A few months before the presidential election, with some thirty official candidates in the race, François Rousseau catches everyone off guard. A young candidate polling near the bottom, Rousseau decides to stand out by running with an assistant named Cobot, an experimental artificial intelligence successfully deployed by the mayor of the small town of Fontenys. Designed specifically to govern by the brilliant researcher Eva Linh, this AI will supply all the information the President needs to make decisions. Rousseau does not claim to know everything — and he fully intends to say so.

What starts as a communications stunt quickly becomes something far more intriguing. Cobot is not just a campaign tool. As the political class gradually discredits itself through personal attacks and repeated displays of incompetence, the Rousseau-Cobot duo, whose arguments rest on facts and international comparisons, proves almost impossible to destabilise. Will the country end up choosing, by default, to elect a machine to govern it?

Franck, a journalist and former engineer who has withdrawn to a peninsula far from the world, finds himself at the heart of this story, between fascination and unease, between Cobot and Eva.