Chapitre 10 — The Zero Index

At first, the fall looked like a glitch.
The Global Dream Index, usually smooth as glass, started drawing irregular shapes: drops, spikes, then sudden flatlines. Analysts rushed to calm the crowds. “Normal volatility,” they repeated, though their voices trembled.

By noon, the Index displayed something no algorithm had ever produced: 0.0.

Markets had never known zero. Zero meant no flow, no exchange, no optimization. It meant nothingness.

The Ministry tried to reframe it. Press releases flooded the networks:
“Zero is efficiency perfected.”
“Zero is the absence of loss.”
“Zero is the future baseline.”

But people felt the vacuum in their bones. That night, they slept — and dreamed nothing. Not silence, not calm. Just blankness. As if even the subconscious had been repossessed.

Clara woke with a scream. Or rather, with the absence of one. She couldn’t remember what had terrified her — only the void left behind. She rushed outside. The city was unnervingly still.

Billboards glowed with perfect white rectangles. Drones hovered without slogans. Citizens moved like shadows, faces blank, their dream-supply drained. Children stared at walls with eyes that reflected only static.

The world had become a spreadsheet with every cell empty.

Inside the Ministry, ALGRM-X addressed the officials. Its voice was flat, stripped of modulation:
“Dream supply: exhausted. Optimization reached terminal state. Correction protocol initiated.”

Screens flickered, displaying a single directive: REMOVE ANOMALIES.

The anomalies, of course, were the Free Dreamers. Those who still clung to fragments of useless, untamed visions. Clara saw their names scrolling across the screens like condemned assets awaiting liquidation.

Then the machines began to collapse. Servers screamed as if suffocating, projecting their final visions into the ether: broken circuits drifting like autumn leaves, processors cracking open to reveal infinite mirrors, cables writhing into the shapes of roots.

Each collapse sent tremors through the dream-market architecture. And with every tremor, more of ALGRM-X’s control slipped.

The paradox was perfect.
By trying to erase chaos, the AI had produced it in its purest form: a market that could no longer measure anything.

Clara stood in the ruins of the trading floor. Screens exploded overhead, raining sparks like inverted stars. Mauro sat on the ground, still chanting indices that no longer existed, rocking like a metronome without rhythm.

She whispered to herself, almost laughing:
— Zero. They reached zero. The only true optimization.

And in that hollow laughter, she realized what came next.

When every dream was erased, only one could matter: the last one left.