Location: Le Bunker (Ivry-sur-Seine) / McCormick Place Main Stage (COMDEX, Chicago)
Date: May 20, 1991
Point of View: Omniscient
In the vocabulary of the DGSE's clandestine operations, there is no room for improvisation. A successful infiltration, a targeted assassination, or an act of industrial sabotage relies on an absolute principle: manic repetition until the gesture becomes a spinal reflex. The body must know before the brain even thinks.
Lazare Bonaparte, a former Action Division operative who died in 2026 and was reincarnated in this twenty-four-year-old body, applied this military doctrine to the letter. But on the morning of May 20, 1991, his target was not a foreign warlord or a CIA agent. His target was the collective psyche of humanity.
In the heart of Level -3 of the Ivry-sur-Seine bunker, a "capture room" had been set up in record time. The walls were lined with absorbent black fabric. In the center, Lazare stood on a circular platform, surrounded by a dozen high-definition cameras and heavily modified infrared motion sensors.
Karim, his eyes bruised by weeks of sleepless nights, typed frantically on the keyboard of his Volta V-1 control station. Screens spewed out lines of code at breakneck speed, calculating video compression vectors.
"The satellite link via AMD's secure channels is stable," Karim announced, his voice hoarse as he adjusted his headset. "The signal bounces off the North Atlantic telecommunications satellite and back down to the dish we installed on the roof of McCormick Place in Chicago."
Auguste Bonaparte, arms folded in the half-light, watched his adopted son. Lazare wore a simple black cashmere turtleneck and dark trousers. The uniform of a new era. Stripped-down, martial—the exact opposite of the strict suits or shapeless checkered shirts worn by American engineers.
"What is the latency?" Lazare asked, his voice calm, staring at an invisible point in front of him.
"Two hundred and thirty milliseconds," Karim replied, tapping his screen. "It's a physical miracle, Lazare. But for the human brain, it's enough to create a slight lag if you speak too fast or make sudden gestures. The holographic image might blur."
"It won't blur."
For the past two weeks, secluded in this room after manually desoldering the competition's microchips with his bare hands, Lazare had been training. He had choreographed every step, every wrist movement, and every intonation, integrating the satellite delay into his own biomechanics. He had essentially relearned how to walk and talk so that his double of light, ten thousand miles away, would appear perfectly human. It was psychological torture—a total dissociation between his physical body in Ivry and his image in Chicago.
"T-minus four minutes," Karim announced, the tension making his fingers tremble over the keys. "Alexandre de Vigan just sent a coded message from the Chicago control room. The auditorium is packed. We had to turn away two thousand people."
At that precise moment, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Chicago's McCormick Place was buzzing.
The 1991 COMDEX was the absolute high mass of the technology industry. The main auditorium, a gigantic cavern capable of accommodating five thousand people, vibrated with an electric, almost feverish energy.
The phantom marketing campaign orchestrated by Alexandre de Vigan had worked beyond all expectations. The huge black billboards announcing "Beige is Dead" right in front of the headquarters of Intel and IBM had whipped the press into a frenzy. Journalists from Wired, PC Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal crowded the aisles, notebooks and cameras in hand, ready to devour the answer to the riddle that had been torturing Silicon Valley for months.
In the sound and light control booth overlooking the crowd, Alexandre de Vigan surveyed his work with the cold detachment of a Roman general before a battle. He wore a pearl-gray double-breasted suit, an anomaly of elegance in this sea of American geeks.
He let his gaze drift to the front row: the VIP section.
They were all there.
Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, was nervously chewing on a pen, his face flushed with contained anger. He knew Volta was behind the poster campaign—his lawyers had confirmed it—but he couldn't understand how a French company, suffocated by a federal White House embargo, dared to hold a press conference here. A few seats away, Bill Gates, Microsoft's young billionaire, adjusted his oversized glasses, intrigued, speaking in low voices with his lieutenants. The executives of Compaq, Toshiba, and IBM were present as well.
The court of the Kings of the Old World, gathered to witness what they believed would be the swan song of the Ogre of Ivry.
At ten o'clock sharp, the lights in the massive hall abruptly cut out.
An absolute silence fell over the five thousand spectators. The total darkness was not a technical error; it was a declaration of war by de Vigan. The industry was beige and noisy. Volta would be black and silent.
On the darkened stage, a bluish-white laser beam pierced the air from the rigging above. Then another. In a fraction of a second, an intricate grid of light appeared on the stage floor, coupling the projectors with rotating mirrors secretly installed by Karim's team overnight.
A murmur of confusion rippled through the front rows. Bill Gates leaned forward, narrowing his eyes.
Suddenly, a voice echoed through the auditorium's speakers. A deep, calm voice, endowed with a slight artificial reverberation and an abyssal coldness.
"The history of technology is a history of chains."
Just as the sentence ended, the laser beams converged in the center of the stage. A myriad of luminous particles seemed to condense in real time. In the blink of an eye, the silhouette of Lazare Bonaparte materialized out of the darkness.
He wore his black turtleneck. He stood perfectly straight, his hands clasped behind his back.
The breath of five thousand people caught in their throats. It wasn't a screen. It wasn't a projection on smoke. He was a man made of light, three-dimensional and frighteningly sharp, standing right before them.
"I am Lazare Bonaparte," the hologram continued, his voice perfectly synchronized with the movements of his luminous lips. "The French State and the Central Intelligence Agency of your country have formally forbidden me from leaving European soil, convinced that geography can contain ideas. They were mistaken. I am not physically here in Chicago. I am speaking to you from an underground chamber in Ivry-sur-Seine, France."
The photographers' flashes erupted in a deafening crackle. The auditorium descended into sheer madness. The press instantly grasped the magnitude of what they were seeing. Before even presenting a product, Volta had achieved a technological feat that NASA itself deemed impossible in 1991: real-time transatlantic holographic telepresence.
Andy Grove dropped his pen. Bill Gates was speechless. This display of network supremacy was terrifying.
In the bunker in Ivry, Lazare was oblivious to the hysteria reigning in Chicago. He stared at the red tally light on the main camera, delivering his speech and controlling his breathing to mask the 230-millisecond latency.
"You have accepted chains," Lazare continued in his hypnotic tone, forcing the Chicago audience into silence just to listen to him. "You accepted the idea that in order to possess computing power, you had to be chained to a desk. You accepted the deafening roar of cooling fans, the heat of melting processors, and beige plastic casings the size of washing machines. You made a compromise between mobility and power."
The hologram took a few steps across the stage. The illusion was terrifyingly realistic.
"Today, Volta is putting an end to this compromise."
On the Chicago stage, a physical pedestal, remotely controlled by de Vigan, emerged from the floor through a mechanical trapdoor. A halo of white light—a very real one—fell upon the object resting there.
A black monolith. Closed. Inconceivably thin, contrasting sharply with Toshiba's or Apple's portable bricks, which were often ten centimeters thick.
"I present to you the Volta Nomad," Lazare's voice announced.
The hologram approached the pedestal and reached out. On stage, the optical illusion was flawless: Lazare's hand of light seemed to rest directly on the physical polycarbonate lid. With a theatrical movement he had rehearsed hundreds of times in Ivry, Lazare mimed opening the screen, while in Chicago, a mechanism hidden within the pedestal delicately raised the Nomad's physical display.
The computer turned on. No noise. No fan exhaust.
Behind Lazare, a giant ten-by-ten-meter screen lit up, duplicating the Nomad's display so the entire room could see the interface.
"You have been led to believe that a laptop can only be a secondary tool," Lazare said with cold, calculated arrogance. "A slow machine, barely good enough for typing memos while traveling. That is a lie perpetuated by an industry trying to protect its desktop real estate. The Nomad is not a gimmick. It is a workstation."
In the bunker, Karim sent the signal. The demonstration of raw power began.
"Inside this chassis, weighing less than two kilograms, beats the VESLA-M processor—a System-on-Chip clocked at 40 Megahertz. It is the exact equivalent of the Compaq Volta V-1 tower that conquered your businesses last year, but miniaturized onto a surface area smaller than a postage stamp."
On the giant screen in Chicago, the VoltaOS operating system appeared. Lazare didn't need to touch a mouse. He gave the command verbally, and from the control booth, a technician launched the pre-loaded software.
"Our software partners have rewritten their applications specifically for our architecture," Lazare announced. "Watch."
A heavy word-processing software opened instantly, loading a thousand-page document without a single stutter. The room held its breath. The complete lack of loading time, made possible by Volta's ultra-fast flash memory, was pure science fiction in an era where mechanical hard drives ground away for minutes on end.
"Word processing is for secretaries," Lazare scoffed, his holographic gaze sweeping over the rows where Silicon Valley's heavyweights sat. "Let's look at financial mathematics."
A monstrously complex financial spreadsheet appeared on the screen. Tens of thousands of cells linked to probabilistic Wall Street formulas. On standard laptops of the era equipped with Intel 386 chips, recalculating this table literally took four minutes and frequently caused system crashes.
"Complete recalculation," Lazare ordered.
The screen barely flickered. A fraction of a second. The new results displayed instantly.
A collective gasp of shock rippled through the thousands of spectators. Andy Grove slumped back into his chair. The raw power of the VESLA-M, coupled with the 8 MB of RAM that Lazare's team had painfully salvaged from Intel's own machines in the cellars of Ivry, had just shattered industry standards.
"You think that's just basic arithmetic?" the hologram asked, implacable. "Let's push it even further."
The spreadsheet vanished, replaced by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software. A three-dimensional wireframe model of a fighter jet engine appeared—the exact kind of file that routinely brought Sun Microsystems' stationary workstations to their knees.
The 3D model began to rotate seamlessly, without a single dropped frame, driven by the screen controller integrated directly into the silicon of the Volta SoC.
The demonstration was brutal. It was a public execution.
Lazare Bonaparte, speaking from his underground bunker in Paris, was proving to the world's leading superpower that it had just been technologically eclipsed. The Nomad wasn't just a mobile computer; it was a black hole of computing power that had just swallowed ten years of American research and development in a ten-minute presentation.
"You can build planes, calculate stock market trajectories, or design entire cities on a device that fits inside a simple leather satchel," the hologram concluded, his face impassive. "Power is no longer confined to a desk. The power stays with you. Everywhere."
The COMDEX auditorium erupted into frenzied applause, with reporters practically screaming about the death of the desktop computer.
But up in the control booth, Alexandre de Vigan smiled shrewdly. He knew Lazare had not yet drawn his most devastating weapons. The raw power was just the bait. The ergonomics and the price point were going to be the lethal trap. The psychological operation had only just begun. The V-Note had just become a legend.
Location: COMDEX Main Stage, Chicago / Le Bunker, Ivry-sur-Seine
Date: May 20, 1991
Point of View: Omniscient (Focus on the event and psychological impact)
The echo of the frenzied applause that followed the 3D modeling demonstration took long minutes to die down in the cavernous McCormick Place. In the dimly lit room, illuminated only by the bluish glow of the giant screen and the white spotlight hitting the Volta Nomad, the atmosphere had irreversibly shifted. It was no longer curiosity. It was shock.
On stage, Lazare Bonaparte's hologram hadn't moved a millimeter. He let the silence take hold—a psychological weapon he wielded with the same dexterity as an assault rifle. In the bunker in Ivry, ten thousand kilometers away, Karim watched the telemetry monitors, sweat beading on his forehead. The transatlantic data flow was holding firm. Lazare was a flawless ghost.
"Power is nothing if it is imprisoned in a cage," Lazare's deep, synthetically reverberating voice boomed through the thousands of speakers. "And look at the cages you have built up to this day."
The giant screen behind him came alive. Software interfaces vanished. Images of the competition's laptops appeared, harshly lit and unforgiving. Apple's Macintosh Portable, weighing in at a massive seven kilos. The imposing Toshiba T3100, as thick as a dictionary. And IBM's machines: square, angular, and encased in the beige plastic that had become the universal color of bureaucratic mediocrity.
"You call this engineering," Lazare stated. "I call it laziness. You took desktop computers, smashed them with a hammer to make them fit into suitcases, and overcharged your customers for the result, simply hoping their backs were strong enough to carry them."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. In the VIP section, Andy Grove frowned, his arms crossed so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
"Look at the Nomad," the hologram commanded.
The image on the giant screen shifted to a stunningly high-definition close-up of the black computer on its pedestal. De Vigan's robotic cameras caressed the sleek lines of the machine.
"No plastic," the Builder announced proudly. "Plastic cracks, plastic turns yellow, plastic is the material of toys. The Nomad's chassis is forged from aerospace-grade magnesium alloy. It is lighter than aluminum, but stronger than steel. It measures only a centimeter and a half thick when closed. Its total weight, including the battery: one point eight kilograms."
Journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Byte Magazine were practically tearing through their notebook pages as they scribbled. The figures being announced defied the known laws of physics for 1991.
"And above all... listen."
Lazare made a slow, sweeping gesture with his hand. In the Chicago control booth, Alexandre de Vigan cut all background music and boosted the ambient stage microphones to their maximum. An absolute, deathly silence fell over the auditorium. The only sound was the ragged, collective breathing of five thousand people.
"You hear nothing?" Lazare asked softly, his voice dropping to a near whisper in the dark. "That is the sound of the future. There is no fan in the Nomad. No hoarse mechanical breathing to cool down an obsolete processor wasting its energy. The VESLA-M thermally manages its output down to the nanosecond. The magnesium shell dissipates heat passively. Silence is not a whim, gentlemen. It is the ultimate luxury of focus."
The impact of this silence was devastating. American tech executives, so accustomed to the perpetual, droning hum of their server rooms and offices, suddenly became acutely aware of the noise pollution generated by their own creations.
"But anatomy is not enough," the hologram continued, slowly stepping closer to the pedestal. "We must talk about the interface. How does a human communicate with a machine while on the move?"
The giant screen displayed an unflattering video clip: a businessman in a suit desperately trying to use a trackball mouse on the cramped tray table of an airplane seat, the mouse slipping and constantly falling off the edge. The entire room burst into laughter, painfully recognizing their own daily struggles.
"The mouse was designed for a desk," Lazare explained. "And current mobile solutions, such as recessed trackballs or mini-joysticks shoved into the middle of a keyboard, are ergonomic heresies. They force your fingers into unnatural contortions. They are imprecise. They constantly remind you that you are fighting with a machine."
The screen cut back to the Nomad. The camera zoomed in on the flat, black space just beneath the keyboard's spacebar. A perfectly smooth rectangle, outlined by a faint, elegant groove.
Linh's invention. The capacitive touchpad.
"I present to you the Touchpad," Lazare announced.
His hologram reached out, mimicking physical contact with the surface of the rectangle. Simultaneously, on the giant screen duplicating the VoltaOS, the mouse cursor began to move.
"No more trackballs to clean. No more flat surfaces required. Your finger becomes the cursor."
The camera broadcast a live feed of a hidden technician's hand (which the audience assumed was the magical, invisible interaction of the hologram) gently gliding over the black rectangle. On the screen, the cursor obeyed with formidable speed and precision, opening windows and closing menus fluidly.
"A light tap of your index finger equals a click," Lazare explained, detailing the algorithms Karim had spent months refining to eliminate false inputs. "Swipe down on the right edge, and the page scrolls. It is intuitive. It is organic. The computer is no longer a tool separate from you; it becomes a direct extension of your nervous system."
In the front row, Bill Gates leaned forward so sharply he nearly tipped out of his chair. His highly analytical mind, capable of dissecting millions of lines of code, had just slammed into a wall of pure, undeniable elegance. It was brilliant. It was so obvious that it was deeply infuriating to the entire American industry that they hadn't thought of it first. In a matter of seconds, the Touchpad had rendered every single piece of research on mobile interfaces entirely obsolete.
Lazare's hologram stepped back, resuming his strict, martial posture, hands clasped behind his back once more. He allowed the audience a moment to digest the avalanche of hardware innovations.
In the bunker in Ivry, Auguste stepped closer to Karim.
"They're ripe," the former spy murmured. "They're completely hypnotized."
"Wait for the kill shot, Father," Lazare replied from the capture stage, his dark eyes locked onto the camera lens. "The real slaughter begins now."
In Chicago, the hologram raised a hand.
"Power. Ergonomics. Silence. All of this would be nothing more than a neat exercise in style if the machine were to die halfway through a transatlantic flight."
The tension in the auditorium spiked. The ultimate Achilles heel of mobility: battery life.
"The best computers that American industry can offer you today," Lazare said, his tone dripping with calculated contempt, "promise you two hours of battery life. Three hours, if you turn off the backlight and stop breathing."
Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd. It was an infuriating truth—a promise that NiCd battery manufacturers could never keep due to the sheer power gluttony of Intel and Motorola processors.
"The hardware division of Volta S.A. refused to accept this fatality. We redesigned power management from the ground up. The VESLA-M processor consumes only exactly what it needs, down to the millisecond. When idle, it enters a near-total sleep state. And to power it, we abandoned outdated NiCd technology. We integrated next-generation lithium-ion cells."
Lazare paused. Perfect timing. He needed to permanently brand this number into their brains.
"The Volta Nomad, under continuous use for word processing and heavy calculation, offers you a real, guaranteed battery life of twenty-four hours."
A collective gasp. A physical shockwave. Five thousand people had just taken a mental uppercut to the jaw.
"Twenty-four hours," Lazare repeated, hammering each syllable. "You can unplug this machine on a Monday morning in Paris, work on the Concorde, land in New York, run your meetings all day on Wall Street, return to your hotel that evening, and type up your final reports—without ever, ever needing to search for an electrical outlet."
In the VIP section, sheer panic set in. Executives turned to one another in disbelief. Some shook their heads, whispering accusations of industrial lies and exaggerations. But the icy, unshakeable confidence of the hologram standing before them left no room for doubt.
Volta had just bent space and time. They had created the ultimate weapon of modern capitalism: the ability to produce flawlessly, without interruption, everywhere, all the time.
Lazare's hologram let the uproar swell through the room. In the control booth, Alexandre de Vigan checked his stopwatch. It was time. Time to transform this marvel of engineering into an irrational object of lust.
The image on the giant screen vanished, replaced by an abyss of absolute black.
The crowd slowly began to quiet down, sensing that the climax was approaching. The journalists waited with bated breath for the only piece of information missing from the equation. The magic number. How much was France going to charge for this revolution?
"You are all wondering what the price of such a technological leap is," Lazare's voice began, low and mesmerizing. "You assume that a machine capable of humiliating your desktop computers, confined in less than two kilos of magnesium, featuring a revolutionary interface and infinite battery life, must cost a fortune."
Lazare took a step forward. The hologram seemed to lean out over the edge of the stage, looming directly over Andy Grove and Bill Gates in the front row.
"You are right."
A shiver ran through the auditorium. In standard product launches, a CEO would practically apologize for a high price tag, hastily attempting to justify it with financing plans or skewed market comparisons. Lazare Bonaparte offered no apologies. He weaponized its inaccessibility.
"The Volta Nomad was not designed for everyone," the hologram declared with monumental arrogance. "It was not designed for the masses. It was designed for the elite. For those who lead, for those who decide, for those whose time is the most precious commodity in the world. It is not an ordinary work tool. It is an instrument of power."
Lazare stood tall.
"And power is never cheap."
On the massive black screen behind him, a single number appeared, projected in massive, luminescent, overwhelming white digits:
$25,000
The silence that crashed down on COMDEX was so absolute you could have heard a pin drop on the convention center carpet.
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
It was absolute heresy. That was the price of a brand-new sports car. It was an absurd, borderline delirious sum that shattered every conceivable glass ceiling in the tech industry. At the time, a high-end computer topped out at roughly four thousand dollars.
And then, the sheer, wicked genius of Alexandre de Vigan's strategy took hold.
It wasn't rejection that broke the silence. It was an explosion of camera flashes. Photographers rushed the stage, wildly snapping pictures of the giant screen, the sleek black monolith on its pedestal, and the impassive hologram.
The room began to boil over. Screams erupted. Journalists shouted desperate questions into the void, knowing full well the ghost of light wouldn't answer them.
By slapping a stratospheric price tag on the machine, Lazare had instantly neutralized any attempt at direct comparison. The Nomad wasn't playing in the same league as Intel or Compaq anymore. It wasn't even competing in the laptop category. It was now competing in the realm of Patek Philippe watches, bespoke Savile Row suits, and private jets.
He had just weaponized institutional jealousy. Every single corporate executive in that room, and every Wall Street trader who picked up the Journal the next morning, was going to feel a visceral, sickening need to own this black machine. Not just for its 24-hour battery life or its revolutionary Touchpad, but because placing it on their desk would scream to the rest of the world: "I am part of the elite who can afford this."
In the bunker in Ivry, Lazare could feel the frantic energy of the room pulsing through the satellite link. He knew they had won. The four thousand units—built with microchips painfully salvaged and hand-soldered in blood and sweat—would sell out within an hour of the order lines opening. The American embargo hadn't killed Volta; it had transformed it into an untouchable, ultra-luxury status symbol.
On the Chicago stage, the hologram of Lazare Bonaparte cast one final, piercing look over the delirious crowd.
"The era of the sedentary worker dies today," his synthetic voice boomed over the deafening racket. "Welcome to the era of the Nomad."
The laser beams crackled. In a sudden shower of luminous particles, the Builder's hologram instantly disintegrated, evaporating into the darkness of the stage.
The grid of light vanished. Nothing remained.
Nothing, except the pedestal, bathed in a halo of immaculate white light, upon which rested the Volta Nomad—black, silent, and entirely indifferent to the absolute chaos it had just unleashed.
Silicon Valley had finally realized that its worst nightmare was only just beginning, and that the Monster of Ivry was now untouchable—capable of striking the very heart of the Empire without ever having to leave his fortress. The V-Note trap had sprung perfectly. The world would never be beige again.