Location: Maître Delcourt's office, Boulevard Raspail (Paris 6th)
Date: September 1984
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazarus)
History often remembers the roar of cannons or the speeches delivered under the gilded palaces of the Republic to mark the beginning of great empires. However, real revolutions are almost always born in the hushed silence of a closed room, carried by the black ink and the coldness of the figures.
On that September morning in 1984, the air in Paris was crisp, sweeping away the last heat of summer.
In the sumptuous wood-panelled office of Maître Delcourt's notary's office, the silence was broken only by the solemn ticking of a Comte clock. Behind his imposing mahogany desk, the notary adjusted his tortoiseshell glasses. Opposite him stood two young men who clashed radically with the bourgeois classicism of the place.
The first was Karim Belkacem. At twenty-one, the scholarship student and coding genius was sweating profusely. He wore a cheap tergal suit, obviously borrowed or hastily bought, the shirt collar of which half strangled him. He kept wringing his hands, terrified by the opulence of the play and the legal vertigo of what they were about to accomplish.
The second was Lazare Bonaparte.
He wore a dark, tailor-made suit of minimalist and implacable elegance. He stood perfectly straight, his hands flat on the armrests of his leather chair. His face, with features now carved with a pruning hook by the end of adolescence, betrayed absolutely no emotion.
It was his birthday. The exact day of his eighteenth birthday.
The barrier of time had finally given way. Lazare was no longer a minor subject to parental authority or guardianship judges. In the eyes of French law, he was a free man, endowed with full and complete legal capacity. The hourglass that the sixty-year-old engineer had been staring at since he woke up in this child's body had just run out.
"Good, gentlemen," said Maitre Delcourt, smoothing out a thick bundle of documents stamped with the seals of the Republic. "Here we are. The term deposit account, opened by Colonel Auguste Bonaparte in November 1977, was officially released this morning, in accordance with the majority clauses. »
The notary paused, looking with deep respect for Lazarus.
"With capitalization, the total amount amounts to four hundred and seventeen thousand francs. As you demanded, Mr Bonaparte, this sum did not pass through your personal accounts. It was deposited directly in the deposit account of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. As soon as these articles of association are signed, it constitutes the entire starting cash share capital of your company. »
Karim let out a small hiss of admiration and panic mixed together. More than four hundred thousand francs. It was a colossal fortune for the time. This was the price of absolute independence.
Lazarus did not blink. His father's money, earned in the shadows and through risk-taking, was going to be transmuted into silicon and lines of code. The blood of Augustus, shed in the ruins of the Drakkar in Beirut, now irrigated his son's industrial future.
"Let's read the statutes, Master," Lazarus ordered softly, his deep voice echoing through the room.
Maître Delcourt cleared his throat and began to read the obligatory information quickly.
"Legal form: Public limited company. Company name: VOLTA S.A. Corporate purpose: Research, design, development and marketing of microelectronic components, secure hardware architectures and computer operating systems... »
Words floated in the air, freezing months of clandestine work in an unshakable legal reality.
"Breakdown of the capital: Mr. Lazare Bonaparte, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, holder of ninety percent of the shares. Mr. Karim Belkacem, Technical Director, holder of ten percent of the shares in exchange for his contributions to the software industry. The registered office is provisionally located at a domiciliation address in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. »
The notary turned over the last page, that of the signatures. He unscrewed the cap of his Montblanc fountain pen and handed it to Lazarus.
It was at this precise moment, as the solid gold nib touched the vellum paper, that the destiny of technological Europe changed.
If an omniscient observer had been able to scrutinize this scene from the future, he would not have seen an eighteen-year-old kid sign an administrative form. It would have seen the birth certificate of the greatest industrial predator of the late twentieth century. This document was to become a national relic.
Volta S.A. wasn't going to be just an IT company. In the decades to come, it would become the sovereign monster, the absolute pride of a nation that refused to bend the knee to American hegemony. It was from these four hundred thousand francs that Lazare would build semiconductor factories, impregnable data centers, and software architectures that would make the boards of directors of IBM, Microsoft and Apple tremble. The silicon shield, dreamed up by a reincarnated man and forged in the clandestinity of a maid's room with a scholarship student, became a legal entity, ready to devour the market.
Lazarus signed with a firm, black, sharp line.
He passed the pen to Karim. The young man with his hands damaged by mechanical keyboards took a deep breath. His fingers trembled slightly. He put his signature next to that of his boss. Spirit and matter were now bound by an inviolable commercial pact.
"Congratulations, gentlemen," said Maître Delcourt, affixing his own stamp to the document, sealing the creation. "The Kbis extract will reach you in a few days. Your company officially exists. The funds are released. You have the power to bind Volta S.A."
Lazarus got up. He buttoned his jacket with calculated slowness.
"Thank you, Master."
Karim stood up in turn, wiping his sweaty hands on his pants. When they passed through the doors of the study to find themselves on the sidewalk of Boulevard Raspail, the student let the tension he had been holding back for an hour explode.
"Holy shit, Bonaparte!" exclaimed Karim, a nervous laugh shaking him from head to toe. "We did it! We have a box! We have a crazy amount of capital! We will be able to buy UNIX servers, we will be able to rent real offices and launch the industrial engraving of V-1 modules! »
Lazarus looked at him, a slight grin of satisfaction stretching the corner of his lips. The preparation phase, seven years long of childhood frustration and school comedy, was over.
"We have an appointment at two o'clock to visit the basement premises on rue de Tolbiac," said the young CEO, slipping the company's cardboard file under his arm. "This will be our first official laboratory. Prepares purchase orders for welding equipment and blank EPROM batches. Tomorrow, we are starting the assembly of the first ten commercial prototypes of the V-1 board. I want them to be perfect. »
Karim nodded frantically, drunk with adrenaline. The silicon war had just left the stage of theory.
As they were about to go down to the subway entrance, a shrill and jerky beep sounded in the inside pocket of Lazarus' coat.
The young man stopped short. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a heavy black pager (a pager, a state-of-the-art technology in 1984, which Lazare had acquired to remain reachable at all times). The greenish liquid crystal display displayed a phone number with a flashing emergency mention.
Lazarus immediately recognized the prefix. This was the standard of the Val-de-Grâce Military Hospital.
The Shadow Patriarch's heart skipped a beat. An emergency call from the hospital, ten months after the Beirut attack, could only mean two things: permanent cardiac arrest, or a miracle.
"Change plans, Karim," Lazarus ordered, his voice suddenly blank, turning back to a phone booth. "Visit the premises on your own. I have to make a call. »
Location: Telephone booth (Paris 6th) / Army Training Hospital of Val-de-Grâce (Paris 5th) Date: September 1984 (End of day) Viewpoint: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The door of the glass telephone booth closed on Lazare, cutting off the rumble of traffic on Boulevard Raspail. The cabin smelled of cold tobacco and dried urine, but the young CEO paid no attention to it. With mechanical precision, he slipped a one-franc coin into the metal slot and dialed the number of the Val-de-Grâce switchboard that was displayed on the greenish screen of his pager.
The heavy, black handset pressed to his ear, he waited. The background noise of the line crackled.
The mind of the sixty-year-old engineer, usually so quick to calculate probabilities and decision trees, was running on empty. The medical emergency call obeyed an absolute binary: death or awakening. Ten months of deep vegetative coma. The medical statistics were clear: beyond six months, the chances of regaining clear consciousness collapsed exponentially.
"Val-de-Grâce, extended intensive care unit, I'm listening."
"Lazare Bonaparte," he said, his sluggish voice betraying the titanic effort he was making to control his own heartbeat. "I was beeped on this number. It was for Colonel Auguste Bonaparte. Room 412. »
"Don't leave, I'll pass on Madame Bonaparte to you, she's in the office of the head of department."
A transfer click sounds. Then, a sound that Lazarus had not heard since the previous autumn: the erratic breath of a woman crying, not in despair, but in a joy so brutal that it becomes suffocating.
"Lazarus... Madeleine's voice was broken, high-pitched, almost childish.
"Mom. Status report," he demanded, unable to shake off his martial terminology, for it was the only shield that kept him from faltering.
"He has opened his eyes, Lazarus!" Madeleine's scream echoed through the receiver, saturating the crackling speaker. "It's not a reflex, the doctors are formal! He followed the lamp with his eyes, he squeezed my hand... My God, Lazarus, he is awake! Your father has returned! »
Lazarus closed his eyes. The stale air in the phone booth suddenly seemed to him to be charged with pure oxygen.
The wolf had survived. The DST officer who had marched in Beirut's Death Valley, the father who had financed Volta's foundations in the shadows, had just snatched himself from limbo. And he did it that day. Exactly that day.
Lazarus' ultra-rational mind immediately rejected the idea of divine intervention, but he couldn't help but shudder at the cosmic irony of this chronology. That same morning, he signed the birth certificate of his industrial empire thanks to the blood money of Augustus. In the afternoon, Augustus came back to life, as if nature had waited for the transmission of power to be legally recorded before allowing the deposed patriarch to open his eyes again.
"I'm coming, mamma," said Lazare simply. "Tell him I'm coming."
He hung up, the slam of plastic on metal resonating like a gunshot. He stepped out of the cab, hailed a marauding taxi on the boulevard, and rushed into the back seat.
"Val-de-Grâce, by the shortest route," he ordered the driver.
During the journey, Lazare kept his hand on the leather folder that contained the statutes of Volta S.A., the newly signed statutes. The cardboard was heavy with the promise of decades to come. His mind navigated between two dimensions: the intimate, organic joy of finding his father, and the strategic coldness of the one who had just armed his country with an inviolable shield.
When he passed through the heavy glass doors of the military hospital, Lazarus did not walk: he cut through the air.
The immaculate corridors passed by at breakneck speed. Fourth floor. West wing. Prolonged resuscitation and intensive care. The smell of ether and chlorinated disinfectant, which had been stirring in his heart for months, did not stop him.
In front of room 412, an unusual crowd broke the clinical silence of the department. Two nurses were busy around a care cart, and Professor Lemaître, head of the military neurology department, was talking in a low voice with Madeleine.
Lazarus' mother turned round when she heard her son's swift footsteps. She staggered forward and threw herself into his arms. Lazarus welcomed her, placing his large hand on the trembling back of this woman who had just been through hell for nearly a year.
"He's conscious," she cried, her face buried in her son's shoulder. "He can't speak well yet, they removed his breathing tube this morning, but he recognized me. I swear to you that he recognized me. »
Lazare looked up at Professor Lemaître, demanding a diagnosis over his mother's shoulder.
The military doctor, his face barred by fatigue but illuminated by the professional pride of those who had defeated the reaper, approached.
"This is a phenomenon of absolute rarity, Mr. Bonaparte. Glasgow's score rose to 14 in the space of six hours. The cerebral edema was completely resolved over the months, and the synapses damaged by the shock wave of the explosion managed to bypass the lesions. Cognitively, your father seems intact. His lucidity, his long-term memory, it's all there. »
"And the physical plane?" asked Lazarus, his voice sluggish, the analyst regaining the upper hand.
The professor lowered his head slightly, the enthusiasm giving way to clinical reality.
"That's where the fight begins. Ten months in a coma is an eternity for the human body. He suffers from severe sarcopenia. His muscles are atrophied, melted by inactivity. He weighs less than sixty kilos. He cannot raise his arms, his vocal cords are damaged by prolonged intubation, and his digestive system will have to learn to function again. He is in his right mind, but he is a prisoner of a body that no longer obeys. Rehabilitation will take years. »
Lazarus nodded slowly. The wolf had returned, but its fangs were broken and its legs broken. He would never again run in the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior. His operational career at the DST was over, atomized on a road in Beirut.
"Can I see him?"
"Of course. Don't go with others, he gets tired extremely quickly," warned the doctor.
Madeleine stepped aside, wiping her cheeks bathed in tears.
"Go ahead, Lazarus. He is waiting for you. »
Lazarus pushed open the heavy door of the barren room. The whistling of the ventilator, which had been the soundtrack to his nightmares all winter, was gone. Only the regular beep of the heart monitor, measuring a slow but powerful pulse, attested to life.
On the medical bed inclined at forty-five degrees, Auguste Bonaparte rested.
The visual shock was unbelievably brutal. Lazarus, although he had seen him wither away month after month, was struck by his father's cadaverous thinness, now that he was no longer an inert medical object, but a conscious being. The former officer's cheeks were hollowed out to the extreme, the skin of his face stretched over the jawbone like a translucent parchment. Her hair, which had begun to turn gray before she left for Lebanon, was now pure and spectral white. His arms, resting at his sides under the thin hospital sheet, seemed to be those of an emaciated old man.
But in the midst of this field of biological ruins, two jewels shone with a terrifying brilliance.
The grey eyes of Augustus.
They were open. They were scanning the room, the medical equipment, the door. As soon as Lazarus entered, Augustus' gaze was fixed on him. There was no veil in those eyes. No confusion. It was the look of a high-flying analyst who had just taken control of his control tower, even though the building around him was on fire. It was the spirit of a predator intact in the shell of a baby bird.
Lazarus advanced to the foot of the bed. The legal file of Volta S.A. was still squeezed under his left arm.
For a long minute, the two men huddled in silence. The father nailed to his bed of pain, the son dominating the room from the height of his newly acquired eighteenth year. Lazare instantly remembered their last conversation, in the room in the Rue d'Assas. The young man who was giving lessons in urban survival to an officer going to the breaking point.
Augustus' right hand trembled on the sheet. A colossal effort animated the atrophied tendons of his forearm. He managed to raise his index and middle fingers by a millimeter to point to the plastic chair next to him. A silent invitation.
Lazarus walked around the bed and sat down.
Augustus took a wheezing breath. The air painfully cleared his throat, bruised by months of endotracheal intubation. Her dry, chapped lips parted.
"You... you have grown up," murmured the patriarch.
The voice was just a hoarse breath, a rustle of sandpaper, barely audible above the machines. She no longer had anything of the authoritarian baritone who made criminals tremble and ministers obey. But the lucidity of the remarks was total. He had just analyzed Lazarus' bone and muscle growth. Ten months away, the teenager had become a young adult.
"I did the right thing, father. You have been asleep for a long time," Lazarus replied, leaning forward slightly to catch every syllable without forcing the broken man to raise his voice.
Augustus blinked slowly, taking in the information. His spirit of deduction, a formidable mechanism, set in motion. He looked at his son's clothes. A dark suit, impeccably cut, a silk tie. Not the outfit of a student coming out of the benches of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
"The... the date... Auguste croaked, each word requiring an expenditure of energy that deepened his features a little more. "What... year? What month? »
Lazarus felt his heart tighten under the armor. The time had come to unveil the perfection of the cosmic alignment. He placed the heavy cardboard folder on his knees.
"We are in 1984, Auguste. It is September. »
Augustus' breath was blocked for a fraction of a second. His gray eyes widened imperceptibly. The calculations were made in his mind at lightning speed. 1977. The promise made to Madeleine in the half-light of the living room. The silent pact. The four hundred thousand francs. The term account can be unlocked at the legal majority.
"Today... Auguste murmured, his voice charged with an almost mystical incredulity.
"Today is the exact day of my eighteenth birthday," Lazarus confirmed in a solemn, grave tone, sealing the moment in the marble of family history.
The DST officer's gaze slid to the leather backrest on his son's lap. Augustus gave a painful grin. The sketch of a smile. The smile of a man who understands that his will was not a posthumous document, but a launching pad.
Lazarus placed both hands on the backrest. He could no longer hide the immensity of his work from her. Auguste was no longer his hierarchical superior within the clan, nor the cop who had taken him to the shooting range. Augustus had just earned, by his blood shed on Lebanese soil, the supreme title: that of providential founder.
"When the state ordered you to be placed under guardianship, Maître Delcourt contacted me," Lazare began, his voice lowered, sharing the industrial secret at the very heart of the intensive care unit. "I discovered trust, father. I discovered what you had been doing in the shadows for six years. The money you took from your bonuses, your silence, the absolute trust you gave me without even knowing what I wanted to build. »
Augustus did not blink, drinking his son's words like the water of an oasis after crossing the desert.
"Mom was crying about your coma. Victor and the little ones were looking for a landmark. I kept the house. I have held the clan, as I promised you before your departure for Villacoublay," continued the sixty-year-old engineer, the man of the second life paying his moral debt to the father of his corps. "But while I was looking after them, I also worked. Your money hasn't slept in a bank account. »
Lazarus patted the heavy leather back with his index finger.
"This morning, at nine o'clock. I signed the statutes. The company was legally born. Her name is Volta S.A., Father. It exists. The share capital, your four hundred and seventeen thousand francs, has been fully injected. We rented our first laboratories in the basement. Tomorrow morning, we begin the industrial engraving of sovereign memory. In a few months, we will attack the servers of the French banking system to impose our security architecture. We are going to drive the Americans out of our networks, market by market. »
A lonely, shining tear beaded at the corner of Auguste Bonaparte's right eye.
It slid down his hollowed cheek, sinking into the premature wrinkles drawn by pain. It was not a tear of sadness. Nor was it the tear of joy of an ordinary father seeing his son succeed.
It was the pure ecstasy of a state strategist.
Auguste had spent his life protecting the secrets of France against Soviet espionage, against American interference, against terrorism from the Levant. He knew the weakness of Europe in the face of the computer tidal wave that was brewing in California. And what he heard, there, from the mouth of this son whom he had never really understood, was the absolute certainty of victory.
The genetic anomaly he had created was not a soldier for the French army. He would never be the brilliant intelligence officer that Augustus secretly hoped for. He was infinitely more than that. He was the Builder of the Wall.
The officer, nailed to his bed, gathered his wavering strength. His hand, frighteningly thin, slipped slowly over the white sheet. The twisted knuckles approached Lazarus' hand, which rested on the company's file.
Lazarus did not back down. He opened his hand, and let his father's frozen fingers grip his wrist. Augustus' grip was weak, pitiful with physical frailty, but the moral strength it transmitted weighed tons.
"Build... Augustus whispered, his eyes fixed on Lazarus's, a sacred fire burning his last reserves of energy. "Build the empire... Lazarus. Don't let them... nothing. »
The final order. The blessing of the broken patriarch.
The sixty-year-old engineer felt an emotional shockwave that he had never experienced in his previous life. In his first life, he had been a mercenary in the shadows, a gifted technician in the service of a blind state, dying alone under a bridge in Paris trying to save the sovereignty of his country, without anyone knowing his name or validating his sacrifice.
But here, in this second life, he had a lineage. He had a meaningful last name, and he had a father who, although he didn't understand lines of hex code or microprocessor architecture, had grasped the essence of his mission. Augustus had paid for Volta's birth with his own blood, with his crushed body, only so that his son could devour the world.
Lazarus covered his father's gaunt hand with his own palm, warm and powerful.
"I promise you, Augustus," Lazarus replied, sealing the ultimate alliance with terrifying calm. "I am going to build a monopoly so massive that no nation will be able to dictate its laws to us. Rest now. You've done your part. The silicon war belongs to me. »
Auguste Bonaparte exhaled a long sigh. A sigh of absolute, almost ecstatic peace. The tension that had stiffened his jaw since he woke up disappeared suddenly. The intelligence officer's eyelids slowly closed, heavy with the fatigue of a resurrection and freed from the burden of the future. He was not falling back into a coma, but into the first real restful sleep in ten months.
The beep of the electrocardiogram resumed its cruising pace, slow, regular, reassuring. The wolf fell asleep, assured that his pack was under the protection of a titan.
Lazarus gently withdrew his hand. He got up, adjusted his suit, and remained for a few more seconds contemplating his father's peaceful face. The handover was total. Childhood was officially dead, buried under notarial signatures and whispered words on that hospital bed.
When he came out of the barren room, Madeleine was standing in the corridor, supported by Victor, who had been brought back urgently by Uncle Henri. The rest of the clan arrived as reinforcements, drunk with relief and hope.
Lazarus passed before them with the icy majesty of a monarch. He kissed his mother's forehead gently.
"He's sleeping," he said simply to reassure them. "The brain works perfectly. This is the beginning of the return. »
He gave Victor a look full of meaning, who returned it with mute admiration. Then, the young CEO walked away into the long corridor of the military hospital.
He left the building and found himself on the square in front of the Val-de-Grâce. The afternoon was coming to an end. The sky of Paris was ablaze with a coppery hue, announcing twilight. Lazare Bonaparte raised his eyes to the receding clouds.
In his pockets, he had the keys to a basement on the rue de Tolbiac. Under his arm, he held the genetic code of a company that was going to rewrite the rules of the global industry. His right-hand man, Karim, was already waiting for him in the shadows, his fingers burning with the desire to type the first lines of commercial code of the Volta system.
The curtain had just fallen on the genesis of the invisible man. The years of clandestinity, calculations in a maid's room, family manipulation and school frustration were over. The money was on the table. The statutes were signed. The father was alive to testify what happened next.
At exactly eighteen years of age, Lazare Bonaparte entered the arena of giants. IBM, Apple, Intel and Microsoft thought they would share the world at the dawn of this mythical year. Little did they know that a boy in a dark suit, from the future and endowed with absolute rationality, had just started a sovereign countdown in the heart of Europe.
The prologue of the war was over. The first chapter of the conquest was to be written in silicon and in the blood of its competitors.
The Volta S.A. empire had just been born.