Location: Dufresne Residence / Dufresne Industries Factory, Dunkirk Date: February 1976 (The night from Saturday to Sunday) Viewpoint: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The night at Dunkirk brought no rest. It was only a continuation of the weather hostilities, an uninterrupted assault of salty wind and freezing rain against the heavy oak shutters of the Dufresne family home.
Lying in the extra bed in the guest room, Lazarus kept his eyes open. A few meters from him, Victor slept the heavy and noisy sleep of exhausted children, his little hands gripping the woollen blanket. Lazarus, on the other hand, was unable to sleep. His ten-year-old body cried out for rest, but his mind burned with a dry fever.
He kept reviewing the glow-in-the-dark screen of the IBM System/370. The green glow throbbed in the darkness of the room, imprinted on her retina like a luminous scar. D U,DASD,ONLINE. Five words, a few commas, and the scrap metal world of the seventies had suddenly opened up to offer him a glimpse of the digital paradise.
He had made a major tactical error that afternoon, in front of his father and uncle. The addiction had been stronger than the caution. He had touched the keyboard, and in a split second, he had let decades of encrypted knowledge slip away. His excuse, this alleged article read in a dentist's waiting room, was just a crude smokescreen. Auguste, with his paranoia as a DST cop, had almost clung to it. But it was Henri Dufresne's gaze that tormented Lazare.
The uncle hadn't swallowed the lie. Henri had seen the posture. He had recognized the fluidity of the predator.
Lazarus closed his eyes, attempting to calm his heartbeat by visualizing the architecture of VoltaOS's future kernel, mentally designing the virtual memory allocation he would have to code years later.
Suddenly, a tiny crack tore him from his thoughts.
The sound did not come from the storm outside. He came from the hallway. A slow, deliberate pressure on a parquet floorboard. Lazarus instantly stopped breathing. His hearing, sharpened by years of nocturnal stalking in his early life, isolated the noise. Someone was approaching. Not Auguste. His father's step, shaped by the military, was light, walking on the soles of his feet to minimize the impact. This step was heavy, anchored, that of a man who owns the walls on which he walks.
The brass handle turned with calculated slowness.
A ray of yellow light pierced the darkness of the room, slowly widening. The tall figure of Henri Dufresne was silhouetted in the doorway. He wore a heavy dark wool overcoat over a black turtleneck. In his right hand, a half-burned cigarette let out a wisp of blue smoke.
Henri stood still for a moment, scanning the room. Her gaze slid over Victor's bed, then fell on Lazarus.
The ten-year-old child did not pretend to be asleep. He didn't start. He was already half seated, leaning against the head of the bed, his black eyes staring at his uncle with unfathomable intensity.
Henri sketched the same carnivorous smile he had had that afternoon. He entered the room, closed the door without rattling the bolt, and approached the bed. He took no maternal precautions. He grabbed Lazarus' velvet trousers and thick sweater from a chair, and threw them on the child's lap.
"Get dressed," Henri whispered in a gravelly voice, just above a whisper. "Put on your shoes. We go out. »
Lazarus asked no questions. Why? Where are we going? And Dad? These questions belonged to the repertoire of a normal child. The sixty-year-old engineer understood the situation perfectly. Henry had just violated the sovereignty of Augustus. Henri was carrying out an exfiltration.
Lazarus dressed in silence, his gestures precise and quick in the half-light. He tied his laces, put on his navy blue coat, and stood up. He reached the height of his uncle's waist.
Henri crushed his cigarette in a small crystal ashtray on the chest of drawers, placed a heavy hand on Lazarus' shoulder, and guided him to the door.
The crossing of the sleeping house was a surgical operation. They passed in front of the closed door of the room where Auguste and Madeleine were lying. Lazarus felt a rush of cold adrenaline run down his spine. If his father, whose sleep was that of an intelligence agent always on alert, opened the door at that moment, the diplomatic incident would be explosive. What was the industrialist from the North doing taking the eldest son to one o'clock in the morning in the rain?
But Augustus did not wake up. The bourgeois arrogance of the Dufresne house, with its thick walls and massive doors, drowned out the sound of their flight.
Outside, the wind hit them with the violence of a wall of icy water. Henri's heavy grey Mercedes was parked in the gravel driveway. The uncle opened the passenger door. Lazarus rushed in, grateful for the warmth of the leather. Henri got behind the wheel, turned the ignition key without turning on the headlights, and let the sedan slide gently toward the property's gate before roaring the six-cylinder engine.
The interior smelled of blond tobacco, new leather and peppery cologne. Silence settled, heavy, only broken by the frenzied flapping of windshield wipers chasing away waterspouts.
Lazare kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, on the beams of the headlights that pierced the darkness of the departmental road. His analytical mind dissected the situation. Henri did not take him to a forest to make him disappear. Henri was not a psychopath; he was a CEO. And a CEO doesn't wake up in the middle of the night for nothing. He is looking for a return on investment. Henri had seen an anomaly in the system, a flaw in his nephew's womb, and instead of calling a psychiatrist as Madeleine would have done, or conducting a police interrogation as Auguste would have done, Henri wanted to test the anomaly. He wanted to exploit it.
"Your father is a great man, Lazarus," said Henri at last, his voice drowning out the sound of the shower, without taking his eyes off the road. "He is an upright man. A patriot. It protects the state. But the state makes him blind. Augustus sees the world in black and white. What is normal, and what is a threat. If he doesn't understand something, he destroys it or locks it up. »
Henri turned his head briefly towards the child. The greenish glow of the dashboard illuminated the hard features of the industrialist.
"You figured that out very quickly, didn't you?" the uncle added.
Lazarus did not answer. Silence was his best armor. Any word could be held against him.
"A child of ten years old who reads Science and Life at the dentist's," replied Henri, with a dry laugh, devoid of all joy. "And who, by divine coincidence, remembers exactly one hexadecimal command line specific to the IBM TSO system, without making a single typo. A great story to put a tired cop to sleep. But I, Lazarus, am not a cop. I am a builder. And I hate being taken for a fool. »
The Mercedes slows down. The huge gates of Dufresne Industries loomed in the rain. The night watchman, sheltered in his neon-lit gatehouse, rushed to open the entrance, recognizing the owner's license plate. He saluted militarily, not daring to glance at the passenger seat.
The sedan crossed the deserted factory yard, stopping as close as possible to the computer annex.
Henri turned off the engine. The brutality of the silence that followed was almost deafening. He turned entirely to Lazarus, resting his arm on the back of the seat.
"I don't care how you know what you know, Lazarus," Henri whispered, his tone suddenly stripped of all irony, icy and sharp as a scalpel. "I don't believe in spirits, I don't believe in magicians. I don't care if you're a mutant, a precocious genius or if you break into Bull's offices in Paris at night. What interests me is to know how far you can go. »
Lazarus held the gaze. Physical fear did not exist in him. He had stood up to heavily armed commandos in the Middle East. It wasn't a textile boss in a woollen coat that was going to make him waver. But he felt the noose close. The secret, patiently constructed over the past ten years, had just undergone its first critical breach.
"What if I'm just a lucky kid?" asked Lazarus softly, his thin ten-year-old voice in horrific contrast to the gravity of his words.
"Then you will go back to bed, and tomorrow we will forget about this walk," replied Henri for tat. "But if you're what I think you are..." You are suffocating to death under your father's roof. You're dying of boredom. You're dying of not being able to touch the machines. I saw it in your eyes this afternoon. You had the look of a hungry man in front of a banquet. »
Henri got out of the car, slamming the door. Lazarus closed his eyes for a second. The uncle had hit the nail on the head. Hunger. That was his weak point.
He went out in his turn, bowing his head against the rain, and followed Henri to the double door of the annex. The manufacturer typed the code on the numeric keypad with sharp gestures. The airlock opened.
The thermal airlock dried them almost instantly. Then the second door opened into the immaculate hall.
The behemoth was there. The IBM System/370 purred softly, its metal cabinets towering over the room like gray monoliths. The light of the neon lights reflected off the perfectly polished floor. The smell of ozone and warm plastic rose to Lazarus' nostrils, causing an involuntary shiver down his arms. His drug.
Henri walked up to the main console and turned on the control terminal. The CRT screen woke up in a static crackle, displaying the green prompt. The industrialist took a step back, clearing access to the heavy black leatherette swivel chair.
He crossed his arms over his chest, his tall stature towering over the child.
"My chief engineer explained to me how fragile this machine was," Henri began, his voice echoing in the air-conditioned silence. "He told me that a syntax error in the lower layers of the system could corrupt the database, block production at three factories and cost me millions of francs in late deliveries."
Henri nodded to the chair.
"I am ready to accept this loss, Lazarus. I'm willing to risk the destruction of my own system tonight just to see if I'm right. »
It was a gamble of crazy audacity. Henri put the vital tool of his industrial empire in the hands of a ten-year-old child, on the basis of a dazzling intuition. It was the folly of the great captains of industry, those who preferred to risk bankruptcy rather than miss out on a revolution.
"Your father would see in you an anomaly to be corrected, a state secret to be protected," Henri continued, lowering his tone, almost confidential. "I see a lever. An unfair advantage. The question is: will you continue to play the little idiot from elementary school, or will you show me what you've got in your belly? »
Lazarus remained motionless in the center of the room. Her little navy blue coat dripped on the immaculate floor. He looked at the green screen. He looked at his uncle.
The calculation was instantaneous.
If he refused, if he began to cry while playing the terrified child, Henri would perhaps end by doubting. He would return to Paris. He would once again become the prisoner of his childhood bedroom, condemned to blacken secret notebooks with ballpoint pens for another eight long years before being able to touch the shadow of a keyboard. He would continue to suffocate.
If he accepted, he signed a pact with the devil. He gave Henri a formidable psychological weapon, a shared secret that would bind them forever. He knew that the uncle would one day seek to use this alliance to take control of what Lazarus would build. It would be a war of attrition, a game of chess that would last for decades.
But in the end, the choice was not a choice. Lazarus could not back down. The soldier had found his weapon. The architect had found his foundation.
Slowly, Lazarus removed his damp cloak and let it fall to the ground with regal indifference.
He walked towards the desk. The leatherette stool was too high for him. He had to pull himself up by leaning on the metal bar. His feet were dangling in the air, ten centimeters from the ground. A pathetic and childish image.
But when he put his little hands on the ash-gray keyboard, everything changed.
The mask melted. The comedy evaporated in the air-conditioned air of the room. Lazarus' back stiffened with military stiffness. His neck aligned with the axis of his shoulders. The angle of his chin went up, arrogant, domineering. His dark eyes lost the naivety he had taken ten years to forge. His eyes became abysses of cold, analytical, implacable intelligence.
Behind him, Henri Dufresne held his breath. The manufacturer had just had the answer to his question. There was no longer a little boy in the room. There was an entity of terrifying density.
Lazarus inhaled deeply the smell of ozone. And he knocked.
Location: Central server room, Dufresne Industries factory, Dunkirk Date: February 1976 (Saturday night to Sunday) Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Omniscient (focus on Henri Dufresne)
The IBM System/370's keyboard was a piece of heavy engineering, designed for the hands of adult typers, with hollow keys that required firm pressure and returned a mechanical, sharp click. For Lazare's little hands, ergonomics was a nightmare. He had to stretch his fingers to the extreme to reach the function keys and the spacebar simultaneously.
But the brain had not shrunk.
From the first second, Lazarus' mind interfaced with the logic of the American machine. He could no longer see a green screen and flashing letters; He saw a flow architecture, memory registers, data pipelines.
He began with a series of audit orders. Her fingers, hesitant at first long enough to calibrate their strength, quickly found their rhythm. The rattle accelerated to a continuous roll, a hailstorm beating down on the heavy plastic.
Behind him, Henri Dufresne had ceased to breathe. The industrialist was watching his nephew's back. He wasn't a gifted kid playing with a complicated toy. He was a surgeon who opened a patient with an open heart. The speed of the strike was inhuman for a boy of that age. Lazarus did not even look at the keyboard; His black eyes remained fixed on the cascade of hexadecimal lines that passed across the glow-in-the-dark screen, reading the machine code as one reads a newspaper.
Lazarus penetrated the ordering layers of the TSO system. Henri's chief engineer, whose services the industrialist paid handsomely, had done a clean job, but fundamentally scholastic. He had used standard IBM routines to manage the queue of the mill's processes: yarn inventory management, loom turnaround time calculations, maintenance schedules. It was heavy, sequential, and tragically ineffective.
A factory is not a logical consequence, it is a living organism, Lazare thought, a contemptuous grin distorting his child's lips. Data must be processed in parallel, bottlenecks must be anticipated.
He opened the Job Control Language (JCL) editor.
"What are you doing?" asked Henri's deep voice behind his back, betraying a tiny crack of nervousness. The CEO saw warning screens flashing. The word OVERRIDE had just appeared in capital letters.
Lazarus did not turn round. When he spoke, his voice was no longer of the thin candor he used with his mother or his little brother. The tone was low, composed, charged with an icy authority that made Henri shiver despite the warmth of the waiters.
"I'm watching how your factory breathes, Uncle Henri," replied Lazare, without ceasing to tap. "And she breathes badly. Your engineer has configured the batch job to run linearly. When workshop B requests polyester thread, the system blocks requests from workshop C while it allocates the resource. It's stupid. It creates micro-downtime on your machines. Over the course of a day, you lose cumulative production hours. »
Henri's eyes widened. What the ten-year-old had just described in three sentences, with the vocabulary of an experienced COO, was the exact problem that the board had been trying to solve for six months.
"You... Can you see that just by reading these lines? Henri murmured, taking a step forward, terrified and fascinated.
"Code never lies. Men lie, balance sheets lie, but the machine does exactly what it is ordered to do. Your system is stupid because it has been taught to be stupid. »
Lazarus erased a block of fifty lines of code in one go.
"Wait!" exclaimed Henri, the blood running cold in his veins. "If you purge the base, tomorrow morning the factory won't start!"
"Don't interrupt me when I'm working," Lazare cut off in a tone so dry, so imperious, that Henri Dufresne, the great boss feared throughout the North of France, closed his mouth and obeyed.
For an hour the silence belonged only to the frenzied clatter of the keyboard. Lazarus was in a trance. He was rewriting resource allocation routines. It circumvented the limitations of the American operating system by injecting subroutines that it coded directly in assembler, optimizing access to magnetic disks to save precious milliseconds. It was raw, it was absolutely elegant. He applied software architecture concepts from the 90s to a machine from the 70s. He twisted metal by the sheer force of his mind.
He was hot. Sweat beaded on her childish forehead, wetting her brown hair. The cognitive effort was titanic. His small body was not made to withstand such a burst of adrenaline and prolonged concentration, but the ecstasy of creation compensated for the physical pain.
Finally, he struck the execution key one last time with the flat of his hand.
JOB SUBMITTED. COMPILE SUCCESSFUL. ROUTINE REPLACED.
Lazarus relaxed his breath with a long, trembling sigh. He leaned against the leatherette back of the chair, his arms dangling, his eyes half-closed, drunk with fatigue and power.
Slowly, he swiveled the heavy chair to face his uncle.
Henri looked at him as one looks at a demon. The industrialist's face had lost its colour. He leaned against a metal cabinet, his arms still crossed, but his posture was no longer dominant. He had just understood that the boy sitting in front of him did not belong to the rational world.
"What have you done?" asked Henri, his voice hoarse.
"I've rewritten the queue management algorithm for your three factories," Lazare replied, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve. "I introduced a dynamic prioritization system. The machine will no longer process requests in order of arrival, but by strategic production weight. The most profitable workshop will always be served first, without blocking the others in cache. »
Lazarus laid his black eyes on those of his uncle.
"As soon as the morning shift takes up their shifts tomorrow, your looms will turn with absolute fluidity. Computing latency is reduced by eighty percent. Theoretically, with the same amount of energy and the same payroll, you'll see an increase in your productivity of twelve to fifteen percent by the end of the month. »
The silence fell, heavy and sticky.
Fifteen percent. For Dufresne Industries, this represented millions of francs in additional net margin per year. An unfair competitive advantage over the rest of the European textile industry. Generated in an hour, on a keyboard, by a child who didn't even know how to solve quadratic equations at school.
Henri took a pack of cigarettes out of his coat. His hands trembled slightly. He lit one, inhaling a long puff of acrid smoke that polluted the purified air in the waiter's room.
"What are you, Lazarus?" asked Henri gently, almost to himself. "A learned monkey? A monster? »
"I am the son of Auguste and Madeleine. And I am your nephew," replied Lazarus, with perfect neutrality. "The rest is none of your business."
The industrialist laughs out loud. A burst of dry laughter that resonated strangely. The capitalist instinct, stronger than the metaphysical terror, was rapidly regaining its rights. Henri Dufresne did not understand magic, but he understood money, and he understood power. The anomaly sitting on this chair was worth more than his entire empire of bricks and cotton.
"Your father would treat you like a guinea pig. He would have you locked up in the basement of the DST to decrypt Soviet cables. Your mother... your mother would have a nervous breakdown," said Henri, resuming his negotiating posture, and advancing towards the child.
"That is why Augustus and Magdalene will never know," Lazarus said.
"And why should I keep your secret, Lazarus? What prevents me from going to wake Auguste when I come home, and telling him that his son is a dangerous phenomenon for himself? »
Lazare sketched that cold grin, that smile that he hadn't worn since his death in Bali.
"Because you're a Dufresne, Uncle Henri. Because you prefer the shadow that brings back to the light that destroys. If you hand me over to my father, you lose the advantage. The DST confiscated the anomaly. But if you keep quiet... Lazarus gestured to the computer with a fluid gesture. « ... You just saw what I can do with your American toy. Imagine what I can do when I grow up. »
Henri crushed his cigarette under the sole of his Italian moccasin, mocking the security rules of the computer room. He approached, placed both his hands on the armrests of Lazarus' chair, enclosing him in his shadow. Their faces were only inches apart.
"You want a deal, kid."
"I want oxygen," Lazare corrected, not backing down a millimeter. "I'm slowly dying in my room in Paris. School is exhausting me. The silence drives me crazy. I need equipment. I need American technical manuals, logical architecture, applied mathematics. I want to be able to come here, to this factory, without Auguste asking any questions. I want you to be my cover. »
"A blanket is expensive," Henri retorted, his eyes narrowed. "What's in it for me?"
"Total optimization of your factories. In two years, when I'm ready, I'll build you a forward-looking order management program. I will make Dufresne Industries the most modern company in Europe. I will make you untouchable in your market. »
"And for you? What is your goal? »
Lazarus looked away for a moment. He thought of the black notebook in his coat pocket. He thought of Volta. He thought of the sovereignty of France. But he knew that Henri would not understand sacrificial patriotism. It was necessary to speak his language to him: pure ambition.
"I want to build my own systems," Lazare said. "American IT is an insult. I'm going to create better. And for that, I need a clandestine laboratory. You provide me with access and books, and in exchange, I pay you in code. »
Henri Dufresne observed this child's face with smooth features, and behind it, this abyss of black and domineering intelligence. He felt the thrill of history brush the back of his neck. He was playing with fire, he knew it. A child capable of manipulating a system of this magnitude with such cynicism would, as an adult, be a terrible adversary. But Henri had never refused a risky bet.
Slowly, the industrialist held out his large right hand.
"The secret will remain within these walls, Lazarus. I will tell your father that you have a curious passion for machines, that I think you are gifted, and that I want to encourage you. Auguste is rigid, but he respects my judgment. I will have everything you ask delivered to you in Paris, in a discreet envelope. And every school holiday, you'll come to Dunkirk. »
Lazarus looked at the outstretched hand. It was not a friendly hand. It was the claw of an eagle who thought he was seizing a useful prey. Lazarus knew very well that in ten, fifteen or twenty years, when Volta was a behemoth, Henri Dufresne would use this pact to claim his share of the pie. He would try to nibble away at it, to influence his board of directors. The ambiguity of their relationship had just been born, here, on this technical false floor.
Lazarus put out his little hand and squeezed his uncle's. Henry's grip was crushing; that of Lazarus was cold, almost inert, but did not yield.
"Deal done," said Lazarus.
When they left the factory, the rain had stopped. Dawn was breaking on Dunkirk, a grayish scratch on the black horizon of the North Sea.
The drive back to the large family home was done in total silence. But it was no longer the heavy and suspicious silence of the outward journey. It was the silence of two conspirators.
Lazarus watched the industrial landscape go by. Fatigue was finally starting to catch up with him, a deep bone exhaustion that threatened to swallow him up. He folded his legs over the leather seat, rested his head against the cold glass, and for the first time since his reincarnation, he felt the weight of his flesh prison lighten ever so slightly.
He was no longer totally alone. He had an accomplice, motivated by greed, certainly, but a useful accomplice.
Henri parked the Mercedes in front of the house without making a sound. He opened the front door with his key, and the two figures slipped inside the sleeping building, erasing their tracks.
When Lazarus again slipped under the covers of his little bed, the house was still plunged into sleep. Victor whispered something in his dream and turned around. Augustus had not moved in the master bedroom. The heist of the night had been perfect.
Lazarus stared at the white ceiling in the half-light.
In the factory, a few miles away, the IBM System/370 was swallowing its new lines of code, processing the first data of the morning with lightning speed. The metal obeyed the thought of the new man.
February 1976, Lazare thought to himself, closing his eyes. Eight years before the premiere.
The clandestine laboratory was open. The first soldier in the shadows had just recruited his first logician. The silicon war could begin. Lazarus finally fell asleep, an almost imperceptible smile, cold and triumphant, frozen on his childlike lips.