Location: Primary school, Paris / Family apartment Date: September 1972 – During 1975 Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
September 1972. The air in the playground smelled of hot tar, crushed chalk and childish anguish.
Lazare Bonaparte, six years and three months old, was leaning against the rough trunk of an old plane tree, his hands buried in the pockets of his short corduroy breeches. Around him, a screaming tide of boys in gray coats ran in all directions, scraping their knees on the gravel, crying for a lost marble, or howling with laughter for no apparent reason. The noise was a physical assault. A cacophony of high-pitched voices pierced the eardrums of the former Service Action agent.
He closed his eyes for a moment. He sought silence. In his previous life, when chaos threatened to overwhelm him, he would lock himself in his Cambridge office, turn on the harsh light of his architect's lamp and plunge into the absolute serenity of a microprocessor architecture. The silicon wasn't screaming. Logic doors opened and closed with irrefutable binary logic. One and zero. True and false. Life and death.
But here, in 1972, in this schoolyard of the French Republic, there was neither silicon nor logic. There was only an organic absurdity that he would have to endure for years.
The bell rang, a metallic, squeaky sound that instantly froze the chaos. The children lined up, obeying the invisible authority of the institution. Lazarus took his place in the line, his back straight, his face smooth, his gaze empty. He set his breath to a slow rhythm. Mission in progress. Infiltration into hostile territory.
The classroom of the Preparatory Course was a mausoleum of varnished wood and rancid smells of beeswax. The desks were inclined, equipped with small white porcelain inkwells in which nibbled pen holders were dipped. For Lazarus, sitting at this table was a contortion. Not that her six-year-old body was too big, but her mind was suffocating in this confined space, designed to format virgin brains.
The schoolmaster, a stern man in a tweed suit who smelled of pipes and mothballs, clapped his hands to demand silence. He turned to the large blackboard and, with religious diligence, traced in white chalk a huge letter "A" in cursive capital letters.
"Today, children, we are going to learn the first letter of the alphabet," the man said in a solemn voice, convinced that he was opening the doors of knowledge to a new generation.
Seated in the third row, near the window, Lazarus stared at the picture. A. A vowel. An ASCII code of 65 in decimal, 01000001 in binary, 41 in hexadecimal. In his mind, the letter instantly broke down into bytes, electrical pulses traveling through data buses at the speed of light. He relives screens scrolling through millions of lines of code in C++, compression algorithms that he himself patented in the 90s, entire operating systems capable of handling billions of operations per second.
And there, in front of him, a man in tweed asked him to copy an "A" on a large-squared notebook.
The violence of the shift made him nauseous. It was a torture of refined cruelty. Lazarus took his pen-holder. His fingers, which had the muscle memory to assemble the tiny components of a motherboard or to disassemble the breech of an automatic weapon blindly, clenched around the light wood. He had to feign ignorance. He had to simulate the motor clumsiness of a child who is discovering writing.
He put the metal tip on the paper, mentally dipped it in lies, and drew a trembling "A." He purposely outflanked the blue line. He added a purple ink stain by pressing too hard. He looked at his work with cynical satisfaction. It was pathetic. It was perfect.
In the evening, when he brought his notebooks back to the family apartment, evaluation became an exact science. Lazarus had developed a mathematical strategy of calculated mediocrity.
Auguste Bonaparte demanded excellence. A son of the Bonaparte family, moreover the son of a senior intelligence officer, could not afford to be an average student. But Lazarus knew that to be too excellent was to expose oneself. If he brought back 20/20s on each assignment, if he read complex texts at the age of six, if he solved math problems at the middle school level, Auguste would notice it. His father's analytical eye tracked down the slightest anomaly. A precocious genius would attract psychologists, IQ tests, inquisitive looks. Light was the enemy of secrecy.
Lazare was therefore aiming for a 17.5/20 overall average.
It was a dizzying ridge line. During dictations, he immediately spotted the grammatical structure and spelled each word with the assurance of a member of the Académie française. Then, deliberately, he would slip a faulty "s" at the end of an irregular plural, or forget a circumflex accent on a simple past. During calculus lessons, as he visualized differential equations and complex matrices, he pretended to count on his fingers to add seven and eight, before writing down the answer, with exasperating slowness.
He excelled in the art of being very good without ever being extraordinary. Auguste nodded as he signed the notebook, satisfied but not surprised. Madeleine kissed him on the forehead, proud of her diligent little boy. And Lazarus returned to his room, exhausted by the monumental effort required of him by this comedy of stupidity.
But the real suffering was not at school. The real suffering was the surrounding emptiness.
France in the seventies appeared to him as a prehistoric desert. When walking the streets of Paris, Lazarus felt like a time traveler stranded on a dead planet. He looked at the coin-operated telephone booths, those heavy glass and steel boxes where people lined up to make a crackling call. He observed the cathode ray tube television sets in the living room, huge wooden furniture that took two minutes to heat up to spit out the bland images of the ORTF's only three channels.
Everything was mechanical, slow, heavy. Everything worked with gears, belts, massive electromagnetic relays. The very notion of information was physical: we read the newspaper printed the day before, we listened to vinyl records that we scratched with a needle, we sent letters that took days to cross the country.
For a mind that had known the immediacy of data flows, the permanent connection and the lightness of the immaterial, this era was a slow asphyxiation. He was suffocating. He was in need of a future.
In the evening, shut up in his room, when the city finally fell asleep, Lazarus opened a sketchbook that Madeleine had given him. Officially, he drew imaginary cities. In reality, he was putting his technological memory on paper before it faded. Using a ruler and a criterion, he drew diagrams of printed circuit boards. He reproduced the basic architectures of the first processors he had studied in his past life, instruction sets, registers, memory buses.
He was laying the foundations for what would become, twelve years later, Volta's founding patents.
One evening in November 1973, as he was completing the intricate sketch of what looked furiously like the logic diagram of a RISC chip, the door to his room opened without a sound.
Madeleine stepped forward, bringing the reassuring smell of her perfume and clean linen. Lazarus jumped imperceptibly, an old soldier's reflex, but he immediately covered the page with his hand with the fluidity of a child caught in error.
"Aren't you sleeping, big boy?" she whispered as she sat down on the edge of the bed.
Lazarus closed the notebook. Her eyes, dark and unfathomable, stared at her mother. He was seven years old. In the half-light, with his still round childlike features, he looked like a wax doll animated by a spirit too old.
"I was drawing, Mom."
Madeleine smiled and tried to take the notebook from him. "Show me your beautiful drawings. Are they still your big cities with all these little squares? »
Lazarus stood firm. Her little hands clenched on the cardboard cover. If he showed her this precise diagram, his annotations in the margins in technical English, the Boolean equations, she would understand that they were not city plans. She would see it as madness. Or worse, she would tell Auguste about it.
"It's a maze," he lied in a neutral voice, not flinching. "But it is secret. I didn't finish it. The hero is lost in it and he must find the way out. »
The analogy was not entirely wrong. Madeleine laughs softly, respecting her son's secret garden. She stroked his cheek, wished him a good night, and closed the door. Lazarus remained in the dark, his heart beating at a slow and painful pace. The labyrinth was real. And he was the only one who knew the walls.
While Lazare was building his inner fortress, the Bonaparte family was growing, irreparably altering the balance of the Parisian apartment.
In the early seventies, the arrival of his younger brother, Victor, introduced a physical dynamic that had the effect of a gust of wind. Where Lazarus was calculation, immobility and silence, Victor was pure energy, movement and noise. As soon as he could walk, the little boy turned the corridors into running tracks. He broke the vases, shouted when he was joyful, wept bitterly when he fell, and climbed on the furniture with the magnificent unconsciousness of a child who discovers the world without knowing its dangers.
For Lazarus, Victor was a fascinating enigma. He observed it as one studies an alien species. Victor was the embodiment of everything Lazarus had never been able to be in this new life: an authentic child.
The little brother very quickly devoted an absolute cult to his elder. For Victor, Lazarus was not only a brother; He was a superior entity, infallible, silent, and strong.
On a Wednesday afternoon in the winter of 1974, the dynamics of their relationship froze forever. Victor, then three or four years old, was crying hot tears in the drawing-room. He had just broken the mechanism of a small mechanical car made of painted sheet metal that Auguste had brought him back from Berlin. The rear axle was bent, the internal spring had unwound in a sinister rattle.
Lazarus, then eight years old, was sitting on the carpet, immersed in a history book whose geopolitical simplifications he was mentally correcting. Victor's shrill cries disturbed his concentration. Lazarus sighed, put down his book, and approached his little brother.
"Give," he said simply, holding out his hand.
Victor, his cheeks red and shining with tears, handed him the broken toy. Lazare took the little carriage. His fingers brushed against the sheet metal. He turned the object over. His brain scanned the rudimentary mechanics in a tenth of a second. Off-axis primary gearing. Spring leaf disengaged from the center pivot. Broken torsional force. It was elementary.
Using the handle of a small spoon that was lying on the coffee table, Lazarus pry up. He pushed the metal frame aside with surgical precision, just enough to slide his pinky inside. In three fluid movements that Victor was unable to follow, he replaced the spring in its notch, straightened the axle by a sharp twist of the wrist, and closed the chassis by pressing the sheet metal with his thumb.
He put the car on the floor, turned the small key to the side three times, and released the pressure. The toy sped off toward the couch with a joyful whirr.
Victor's tears stopped abruptly. Her eyes widened in wonder, instantly erasing her grief. He looked at the car, then looked up at his big brother.
"You're a magician, Lazarus," the child whispered, his voice breaking with admiration. "You're a genius."
Lazarus does not smile. He looked at the absolute confidence, the pure adoration that shone in the eyes of his younger brother. And instead of pride, he felt an icy cold wash over him. This look of admiration was a burden. Victor considered him a god because he knew how to fix a toy, but he was unaware of the chasm of darkness and calculations that lay behind his brother's actions.
The Cambridge engineer and the soldier of the Action Service had repaired the machine. The eight-year-old older brother had done nothing, because he didn't exist.
"It's just mechanical, Victor," Lazarus replied curtly, returning to his seat near his book. "Don't cry for things that can be repaired."
He had just laid the first brick of his character of a protective, cold, miracle-working but emotionally inaccessible older brother. He loved Victor, with the visceral love of an old soldier watching over an innocent recruit, but he knew they would never speak the same language. Victor would always be the arms, the action, the vital impulse. Lazarus would always be the brain, the shadow, the algorithm.
The following year, the family grew even more with the birth of Claire.
The house became noisier, more chaotic, more lively. Lazarus was nine years old. When he held his little sister in his arms for the first time at the clinic, he felt a familiar tightness in his chest. Claire was tiny, her little fists clenched against her sleeping face. Lazarus watched her breathe. He knew, with that prescience peculiar to the ancients who have seen too much, that she would be different from Victor. There was in the frown of his infant eyebrows the promise of mute observation. She would be the silent one, the one who listens at the doors, the one who searches. She would one day be a threat to Lazarus' great secret.
While the family unit was becoming denser, the outside world was convulsing. The father, Auguste, brought home the muffled echo of geopolitical upheavals.
At the table, there was no talk of rain and sunshine. Auguste dissected the oil crisis of 1973, galloping inflation, the death of Georges Pompidou, the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The DST was on edge, hunting down Soviet agents, monitoring far-left groups, managing the upheavals of the Cold War.
Lazarus, his face buried in his plate, ate his meat in silence, but his ears picked up every nuance. He listened to his father analyze France's energy dependence with palpable anguish. Augustus feared for the sovereignty of the nation in the face of blackmail from oil-producing countries.
"We are weak, Madeleine," Auguste said one evening in 1975, his face tired, lighting a cigarette despite his wife's protests. "France believes that it is independent because it has the atomic bomb and nuclear power plants under construction. But this is an illusion. Energy is only the first step. Soon, the real war will be fought elsewhere, and we don't even have the weapons to understand it. »
Lazarus slowly looked up at his father. For the first time, their eyes met not in defiance, but in asymmetrical understanding.
Augustus was right, thirty years in advance. He sensed the threat, but he did not know its form. Augustus was looking for spies in embassies and chariots on the plain of Fulda. Little did he know that the real war for sovereignty would not be fought with uranium or oil, but with silicon wafers etched in Asia and lines of code compiled in American Silicon Valley. Little did he know that America was poised to dominate the world not through its missiles, but through its processors and software.
"I know, father," thought Lazarus, his gaze in Auguste's eyes. I know how France will lose. I've seen her kneel before. I saw Thomson die, Bull get skinned. I have seen Europe become a digital colony.
"Eat, Lazarus, your dinner will grow cold," said Magdalene, breaking the heavy silence.
Lazarus lowered his eyes and took up his fork again.
His plan became clearer and clearer. Primary school was coming to an end. He had survived the first phase of his childhood without being unmasked. He had built his walls. He had accepted his existential loneliness. The family was nothing more than a warm setting in which he moved in apnea.
But the apnea could not last forever. He was starting to run out of air. The drawings in his secret notebooks were no longer enough to quench his thirst for technology. He needed to touch metal, to hear the crackling of electricity, to feel the thrill of the machine. He needed to reconnect with the network of History.
He was approaching ten years old. And the opportunity for a first breath was not going to come from Paris or his military father, but from the north of France. Mist, rain, and the territory of the most dangerous man in the family: his maternal uncle, Henri Dufresne.
The countdown to the founding of Volta, planned in his head for 1984, was entering its active phase. The sleeper would have to slowly begin to awaken.
Location: Dunkirk, Dufresne Industries Headquarters / A1 motorway Date: February 1976 Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Omniscient (focus on Henri Dufresne)
Dunkirk in the middle of February was not a city, it was a showdown. The sky, a heavy, metallic gray, seemed to weigh physically on the slate roofs. The icy North Sea wind rushed through the straight streets, carrying with it the smell of salt, heavy fuel oil and molten steel.
In the back of the Peugeot 504 wagon, ten-year-old Lazare watched the industrial landscape pass by through the fogged window. Next to him, Victor, exhausted from the journey from Paris, slept with his mouth open, his head propped up against their mother's coat. Little Claire had been entrusted to a nanny for the weekend, the northern climate and the austerity of the visit having been deemed unsuitable for an infant.
They came to visit Henri Charles Dufresne, Madeleine's older brother.
Henri was the CEO of Dufresne Industries, a northern textile flagship that the family patriarch had founded at the beginning of the century. But Henry was not a sleeping heir. He was a pragmatic predator. He had understood, long before his competitors, that traditional textiles were going to be crushed by the nascent globalization. He was already beginning, with assumed brutality towards the unions, the pivot of his factories towards composite materials and industrial technical textiles.
When the Peugeot parked in the courtyard of the Dufresne family's large home, a red brick building surrounded by a park of bare trees, Henri was waiting for them on the porch.
He was a tall, dry man, with a face cut with a pruning hook. He wore a dark wool suit with an impeccable cut. He embraced Madeleine with restrained affection, pressed Auguste's hand vigorously, and then lowered his eyes to his nephews. He absentmindedly patted Victor on the cheek, who had just woken up, before stopping on Lazarus.
The uncle and nephew gauged each other. Henri Dufresne used to intimidate. His grey gaze, pitiless, searched the weaknesses of his interlocutors. But Lazarus did not lower his eyes. He held the gaze of this man of forty-five with the absolute tranquillity of a veteran of sixty. Lazarus did not see an uncle; He saw an industrial boss, a hard-line capitalist, a potential ally or a future adversary.
Henri narrowed his eyes slightly. An amused, almost carnivorous grin stretched the line of his lips.
"He's cold-eyed, your eldest, Auguste," Henri said, without breaking eye contact with the child. "It looks like he's calculating the value of my shoes."
"He is thoughtful," Augustus replied matter-of-factly, though a hint of paternal pride pierced through his voice. "It's a useful trait."
The dinner that followed was in the image of the master of the house: rich, heavy and dominated by business. While Madeleine tried to soften the atmosphere by talking about Parisian life, the dialogue between Henry and Augustus inevitably drifted towards the state of France.
Sitting at the end of the table, Lazarus cut his meat in silence, recording every syllable.
"The State is blind, Auguste," asserted Henri, pouring a powerful Burgundy into his brother-in-law's glass. "You are looking for Russian spies under the beds, while the Americans are patenting the future. General de Gaulle understood the importance of independence, but his successors had no industrial vision. If we don't modernise our production lines at a forced march, in ten years' time, we will be the museum of Europe. »
"The security of the state depends first of all on the control of its borders and its energy, Henry," Augustus retorted, his jaw clenched. "Civilian industry must follow, not dictate the policy of the Nation."
"The frontier of tomorrow will not be geographical, my poor Auguste. It will be technological. And I intend to be on the right side of the line. Tomorrow, I'll show you what I had to buy from the Americans to modernize the management of my factories. You may understand what I'm talking about. »
Lazarus stopped chewing. His heart had just missed a beat. What he had to buy from the Americans. The next morning, the sky in Dunkirk had not changed colour. Henri took Auguste and Lazare to visit the main factory of Dufresne Industries. Victor had stayed at home with Madeleine, the industrial environment having been deemed too dangerous for his boundless energy.
The factory was a screaming monster. The infinite alignment of the industrial looms produced a deafening din, a mechanical vibration that rose through the soles of the feet to hit the stomach. The air smelled of hot grease, cotton dust, and worker sweat. Lazarus walked behind the two men, his face impassive in the face of this gigantism inherited from the nineteenth century. For him, all this was already dead.
After passing through the production workshops, Henri led them to a newly built annex. A double watertight door, equipped with a stammering digicode, marked a brutal border with the rest of the factory.
"This is the nerve center," Henri announced, typing the code. "It cost me the price of three warehouses, and the state didn't want to help me. But this is the price of survival. »
The door opened with a faint hiss of depressurization.
Lazarus stopped on the threshold.
The silence inside was religious, only disturbed by the low, continuous hum of an oversized air-conditioning system. The room was bathed in white, clinical light, without any windows. In the center, placed on an immaculate technical false floor, was the behemoth.
An IBM System/370 mainframe.
It wasn't a machine that you put on a desk. It was a physical architecture that occupied the space of several large metal cabinets. Gray control consoles, magnetic tape units with coils waiting to turn, flashing lights on complex control panels.
For Auguste and Henri, it was a management tool, a big calculator capable of processing payslips and stock logistics. To Lazarus, it was a divine apparition.
A shock wave went up his spine. For ten years his spirit had fasted. For ten years, he had been a man of the Silicon Age forced to live in the Bronze Age, condemned to draw circuit boards on paper notebooks, to listen to the pathetic clatter of mechanical typewriters, to endure the slowness of an analog world.
And suddenly, the smell of ozone. The dry heat of electronic components. The soft creak of a standby terminal.
It was primitive. The ARM processors he designed in his previous life, as big as his thumbnail, had a million times the computing power of these gigantic cabinets. But Lazarus didn't care. That was the starting point. It was the fire of Prometheus. It was the spark that would allow him to set the world ablaze.
He slowly advanced towards the main terminal, as if attracted by a magnetic field. His black eyes rounded out, reflecting the green glow of the glow-in-the-dark screen. He no longer needed to play the comedy of childish wonder. His fascination was total, absolute.
"It's impressive, isn't it?" said Henri, addressing Auguste with a satisfied smile, ignoring his nephew's trance. "It manages data from three factories in real time. The operating system has just been updated. Obviously, you need an engineer trained in Paris to run it. »
The engineer in question, a young man in a white short-sleeved shirt and thin tie, stood cautiously back from his boss, a notepad in his hand.
Lazarus reached the lectern. The screen displayed the flashing command prompt of the Time Sharing Option (TSO) system. The green cursor pulsated. Flashes. Flashes. A digital heartbeat that was calling him.
His tiny hands rose above the imposing mechanical keyboard. He felt his father's gaze fall on him, curious.
"Don't touch, Lazarus," Augustus warned gently. "It's professional equipment."
But the hunger was too great. Lazarus could not resist. After ten years of asphyxiation, he needed to know if he still spoke the language of the machine. He needed to check that his mind hadn't made it all up.
His fingers fell on the keys.
The sharp sound of the knocks echoed in the air-conditioned silence of the room. It was not the hesitant groping of a child of ten years old looking for letters. It was a precise, rhythmic burst, the muscle memory of a man who had typed millions of lines of code in another life. In a second and a half, Lazarus enters a basic system diagnostic command to query the status of the logical disks.
D U,DASD,ONLINE
He hit the heavy "ENTERED" key with the flat of his thumb.
The system reacts instantly. The green screen was swept away by a cascade of lines of text, spitting out the hexadecimal addresses, volume statuses, and serial numbers of connected disks.
The engineer in the white shirt let out a small muffled sound. He took a step forward, his eyes bulging, staring at the screen, then at the child.
Auguste frowned, the policeman's instinct suddenly awakening in the face of the anomaly. But it was Henri Dufresne's reaction that set the moment in stone.
The industrialist had stopped breathing. His hard face froze. He looked at Lazarus with terrifying intensity. Henri knew nothing about computers, but he knew human nature, he knew power, and he had just seen the impossible. A ten-year-old child had just addressed an American machine worth a million francs with the natural authority of a master talking to his dog.
The tension in the room became sharp. Lazarus' mask had just slipped off. A major tactical error caused by his addiction to silicon.
The agent of the Action Service regained control in extremis. Lazarus abruptly withdrew his hands from the keyboard, took a step back, and feigned a start, as if frightened by the sudden scrolling of data on the screen. He turned a falsely guilty face towards his father.
"Sorry, Dad..." He stammered, forcing his voice to drift slightly to the high notes. "I typed what they wrote in the magazine... »
"Which magazine?" asked Auguste, his voice cold, dissecting the lie.
"The Science et Vie that I found at the dentist last month. There was an article about American computers. They said that you had to type these letters to see the memoirs. I just wanted to try it for real. I didn't break it, did I? »
The explanation was far-fetched. But it offered a rational way out. For an adult in 1976, the idea of a child having a photographic memory from a popular science magazine was rare, but acceptable. The idea that this child was a reincarnated 21st-century engineer belonged to no register of possibility.
Augustus expired for a long time, the tension dropping a notch. "You don't touch anything without permission, Lazarus. Curiosity does not excuse indiscipline. »
The engineer, relieved, stepped forward to clear the screen, muttering that the child had had "an incredible stroke of luck" by typing an exact syntax at random from a magazine's memories.
But Henri Dufresne said nothing.
The great industrialist of the North did not take his eyes off Lazarus. Henri didn't believe the magazine's excuse for a second. He had seen the fluidity of the gesture. He had seen Lazare's dark gaze before the strike: not the hesitation of a reader remembering an article, but the icy concentration of a professional at work.
Henri asked no questions. He did not attempt to expose his nephew before Augustus. He contented himself with sketching a very slight smile, a smile of predatory connivance. He had just understood that the eldest son of the Bonapartes was hiding a monster under his face of the top of the class. And Henri Dufresne loved monsters, especially when they were part of the family.
"Leave him, Augustus," said Henry gently, laying his heavy hand on Lazarus's shoulder. "The little one understood that the future was behind this screen. If he's interested in his uncle's machines, I'm not going to blame him. »
Henry's hand weighed like lead. Lazarus looked up at him. In this shared silence, amidst the hum of the computer, an invisible and dangerous pact had just been sealed between the two men. Henri knew there was a secret. Lazare knew that Henri knew. For decades to come, this line of tension would never fade. Henry was going to nibble away at Lazarus' empire, try to influence him, respect him, but without ever crossing the red line, because he had seen, that day, that Lazarus was of a different nature.
The visit ended. The machine resumed its invisible work, and Lazarus returned to his exile. But the spark had sparkled.
The return trip to Paris took place on Sunday evening, in a pouring rain that swept the A1 motorway. The regular sound of windshield wipers rocked the interior of the Peugeot. Auguste drove silently, frowning, focused on the shiny road. Madeleine slept quietly in the passenger seat. At the back, Victor had sprawled out, his mouth half-open.
Only Lazarus was awake.
The fading yellow glow of highway streetlights intermittently illuminated his ten-year-old face. His eyes were wide open, shining with feverish intensity. Contact with Henri's computer had broken the dam of his patience. He could no longer wait passively. He could no longer be content to survive elementary school.
He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a small black-covered notebook and a ballpoint pen.
Taking advantage of the darkness and the hypnotic rhythm of the road, he opened the notebook to the first blank page. He did not draw fake printed circuit boards to deceive his mother. He did not draw abstract schemes.
He wrote.
His writing had become more refined, rid of the scholastic curves that he imposed on himself during the day. It was the dry, angular, and precise handwriting of the Cambridge engineer.
At the top of the page, he drew a chronological line.
He wrote the date of the day: February 1976. Then he shot an arrow towards the future, stopping on another date, circled in black: June 1984 - Civil majority.
He had eight years left. Eight years to accumulate absolute intellectual capital. Eight years to design, in his head, without access to any machine to help him, the architecture of the first sovereign operating system in the history of France. He would have to write it down on paper, compile it in his brain, check it mentally night after night, in a total technological vacuum. It was a mammoth job, a challenge that would drive the best programmer in the world crazy.
But Lazarus had time, and he hated defeat.
Under the date of 1984, Lazarus put his pen to paper. He stared at the blue ink for a moment. He was looking for a name. Not a technical acronym. Not an English word would remind us of Europe's submission to Silicon Valley. He needed a name of energy. A name of spark. A name that evoked the origin of electric power, a tribute to the founding fathers of European science.
The car passed under a bridge, plunging the passenger compartment into total darkness for a second, before the headlights reasserted itself.
Lazarus pressed the tip of his pen firmly on the paper, and in capital letters he wrote:
VOLTA.
He underlined the word twice. The tip of the pen pierced the paper slightly.
He had just founded his empire in the back seat of a French sedan, in the middle of the night, at the age when other children were learning their multiplication tables.
He closed the notebook, slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket, right against his heart. The sound of the windshield wipers suddenly seemed to have changed rhythm. It was no longer the throbbing sound of rain. It was the ticking of a ticking time bomb which Lazarus had just armed in silence, and which in eight years would explode in the face of the world.