knowledge was not imitated anywhere else. 

A number of readers resolved to learn their favorite texts by heart, and the soaring value of a good memory promptly became apparent. Unfortunately, the blinding speed of the Phenomenon made it impossible to make any significant progress. A few students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to memorize fifty or so short stories by Ray Bradbury before his works were engulfed.

The choice of Ray Bradbury may have seemed questionable, but the situation was deteriorating at such a rate that any author, any book seemed appropriate. Indeed, the Phenomenon had begun to overtake technical handbooks, books of Law, encyclopaedias, Web sites, instructions printed on medicine bottles, wrappers and labels, road signs, passports, dashboards . . .

New cases of Zacharification were constantly popping up. You could be reading the ingredients on a chocolate bar and realize even before taking the last bite that the list of glucoses, lactoses, and assorted soy lecithins had been transmogrified into a paragraph of Zacharias Ascaris.

Wherever there were a few words, the Phenomenon struck.

This new phase rekindled media interest, but the interest was short-lived because no sooner was it written or published than the slightest piece of journalism was Zacharified.

While computer specialists looked for ways to outstrip the Phenomenon, the computers stopped working. The upper layers of their operating systems, comprised of numbers and text, were now as exposed as any chocolate bar.

In the absence of computers, all electronic means of communication abruptly collapsed, and at daybreak on a rainy November 1st humanity sank into a great prehistoric silence.

Radios, TVs, computers, telephones, GPSs: dead.

Even the electricity wavered.

It lasted for ten days and ten nights.

At this point they dug out the antique transmitters that had preceded computerized hardware and had been gathering dust in the depths of warehouses here and there.

Installing them proved to be laborious, since, naturally, the instruction manuals, technical diagrams, and even the inscriptions on the instruments themselves had been transformed. In different places, eighty-year-old technicians, the last guardians of knowledge, were enlisted and acclaimed like Greek demigods.

After a few weeks, the old analog radio stations began broadcasting again, one after the other, as shaky as candles. Their impact remained regional, yet they ensured that a minimum of information was being disseminated. In the evening, people gathered around old receivers retrieved from attics and cellars and listened to the latest news.

Thus it was learned that Zacharias Ascaris had meanwhile continued to plunge like an out-of-control nuclear reactor, devouring deep strata of books conserved under lock and key in airtight rooms inside century-old libraries.

A number of suicides were reported when the last Gutenberg Bibles went under.

Just when we thought we had hit bottom, the small handwritten newspapers that had been circulating for a while were also transformed. The human hand, the final bunker of written culture, went down as well.

The contagion spread to the last vaults. The letters of Isaac Newton, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the manuscripts of Balzac, Tolstoy, Basho, the billions of characters formed by thousands of medieval scribes—all of them from now on reproduced the fateful, familiar sentences of Zacharias Ascaris.

The Codex Leicester, penned by Leonardo da Vinci, was withdrawn from its safe and examined in a mirror held in the curator’s trembling hand. What he found were long excerpts of Zacharias Ascaris in elegant script written in reverse.

The least grocery list, the least memo scribbled in pen was Zacharified as soon as one looked away.

There you have it.

Some five years have passed since the very first copy of Zacharias Ascaris was displayed in the window of a London bookstore.

Books can still be seen in various places, but no one reads them anymore. They have become worthless, except as fuel, insulation, or cat litter. Only tatters remain of what we were, what we wrote.

With my own eyes I have seen a few relics: a grocery list in Spanish, a TWA advertisement torn out of an old issue of National Geographic, a Toronto subway ticket. It is claimed that one last book has eluded Zacharification: a highway code printed in Croatia. But does anyone still care about such scraps of paper? They are mere curiosities, artefacts that our children will be unable to understand.

The storm seems to have blown over, but that is only a surface impression. Some specialists have concluded that the world’s handwritten archives will have been entirely Zacharified in the short run. Already there are accounts to the effect that texts engraved in stone or metal may also have been affected.

No need to be a futurologist to predict that before long the Egyptian stelae of the British Museum will also be Zacharified. The Rosetta Stone will engender three versions of Zacharias Ascaris: hieroglyphic, Egyptian demotic, and Ancient Greek. And the same will be true of every written document, down to the oldest, down to the Sumerian clay tablets.

What will happen when the totality of humankind’s written material has become completely Zacharified? The optimists claim that we will enter into a new era of oral literature, a time of freedom and serenity. Good for them.

As for me, I believe instead that the Ascaris will pursue its course and assault new languages, new media. The spoken word—that immaterial, intangible vibration—will offer no hold for the parasite, and so the only thing left will no doubt be the long protein helixes that make up our genetic code.

Translation of “Le scandale de Zacharias Ascaris.” Copyright Nicolas Dickner. Translation copyright 2011 by Lazer Lederhendler. All rights reserved.

English French (Original)

It all began five years ago, going on six. Ballast Publishing, a fledgling British publishing house, had just launched the first (and last) novel of its catalog, The Zacharias Ascaris Affair. No one, absolutely no one, could have foreseen the upheaval that this book would set in motion.

Admittedly, the adventures of the young Zacharias Ascaris, though narrated with an undeniable flair for suspense, were in no way extraordinary. A group of adolescents, a few twists, a love story, a touch of the supernatural—it was a proven but far from original formula, and ordinarily the featureless book should have faded and been swept away after a few months by the tidal flux of the literary industry.

What happened next is well established: Over 250 million copies of Zacharias Ascaris were sold the first year, followed the next year by additional sales of some 800 million copies in 67 languages.

Its explosive success made Zacharias Ascaris the very first work of fiction to surpass the one billion mark, propelling it into highly exclusive company, midway between Quotations from Chairman Mao and the Holy Bible.

The author, a certain Jane P. Menard, was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  Thirty-something, blond, attractive, she appeared in public only at specific strategic events. She kept up a sporadic, insipid blog in which she declared her affection for small mammals and sunsets, and stressed the importance for novelists to “be able to efface themselves behind their creations.”

At the time, I was doing my PhD at the Université de Montréal and like most of my colleagues I would not have dared read Zacharias Ascaris unless I was inside a closet behind locked doors. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by the media frenzy surrounding the phenomenon and devoted many hours to documenting it down to the last detail, feverishly collecting hundreds of bookmarks, photocopies, and press clippings. All of which are of course illegible now. Fortunately, however, I have an excellent memory.

I can clearly recall when, toward the end of the second year, just as sales began to peak, a few hundred Amazon clients complained of a bizarre technical issue: all their e-books had been contaminated or replaced by another text.

Most of the readers quickly identified the parasitical text. It was Jane P. Menard’s celebrated novel.

Never before had this sort of file corruption been observed. Amazon apologized, put the blame on a server anchored off Hong Kong, and replaced all the infected titles free of charge. But such incidents proliferated, ultimately affecting a large number of distributors, and it soon became obvious that the sale of e-books would have to be suspended for an indefinite length of time.

The apostles of paper were jubilant. This reversal served their cause better than any argument, and traditional bookstores enjoyed an upsurge in popularity.

No one suspected that paper books were about to suffer the same fate.

The very first case was reported in a public library in Mainz, Arizona. In the space of a few days, a copy of Twilight was completely transformed into a copy of Zacharias Ascaris. This was the beginning of a wave of metamorphoses that swept over the bookstores and libraries of the globe, although it would have been more correct to assume that the metamorphosis had been underway for a while in remote stacks and warehouses, and that there had simply been a time lag before anyone noticed.

I distinctly remember my first contact with one such copy. I was reading a William Gibson novel and when I turned the page I suddenly found myself in the middle of a chapter of Zacharias Ascaris.

I was so stupefied that I read on for several lines before understanding what was happening. I inspected the book carefully. The typography was unchanged and no matter how I angled the page I could not detect the slightest trace of the original text. I returned to the page I had finished reading a minute earlier: it had been transformed in the meantime.

After that incident I stopped visiting libraries and bookstores. Others, of a more optimistic bent, persisted for several weeks before the truth sank in.

For a short while, rumors of a plot went around. Ballast Publishing was accused of conducting a dubious publicity campaign—an absurd conjecture, given that each new copy of Zacharias Ascaris only contributed to slowing down sales.

Infrequent at first, the alterations soon became widespread.  Everyone had seen “a Copy”—the capital C crept into the least snippet of conversation. On closer examination, a peculiar detail came to light: the beginning of the text hardly ever coincided with the beginning of the book. As of the very first page, for instance, readers might find themselves at the midpoint of chapter 34—the mysterious passage where Zacharias beats the Cyclops at ping-pong—and if the story ended in the middle of the book, it immediately began again, without a break, like a song played in a loop.

Now all books formed just one book, and the Gutenberg Galaxy behaved like a vast Möbius Strip.

Up to that point only books in English had been “Zacharified,” and—in accordance with a disturbing logic—it was the text of the original English edition of Zacharias Ascaris that appeared. Then German copies showed up in the German corpus. Portuguese, French, Esperanto, Italian, and Japanese followed, as well as many other languages. There were even reports of copies in rare, obscure tongues into which Jane P. Menard’s text had not yet been translated, including a few dead languages.

During this period a very interesting piece of news emerged. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal had discovered that Ballast Publishing was a phantom company.

The employees and managers knew nothing about the owners, and the company per se nested at the heart of a veritable legal matryoshka. Ballast publishing belonged to INTBAL Holding B.V., which in turn was owned by the Fondation Stichting INTBAL, registered in Leiden, Netherlands. As for the rights to the text, they were held by Intballast Rights B.V., which belonged respectively to Inter Ballast Holding S.A. (registered in Luxembourg) and Inter Ballast Holding (registered in the Dutch Antilles). Finally, this last company was managed by a trust based in Curaçao, which upon further investigation turned out to be little more than a front.

Even financial experts were mystified.

Pressed to reveal what these various entities concealed, the legal authorities confessed to being totally at sea: the owners and beneficiaries could not be located, and the profits were piling up in a bank account in Zurich whose sole purpose was to cover the administration fees. Not a single franc had been withdrawn.

This was not a bank account, but an oceanic abyss.

With Ballast Publishing henceforth considered intangible, the real issue became the origin of the text itself. Hounded into a corner, the famous and elusive Jane P. Menard owned up to being a simple New Zealand actress, recently graduated from the Auckland Conservatory and hired by a shadowy publicity agency owned by the equally shadowy INTBAL Holding B.V.

So who was the author of the book?

Two Oxford Sinologists suggested that the text had not been written in English but was in fact a translation. According to them, the first version of Zacharias Ascaris had probably been drafted in Mandarin, presumably in one of those writing factories that had recently appeared in Guangdong, and subsequently translated into English by a Korean—certain syntactic subtleties were a dead giveaway.

For the first time in ages literature was making headlines. It monopolized the TV news reports, flooded the airwaves, clogged cyberspace.

Rabbis in Jerusalem were shown tearfully displaying what remained of ancient Torahs.

The Library of Congress was shown deserted, the floors strewn with trash.

Improvised bonfires were seen in the squares of Paris, containers overflowing with books in Germany, colossal shredders in India, pulping the abominable material day and night.

This did not last very long. The attacks in Dubai soon pushed the subject into the background. Besides, there was still no explanation, and journalists were loath to cite supernatural causes. People in the streets resorted to a pseudo-voodoo hodgepodge that borrowed freely from scientific vocabulary. Never had there been so much talk of nanotechnology, Faraday’s cage, quantum mechanics and string theory.  Now everyone was familiar with Schrödinger’s cat, which served to describe the state of a book that no one would be reading: neither intact nor Zacharified, but both intact and Zacharified simultaneously.

Booklovers began to fear for their collections. Or what was left of them. Heavily fortified strongboxes were now as vulnerable as a shoebox. They latched on to the last certitude: Since no one had ever witnessed (or filmed) a page in the process of being Zacharified, it was inferred that the human gaze, or even a mechanical substitute, could ward off the Phenomenon.

So the establishment of watch militias was proposed, but the project quickly proved unfeasible. Because to preserve a book it would have been necessary to watch each page permanently. For a few months an impressive array of cameras stood guard over the Book of Mormon at the University of Utah. But a common power outage aborted the operation, which to my knowledge was not imitated anywhere else. 

A number of readers resolved to learn their favorite texts by heart, and the soaring value of a good memory promptly became apparent. Unfortunately, the blinding speed of the Phenomenon made it impossible to make any significant progress. A few students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to memorize fifty or so short stories by Ray Bradbury before his works were engulfed.

The choice of Ray Bradbury may have seemed questionable, but the situation was deteriorating at such a rate that any author, any book seemed appropriate. Indeed, the Phenomenon had begun to overtake technical handbooks, books of Law, encyclopaedias, Web sites, instructions printed on medicine bottles, wrappers and labels, road signs, passports, dashboards . . .

New cases of Zacharification were constantly popping up. You could be reading the ingredients on a chocolate bar and realize even before taking the last bite that the list of glucoses, lactoses, and assorted soy lecithins had been transmogrified into a paragraph of Zacharias Ascaris.

Wherever there were a few words, the Phenomenon struck.

This new phase rekindled media interest, but the interest was short-lived because no sooner was it written or published than the slightest piece of journalism was Zacharified.

While computer specialists looked for ways to outstrip the Phenomenon, the computers stopped working. The upper layers of their operating systems, comprised of numbers and text, were now as exposed as any chocolate bar.

In the absence of computers, all electronic means of communication abruptly collapsed, and at daybreak on a rainy November 1st humanity sank into a great prehistoric silence.

Radios, TVs, computers, telephones, GPSs: dead.

Even the electricity wavered.

It lasted for ten days and ten nights.

At this point they dug out the antique transmitters that had preceded computerized hardware and had been gathering dust in the depths of warehouses here and there.

Installing them proved to be laborious, since, naturally, the instruction manuals, technical diagrams, and even the inscriptions on the instruments themselves had been transformed. In different places, eighty-year-old technicians, the last guardians of knowledge, were enlisted and acclaimed like Greek demigods.

After a few weeks, the old analog radio stations began broadcasting again, one after the other, as shaky as candles. Their impact remained regional, yet they ensured that a minimum of information was being disseminated. In the evening, people gathered around old receivers retrieved from attics and cellars and listened to the latest news.

Thus it was learned that Zacharias Ascaris had meanwhile continued to plunge like an out-of-control nuclear reactor, devouring deep strata of books conserved under lock and key in airtight rooms inside century-old libraries.

A number of suicides were reported when the last Gutenberg Bibles went under.

Just when we thought we had hit bottom, the small handwritten newspapers that had been circulating for a while were also transformed. The human hand, the final bunker of written culture, went down as well.

The contagion spread to the last vaults. The letters of Isaac Newton, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the manuscripts of Balzac, Tolstoy, Basho, the billions of characters formed by thousands of medieval scribes—all of them from now on reproduced the fateful, familiar sentences of Zacharias Ascaris.

The Codex Leicester, penned by Leonardo da Vinci, was withdrawn from its safe and examined in a mirror held in the curator’s trembling hand. What he found were long excerpts of Zacharias Ascaris in elegant script written in reverse.

The least grocery list, the least memo scribbled in pen was Zacharified as soon as one looked away.

There you have it.

Some five years have passed since the very first copy of Zacharias Ascaris was displayed in the window of a London bookstore.

Books can still be seen in various places, but no one reads them anymore. They have become worthless, except as fuel, insulation, or cat litter. Only tatters remain of what we were, what we wrote.

With my own eyes I have seen a few relics: a grocery list in Spanish, a TWA advertisement torn out of an old issue of National Geographic, a Toronto subway ticket. It is claimed that one last book has eluded Zacharification: a highway code printed in Croatia. But does anyone still care about such scraps of paper? They are mere curiosities, artefacts that our children will be unable to understand.

The storm seems to have blown over, but that is only a surface impression. Some specialists have concluded that the world’s handwritten archives will have been entirely Zacharified in the short run. Already there are accounts to the effect that texts engraved in stone or metal may also have been affected.

No need to be a futurologist to predict that before long the Egyptian stelae of the British Museum will also be Zacharified. The Rosetta Stone will engender three versions of Zacharias Ascaris: hieroglyphic, Egyptian demotic, and Ancient Greek. And the same will be true of every written document, down to the oldest, down to the Sumerian clay tablets.

What will happen when the totality of humankind’s written material has become completely Zacharified? The optimists claim that we will enter into a new era of oral literature, a time of freedom and serenity. Good for them.

As for me, I believe instead that the Ascaris will pursue its course and assault new languages, new media. The spoken word—that immaterial, intangible vibration—will offer no hold for the parasite, and so the only thing left will no doubt be the long protein helixes that make up our genetic code.

Le scandale de Zacharias Ascaris

Tout débuta il y a cinq ans, bientôt six. Ballast Publishing, une jeune maison d’édition britannique, venait de lancer le premier (et dernier) roman de son catalogue : Le scandale de Zacharias Ascaris – et rien, non, vraiment rien ne laissait présager les bouleversements que provoquerait ce texte.

Il fallait admettre que les aventures du jeune Zacharias Ascaris, quoique narrées avec un sens certain du suspens, n’avaient rien de très extraordinaire. Une bande d’adolescents, des rebondissements, de l’amour, une touche de surnaturel : la recette était éprouvée, mais peu novatrice, et ce livre sans relief aurait normalement dû s’évanouir au bout de quelques mois, emporté par le mouvement marémoteur de l’industrie littéraire.

Or, on connaît la suite : plus de 250 millions de copies de Zacharias Ascaris furent écoulées durant la première année, suivies, au cours de l’année suivante, de quelque 800 millions de copies supplémentaires en 67 langues.

Cet explosif succès faisait de Zacharias Ascaris le tout premier ouvrage de fiction à doubler le cap du milliard, ce qui le catapultait dans un club extrêmement restreint, à mi-chemin entre le livre des citations de Mao Zedong et la Sainte Bible.

L’auteure, une certaine Jane P. Menard, était « un secret enveloppé dans un mystère, niché à l’intérieur d’une énigme. » Trentenaire, blonde, jolie, elle n’apparaissait en public qu’à l’occasion de certains événements stratégiques. Elle rédigeait un blogue irrégulier et insipide où elle affirmait aimer les petits mammifères et les couchers de soleil, et insistait sur l’importance, pour un romancier, de « savoir s’effacer derrière sa création ».

J’étais doctorant à l’Université de Montréal, à cette époque, et comme la plupart de mes collègues, je n’aurais osé lire Les aventures de Zacharias Ascaris qu’enfermé à double tour dans un placard. L’effervescence médiatique qui entourait le phénomène me fascinait, en revanche, et je consacrai de nombreuses heures à la documenter dans ses moindres détails, accumulant fiévreusement des centaines de signets, de photocopies et de coupures de presse. Tout cela est aujourd’hui illisible, bien sûr, mais je dispose heureusement d’une excellente mémoire.

Je me rappelle clairement lorsque, vers la fin de la deuxième année, au moment où les ventes commençaient à plafonner, quelques centaines de clients d’Amazon signalèrent un étrange problème technique : tous leurs livres électroniques avaient été contaminés ou remplacés par un autre texte.

La plupart des lecteurs identifièrent très vite le texte parasite : il s’agissait du célèbre roman de Jane P. Menard.

Jamais on n’avait vu de corruption de fichiers de ce type. Amazon s’excusa, incrimina un serveur ancré au large de Hong Kong, et remplaça tous les titres corrompus sans frais. Les incidents se multiplièrent, cependant, jusqu’à toucher plusieurs fournisseurs, et on se résigna vite à suspendre les ventes de livres électroniques pour une durée indéterminée.

Les apôtres du papier exultaient : cette déroute servait leur cause mieux que n’importe quel argument, et on enregistra un regain d’engouement pour les librairies traditionnelles.

Personne ne soupçonnait que le livre papier connaîtrait bientôt le même sort.

On répertoria le tout premier cas dans une bibliothèque publique de Mainz, en Arizona : un exemplaire de Twilight, en l’espace de quelques jours, s’était entièrement transformé en copie de Zacharias Ascaris. Ce fut le début d’une vague de métamorphoses qui déferla sur les bibliothèques et les librairies du monde entier – quoiqu’il eut été plus juste de supposer que la métamorphose avait commencé depuis un moment, dans les entrepôts et les rayons reculés, et que l’on avait simplement tardé à la remarquer.

Je me souviens bien de mon premier contact avec une de ces copies. Je lisais un roman de William Gibson lorsque, soudain, en tournant une page, je me retrouvai en plein chapitre de Zacharias Ascaris

J’étais si abasourdi qu’il me fallut parcourir plusieurs lignes avant de comprendre ce qui se passait. J’examinai avec soin le livre. Aucun changement dans la typographie ou dans le pas de ligne, et peu importe l’angle dans lequel on examinait la page, il ne subsistait pas la moindre trace du texte original. Je revins à la page précédente, que je venais de terminer une minute plus tôt : elle s’était transformée entre-temps.

Dès cet épisode, je cessai de fréquenter les bibliothèques et les librairies. D’autres, plus optimistes, s’entêtèrent plusieurs semaines avant de comprendre.

Des rumeurs de complot circulèrent brièvement. On accusa Ballast Publishing d’entretenir une douteuse campagne de publicité – une présomption absurde puisque chaque nouvelle copie de Zacharias Ascaris contribuait à ralentir les ventes.

Les altérations, initialement peu fréquentes, se produisaient désormais partout. Tout le monde avait vu « une Copie » – on sentait ce C majuscule hanter la moindre conversation. En les examinant, on notait vite un singulier détail : le début du texte ne coïncidait que rarement avec le début du livre. Dès la première page, par exemple, on pouvait se retrouver au milieu du chapitre 34 – cet énigmatique passage où Zacharias battait le cyclope au ping-pong –, et si le récit se terminait au milieu du livre, alors il recommençait aussitôt, sans discontinuer, comme une chanson qui aurait joué en boucle.

Tous les livres n’en formaient plus qu’un seul, et la Galaxie Gutenberg se comportait comme un immense ruban de Möbius.

La « zacharification » n’avait touché jusque-là que des livres en anglais – où apparaissait (par une déconcertante logique) le texte de l’édition originale anglaise. Bientôt apparurent des copies allemandes dans le corpus allemand. Le portugais, le français, l’esperanto, l’italien, le japonais suivirent, et tant d’autres langues encore, et on rapporta même des copies dans les rares idiomes obscurs où le texte de Jane P. Menard n’avait pas encore été traduit, incluant quelques langues mortes.

C’est à cette époque que circula une information fort intéressante : un reporter du Wall Street Journal avait découvert que Ballast Publishing était, en quelque sorte, une compagnie fantôme.

Les employés et les cadres ne savaient rien des propriétaires, et la compagnie en tant que telle nichait au cœur d’une véritable matriochka juridique : Ballast Publishing appartenait à la compagnie INTBAL Holding B.V., laquelle appartenait à son tour à la Fondation Stichting INTBAL, enregistrée à Leiden, aux Pays-Bas. Quant aux droits sur le texte, ils relevaient d’IntBallast Rights B.V., laquelle compagnie appartenait dans l’ordre à Inter Ballast Holding S.A. (enregistré au Luxembourg) et Inter Ballast Holding (enregistrée aux Antilles Néerlandaises). Cette dernière compagnie, enfin, était gérée par une société fiduciaire de Curaçao – qui se révéla, après enquête, n’être qu’une simple façade.

Même les économistes en perdaient leur latin.

Pressées de révéler qui se cachait derrière ces différentes entités, les autorités légales avouèrent patauger dans la mélasse la plus totale : les propriétaires et bénéficiaires demeuraient introuvables, et tous les profits s’entassaient dans un compte bancaire de Zurich qui servait exclusivement à défrayer les frais de fonctionnement. Pas un franc n’avait été retiré par le bénéficiaire.

Il ne s’agissait pas d’un compte en banque, mais d’une fosse océanique.

Ballast Publishing étant désormais intangible, l’origine même du texte devint le véritable enjeu. Traquée jusque dans son bunker, la célèbre et élusive Jane P. Menard avoua n’être qu’une comédienne néo-zélandaise, fraîchement graduée du conservatoire d’Auckland, embauchée par une nébuleuse agence de publicité appartenant à la non moins nébuleuse INTBAL Holding B.V.

Qui donc avait écrit ce livre ?

Deux sinologues de l’Université Oxford suggérèrent que le texte n’avait pas été composé en anglais, mais qu’il s’agissait en fait d’une traduction. Selon eux, la première version de Zacharias Ascaris aurait été rédigée en mandarin, vraisemblablement dans un de ces ateliers d’écriture récemment apparus dans le Guangdong, puis traduite en anglais par un Coréen – certaines subtilités syntaxiques étaient, à cet égard, sans équivoques.

Pour la première fois depuis des lustres, la littérature défraya les manchettes. Elle accapara les bulletins télévisés, satura les ondes radio, congestionna la webosphère.

On vit des rabbins de Jérusalem brandissant, éplorés, ce qui avait été de très anciennes Torah.

On vit la Bibliothèque du Congrès désertée, des papiers gras jonchant le plancher.

On vit des bûchers improvisés sur les places de Paris, des conteneurs débordants de livres en Allemagne, des déchiqueteuses colossales en Inde qui pilonnaient jour et nuit le matériel pestiféré.

Cela ne dura guère. Les attentats de Dubaï chassèrent vite le sujet au second plan. En outre, on ne disposait toujours d’aucune explication et les journalistes répugnaient à invoquer des causes surnaturelles. Dans la rue, les badauds recouraient à tout un charabia pseudo-vaudou tiré du vocabulaire scientifique. Jamais n’avait-on autant entendu parler de nanotechnologie, de cage de Faraday, de mécanique quantique et de théorie des cordes. Tout le monde connaissait désormais le chat de Schrödinger, que l’on brandissait afin de décrire l’état d’un livre que personne n’aurait été en train de lire : ni intact, ni zacharifié, mais intact et zacharifié simultanément.

Les bibliophiles commencèrent à craindre pour leurs collections – ou ce qui en restait. Les coffres-forts les mieux blindés s’avéraient désormais aussi fragiles que de simples boîtes à chaussures. On s’accrochait à une dernière certitude : personne n’avait pu voir (ou filmer) une page en train de se zacharifier, et on en déduisait que le regard humain, même instrumentalisé, pouvait dévier le Phénomène.

On proposa la création de milices de veille, mais le projet s’avéra vite irréalisable : pour préserver un livre, en effet, il aurait fallu regarder chaque page en permanence.  Pendant quelques mois, un impressionnant dispositif de caméra protégea une copie du Livre des mormons, à l’Université d’Utah. Une anodine panne de courant fit cependant avorter l’entreprise, qui ne fut à ma connaissance imitée nulle part ailleurs.

Plusieurs lecteurs entreprirent d’apprendre leurs textes préférés par cœur – on commençait à deviner la valeur que prendrait bientôt une bonne mémoire. Malheureusement, la fulgurance du phénomène ne permit guère d’aller très loin. Quelques étudiants du Massachusetts Institute of Technology réussirent à mémoriser une cinquantaine de nouvelles de Ray Bradbury avant que son œuvre ne soit engloutie.

Le choix de Ray Bradbury pouvait sembler discutable – mais la situation s’aggravait  à un rythme tel que n’importe quel auteur, n’importe quel livre semblaient convenir. D’ailleurs, le Phénomène s’attaquait désormais aux manuels techniques, aux ouvrages de loi, aux encyclopédies, aux sites Web, aux posologies imprimées sur les flacons de médicaments, aux emballages et étiquettes, aux panneaux routiers, aux passeports, aux tableaux de bord…

Les cas de zacharification se produisaient sans cesse. Vous pouviez lire les ingrédients sur une barre de chocolat et, avant même d’avoir croqué la dernière bouchée, constater que la liste de glucoses, lactoses et autres lécithines de soya s’était transformée en un paragraphe de Zacharias Ascaris.

Partout où figuraient quelques mots, le Phénomène frappait.

Cette nouvelle étape engendra un regain d’attention médiatique – fort bref, car aussitôt écrit ou publié, le moindre texte journalistique se zacharifiait.

Alors que les informaticiens cherchaient des moyens pour prendre le Phénomène de vitesse, les ordinateurs cessèrent de fonctionner. Les couches supérieures de leurs systèmes d’opération se composaient de chiffres et de texte – désormais aussi vulnérables que n’importe quel emballage de tablette de chocolat.

Faute d’ordinateurs, les moyens de communication électronique flanchèrent brusquement – et l’humanité sombra, à l’aube d’un 1er novembre pluvieux, dans un grand silence préhistorique.

Radios, télévisions, ordinateurs, téléphones, GPS : tout était mort.

Même l’électricité vacillait.

Cela dura dix jours et dix nuits.

Puis, on exhuma ces antiques émetteurs qui avaient précédé le matériel informatisé, et qui prenaient la poussière ça et là, tout au fond des entrepôts.

Leur installation s’avéra laborieuse – car, bien sûr, les manuels d’instructions, les schémas techniques et même les inscriptions sur les appareils s’étaient transformés. Un peu partout, on vit des techniciens octogénaires reprendre du service, derniers gardiens du savoir, célébrés comme des demi-dieux grecs.

Les vieilles stations de radios analogiques recommencèrent à émettre au bout de quelques semaines, une à une, fragiles comme des chandelles. Leur influence restait régionale, mais assurait une circulation minimale de l’information. On se rassemblait le soir afin d’écouter les dernières nouvelles, assis autour de vieux récepteurs tirés des greniers et des caves.

Ainsi apprit-on que Zacharias Ascaris avait entre-temps continué à s’enfoncer, tel un réacteur nucléaire hors contrôle, dévorant des strates profondes de livres conservés sous clé et sous vide, dans des bibliothèques séculaires.

Il y eut, dit-on, quelques suicides lorsque les dernières Bibles de Gutenberg y passèrent.

Alors que nous pensions bientôt toucher le fond, les petits journaux calligraphiés qui circulaient depuis un moment commencèrent aussi à se transformer. La main humaine, dernier bunker de la culture écrite, tombait elle aussi.

La contagion gagna les dernières voûtes. La correspondance d’Isaac Newton, la Constitution américaine, la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, les manuscrits de Balzac, Tolstoï et Bashô, les milliards de caractères tracés par des milliers de copistes médiévaux – tout cela reproduisait désormais les phrases fatidiques et familières de Zacharias Ascaris.

Le Codex Leicester, rédigé par Léonard de Vinci, fut tiré de son coffre-fort et examiné dans un miroir, sous la main tremblante d’un conservateur. Il y trouva de longs extraits de Zacharias Ascaris élégamment calligraphiés à l’envers.

La moindre liste d’épicerie, le moindre mémo griffonné au stylo se zacharifiait dès que l’on détournait le regard.

Voilà.

Quelque cinq ans ont passé depuis que le tout premier exemplaire de Zacharias Ascaris aura été placé dans la vitrine d’une librairie londonienne.

On voit encore des livres un peu partout, mais plus personne ne les lit. Ils ont perdu toute valeur – sinon comme combustible, isolant ou litière. Il ne reste plus que des lambeaux de ce que nous étions, de ce que nous écrivions.

J’ai vu, de mes propres yeux, certaines reliques : une liste d’épicerie en espagnol, une publicité de TWA arrachée d’un vieux numéro du National Geographic, un billet du métro de Toronto. On prétend qu’un tout dernier livre aurait échappé à la zacharification, un code de la route imprimé en Croate – mais qui accorde encore de l’importance à ces bouts de papier ? Ce sont de simples curiosités, des artefacts que nos enfants seront incapables de comprendre.

La tempête semble derrière nous, mais il ne s’agit que d’une impression superficielle. Certains spécialistes estiment que les archives manuscrites du monde seront entièrement zacharifiées sous peu ; déjà, on entend des témoignages à l’effet que les textes rédigés dans la pierre ou le métal seraient aussi affectés.

Nul besoin de futurologue pour deviner que, bientôt, les stèles égyptiennes du British Museum se zacharifieront elles aussi. La Pierre de Rosette reproduira trois versions de Zacharias Ascaris – hiéroglyphes, égyptien démotique et grec ancien –, et il en ira ainsi de tous les documents écrits, jusqu’aux plus anciens, jusqu’aux tablettes en argile sumériennes.

Que se produira-t-il lorsque la totalité du matériel écrit de l’humanité se sera entièrement zacharifiée ? Les plus optimistes prétendent que nous entrerons dans une nouvelle ère de l’oralité, libre et sereine. Grand bien leur fasse.

Pour ma part, je crois plutôt que l’Ascaris cherchera à poursuivre son invasion dans de nouveaux langages, sur de nouveaux supports. La parole – vibration immatérielle, intangible – n’offrira guère de prise au parasite, et sans doute ne restera-t-il, alors, que ces longues hélices de protéines qui composent notre code génétique.

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