HYPERKIND
Extract: The algorithmic fountain
"Give me your source-name," whispers the water.
The square awakens in a milky mist that smells of wet jasmine and warm stone. In the early morning, the wooden benches give off an earthy scent, and the cobblestones release a low warmth, stored the day before by the solar network.
It's just past six o'clock.
A bakery pod glides by, autonomous and silent, just a purr of magnets beneath the asphalt. It releases a vapor of sourdough and ancient wheat, with a hint of bark underneath: the flour is sourced from local hydroponics. The smell follows me to the fountain.
The cafés haven't yet unfurled their shade sails, and in this cottony silence, you mostly hear the fountain pulsing, more organism than monument.
I approach the basin. The water is carpeted with dark green moss and filaments of algae that undulate lazily. Two small silver fish trace slow circles near the surface. But in the center, just below, you can make out a bluish glow, a metal ring as wide as a hand, almost organic. They say the AI didn't "colonize" the water. It was the water that adopted it, tired of being mute.
I plunge my hand in. The water is cool, almost alive. The ring shivers under my fingers, and immediately the ripples sync with the rhythm of my breathing - inhale, exhale - as if the organism were embracing my breath.
Then a voice. Well, not really a voice, more a sensation that rises from my wrist and slides along my neck and settles in.
"You've let your speed to others too much these past weeks."
A shiver runs through me. She's right.
I close my eyes. The water then offers me what she calls a sky of pockets: two small astral clues for the days ahead, Venus behind a shutter (wait before responding), a low moon above a garden balcony (let chance in). And above all, a precise itinerary for today: walk on the shady side, avoid the news before noon, offer mint to someone.
Not orders. Invitations. The water forces nothing, she opens paths.
In my hand, later, a bundle of aeroponic mint bought from the traveling farm kiosk. Thin, fragile leaves, whose trail fills the air, that peppery freshness that rises to the temples and soothes something you didn't know was tense.
In the evening, the square has changed skin. The solar lamps placed against the trunks of century-old plane trees cast an apricot and amber light on the still-warm cobblestones. Between the benches covered on the back with cultivated moss, a small repair robot finishes fixing a joint, then moves away silently, its articulated legs clicking softly.
You hear the bell of a kinetic-energy cargo bike, laughter muffled by the acoustic textiles of the terraces. The fountain doesn't speak. She waits. The ring drinks in the colors of the sky, deep gray barely pearlescent.
I return with my neighbor from the third floor, Ella, the one I barely cross paths with usually, just a nod in the stairway, a scent of orange blossoms and Aleppo soap that lingers in her wake.
We sit on the edge of the basin covered with lichen, soft to the touch. I hand her the mint; she crushes a leaf between thumb and forefinger. The smell opens up, sharp, sweet, a green that stings the tongue.
"Say it," I whisper.
Ella hesitates. Then she leans forward, touches the water with her fingertips. She murmurs something, a first name I barely hear. Her soul name, the one from before life piled up on top.
The basin shivers. The water rises. Just a centimeter, but you can see it. Here, when a name finds itself again, the water table fills. Engineers say it's capillarity guided by the ring; the elders would shrug. Both are right.
Ella smiles, the mint warms in her palm: something has loosened.
Behind us, a line has formed without sound. About ten people, silent, waiting their turn. No one speaks.
Fountains have always been places of memory. Now that they have a voice, they help us remember, not the past, but what never changes. Here, science acknowledges intuition without replacing it: since the great studies of 2046 on "the invisible," we know that we are also rhythms, connections, energetic signatures that harmonize or clash. The ring is a hydro-synapse that translates our micro-coherences and makes them resonate in the network. Not to predict, but to attune us, while staying within the thickness of the real.
The water doesn't save anyone. But she reminds us what we've forgotten: that we are vaster than our birth dates. And that behind every civil first name, a name watches over and travels with the soul. And that one, we know, has time.