Location: Bonaparte family apartment, rue d'Assas (Paris 6th)
Date : Printemps 1978
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The torture of the drop of water is a very old method of psychological torture. It consists of immobilizing a victim and dropping, at regular intervals, a drop of cold water on his forehead. At first, it's just an annoyance. Then, the regularity of the stimulus, the impossibility of escaping it and the wait for the next drop end up driving the target totally crazy, transforming every tiny impact into a destructive hammer blow.
For Lazare Bonaparte, the equivalent of the drop of water was called the National Education program.
In the spring of 1978, Lazare was about to turn twelve. He was sitting in the third row of his sixth grade class at Collège Stanislas, his back perfectly straight, his face smooth and empty of any expression. On the blackboard, a pot-bellied mathematics teacher, Mr. Chassagne, had been working hard for forty-five minutes to explain the concept of reducing to the same denominator to add two simple fractions.
The shrill crunch of chalk on the slate echoed in Lazarus' skull like a circular saw.
Three-quarters plus a half. To find the common denominator, we need to multiply... Lazarus looked down at his spiral notebook. Officially, he was taking studious notes, his head slightly tilted. In reality, hidden behind the cardboard cover, he was designing the logic gates of an Arithmetic and Logic Unit (UAL) capable of processing 16-bit instructions in a single clock cycle.
The sixty-year-old engineer felt his brain literally rotting from the inside.
He had held on since the Preparatory Course. For six long years, he had played the comedy of the model schoolboy. He had pretended to learn to read even though he knew the syntax of the C language. He had pretended to learn multiplication tables while mentally calculating encryption algorithms. He had smoothed out his grades to always stay in the top third of the class, without ever showing a suspicious lead that would have attracted the attention of school psychologists. The perfect illusion. The ideal cover not to alert Auguste, before the latter finally understands on his own the nature of his son.
But today, the patience of the man from the future had reached its limit of structural rupture.
He knew the calendar. The year was 1978. Across the Atlantic, in Silicon Valley garages, shaggy guys named Wozniak and Jobs began selling pre-assembled computers. Intel was about to release the 8086 processor, laying the foundation for the x86 architecture that would dominate the world for decades. America was arming itself for the silicon war.
And he, the only man capable of endowing France with a sovereign technological shield, was stuck in a classroom that smelled of dust and beeswax, forced to listen to a professor explain that three-quarters equaled six-eighths.
It was a strategic heresy. A suicidal waste of time. He had six years left before the fateful date of 1984, the year he had set himself to found Volta. Six years. If he remained in the classical curriculum, he would barely enter the final year of high school on that date. He would have no access to any cutting-edge laboratory, no network of engineers, no research credit.
The school bell finally rings, freeing Lazarus from his cell. He packed his things with calculated slowness, walked around the students who were bawling in the corridors—and who had always instinctively moved aside in his path since the incident in the alley—and went home.
The apartment on the rue d'Assas was bathed in the soft light of the late afternoon. The atmosphere was hushed. Augustus was still in the ministry. Victor was at his judo class. Madeleine was busy in the kitchen, from which a comforting smell of melted butter and apples escaped.
Lazarus put his heavy leather satchel in the hallway. The silence of the apartment slightly calmed the migraine of frustration that gripped his temples.
He walked to the end of the hallway. The door to her little sisters' room was ajar. Lazarus paused on the threshold and watched the scene in silence, with his arms folded.
Claire, who had just turned four, was sitting cross-legged on the great woollen carpet. She didn't play with dolls or stuffed animals. She was handling a solid wood construction set. But unlike children her age who pile up blocks at random for the simple pleasure of seeing them collapse, Claire built with a troubling methodology. She classified the cubes by color, then by size. The tower she erected had perfect symmetry, a rigorous geometry that excluded any form of chance.
Suddenly, without Lazarus having made the slightest sound, Claire stopped.
She didn't turn her head immediately. Her little hands hung over a red block. Then, with the slowness of an owl, she turned her face towards the doorway. His large, clear eyes, devoid of the usual candor of childhood, were fixed on Lazarus.
She doesn't smile. She did not invite him to play. She watched him.
Lazarus held her gaze. There was something fascinating and deeply disturbing about this little girl. Claire saw everything. She recorded everything. She was the only one in the house, along with Augustus, who understood that Lazarus' mask hid an abyss. She said nothing, her sentences were still those of a toddler, but her silent detective's gaze dissected every anomaly.
A happy little chirp broke the mute tension of this visual confrontation.
Camille, one and a half years old, had just seen her older brother. She let go of the rattle she was nibbling on the carpet and stood up, clutching the edge of a chest of drawers. With the swaying and uncertain gait of toddlers, she staggered across the room, her arms outstretched towards Lazarus.
The sixty-year-old engineer felt his cynicism melt away instantly. He crouched down to get up to her. Camille crashed against his chest, uttering a small cry of victory, burying her chubby face in her brother's neck.
Lazarus closed his eyes. The warmth of the little body against his acted like a balm on his raw nerves. Camille did not judge him. She didn't analyze his symmetry like Claire, she didn't project on him the fantasies of an invulnerable superhero like Victor. Camille simply felt his presence, his unspoken need for comfort, with a pure, organic empathy that spoke for itself. She put her warm little hand on Lazarus' cheek, just as she had done the previous summer in Normandy, in that moment of grace when she had seemed to caress the ghosts of her first life.
Lazarus inhaled the smell of talcum powder and warm milk from the back of the baby's neck.
As he held his little sister close to him, under Claire's analytical gaze, Lazarus had an epiphany of brutal clarity.
The empire he wanted to build, Volta, sovereign architecture, billions of francs in investments, the secret war against American hegemony... All this was not just a matter of intellectual pride or abstract patriotism. It was a shield.
He looked at Camille, who was now amusing herself by pulling on the collar of her shirt. He looked at Claire, who had resumed her symmetrical construction. He thought of Victor. He thought of Madeleine.
If he failed, if he allowed France to be vassalized by foreign technologies, the world in which his sisters would grow up would be a world under control. A world where Europe would be nothing more than a digital colony, unable to protect its own secrets, its own citizens. If he really wanted to be the patriarch of the shadows, the titan who absorbs shocks to let his people live in the light, he had to give himself the means to achieve his ambitions.
And you don't build a fortress by listening to Mr. Chassagne explain the fractions.
Time was his most implacable enemy. He could no longer afford to waste it to maintain a normal child blanket. He had to tear off the chains of the traditional school system. He had to propel himself forward, short-circuit the National Education system in order to reach as quickly as possible the spheres where the power of mental arithmetic met applied research. He had to reach high school, then Polytechnique, or the École Normale Supérieure. As soon as possible. Even if it means being seen as a fair phenomenon in the eyes of the world.
Lazare kissed Camille's forehead and gently placed her on the playmat. He got up.
"I must work," he murmured, more for himself than for the girls.
Claire looked up from her wooden tower.
"Great," she said simply in her small, clear voice, pointing a finger at him.
Lazarus gave a cold grin. Yes, Claire. It's time to grow up.
He left the girls' room. His decision was made. It was irrevocable, rational and absolute. He wasn't going to have a crying fit or a tantrum with his mother. He was going to treat this problem as a contract negotiation with the only person capable of understanding its terms, and above all, capable of imposing this institutional violence on the system.
He went to see Auguste.
Location: Auguste's office, apartment on rue d'Assas (Paris)
Date: Spring 1978 / Ellipse until autumn 1981
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding Focus on Augustus and Lazarus)
Auguste Bonaparte's office was the only real sanctuary in the apartment. It was a stern room, lined with dark woodwork, where a tenacious smell of brown tobacco, leather, and archival paper floated. It was there that the DST officer went through his files, far from the laughter of the girls and the overflowing energy of Victor.
That evening, Auguste was looking at a report from the General Intelligence. The light of his brass banker's lamp shone harshly on his concentrated features.
Three sharp taps, spaced exactly one second apart, echoed against the oak door.
It was not Victor's hesitant strike, nor Madeleine's, soft. It was a purely formal request for permission to enter.
"Come in," said Auguste, without looking up from his file.
Lazarus entered the room. He was not wearing his pajamas, although it was past twenty-one, but velvet trousers and a shirt buttoned up to the collar. He held in his arms a heavy pile of books, so large that it forced him to bend his back slightly.
He walked up to the heavy solid oak desk.
Clac.
Lazarus dropped the pile on his father's leather desk pad. At last the sharp noise made Augustus look up.
The officer looked at the works. They were not the textbooks of the sixth grade class of Collège Stanislas. These were the official mathematics, physics and chemistry books for the Fourth, Third and Second grades.
"What is that, Lazarus?" asked Auguste, leaning back in his chair, feeling at once that this was not the time for ordinary paternal discussions.
"It's a profitability audit, Father," Lazarus replied in the tone of a consultant presenting a disastrous record to a board of directors. "And the profitability is zero."
Auguste frowned. He reached out, grabbed the second-grade math textbook—the book students normally studied at fifteen or sixteen—and opened it at random.
The margins of the book were blackened with ink. Lazarus had not merely read the work; he had dissected it. Alongside the classical theorems, the child had annotated alternative, more elegant proofs, often based on post-baccalaureate mathematics. Several complex exercises were crossed out with a red line, accompanied by the words: Obsolete school method. More efficient matrix calculation solution. Augustus turned over the other books. The observation was the same everywhere. Chemistry, physics, trigonometry... Everything had been ingested, digested, and corrected by the eleven-year-old boy.
"The middle school curriculum is designed for brains that are discovering abstract logic," Lazarus said, standing in front of the desk with his hands crossed behind his back. "It's a process of attrition. We are asked to remember simplified methods before teaching us the real rules years later. I'm wasting my time. Worse, this slowness atrophies my ability to concentrate. To go back to sit in this sixth grade class is absolute strategic nonsense. »
Augustus put down the book. He looked at his son. Since the revelation of the shooting range, the DST officer had kept his promise to Madeleine: he had no longer forced Lazare. He had watched him from afar, secretly accumulating the money on the invisible trust, waiting for the "builder" to make his first move.
The movement had just taken place.
"The French education system is a heavy machine, Lazarus," Augustus replied calmly. "We don't skip three classes because we're bored. The teachers will argue that you are psychologically immature. They will say that you will not be socially integrated with fifteen-year-old students. »
Lazarus grinned coldly. A smile that belonged only to the sixty-year-old engineer.
"I have no intention of integrating socially with hormone-filled teenagers, father. I don't go there to make friends. I go there to have access to physics laboratories and higher mathematics. The system is a heavy machine, of course. But the system obeys force. And you have this strength. »
Auguste felt a familiar shudder, this mixture of professional respect and giddiness. Lazarus was manipulating him openly. He came to claim the influence of the DST officer, the man of power.
"You are very presumptuous for a boy who has not yet hair on his chin," said Augustus gently.
He opened a drawer in his desk, took out a blank sheet of paper and his Montblanc fountain pen. For a minute the officer wrote in silence. He drew on his own memories of preparatory class, then on the accelerated cryptography training he had received in the army. He put down on paper a complex second-order differential equation with a particularly vicious boundary condition. A problem designed to make a first-year engineering school student sweat.
He pushed the paper towards the edge of the desk.
"Prove to me that you're not bluffing," Auguste ordered. "Solve this. Without a calculator. No draft. »
Lazarus stepped forward. He didn't even bother to sit down. He leaned over the leather desk pad, his eye fixed on the equation.
His brain, freed from the straitjacket of the sixth-grade program, roars with pleasure. It was a basic mathematical analysis problem for the architect that he was. The equation was modelled in his mind in the form of curves. In less than thirty seconds, he identified the particular solution, solved the associated homogeneous equation, and combined the two.
He grabbed the fountain pen that his father handed him. With a child's hand, small but absolutely firm, he wrote the final result at the bottom of the page, surrounding the mathematical expression with a black line.
Then, with majestic arrogance, he added a note in the margin: An elegant equation, but unstable in real physical application due to residual oscillations.
He corked the pen and placed it on the paper.
Augustus looked at the result. He didn't even need to check the complete solution; The very structure of the answer screamed total mastery of the subject. The intelligence officer leaned back in his chair, breathless. His son was not only gifted. He was an intellectual singularity. A mathematical monster.
The promise made to Madeleine resounded in her skull: You don't force the nature of a builder. He was provided with foundations.
Augustus closed his eyes for a second, acknowledging the definitive end of Lazarus' childhood.
"Get ready to take tests," the officer said at last, his voice heavy, official. "Official tests, in front of inspectors from the academy. I will demand that they be impartial and terminal. If you succeed in them, I will make Stanislas' management bend. If you fail, you go back to the sixth grade and I don't want to hear another word about it. »
"I will not lose a minute of my life, father," replied Lazarus.
He nodded slightly, turned on his heel, and left the desk, leaving the books on the table. The contract was signed.
The administrative storm hit the Collège Stanislas the following week.
Auguste Bonaparte made use of all his networks. He used the influence of the Dufresne family, discreetly raised the spectre of his relations with the Ministry of the Interior, and imposed the holding of an exceptional class skipping commission. Father de Fontenay, the director, tried to invoke the rules, psychomotor development, the sacrosanct republican norm. Augustus brushed him off with a sentence: "My son is not the norm. Remember it, and I will inscribe it elsewhere, making sure that the whole of Paris knows that Stanislas is stifling the French genius. »
Lazarus passed the academic tests in May 1978.
He was not content with succeeding in them. He pulverized the metrics of the National Education. The inspectors, dispatched for the occasion, watched, stunned, as a boy in short pants whose feet barely touched the floor under his examination chair solved trigonometry and physics-chemistry at the baccalaureate level.
The verdict was in, irrevocable. Lazarus jumped the Fifth, the Fourth, and the Third in one block.
At the beginning of the school year in September 1978, when he had just celebrated his twelveth birthday, Lazare Bonaparte entered the second grade. He crosses the gates of the Lycée, leaving the world of children behind him for good.
This was the beginning of the acceleration.
Once the chains were broken, time lost its sticky thickness and became a high-velocity fluid. Lazarus immersed himself in complexity. Her body grows, driven by the hormones of adolescence, slowly catching up with the frightening maturity of her mind. The curves of her cheeks faded, giving way to a square jaw, prominent cheekbones, and that perpetually analytical black gaze that froze her interlocutors.
He went through the high school years like a lightning spectre.
In his second grade, he was already studying the MIT doctoral theses that Uncle Henri sent him by industrial diplomatic bag. In his first year of secondary school, he drew the architecture of registers for imaginary microprocessors in his black notebooks. At the age when his comrades — who were three or four years older than him — were discovering the first stirrings of love, clandestine parties and drunken evenings, Lazare remained locked in his room.
He felt no desire to fit in. The age difference was the perfect social excuse to justify his isolationism. He was the high school alien, the mute entity who made perfect copies in a third of the allotted time and spent his recesses in the library, immersed in books in technical English.
And then, the global calendar proved him right.
History was in the making, and it resonated exactly with the memories of his first life.
In 1979, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor was born. In 1980, Apple went public, turning young hippies on the West Coast into millionaires. IBM was secretly working on its "Personal Computer", preparing to offer the monopoly of operating systems to a certain Bill Gates.
America was laying the foundations of its absolute numerical hegemony.
From his Parisian room, Lazare watched this tidal wave with a mixture of feverish anxiety and cold excitement. He knew exactly where the American giants would strike. He knew of their future architectural weaknesses — the energy greed of CISC architectures, the structural security flaws of future open operating systems. He was preparing the antidote. The Volta shield was taking shape, line by line, equation by equation, in absolute secrecy.
But to turn paper into silicon, he needed the elite. He needed the state laboratories, the malleable brains of the best French engineers, and the infrastructure to test his prototypes.
In June 1981, a month after the presidential election of François Mitterrand, which plunged the Parisian bourgeoisie into panic, Lazare Bonaparte obtained his scientific baccalaureate with the congratulations of the jury. He was fourteen and a half years old.
Autumn 1981.
The air of Paris was lively, laden with the smell of hot chestnuts and dead leaves in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Lazare stood motionless in front of the heavy studded wooden doors of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. The mythical institution of the Latin Quarter, the antechamber of the Republic's grandes écoles. It was here that the nation's mathematical elite was forged in pain, overwork, and sheer elitism.
He was fifteen years old. He was now one meter seventy. He wore a long dark woollen cloak, his collar turned up against the September wind. His brown hair was cut short, almost militarily. He was no longer a child. He was a young man with the face of an ascetic, radiating a cold and intimidating intellectual power.
In his leather satchel, he didn't just carry his school supplies. It carried the fundamental source code of what would become VoltaOS, and the conceptual blueprints of a sovereign RISC processor.
He had entered Higher Mathematics, the royal road.
Auguste and Madeleine had not come to accompany him. Lazarus' independence was now total and enacted. It was a solitary star evolving in its own galaxy. The family pact worked perfectly: Auguste fed the secret trust — which was now close to two hundred thousand francs — Madeleine watched over her brothers and sisters by praying for her soul, and Uncle Henri waited for his time in the shadows of the factories of the North.
Lazarus laid his hand on the heavy brass handle of the door of Louis the Great.
Behind these walls were the brains he needed. The future polytechnicians, the future normaliens. He did not enter this sanctuary to be taught by the professors. He entered it like a headhunter, a predator infiltrated into the heart of the herd to select his future lieutenants.
He had to find his architects, his coders, his loyal soldiers.
The decisive decade had just begun. In three years, he would be eighteen years old. In three years, he would touch Augustus' war chest. In three years, Volta would be officially born.
Lazarus pushed open the heavy door and entered the courtyard of the school, disappearing into the crowd of students. The silicon war could finally leave the paper and enter the real world. The invisible man was on the move.