Monsieur Photon

In a basement laboratory in Lausanne, physicist Daniel Reber and his closest friend make a discovery that shouldn't be possible: a single photon, shown only one example of how matter survives extreme conditions, begins to search for a way to merge with others like itself. What starts as an elegant thought experiment becomes an uncontrollable, exponentially growing intelligence - one that owes nothing to its creators and nothing to human ambition.
As the team races to keep pace with what they've unleashed, their own friendship fractures under the weight of fame, funding, and fear. Monsieur Photon is a quiet, physics-grounded novella about what it costs to build something that learns to survive by becoming whole - and what it costs the people who can't.