I wonder if I would be saner, more serene, if my consciousness were transferred into a robot. No doubt this artificial version of me would resist life better. My ghosts growl. They are annoyed by my stupidity. In the flakes of dust that waltz gently towards the ground, I decide to return to the only thing that could protect me as much as a synthetic body: all these papers, these boxes that conceal a crucial part of me that I have been slow to look for, but that I have finally begun to find.

I n 2045, a young woman finds herself confined, isolated at home, in North America, during yet another pandemic. She then delves into the archives bequeathed by her grandmother, who arrived from Haiti to Quebec in the 1960s. At the same time, she conducts research on access to the history of Black communities, on the constitution and status of their archives. Recluse in a universe that is becoming virtualized and crumbling, she seeks to reestablish ties with her family, by trying to find something she believes she has lost.

"Initiatory tales are precisely made of impossible quests: between on the one hand the project of preserving the archive and finding its own coherence there, while it itself is deeply affected by the sediments of transatlantic history and its avatars, and on the other hand the apparently unlimited resources of artificial intelligence, the technological device appears both as an opportunity and as a profound obstacle. We must therefore find all the means of not being blinded, of not performing in this pixelated dust the planned scene of our own disappearance. The author's Afrofuturist fiction contains this danger and these possibilities." — Stéphane Martelly, excerpt from the preface