Location: Jussieu Campus (Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris 5th)
Date : Printemps 1982
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Slippery focus on Karim
The Apple II of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand had given up the ghost on a Tuesday evening, in a pungent smell of melted plastic and burnt out circuits.
For six months, Lazare and Karim had tortured the machine. They had pushed it to its limits to try to compile the first bricks of Karim's software kernel and to simulate the electrical flows of the motherboard imagined by Lazare. But an eight-bit microcomputer was simply not designed to give birth to a sovereign technology.
Lazarus knew exactly what he wanted to build. Since they had neither the means nor the factories to manufacture an entire computer with screen and keyboard to compete with IBM, they were going to make a parasite.
The Volta-1 Module. The V-1.
A simple, black, tamper-proof hardware expansion card. A silicon plate that would be plugged into the bowels of any American or Japanese computer bought by French banks and ministries. Upon insertion, the V-1 board would bypass the original processor, take absolute control of the machine, and impose Karim's hyper-secure operating system. An institutional Trojan horse. Sovereignty in a kit.
But to make the first working prototype of this module, graph paper was no longer enough. Lazare needed virgin silicon, EPROM programmers to burn Karim's code into read-only memory, high-frequency oscilloscopes to measure latencies, and military-precision soldering irons. He needed the computing power of a mainframe to compile his lieutenant's operating system.
And Lazare, who knew nothing of the war chest of four hundred thousand francs which his father secretly accumulated in a chest, had not a penny in his pocket.
So he was left with only one rational option: to help himself to the beast.
"Let's go," whispered Lazarus, motionless in the shade of a plane tree.
It was two o'clock in the morning. The spring air of April 1982 was mild, but Karim Belkacem was chattering his teeth. The nineteen-year-old student was pressed against the raw concrete wall, the collar of his military jacket pulled up to his ears. He cast panicked glances left and right.
Opposite them stood the fortress of the Pierre and Marie Curie University, the Jussieu campus. A giant grid of reinforced concrete bars and steel towers erected in the heart of Paris. At that time, Jussieu was home to the best-equipped computer science and fundamental physics research laboratories in France. It was the nation's technological safe.
"Bonaparte, we're going to be squeezed," Karim hissed, his voice choked with terror. "It's a state domain. If they call the cops, my purse jumps, I'm kicked out of the prep school and I end up in jail. All this to steal resistors and copper? You're completely crazy! »
Lazarus, barely sixteen years old, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and a dark jacket, slowly turned his head towards his lieutenant.
His face expressed neither fear nor youthful excitement. He was abysmally calm, that of a predator entering his hunting ground.
"Breathe, Karim," Lazare ordered, in a low voice that tolerated no retort. "The night watchman in the western sector makes his rounds every forty-five minutes. He passed twelve minutes ago. He is sixty years old, he drags his right paw and he listens to RTL on his transistor. We have a thirty-three-minute window. Follow me, walk on tiptoe, and speak no more. »
Karim's eyes widened. How did this kid know that? They had not made any official recognition.
What Karim didn't know was that the mastermind of his company was also a former Service Action operator. The infiltration of heavily guarded buildings, from Beirut to N'Djamena, had been Lazare's daily life for fifteen years. A Parisian university campus guarded by chubby retirees was a playground for him.
Lazarus darted across the deserted esplanade, skimming the reinforced concrete pillars with reptilian fluidity. Karim struggled to keep up with him, his heart pounding, clutching a heavy empty duffle bag to his chest.
They reached Tower 24, which housed the applied electronics department.
The main access door was a heavy steel-rimmed window, locked by a complex cylinder security lock. Karim stopped, panting.
"It's dead," whispered the scholarship student. "It's a Fichet lock. You need a magnetic mat or a cross key. We go home. »
Lazarus did not answer. He took out of his inner pocket a tiny soft leather case, which he unrolled with a sharp gesture. Karim saw, under the pale glow of a distant lamppost, a collection of surgical steel hooks and tensions.
Lazarus knelt before the door. He inserted a tensor into the bottom of the slit, then slipped a fine probe into it.
While Karim was sweating profusely, looking frantically over his shoulder, Lazarus closed his eyes. The engineer could no longer see the door. He visualized the brass pins inside the cylinder. He listened to the microscopic rattling of metal against metal. Silicon would wait: it was the physical mechanics that spoke.
One, two, three... the fourth is distorted. Rotary pressure.
Click.
The noise was almost imperceptible, but it resounded like a cannon shot in Karim's head. In less than fifteen seconds, without forcing, Lazare had just opened a high-security lock with a simple movement of his wrist.
Lazarus lowered the handle and pushed open the heavy door without a squeak.
"Come in," he whispered.
Karim slipped inside, completely dazed. The terror of the arrest had just given way to an existential vertigo. His young boss was not just a monster of mathematical logic or a theorist of material architecture. He was a professional in trespassing.
"Who the fuck are you?" whispered Karim in the darkened hall, as Lazarus closed the door carefully behind them. "Where did you learn that? To the patronage? »
"Knowledge is universal, Karim. Only the application varies. Lazarus put away his tools. "Third floor. Microelectronics Laboratory. Take the stairs, we don't touch the elevators. »
They climbed the steps in total darkness. Lazare led the way, his crepe soles making no noise, guiding Karim through the corridors with the confidence of a nyctalope cat.
When they entered the laboratory on the third floor, the characteristic smell of ozone, solder flux, and ionized dust flattered Lazarus' nostrils. It was his element.
The vast room was bathed in the glow of the red and green LEDs of the waiters who were running on standby. On the large white-tiled benches were lined up a priceless treasure for two boys from 1982: Tektronix oscilloscopes, brand-new logic analyzers, boxes of military-grade electronic components, and, above all, programming boards for memory chips.
At the back of the room was a heavy terminal, connected to the university's network.
"It's your turn, Karim," Lazare said, pointing to the terminal. "The university's compiler is a UNIX-powered C-Compiler. It has a hundred times the power of Apple. Get out your floppy disks. Load your code, compile the VoltaOS kernel, and get me a binary file. You have twenty minutes before the guard comes back under our windows. »
Karim didn't need to be told twice. As soon as it was a question of software, the student regained confidence. He sat down in front of the terminal, inserted his floppy 5.25-inch floppy disks, and his fingers began pounding the keyboard with the virtuosity of a pianist.
While Karim infused his mind into the machine, Lazarus set to work. The silicon master had to gather the raw material.
He opened the duffle bag and began his underground market. He moved from bench to bench with surgical precision, taking only what he strictly needed so as not to alert the researchers too quickly the next day.
He stole a fine-tipped Weller thermal soldering iron, the essential tool for assembling the future components of the V-1 board. He delicately emptied several labeled drawers of their precious 7400 series ICs, logic gates, tantalum capacitors, and precision resistors.
Then he found the Grail.
In an unlocked cabinet, stored in antistatic plastic housings, lay several dozen blank EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) chips. They were small squares of black ceramic with a quartz window on top. These chips were able to store code permanently, until they were erased with ultraviolet light.
It was in one of these chips that Lazarus would engrave the kernel compiled by Karim. This would be the beating heart of the Volta V-1 module. The seat of their authority.
Lazarus took ten of them, which he slipped carefully into the inside pocket of his jacket.
"It's okay!" suddenly whispered Karim from the back of the room, his voice trembling with excitement. The terminal screen displayed a series of lines confirming the success of the operation. "Zero syntax errors. The binary is generated. It weighs barely eight kilobytes. It's light, it's mean, it's exactly what we need to take control of the priming routines. »
"Copy the binary to a blank floppy disk and erase your tracks on the server," Lazare ordered as he closed the duffel bag, now weighed down by several kilograms of advanced equipment.
Karim obeyed, typing the UNIX erasure commands with evil glee. They had just used the state network to compile the weapon that was going to hack him.
"Bonaparte," Karim said, ejecting his floppy disk, his eyes shining in the half-light. "Are you aware that we have just crossed a red line? If we get caught with this equipment, we're dead. National education is over for us. »
Lazarus lifted the duffle bag and passed it over his shoulder. His face expressed only an icy determination.
"The National Education Department has taught us nothing, Karim. She just lent us her tools. The real work begins tonight. Take your floppy disks. We're going home. »
They descended the stairs in the same absolute silence. Lazarus locked the heavy door of the building in the same way he had opened it, erasing all traces of a break-in. They crossed the campus in the opposite direction, crouching behind the low walls while the old guard passed fifty meters from them, his radio spewing out the hits of the year.
When they finally passed through the exterior gates of Jussieu and melted into the dark alleys of the Latin Quarter, Karim let out a long sigh of relief, the adrenaline suddenly dropping.
He looked at the sixteen-year-old boy who walked next to him, straight as an "I," carrying the bag filled with silicon stolen without the slightest emotion. The alliance was definitively sealed by crime. They were no longer just two brilliant students; they were illegals.
The Mastermind and the Infrastructure had stolen the fire. All they had to do was lock themselves up to forge the weapon.
Location: Karim's maid's room, Latin Quarter (Paris 5th) Date: Winter 1982 - Spring 1983 Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on the duet)
The Rue Mouffetard district, with its cobbled streets and sloping zinc roofs, provided the perfect backdrop for broke students and cursed poets. On the sixth floor without elevator of a decrepit Haussmann building was Karim Belkacem's maid's room.
Nine square meters. A wrought-iron bed pushed back against the wall covered with yellowed wallpaper, a tiny sink whose tap leaked with the regularity of a metronome, and a skylight that let in the draughts of the Parisian winter.
It was there, in this insalubrious recess, that Volta 's first headquarters were established.
Between the winter of 1982 and the spring of 1983, this chamber ceased to be a place of habitation and became a clandestine incubator, a submarine cut off from the rest of the world. The whole of France lived to the rhythm of political reforms, nationalizations, inflation and televised debates. But within these nine square meters, time and space obeyed other laws: those of clock cycles, electrical impulses and lines of hexadecimal code.
The air was of a stifling density. As early as November, Karim had to caulk the gaps in the skylight with adhesive tape to prevent moisture from oxidizing the components stolen from Jussieu. There was no radiator, but the room was kept at an almost tropical temperature by the heat dissipation of the appliances. The Tektronix oscilloscope, the heavy EPROM programmer, the green phosphor CRT screen and the soldering iron that remained on all night radiated dry, industrial heat.
The scent of the room had become an unforgettable olfactory signature for the two boys. It was a pungent mixture of melted rosin—the flux of lead solder—cold coffee left in chipped cups, stressed student sweat, and cold tobacco. Karim smoked cigarette after cigarette, burning his Gypsyes without a filter while exhaling the smoke towards the half-open skylight, because Lazare strictly forbade him to pollute the air near the silicon plates.
"The smoke deposits a microscopic film of tar on the gold contacts," Lazarus had warned him in an icy tone on the first night. "If you increase the electrical resistance of a track because of your vice, I'll make you swallow your ashtray."
Karim had grumbled, but he had obeyed. The natural authority of the sixteen-year-old was impossible to dispute.
Their routine had settled in with military rigidity. During the day, they gave the change to Louis-le-Grand. Lazare continued to maintain his stratospheric grades in Higher Mathematics with a total disregard for effort, while Karim struggled not to fall asleep in physics class, his absences covered by a few complacent medical certificates. But at 6 p.m., the real day began.
They would meet in the maid's room, lock the door twice, and the symbiosis would work.
Space was divided into two zones of absolute sovereignty.
On the small Formica desk, Lazare had set up his microelectronics workshop. It was the realm of matter, the realm of silicon, copper, and tin.
The young boy worked with a meticulousness that terrified Karim. Equipped with a watchmaker's magnifying glass screwed on his right eye, Lazare spent hours hunched over blank epoxy circuit boards. His hand never trembled. With the ultra-fine tip of his stolen Weller soldering iron, he deposited micro-drops of shiny tin to connect the legs of the integrated circuits. He assembled the physical architecture of the famous Volta-1 Module.
It was not a question of tinkering. It was state-of-the-art engineering. The V-1 board had to act like a perfect parasite: once plugged into the expansion port of a host computer, it had to intercept signals from the main processor (often an Intel or a US Motorola), paralyze its boot, and force the machine to read instructions from Volta's secure memory chip.
Lazarus traced the copper paths with the obsession of a tyrannical urban planner.
"Look at this routing, Karim," Lazare would sometimes say, without looking up from his magnifying glass, the smell of weld rising in thin bluish curls. "On American maps, they make data trails take detours for reasons of industrial aesthetics. This is a criminal error. If the track of the high-weight bit is one millimeter longer than that of the low-weight bit, the electron will arrive one picosecond late. At high frequencies, it creates desynchronization. I pull my tracks straight. The signal must hit the register at exactly the same time. This is the geometry of perfection. »
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, the keyboard of the terminal resting on his lap, Karim listened to him with one ear as he furiously typed his lines of code.
The scholarship holder was the master of the second zone: the immaterial. The realm of the spirit.
His mission was titanic, almost suicidal for a single man. He was to write VoltaOS, the kernel of the sovereign operating system. A program capable of managing memory, display, keyboard inputs and outputs, and an unbreakable asymmetric encryption algorithm. And he had to fit all this fledgling artificial intelligence into the EPROM chips that Lazare allocated to him.
Eight kilobytes. Eight thousand one hundred and ninety-two miserable characters. It was the prison into which Karim had to bring a universe.
He encoded directly in the Assembler language, the machine's native language, an arid syntax made up of obscure mnemonic (MOV, JMP, CMP) and hexadecimal addresses. Every additional byte was a defeat. Every clock cycle wasted by a poorly thought out loop was sacrilege.
The nineteen-year-old student lost his health. His fingers, blackened by the ink of his drafts and calloused by dint of striking the mechanical keys, made him suffer martyrdom. He was losing weight visibly, eating exclusively on cans of cold ravioli and caffeine.
Often, the tension accumulated in this suffocating closed door exploded into arguments of rare violence. The head-on clash between the tyranny of hardware and the frustration of software.
One night in January 1983, as snow fell on Paris and covered the skylight, a scream from Karim tore through the silence of the room.
"It's impossible!" roars the scholarship student, throwing his notebook violently against the wall. The leaves flew around the room. "It doesn't fit! I've compressed the keyboard interrupt routines, merged the display management stack with the memory buffer, but I'm sixty-four bytes overrun! Sixty-four fucking bytes, Bonaparte! Your EPROM is full! »
Lazarus, who was soldering a capacitor to tantalum, didn't even startle. He calmly removed his iron from the plate, wiped it on his damp sponge, and slowly turned his head towards Karim. His dark gaze was devoid of the slightest empathy.
"Then write a better code," Lazarus replied with a coldness that made Karim cringe.
"A better code?!" exploded Karim, getting up from the bed to come and fall on Lazare's desk, towering over him from his full height. His bloodshot eyes betrayed his nervous exhaustion. "I just rewrote the management of the ROM five times! It's the densest, most elegant code on the market! IBM would take fifty kilobytes to do what I do with seven! I can't twist reality! Add a second EPROM chip on your fucking card! You have the place, right there, next to the bus register! Solder an extra chip, and give me some air! »
Lazarus looked up at his lieutenant. He didn't back down a millimeter in the face of Karim's fury.
"No."
"Why, what the fuck?! You stole ten of them from Jussieu's lab! »
"Because adding an EPROM chip means adding an address decoder," Lazarus explained with the patience of a teacher speaking to a slow child. "An address decoder adds two logic gates. Two logic gates create a propagation delay of fifteen nanoseconds. This delay will desynchronize the system bus reading of the host machine. Our parasite will be detected, or worse, it will slow down the machine. I don't sacrifice the physical speed of my hardware to compensate for your software laziness. »
"My laziness?! I haven't slept for three weeks! »
"You use an INC increment loop to clean the registers," Lazare pointed out, tapping Karim's crumpled notebook that had fallen on the desk. "It's heavy. Uses an XOR statement on the registry itself. XOR A, A. This will zero it in a single byte and two clock cycles instead of three. Do that on your forty cleaning loops, and you gain your sixty-four bytes. »
Karim froze. His mouth opened, ready to spit out an insult, but his programmer brain had just analyzed the instruction. An Or-Exclusive on oneself always gives zero. It was true. It was vicious, it was unreadable to a normal human, but to a machine, it was a dazzling memory economy.
Karim's anger subsided suddenly, replaced by an immense weariness and a sticky respect for this unbearable kid.
"You're really a bully, do you know that?" muttered Karim as he picked up his notebook, returning to sit on the bed.
"I am the architect," corrected Lazarus, putting his magnifying glass back on. "Constraint creates excellence. If I give you infinite memory, you'll write obese code, like the Americans. By forcing you to code in a tiny space, I'm forcing you to write pure poetry. In ten years, when Silicon Valley software will take three minutes to start because it will be saturated with useless lines, VoltaOS will start in a fraction of a second, because we will have forged our weapons in pain. »
And the pain bore fruit.
As the months passed, an unwavering brotherhood in arms was born between the two boys. Lazarus brought the strategic vision, the cruelty necessary to cut to the quick, and an absolute mastery in the manipulation of electronic matter. Karim brought energy, creative fire, software brilliance, and a work capacity that defied the laws of human biology. They had become two hemispheres of one and the same cybernetic brain.
In May 1983, Paris began to warm up. But in the maid's room, winter seemed to never want to go away, so much was the tension at its peak.
They were nearing their goal.
The Volta-1 map was physically finished. It was an object of raw, industrial beauty. A rectangle of green epoxy resin, streaked with dozens of shiny copper tracks, perfect, parallel like the lines of a French garden. On top of it were black logic chips, carefully aligned, and in the center, recessed in its socket, the EPROM chip covered with an opaque sticker to protect its quartz window from ultraviolet rays.
Inside this small square of ceramic, Karim had inserted his soul. The VoltaOS core was hard-engraved. Eight kilobytes of absolute software perfection, purged of the slightest dross, ready to take control of any information system.
There remained the trial by fire. The first heartbeat.
To test the parasite, Lazare had bought second-hand, with the little money Karim had been able to save on his purse, an old desktop computer running the American CP/M standard, equipped with a heavy monochrome cathode ray screen. The device was open to the desk, its metal innards exposed to the open air.
It was three o'clock in the morning. The silence in the building was total.
Lazare held the V-1 card between his thumb and index finger, by the edges, so as not to short-circuit the components with the static electricity of his fingers. He looked at Karim. The nineteen-year-old student was livid. He was biting his nails until he bled, sitting on the edge of his bed, the cigarette trembling at the corner of his lips.
"It's time," Lazare announced, his voice sluggish, though a tiny twitch of anticipation made his vocal cords vibrate.
He will carefully insert the gold connector of the V-1 board into the expansion port of the motherboard of the American computer. There was a small reassuring mechanical click. The physical graft was in place. The parasite was in the host.
Lazarus put his hand on the big red switch of the computer's power supply.
"If I messed up on the management of temporal interruptions... Karim stammered, breathless, "... The data buses will collide. We're going to burn the central processor of the machine, and the card with it. Months of work in smoke. »
"Your code is perfect. My routing is foolproof," Lazarus said with the certainty of an ancient god. "We're going to slit the throat of this computer and take its place."
Lazarus flipped the switch.
CLAC.
The heavy transformer of the power supply made a dull hum. The cooling fan of the metal frame began to spin with a turbine noise. The oscilloscope, plugged into the V-1 board, saw its screen light up with a perfect sinusoidal curve, confirming that the five-volt current was reaching the logic gates.
The two boys held their breath. Time distended itself. A second lasted an hour.
On a conventional machine, this power-up should have woken up the American processor, which would have gone to read its own BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) to display the manufacturer's usual boot messages.
But the Volta-1 map was faster. More predatory.
The hardware logic designed by Lazare detected the initialization signal of the host machine in a few nanoseconds. Instantly, the V-1 board sent an overwhelmingly electrically powerful HALT (shutdown) signal directly to the control pin of the U.S. CPU, crippling it before it could even execute its first instruction.
Then, the V-1 took over, assuming full power over the machine's data bus. She deflected the read stream and forced the blinded computer to read the instructions contained in Karim's EPROM chip.
The material hijacking had taken place in less than a millisecond.
The CRT screen crackled, spitting out a flash of static light. Karim closed his eyes, fearing the smell of burning or the black screen of death.
Then, the green phosphorescence stabilized.
There was no slow display. There was no American logo. There was no tedious record of memory.
The screen was absolutely pure, completely empty, except for the top left corner. There, flashing with implacable mathematical regularity, a simple line of text in capital letters was displayed:
VOLTA KERNEL V-1.0 READY. > _
The square cursor, eager for instructions, waited.
Karim dropped his cigarette, which rolled on the linoleum without him noticing. He sprang from his bed and threw himself on the keyboard of the machine. His fingers typed a few basic commands to check the integrity of the memory and the speed of the system's response.
The display was instantaneous. There was no latency. The symbiosis between Lazarus' over-optimized hardware and Karim's rickety code produced a supernatural fluidity of execution for the time. The machine no longer met industry standards; it obeyed the sovereign system at the touch of the eye.
"It works... Karim whispered, tears in his eyes, his voice breaking with emotion and the exhaustion of several months in hiding. He ran his hands through his messy hair, laughing nervously. "Holy shit, Bonaparte, we did it! It works! We have a sovereign OS! We have the module! »
Karim turned to Lazarus, ready to hug him, but he changed his mind when he saw the boy's posture.
The sixteen-year-old engineer was not laughing. There were no tears of joy in his black eyes. He looked at the screen with a cold, calculated satisfaction, that of the architect who notes that the foundations of his building have not given way under the weight of the first floors.
It was not the end of an adventure for him. This was the confirmation of the theorem. The weapon was forged. It was lethal. She was perfect.
"Save the EPROM configuration, Karim," Lazarus ordered, his voice cutting short his lieutenant's outpouring of joy. "Destroy the drafts. Unplug the module and put it in an antistatic box. There should be no trace of the compilation on the hard disk of this machine. »
Karim, slowed in his tracks, looked at him with incomprehension.
"But... we have to test it! We have to write encryption applications to prove that it is unbreakable! We have to show it! We go to the banks, we tell them that we have the Holy Grail to secure their transactions! »
"We don't show anything," Lazarus said. "If we release this prototype today, we are two penniless students with stolen equipment. Thomson or Bull will buy the patent for a handful of cherries, they will license our technology, and they will sell it to the Americans in five years. We are not patent sellers, Karim. We are empire builders. »
Lazarus crossed his arms over his chest, his gaze staring at the flashing cursor on the screen.
"The V-1 module is complete. It's the spark. But for the spark to start the fire, we need the right legal and financial environment. We need a public limited company, a share capital, and a board of directors. I'm only sixteen years old. If I sign a contract today, it is null and void, or subject to my father's authority. »
Karim finally understood the scope of his young boss's plan. This boy's patience was terrifying. He had just designed Europe's most advanced technology in a maid's room, and he was willing to bury it in a drawer for two years, just to make sure no one would steal his crown.
"What are we waiting for, then?" asked Karim, suddenly crushed by the weight of the time that remained to pass.
"We're waiting for 1984," Lazare said, his gaze piercing the darkness of the Parisian night through the skylight. "In two years, I will be of age. I will recover my emancipation, and I will find the necessary funds. Until then, you graduate from the École Supérieure d'Electricité, I enter Polytechnique or Normale, and we refine the encryption algorithms in silence. America still has two years of respite. »
Lazarus turned off the screen.
The green message VOLTA KERNEL V-1.0 READY disappeared into the darkness, swallowed by the cathode ray tube. The maid's room regained its silence and coldness. But in the pocket of Lazare Bonaparte's jacket, silicon slept, heavy with the sovereign threat that would soon shake the foundations of the digital world.
The invisible man's childhood was definitely over. The countdown to history could officially begin.