Location: Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Latin Quarter (Paris 5th)
Date: Winter 1981
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The winter of 1981 had fallen on Paris with iron rigor, freezing the statues of the Jardin du Luxembourg under a film of greyish frost. A few streets away, behind the high austere walls of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, another form of frost froze people's minds: the anxiety of the competitions.
In the Higher Mathematics class, the air smelled of chalk, varnished wood, cold coffee and fear. It was a ruthless selection factory, a wringer designed to crush egos and spit out only the absolute elite of the Republic. Eighty students per class, crammed on worn wooden benches, destroying their health with sleepless nights in the hope of joining the École Polytechnique or the École Normale Supérieure.
At the back of the classroom, near the cast-iron radiator that rattled miserably, Lazare Bonaparte observed this great theater of ambition with the coldness of an entomologist.
He was fifteen years old. He was the youngest student in the recent history of the school to sit on these benches. Around him, the young men of eighteen or nineteen years old wore faces hollowed out by fatigue, their eyes red from the revisions of linear algebra and thermodynamics.
Lazarus, on the other hand, did not revise. He didn't need to. His senior engineering brain absorbed the Math Sup program like a glass of water. He was content to maintain an indecent average of eighteen out of twenty, just enough to be untouchable, without trying to publicly crush his teachers so as not to waste time in justifications.
But Lazarus was not at Louis-le-Grand to learn. He was there to hunt.
The empire he was about to found in 1984 could not rest on his shoulders alone. He had designed the theoretical architecture of VoltaOS, he mastered the logic of future operating system kernels, but software is nothing without metal. He needed a master of infrastructure. Someone who can understand the physical innards of machines, solder components, optimize copper and silicon data flows. He needed hands to build the cathedral for which he drew the plans.
He looked at his classmates. The sons of good families, the top of the class disciplined.
Brilliant sheep, thought Lazarus with absolute cynicism. They will become wonderful senior civil servants. They will produce reports for the Ministry of Industry, they will manage budgets, they will obey the ministers. But none of them will be willing to hack the world. None of them has the sacred fire.
He needed a pirate. An anomaly.
And Lazare had spotted this anomaly as early as the third week of September. Her name was Karim Belkacem.
Karim was eighteen years old. He was a scholarship holder, the son of a fitter at Renault, who arrived at Louis-le-Grand by the force of his mathematical brilliance alone. But Karim hated the system. He sported tousled black hair, always wore the same threadbare American military jacket, and regularly arrived late for the kolles (oral interrogations) with dark circles under his eyes. The professors tolerated him only because he was capable of flashes of genius on a blackboard, but his chronic insubordination put him on an ejection seat.
While the other students were studying fluid mechanics at the CDI, Karim disappeared. Lazarus had followed him. The scholarship holder spent his clandestine nights in the basement of the scientific wing, where the administration had relegated the fledgling "computer laboratory".
On a Tuesday evening in December, at 7 p.m., the school was plunged into silence. Only a few windows of the boarding school shone in the night.
Lazarus descended the back stairs, the collar of his long dark cloak raised. He pushed open the swinging door of the laboratory.
The room smelled of ozone, white-hot dust and forbidden cigarettes. In the center, connected to an old Mitra 15 mini-computer from the CII, was one of the few microcomputers of the time, an Apple II imported at a high price. The green phosphor screen bathed the room in a cadaverous glow.
In front of the keyboard, Karim Belkacem was tearing his hair out.
Literally. He held strands of his brown hair between his clenched fists, staring at the screen with desperate rage. Around him, sheets of graph paper covered with circuit board diagrams and lines of assembly language code littered the linoleum floor.
Lazarus approached in silence, his steps muffled by the dilapidation of the place. He stood a meter behind Karim's chair. The eighteen-year-old student, completely absorbed in his failure, did not notice the presence of the fifteen-year-old boy.
On the screen, a low-level script was running in a loop before freezing miserably on a memory address error. FATAL ERROR: SEGMENTATION FAULT.
"Damn data bus," Karim spat between his teeth, hitting the edge of the desk with the flat of his hand. "Why don't you pass? The pile is empty, fuck, empty yourself! »
Lazarus laid his dark eyes on the open notebook next to the keyboard. He instantly understood what the older boy was trying to accomplish. It was bold. Wildly audacious for the time. Karim wasn't just programming the Apple II, he was trying to force the MOS 6502 processor to communicate with a non-standard external device (probably a hacked modem) by directly manipulating hardware interrupts (IRQs) and hijacking a block of RAM reserved for the system.
But Karim was stumbling over a concept he couldn't yet master: the asynchronous addressing conflict. The clock of the processor and that of its device were out of sync with the playback of packets. Karim was trying to solve a hardware problem with a software loop that was too slow.
He has the vision, Lazare analyzed, a shiver of pure satisfaction running down his spine. He sees the metal under the code. But it lacks architecture.
Karim sighed loudly, slouched over his file and closed his eyes in fatigue, preparing to erase everything.
It was then that Lazarus moved.
With a quick and precise gesture, he stepped forward. His pale little hand grabbed the red Bic pen that Karim had placed on his notes. The student opened his eyes with a start, feeling a presence behind him, and turned around.
"Ah! But what are you doing here, Bonaparte? Karim exclaimed, recognizing the strange and chilling "kid" in his class. "Pull out, you don't have the right to be..." »
Lazarus did not even look at him. He bent over the notebook.
With a sharp and implacable stroke of a red pen, Lazare crossed out the ten lines of assembly code that Karim had been working on for five hours.
"But you're sick!" Karim almost yelled, pretending to get up to jostle Lazarus.
The sixty-year-old engineer simply raised his left index finger, a gesture of control so authoritative, so charged with overwhelming arrogance, that the eighteen-year-old froze in his chair, stunned.
For fifteen seconds, the only sound in the room was the furious scratching of the ballpoint pen on the paper.
Lazarus rewrote the instruction. He did not make a loop. He created a diversion. It entered a specific hexadecimal address, forcing the memory pointer to bypass the main buffer to read directly from a phantom register, thus artificially synchronizing the data stream by masking the hardware interrupt. It was a hacking technique of absolute brutality and elegance, a low-level "hack" that no one taught in engineering school in 1981.
Lazarus closed the red pen again. He dropped it on the notebook with a sharp snap.
He straightened up, slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat, and fixed his black gaze like the intergalactic void in Karim's tired eyes. Lazarus does not smile. He gave no explanation.
He turned on his heel and walked to the exit door.
"Wait... What is this syntax? Karim stammered, looking at the paper, then at Lazarus' back as he moved away. "It doesn't make any sense, you're going to create a collision on the motherboard bus, it's suicidal! Bonaparte! »
Lazarus pushed open the swinging door and disappeared into the dark corridor without looking back.
Left alone, Karim Belkacem let out a grunt of frustration. The nerve of this fifteen-year-old boy, little genius or not, made him angry. With an annoyed gesture, convinced that Lazarus had just ruined his demonstration, Karim transferred the hexadecimal instructions written in red pen to the machine's monitor, violently hitting the keys of the Apple II's keyboard.
"Come on,, let's get this over with," he whispered, pressing RETURN to run the compiled code.
He crossed his arms, waiting for the usual fatal error screen.
But the screen did not freeze.
The cursor flashed once. Then, with the fluidity of a waterfall, a stream of raw data began to scroll across the green phosphor screen. Lines of text, retrieved from the modem hacked by Karim, were displayed without any latency, without any packet loss, at a speed that the machine was theoretically not supposed to support.
The asynchronous connection was stabilized. The processor and the peripheral sang in unison. The physical barrier had just been pulverized by three lines of hexadecimal drawn in red pen.
Karim's heart skipped a beat. He approached the screen, his face almost glued to the curved glass, not daring to believe it. He looked at the notebook, then at the code, then at the door through which the boy had just left.
"Holy shit..." Karim whispered in the empty laboratory, his jaw dropped.
The trap had just closed. The Brain had just baited the Infrastructure, and Karim Belkacem would never sleep again until he understood who Lazare Bonaparte really was.
Location: Rue Saint-Jacques / Le Soufflot (Café in the Latin Quarter, Paris 5th) Date: Winter 1981 (Three days later) Point of view: Omniscient (Slippery focus between Karim and Lazarus)
Karim Belkacem had not slept for seventy-two hours.
For three days and three nights, the scholarship student had dissected the modification that Lazare Bonaparte had left him with a red pen. He had gone through the schematics of the Apple II's motherboard, traced the copper tracks, and filled dozens of pages with drafts.
When he finally understood the majesty of Lazarus' intervention, his coder's ego took a massive hit, immediately replaced by an all-consuming curiosity. The kid hadn't corrected his software syntax; he had shown him a physical route. He had shown him how electrons actually moved through the machine's bowels, allowing him to bypass the blockage. This was not the trick of a gifted student. It was the signature of a master of the material. And this master was fifteen years old, wore coats too serious for him, and spoke to no one.
On Thursday evening, at the end of class, under a fine and icy rain that swept the rue Saint-Jacques, Karim went on the offensive.
He waited for the tide of the students of Louis-le-Grand to flow towards the Boulevard Saint-Michel. When Lazarus' dark, straight figure stepped through the heavy wooden doors, Karim threw his cigarette into the gutter and strode forward.
He caught up with the boy and put his hand roughly on his shoulder.
"Hey. Bonaparte. We have to talk. »
Lazarus' reptilian brain, shaped by the Action Service, activated in a millisecond. The engineer's hand reflexively moved to Karim's wrist to break it, but conscious control instantly took over. Lazarus' muscles relaxed. He turned his head slowly, his expression utterly indifferent, the rainwater beading on his short hair.
"Let go of my cloak, Belkacem," Lazarus said in a dull voice, so calm that it became threatening.
Karim withdrew his hand, suddenly uncomfortable with the unfathomable blackness of those teenage eyes.
"How did you know about physical addressing?" the eighteen-year-old student demanded, ignoring the cold, pulling his crumpled notebook out of his military jacket pocket and holding it up under Lazarus' nose. "My code was perfect, but it crashed. You looked at the screen for five seconds, and you gave me the exact routing on the motherboard to avoid the collision on the bus. You don't learn material architecture at this level in prep school. Who are you, exactly? »
Lazare looked at the notebook. Then he looked at Karim. The deep dark circles, the nervous posture, the spark of furious madness in his eyes. The bait had worked. Pure, raw, disorganized talent stood before him, ready to be forged.
"I am thirsty," Lazarus said simply. "Buy me a coffee."
Ten minutes later, they were seated at the back of the Soufflot, a large smoky café facing the Pantheon.
The atmosphere was that of the Latin Quarter of the 80s: noisy, saturated with the smell of unfiltered gypsies, roasted coffee and lukewarm beer. Around them, students from the Sorbonne and Normale Sup remade the world by screaming, debating the new socialist government of François Mitterrand or structuralist philosophy.
Lazarus found this spectacle utterly pathos. They talk about class struggle while America is laying the foundations of their digital prison, he thought as he took off his coat.
Karim sat down across from him, nervously lit another cigarette, and rested his elbows on the zinc table.
"I am listening to you, Bonaparte. What are you? An autistic genius? A son of a CNRS researcher who grew up in a lab? »
Lazarus took his espresso. He drank it black, without sugar. He put the cup down and crossed his hands on the table, staring at Karim with terrifying acuity. The school mask had just fallen.
"You're coding in the void, Karim," Lazarus began, his voice low, forcing the student to bend down to hear him over the hubbub. "You write beautiful software loops, but you treat the machine like a magic black box. You give her instructions and you pray that she digests them. This is the fault of all programmers. They despise metal. »
"And you, do you worship him?" said Karim ironically.
"I understand that," Lazarus corrected placidly. The sixty-year-old engineer had just taken possession of his vocal cords. "I like silicon. I like pure physics, electron routing, microprocessor architecture. I know exactly how to draw a chip that can calculate ten times faster than an Intel 8086 with half the power. The material holds no secrets for me. I can conceive of the most powerful physical brain in the world. »
Lazare leaned back against the red leather bench, his dark eyes twinkling Karim's.
"But a brain without thoughts is only a pebble," Lazare confessed, clinically cold. "My weak point is the software. I have neither the patience nor the grace to write millions of lines of code, to weave a complete operating system or interface. You do. You have a raw talent for software. You're just undisciplined. You have the mind of a software architect, but you're missing someone to draw you the map of the world you need to build on. »
Karim stopped smoking. The monstrous maturity that suddenly emanated from the boy sitting in front of him shattered all his bearings. It was no longer a precocious teenager who spoke to him. He was a strategist.
"IBM, Apple, Intel... Lazarus enumerated as if he were pronouncing the names of diseases. "Look around, Karim."
Lazare pointed to the smoky room of the café with a slow movement of his head.
"Look at these students. The future ministers, the future ENARQUES, the future bank directors. They believe that power resides in the palaces of the Republic or in the gold of the Bank of France. They are blind. History is changing. America is pouring the concrete for tomorrow's world. In ten years' time, information will be the only currency that counts. In twenty years, every company, every home, every administration will depend on a computer. And if we don't do anything, all these machines will speak American. Their processors, their operating systems. We will become a digital colony. Whoever makes the silicon and writes the code controls the nation. »
Silence fell at their table, forming a bubble of gravity in the midst of the din of the Soufflot. Karim crushed his cigarette in the glass ashtray.
The scholarship student had just received the Gospel. This kid didn't talk about getting good grades in competitions. He spoke of geopolitics, of absolute sovereignty, and of an invisible war that had not yet begun.
"Okay... Karim whispered, his throat dry. "It's a beautiful science fiction speech. But what can we do about it? You're a kid in Math Sup and I'm a worker's son who is going to be kicked out of the preparatory class for insubordination. »
"The preparatory school is a factory for producing docile executives," Lazare said with total contempt. "I'm not looking for a diploma. I am looking for an army. And you've just had the job interview. »
"Maintenance for what?!"
Lazarus leaned forward. The yellow light of the wall sconces sculpted his face, giving him the features of a young emperor preparing an annexation campaign.
"For Volta," said Lazarus. The name instantly took on a material consistency in the smoky air of the café. "This is the name of the industrial structure that I am going to create. I will design the equipment. I will design the sovereign chips, the RISC architectures, the motherboards. The stone foundation. And you'll write the operating system that will inhabit this hardware. The mind in the machine. I will give you the direction, I will impose the physical constraints on you, and you will code the interface that will allow us to conquer the market. »
Karim looked at him, stunned. The proposal was insane. This fifteen-year-old boy asked him to help him build a technological empire capable of competing with the American giants, from the benches of the Latin Quarter. It was pure megalomaniac madness. It was suicidal.
"You're completely crazy, Bonaparte," Karim whispered, a fascinated grin finally stretching his lips. "Let's say you know how to make chips and I know how to lay an OS. It costs millions of francs to develop this. The Americans have armies of engineers and venture capital. How much money do you plan to use to launch Volta ? Did you break your piggy bank? »
Lazarus did not blink. He knew nothing of the secret trust of four hundred thousand francs which his father, Auguste, had been silently feeding for four years. As for Lazarus, he was alone in the world, penniless, armed only with his iron will.
"With other people's money," Lazarus replied, with a predatory look. "We are going to parasitize the state. We are going to use our preparatory years, then the engineering schools, to vampirize their laboratories. We will steal computing time from the CNRS's large servers, we will divert the research budgets allocated to practical work to build our first silicon prototypes. The National Education will be our free clandestine incubator. And when I'm eighteen, when I'm of age in the eyes of the law, our prototypes will be functional enough to force the hand of banks and industrialists. We will take the capital where it is."
It was the plan of a buccaneer. The arrogance was so pure, so absolute, that it commanded respect. Lazarus had nothing, but he spoke as if he already possessed the world.
Lazarus stretched out his hand, palm open, over the zinc table.
"I offer you a seat at the right hand of the devil, Karim. Matter and spirit. Hardware and software. You are my first choice. You can refuse, get up, and go back to fight for a position as a minor official. Or you can shake my hand, and we start building the weapon tonight. »
Karim Belkacem looked at the pale hand of the fifteen-year-old. He looked around him. His classmates, drunk on beer and student certainties, who were preparing to wisely integrate the adult world. He saw himself again, alone in the basement, hitting the keyboard of the Apple II, thirsty to be able to make the machine spit out what was in his head.
The scholarship student took a deep breath. His blood was boiling. Absolute insubordination, the ultimate rebellion had just been served to him on a silver platter. He had raw talent, code at his fingertips; Lazarus had the material vision, the coldness of the strategist, and the intelligence of physical architecture. They were two sides of the same deadly coin.
Karim stretched out his arm. He grabbed Lazarus' hand and squeezed it tightly. The teenager's grip was surprisingly strong, cold, and hard as tempered steel.
"Okay, boss," Karim said with a carnivorous smile. "Let's burn IBM. Where do we start? »
Lazarus did not smile, but a glimmer of dark satisfaction lit up in the depths of his eyes. The first apostle had just entered the order. The silicon master had just recruited his software genius.
"To-morrow, at eight o'clock, in the laboratory," ordered Lazarus, taking up his cloak again. "Brings the specifications of the American file system. I'm going to show you how to structure the hardware to speed up reading by four, and you're going to start writing the VoltaOS kernel to fit this architecture. And stop smoking. I need your neurons for the next forty years. »
Lazare got up, left a coin on the table for coffee, and went out into the Parisian night.
Karim remained alone at the table, his hand still quivering from the pact he had just sealed. He looked at his half-burned cigarette, slowly crushed it, and let out a nervous, silent laugh, realizing that he had just sold his soul to the most dangerous and genius entity he had ever met.
Volta's titanic construction site had officially opened its clandestine doors, under the cobblestones of the Latin Quarter, built on the code genius of a stock exchange and the love of silicon of a penniless reincarnate.