Location: New premises of Volta S.A., rue de Tolbiac (Paris 13th)
Date: October 1984
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Karim Belkacem and Lazare Bonaparte)
The thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, in the autumn of 1984, was nothing like the technological hub it would become decades later. It was still an industrial underbelly, a maze of old printing presses, red brick warehouses and cobbled streets where the acrid smell of exhaust pipes and the nearby Seine floated. It was a district of blind labor.
It was the perfect place to hide the birth of a monster.
At the corner of the rue de Tolbiac, behind a heavy garage door made of anonymous gray metal, a raw concrete staircase plunged beneath the surface of the city.
Karim Belkacem descended the steps with cautious slowness. The scholarship student, who had deserted the benches of his engineering school weeks ago, carried a box full of his floppy disks, crumpled notes and full ashtrays. He had expected to discover a damp cellar, a vague storage room hastily rented, barely larger than his maid's room on the rue Mouffetard.
At the bottom of the steps, Lazare Bonaparte was waiting for him.
The young eighteen-year-old CEO had just inserted a key into a brand new armored door. He turned his wrist. The steel bolts retracted with a heavy, incredibly reassuring snap.
"Welcome home, Karim," Lazarus said simply, pushing the door.
He raised the row of main circuit breakers.
A series of industrial neon lights lit up in a cascade. The harsh white light, of surgical purity, flooded the space.
Karim dropped his box. The soft sound of floppy disks hitting the gray epoxy resin floor was the only sound that echoed through the vast space. His jaw dropped.
It wasn't a cellar. It was a sanctuary.
One hundred and fifty square meters of basement had been completely rehabilitated. The stone walls had been sandblasted and painted white. The floor had been poured with an antistatic resin designed to dissipate the slightest electrical charge. The air was dry, stirred by an industrial ventilation system that purred softly.
But what literally took Karim's breath away was the arsenal.
In the center of the room, perfectly aligned under the neon lights, stretched four brand new work benches covered with antistatic mats. The first was dominated by Tektronix 2465 oscilloscopes, the most advanced four-channel models on the market. Next to it are industrial Weller welding stations with integrated fume extraction.
And at the back of the room, placed on reinforced desks, two workstations were enthroned like divinities. They weren't do-it-yourself Apple IIs. They were true professional UNIX stations, heavy engineering machines equipped with massive high-resolution monitors. Alongside them, programmers from industrial EPROMs completed the system.
It was Auguste Bonaparte's war chest materialized.
"Bonaparte... Karim stammered, approaching a UNIX station with an almost religious reverence. "It's... It's unreal. This bike... It costs the price of an apartment. How did you manage to fit all that in here? »
Lazarus walked slowly behind him, watching the machines with the cold eye of a steward reviewing his troops.
"I liquidated fifty percent of our share capital in the space of two weeks," the young CEO replied without the slightest emotion. "Layout, shielding, air extraction, and equipment orders from industrial suppliers. I used Volta S.A. 's Kbis extract to open credit lines, but I paid the machines in cash to get immediate deliveries. »
Karim turned abruptly.
"Fifty percent? Lazarus, you're sick! We have only just created the company! You spent two hundred thousand francs? What if we don't sell anything? We have a prototype module, we don't even have customers! We're going to burn everything else in charges by the end of the year! »
Lazarus placed both hands flat on the central bench. He was wearing a black turtleneck. At eighteen, he already imposed an overwhelming gravity.
"Money is not made for sleeping, Karim. Money is ammunition. My father did not sacrifice his body in Lebanon so that we could watch the interests accumulate wisely. He gave me the means to wage war. »
Lazarus pointed to the laboratory.
"The maid's room was the time of survival. But today, we are an industry. If you want to write an operating system that can take over the world's banking networks, you can't do it on a toy. Your compilation will take four seconds instead of four hours. My routing will be checked to the nearest nanosecond. We didn't burn the capital, Karim. We bought pure speed. »
He approached a small steel safe placed on a reinforced shelf, typed in a code and opened the heavy door. He took out a grey cardboard box, which he placed delicately in the center of the bench.
Karim felt his heart sink. He knew this company.
Lazarus removed the lid.
Inside, placed on a bed of antistatic foam, lay the original prototype of the Volta-1 module. The very first example. The one that had come to life on the night of their break-in at the University of Jussieu. The one whose code had been compiled clandestinely by parasitizing the state's supercomputers, and who had booted with unprecedented savagery on the servers of the research laboratory, proving his ability to take absolute control.
But under the immaculate light of the industrial laboratory, the object suddenly appeared in its cruellest light.
He was a Frankenstein's monster. The green epoxy resin plate was streaked with uneven copper tracks, reinforced by hasty solder bridges. Flying electrical wires ran from one chip to another. Pieces of orange tape held some of the capacitors in place.
However, it was the Holy Grail. Inside, the VoltaOS kernel slept, ready to intercept data streams.
"He's here," Karim whispered, a proud smile stretching his lips. "Our Jussieu baby. It looks a little dented, but it runs like a Swiss clock. I have further refined the priming routine. »
Lazarus' silence was heavy, laden with destructive criticism. The sixty-year-old engineer stared at the prototype with clinical disgust.
"It's not a product, Karim," Lazare said suddenly, his voice cutting like a scalpel.
Karim's smile froze.
"What do you mean, it's not a product? Lazarus, that fucking card takes control of a host server in less than a millisecond! It encrypts flows with a key that the Americans would take a century to break! »
"Technically, yes. Architecture is sovereign," Lazare conceded. "But commercially, Karim... it is an abomination. »
He leaned against the bench and stared into the eyes of his technical director.
"Listen to me. You have the brain of a developer. You think that if the algorithm is perfect, the rest doesn't matter. This is false. The code is invisible. Imagine for a moment. We get an appointment with the IT security director of a large bank. He is used to IBM servers with grey sheet metal bodies, which exude solidity. »
Lazarus grabs the map by the edges.
"And then I arrive in his hushed office, and I put it on the table. A green plate covered with dangling wires, traces of soldering and tape. If they see this, they will call security. In the best case, they will take us for pimply students. In the worst, for bombers. Form dictates the perception of function. We can't sell absolute state security in a package that screams Sunday DIY. »
Karim took the shock. Freed from the euphoria of creation, he had to admit that Lazarus was right.
"Okay... sighed the scholarship student. "Okay, the packaging is disgusting. What do we do, then? Do we send it to a factory so that they can engrave a clean printed circuit board? Without the flying wires? »
"No," said Lazarus. A cold smile appeared on the young CEO's face. "Engraving a clean circuit is what our competitors do. That would make us acceptable. I don't want to be acceptable. I want that when we put the module on a banker's desk, the object itself commands respect and terror. The Volta-1 module will not be a computer board. It will be a monolith. »
Lazarus went to a large sketchbook. He opened it and placed it in front of Karim.
On the blank page, Lazare had drawn an object that had nothing to do with the computer science of 1984. There were no visible circuits, no chips. The sketch represented a perfect rectangular parallelepiped. A black, smooth, totally opaque brick. At its base, only a thin row of gold connectors. On its upper face, devoid of any artifice, was engraved a simple and deep symbol: a stylized "V" with sharp lines.
"What's that?" asked Karim, wide-eyed. "Do you want us to lock the map in a case? It's going to melt! »
"It's not an empty hull," corrected Lazarus. "It's total encapsulation. Industrial potting . We're going to redesign the PCB. Then, we will flood the entire circuit board in a bath of black epoxy resin. The resin will polymerize and harden to become as strong as stone. When the customer takes the module in his hand, he will feel a dense, heavy, cold block of mass. It will be a black box, in the literal sense of the word. Technological mystery in its purest form. »
Karim shuddered. Lazare had just transformed a computer component into a weapon of psychological deterrence. But the coding genius immediately saw the other side of this strategy.
"Lazarus... Karim whispered. "If you cast the whole architecture and the EPROM chip in a rock-hard resin..." no one will ever be able to open it. »
"Exactly."
The sixty-year-old engineer had just closed the circle of state paranoia.
"The day a competitor or a foreign agent gets their hands on one of our modules to try to analyze it, they will come up against the resin. The only way to access the silicon will be to scrape mechanically. And the resin will be formulated to chemically adhere to the fleas' paws with destructive force. »
"The resin will tear the matrix out of the components," Karim finished breathlessly. "The silicon will break. The chip self-destructs if you try to rape it. It is an inviolable armor. »
"The customer buys absolute security. We're going to give it to him down to the atoms of our product," said the young CEO.
"Good," Karim said, the adrenaline erasing weeks of accumulated fatigue. "How do we do this? I've never handled industrial resin. »
"It's the material, Karim. That's my domain," Lazarus replied, taking off his jacket. "Prepare your priming routines. Install your UNIX environment. I take care of the alchemy. We have one month to produce the first ten monoliths. November will be our hunting month. »
This is the second and final part of Chapter 16. I integrated the thermal challenge that is central to hardware engineering: enclosing chips in resin is like creating a furnace. Lazare will have to use his knowledge to transform this physical handicap into an aesthetic and technological feat.
Location: Volta S.A. Laboratory, rue de Tolbiac (Paris 13th)
Date: November 1984
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding Focus on Lazarus and Karim)
The first week of November fell on the laboratory in the rue de Tolbiac with the intensity of a military campaign. Under the merciless light of industrial neon lights, the two young founders of Volta S.A. now lived in complete self-sufficiency, swallowing liters of black coffee and sleeping in three-hour increments on folded camp beds in a corner of the basement.
On the immaterial side, Karim Belkacem was living a real technological honeymoon.
The UNIX workstation that Lazarus had acquired was a monster of power. No more endless waits to compile the slightest piece of code, no more untimely crashes of the Apple II. The scholarship holder of Louis-le-Grand typed on his mechanical keyboard with the virtuosity of a possessed pianist. It cleaned up the VoltaOS core, optimizing asymmetric encryption algorithms to run in a minimum of clock cycles.
But on the side of matter, in the domain of Lazarus, the war against the laws of physics was raging.
The idea of encapsulating the electronic board in a block of black resin to make it a tamper-proof "monolith" was brilliant in terms of security and marketing. But thermodynamically, it was an absolute nightmare.
One Tuesday, at two o'clock in the morning, the first encapsulation test took place.
Lazare had cast a working prototype in a mold filled with standard epoxy resin, the one used in the building. After hardening, the black brick had been plugged into the test bench. Karim had launched a complex calculation loop to use the processor at one hundred percent of its capacity.
For three minutes everything was perfect. The oscilloscope displayed an immaculate response curve.
Then the curve began to shake.
"We're losing clock cycles," Karim whispered, his nose glued to the control screen, his eyebrows furrowed. "The response time is getting longer. Forty milliseconds... sixty... »
Suddenly, the monitoring screen froze sharply. A pungent smell, distinct from that of cold coffee, rose from the straw mattress. A smell of burnt bakelite.
"Cut off the power!" ordered Lazarus, tearing off the cable himself.
He put his hand on the block of black resin. It was hot. Nearly ninety degrees. Inside the block, the processor had literally melted into its own juice.
"I told you so," Karim said, leaning back in his wheeled chair, running his hands over his tired face. "I told you it was going to melt. Standard epoxy is an electrical insulator, great, but it's also a perfect thermal insulator! We just created a fucking microwave oven. Silicon needs to breathe, Lazarus. Heat cannot escape, it accumulates on the chip until the matrix burns out. You can't sell a security system that self-destructs after three minutes of calculation. »
Lazarus did not get angry. The sixty-year-old engineer considered material failure not as a defeat, but as a factor to be integrated into the equation.
"The architecture remains valid," the young CEO decreed in a polar voice, staring at the smoking block of resin. "It's the chemistry of the resin that's bad. Thermodynamics is a stubborn law, but it is not insurmountable. »
"What do you plan to do? Drilling holes in it? Put a small fan? Goodbye to the "inviolable monolith" in this case. »
"Never moving parts," Lazare said. "A fan breaks down. Holes let in dust and moisture. Heat dissipation must be completely passive. The resin itself has to spit out the heat. »
The next morning, Lazarus deserted the laboratory. He spent his day scouring industrial chemical suppliers in the Paris suburbs, using Volta's Kbis extract to access aerospace materials.
When he returned to Tolbiac in the late afternoon, he carried two heavy white plastic buckets and a large bag of bright white powder.
"What is that?" asked Karim, looking up from his screen where lines of green code were scrolling. "Flour? Are you getting into baking? »
"Aluminium oxide. Alumina," corrected Lazare, placing the bag heavily on the bench. He donned thick nitrile gloves and a filter cartridge mask. "Pure epoxy blocks heat. But if you saturate the resin with alumina powder before polymerization, you create a composite material. Alumina is an excellent thermal conductor, but it is still a total electrical insulator. The resin will suck the heat from the processor and conduct it to the surface of the block. »
Karim watched Lazarus prepare his mixtures with the fascination one attributes to a mad alchemist.
"Will that be enough to cool the chip?" doubted the stockholder.
"The thermal conductivity of the material is one thing. The surface area of exchange with the air is another," Lazare explained, taking out new encapsulation planes from his briefcase.
He spread them out in front of Karim.
The design of the black monolith had evolved. It was no longer a totally smooth brick. On the upper surface, Lazarus had drawn a series of fine parallel grooves, very elegant, of an aggressive symmetry. In the center, Volta's capital "V" was no longer a simple engraving: it was a deep beveled notch in the material.
"Design is never purely aesthetic. Form follows function," Lazarus recited, his eyes shining with predatory intelligence. "These grooves and the recessed logo increase the resin's contact area with the surrounding air by forty percent. It's not just a logo. It is a passive heatsink, carved directly into the shield. The monolith will not only be black and inviolable. It will cool itself by natural convection. »
Karim remained silent, stunned by the elegance of the solution. Lazarus had just turned a deadly overheating problem into a high-tech visual signature.
The next three weeks were spent at the forge.
The chemistry of the composites was ruthless. Loading the resin with alumina made it viscous, pasty like fresh cement. If Lazarus poured it as it is into the silicone molds, micro-bubbles of air would get stuck around the legs of the microchips, creating fatal hot spots and weakening the armor.
Lazare invested in a small industrial vacuum bell, connected to a super-powerful pump.
Tolbiac's nocturnal ballet took on the appearance of science fiction. Karim coded, while Lazare assembled the first ten pre-series printed circuit boards, soldering the components under a binocular loupe with inhuman precision.
Then came encapsulation. Lazare prepared the toxic mixture under the extractor hood, loading the black epoxy with the alumina powder. He placed the electronic boards in the silicone molds, poured the dense black paste on top, and immediately enclosed the whole thing in the vacuum bell.
VROUUUM.
The pump sucked the air out of the bell. Through the thick glass porthole, Karim and Lazare watched the resin boil cold, releasing any trapped air bubbles. By purging the vacuum, the resin infiltrated every microscopic gap between the components, sealing the silicon in a gangue of absolute density.
At dawn on November 18, 1984, the production cycle ended.
The laboratory in the rue de Tolbiac smelled of coffee, hot resin and ozone. The neon lights were humming softly.
Lazarus, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up over his forearms, approached the drying bench. He gently removed the soft silicone molds.
One after the other, ten objects emerged.
They were magnificent in terror.
Ten rectangles of absolute darkness, of a deep matte that absorbed the harsh light of the neon lights without reflecting it. The alumina-laden resin gave them an unexpected weight, a mineral density that was more reminiscent of basalt stone than plastic. Their edges were sharply sharp. No button, no slit, no screw disturbed the surface.
At the base, the double row of gold connectors sparkled, the only clue to their electronic nature, ready to bite into the innards of a host machine. On the upper face, the thermal grooves ran with paramilitary rigor, converging towards the center where the seal of the nascent empire — the sharp "V" of Volta — was enthroned, hollowed out of the mass.
It was the Volta-1 module. The V-1. Ready for series production.
Lazarus grabs one. The material was cold under his fingers.
"Load test," the CEO ordered, handing the monolith to his technical director.
Karim, his eyes shining with fatigue and excitement, took the module. The weight surprised him. It was not a gimmick; It was a heavy weapon of the information age.
He inserted the V-1 into the expansion port of one of the test machines, a heavy corporate server compatible with the banking standards of the time. He turned on the current.
The physical interception was instantaneous, brutal and without blunder. The American processor was short-circuited before it could even read its own startup program. The machine's screen flashed, and Karim's clean command line appeared in a split second:
VOLTA KERNEL V-1.0 SECURE MODE INITIATED.
> _
"Launch the brute force attack algorithm," Lazarus commanded. "Make him suffer. We'll see if it holds up to the temperature. »
Karim typed a series of commands. The V-1 was called upon to encrypt and decrypt massive closed-loop data packets, pushing the small encapsulated processor to one hundred percent of its maximum capacity, a stress test that no commercial machine of 1984 could endure without slowing down.
The minutes ticked by. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. One hour.
On the screen, the data scrolled by at lightning speed. Not a single clock cycle was lost. Karim's core held firm, managing memory with obsessive perfection.
But the real test was under the hand of Lazarus.
The engineer had placed his palm flat on the block of black resin connected to the machine.
The heat was rising. The processor inside was screaming, giving off watts of thermal energy. But instead of melting, the heat was literally pumped out of the alumina powder and piped to the surface. The grooves and the "V" logo played their role perfectly. The ambient air in the laboratory swept away the resin, carrying away the calories.
"Surface temperature stabilized at forty-eight degrees Celsius," announced Lazare, consulting a laser thermometer. "It's warm to the touch, but it won't go any higher. Heat dissipation is in perfect balance with power consumption. It could calculate for a hundred years without ever melting. »
Karim let out a long sigh of relief, sliding back into his chair, a laugh of nervous exhaustion shaking his shoulders.
"We did it, boss. It's a fucking masterpiece. If IBM sees that, they're going to faint. »
Lazarus withdrew his hand from the monolith. His face, carved with a pruning hook by the sleepless nights, betrayed only a calculated satisfaction.
The product was complete. The resin armor protected Lazarus' industrial secret and Karim's software genius. If a competitor tried to open the block to copy their architecture, the resin would tear off the silicon, destroying the chip and its code into a thousand pieces. It was a sovereign black box, a technological black hole that was going to swallow the market.
"IBM doesn't syncope. IBM crushes those who disturb them," Lazare placidly corrected, unplugging the still-warm V-1 module to rest it next to his nine twin brothers on the anti-static mat. "Technology is only half the battle. The other half is the invasion of the market. If we want to survive, we have to attack from the top of the pyramid. We need the seal of the Republic. »
Karim frowned, rubbing his eyes.
"The top of the pyramid? What do you mean? That we're going to knock on the door of the Élysée Palace with our black bricks in a sports bag? »
"The French state has been paranoid since the Beirut bombing and the Farewell affair," Lazare analyzed, his eyes staring at the black monoliths as if he were already addressing his future clients. "They know that their communication networks and the servers of the major national banks are porous. They are desperately looking for an encryption solution that is not subject to the goodwill of the Americans. But to approach the ministries, we need a showcase. An unassailable institutional client who will validate our technology. »
"A bank?"
"The Crédit Lyonnais, or the Bank of France," Lazare said.
He fetched his dark suit jacket, thrown over a chair, and put it on. The eighteen-year-old readjusted his tie with the meticulousness of a hitman checking his gun.
"Rest today, Karim. You did your part. The mind is in the machine. Now it's up to the businessman to step in. Get ready, because next week we're putting on our costumes. We're going to prove to them that their digital safes are made of papier-mâché, and that only Volta S.A. has the steel to protect them. »
On the bench of Tolbiac's laboratory, the ten V-1 monoliths seemed to be biding their time, silent, cold and impenetrable. The industrial age of the silicon war had just begun, and the invisible man was about to strike his first big blow.