Location: Bonaparte family apartment, rue d'Assas (Paris 6th)
Date: Spring - Summer 1987
Point of view: Omniscient (Slippery Focus on Augustus and the Family)
The spring of 1987 enveloped Paris in an unexpected softness. In the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens, just below the windows of the apartment on the rue d'Assas, the chestnut trees were budding and the flower beds were bursting with color.
This seasonal revival seemed to have seeped through the heavy double windows of the large bourgeois apartment. The year had started off on a high note for Lazare. Between the titanic design of the SONG chip, the coordination with Taiwanese foundries and the locking in of his dozens of patents, the young Builder led a life of convict. His days began at dawn and ended late at night.
However, contrary to what one might have feared, this relative absence was not experienced as abandonment by the twins he had brought back from Đà Nẵng. Quite the contrary. Lazarus' frantic pace left room for another form of magic to operate: the slow, warm, unwavering magic of the home.
Auguste Bonaparte had radically changed. The former DST strongman, whose body bore the heavy after-effects of the Beirut attack, had put his officer's reflexes and martial authority in the closet. The wounded patriarch, who spent his days in his armchair brooding over his closeting and the fragility of life, had just found a bright reason to get up every morning.
He was no longer the colonel. He had become " Ông nội " — the grandfather.
One Tuesday afternoon, while a warm breeze swelled the thin curtains of the large salon, Auguste sat cross-legged on the Persian carpet. The position pulled painfully on his pelvis, but he didn't show anything about it. In front of him, Minh was bent over with fierce concentration over a complex mechanical alarm clock that Auguste had unearthed at a local second-hand dealer.
The eight-year-old boy was wearing navy blue corduroy overalls. His cheeks had lost the hollow and sickly aspect of the orphanage. He wielded a tiny flat screwdriver with the dexterity of a master watchmaker.
"Gently on the mainspring, my good man," whispered Auguste in French, his gravelly voice softened by infinite tenderness. "If you release him all of a sudden, he's going to jump in your face."
Minh paused. He was not yet fluent in the language, but he understood intonation and gestures. Augustus pointed to a small cogwheel and slowly pronounced the syllable.
"The en-gre-nage."
Minh looked up at the old man with his big black eyes. The boy loved these moments. He liked the way French words rolled through his grandfather's mouth, like well-oiled mechanisms.
" En-gre-nage," Minh repeated, his small voice stumbling slightly over the "r," causing Auguste to smile forgivingly.
"Exactly. Words, Minh, are like the pieces of your alarm clock. If you put them together in the right order, you can create a sentence that tells the truth. If you make a mistake, the mechanism gets stuck and no one understands each other. »
Minh nodded seriously. He liked this logic. He plunged back into the alarm clock, pulling the spring out with infinite gentleness. Augustus watched him do it, his heart squeezed by an emotion he had not felt since Lazarus' childhood. These two children had saved him. As Augustus watched them rebuild, he felt his own war wounds healing. They shared the same unspeakable experience: that of surviving the horror. But here, in this sun-drenched living room, surrounded by the smell of apple cake baking in the kitchen, horror no longer had the right to exist.
On the other side of the room, on the vast velvet sofa, Linh was snuggled up against Camille.
The transformation of the small lookout was one of the most overwhelming in the house. Linh, the marble child who analyzed the world with the coldness of a strategic calculator, had let himself be tamed by the enveloping sweetness of his new eleven-year-old little sister. Camille had never forced her to talk. She had never tried to hold him by force. She had simply shared her space.
At that moment, a heavy illustrated geographical atlas was open on their knees. Camille pointed to the different regions of France, explaining the climates and mountains.
"And this is the sea," Camille explained softly as she traced the contours of the Atlantic coast. "In summer, the water is cool, but you can make huge sandcastles. Have you ever seen the sea, Linh? »
Linh remained silent for a long time. His black eyes stared at the blue stain on the glossy paper. In his previous life, water meant the monsoon, flooded streets, diseases. The sea was a distant monster.
Slowly, she turned her head towards Camille.
"It's... Big? Linh asked, his thin voice, grammatically accurate that always stunned his private teachers, echoing timidly in the living room.
"Huge," Camille promised with a beaming smile. "So big that you don't see the end. Dad said that we would all go to Brittany this summer, when Lazare will have finished with his factory. You'll see, we'll collect shells. »
Linh looked down at his hands, resting quietly on his knees. A tiny smile, discreet, secret, stretched the corners of her lips. The idea of the future, the idea that a joyous event could be planned in advance without a catastrophe cancelling it, began to germinate in his logical mind. The house had become a proven theorem: security existed.
This security was largely woven by the benevolent and unalterable presence of Madeleine Bonaparte.
The mother of the family came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on an embroidered tea towel. She brought with her a warmth that radiated throughout the apartment. For Madeleine, caring for these children was a sacred mission. She didn't ask them any questions about their past. She applied a universal therapy: food, cleanliness, and total emotional availability.
"The snack is ready!" she announced in her singing voice. "I made a brioche with pralines and there is hot chocolate. Minh, leave this poor awakening alone, he has suffered enough for today. »
Upon hearing the magic word, Minh instantly dropped his screwdriver. The hunger reflexes did not disappear so quickly, even if the boy's belly was now full. He jumped to his feet, helped by Auguste, who leaned on his shoulder to straighten up.
It was at this precise moment that the front door slammed with a force that made the windows shake.
"It's a scandal!" screamed Claire's indignant voice from the corridor, accompanied by the thud of a schoolbag being unceremoniously thrown over the terracotta tiles.
The hurricane was coming back from the school.
Thirteen-year-old Claire appeared in the frame of the double door of the salon, her hair in a mess, her face reddened by the race. Seventeen-year-old Victor, massive and placid, walked behind her, calmly chewing an apple.
"What's a scandal again, my dear?" sighed Madeleine with an amused smile, placing the tray on the large table in the dining-room.
"The physics teacher!" protested Claire, gesticulating. "He refused to give me the maximum score for my conductivity experiment on the pretext that I short-circuited half of the bench! It's absurd, the light bulb came on, the theoretical principle was validated! »
Victor giggled. "You almost set fire to your partner's blouse, sister. I saw the smoke from the Terminales building. »
Claire gave him a dark look, then her eyes fell on Minh. His face lit up instantly, forgetting his scholastic indignation.
"Minh! Come and see what I got back! »
She rummaged in the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out a small electric motor salvaged from who knows where. Minh's eyes widened. The brioche with pralines was instantly put in competition with the attraction of mechanics. Claire grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the table.
The dining room quickly turned into a joyful mess. The golden light of the end of the day bathed the room in the atmosphere of a masterpiece. Auguste was seated at the head of the table, savoring his tea, with a laughing eye. Victor, hungry from his day, devoured the brioche with phenomenal speed while levitating a sugar at the tip of his finger to impress Linh, who watched him with silent fascination.
Madeleine served the hot chocolate, making sure that Minh's cup, absorbed by Claire's engine, was well filled. There was noise, laughter, life. The heavy silence of the first days of their adoption seemed to belong to another era, to another dimension.
It was then that a key turned in the lock of the front door.
The noise, usually drowned out by the bursts of voices, caused a slight wavering. It was barely six o'clock. At this time, the Builder was normally in the middle of a meeting in Ivry, or in the process of tormenting the Bull engineers.
The door opened. Lazarus entered.
He stopped in the hallway, the time to put down his heavy black leather briefcase. He wore a dark suit, with an impeccable Milanese cut, but the fabric betrayed long hours spent sitting in front of CAD screens. His tie was loose, his collar unbuttoned. His features, though insolently youthful, bore the gravity of those who shape the world: dark circles under his eyes, his jaws clenched by continuous intellectual effort.
Lazarus advanced towards the dining-room. He did not stand in the shadows like a tortured ghost, refusing affection to preserve his empire. He was not the romantic martyr of a film noir. He was an exhausted young man, returning home, desperately seeking the comfort of the tribe he had formed.
When I saw him, the hubbub faded for a split second, not out of fear, but out of surprise.
Linh was the first to react. The little girl, usually so measured in her gestures, slipped from her chair with unexpected vivacity. She crossed the room and came to a stop a meter from Lazarus. She raised her head to this huge big brother who held the world in his hands. She didn't jump on his neck—the rough physical contact was still an ordeal—but she gently reached out and brushed the fabric of his pants.
"You came home early," she said simply, in Vietnamese.
Lazarus felt his heart tighten, a vice of overwhelming softness crushing his chest. The monumental pressure of the SONG chip design, the anxiety of patents, the terror of industrial leaks... all the noise of the outside world instantly evaporated at the touch of Linh's little hand.
He squats down slowly, his knees cracking slightly from fatigue, to get up to her level. He put his large hand on the little girl's black hair.
"The factory runs on its own for a few hours," he replied with a tired smile, but of immense sincerity, switching back to French so that the family would understand. "I smelled the smell of Mum's brioche from Ivry-sur-Seine. I needed my share before Victor devoured everything. »
Victor burst out laughing, his mouth full, drawing a friendly pat on the shoulder from Madeleine.
"Come and sit down, my dear," said the mother, her eyes shining with joy. She saw the exhaustion of her elder brother, but above all she saw that he did not run away. "There are still some left."
Lazarus got up. As he walked towards the table, his eyes met those of his father.
Auguste had remained silent, watching him from the end of the table. In the old colonel's eyes, there was no pity, only immense respect. Augustus had seen how Lazarus carried the financial future of the clan, how he confronted the giants of industry without ever trembling. And Lazarus, in return, saw how his father had rolled up his sleeves to offer Linh and Minh what he himself had neither the time nor the initial sweetness to provide.
They exchanged an imperceptible nod, a pact of blood and mutual understanding between men of the same ilk.
Lazarus sat down on a free chair, between Claire and Minh. The little boy paid him only a distracted attention, obsessed with the engine that Claire was putting under his nose, but he instinctively moved closer to Lazarus, his shoulder brushing against his older brother's arm. It was a sign of absolute confidence. Minh knew that this human fortress would protect him from any danger.
"So, Minh," Lazarus said, grabbing a thick slice of brioche and unceremoniously dipping it into his own bowl of coffee. "I was told you fixed Grandpa's alarm clock?"
Minh finally raised his head, a broad smile revealing a missing baby tooth.
"The spring was... blocked. I used the oil. The boy searched for his words, applying himself under Auguste's watchful gaze. "It's ticking now."
"It ticks, yes, and it delays ten minutes a day," joked Auguste, laughing. "But it's a great start."
"Next time, we'll check the exhaust," Lazare promised, naturally using the technical vocabulary that Minh was so fond of.
For an hour, Lazarus totally forgot about the existence of IBM's technology, patents, and fierce competition. He listened to Claire complain with delicious bad faith about her physics teacher. He listened to Victor recount in great detail the rugby match of last weekend. He watched as Camille whispered secrets in Linh's ear, making her smile with one of those rare smiles that lit up her serious face.
The sixty-year-old engineer, enclosed in this young body, gorged himself with this human warmth. He realized that his calculation, although unintentional, had turned out to be perfect. By letting his family absorb the shock of the twins' trauma, by letting the joyful chaos of his sisters and the benevolent wisdom of his parents operate, he had given them the best of environments.
He had rescued them from death, but it was his family who taught them how to live.
When the meal ended, Lazarus got up. He stretched, his joints cracking again. He had to go back to his office. The plans for mass production of the SONG chip were awaiting its final validations, and Alexandre de Vigan was due to contact him in the evening to take stock of the cash flow. The war was never really on pause.
"Are you leaving already?" asked Madeleine softly, clearing the cups.
"Right in my office, Mom," Lazarus reassured her as he placed a kiss on her cheek. "I have important calls to make in the United States with the time difference."
"Don't stay up too late, Lazarus. You have dark circles that eat your face. »
"I'll sleep when the global industry leaves me alone. We promise. »
Before leaving the room, Lazarus stopped near Linh. The little girl was studying her brother attentively.
"Your engine is in your head," Linh said seriously, pointing a finger at Lazarus' forehead. "He turns too fast. You should put oil, like Minh. »
The childish analogy, of formidable relevance, froze Lazarus for a second. Then he let out a frank, rare laugh, which resounded in the large apartment.
"It's noted, little lookout. I'm going to try not to blow the spring. »
Lazare Bonaparte left the dining-room and crossed the long corridor, his step infinitely lighter than when he arrived. The sanctuary had fulfilled its function. His mind was at peace, cleansed of the soot of industrial battles.
He entered the den of his office, locked the door, and went to his secure phone. He looked at the thick financial file on his desk pad. The time for family peace was over. The hour of conquest, brutal and ruinous, struck again. The Volta Empire was about to burn its gold reserves to forge the future of global entertainment, and Lazarus was once again ready to shake the earth.
Location: Secure conference room, Volta factory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: Autumn 1987
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Alexandre de Vigan)
Alexandre de Vigan was not a man who sweated easily. The Deputy General Manager of Volta S.A. used to handle millions of francs with the secondment of a casino dealer. But on that rainy morning in October 1987, the shark's silk shirt stuck to his back, frozen by a very real sweat of anguish.
He slid a heavy accounting file onto the large mahogany table in the conference room, in the direction of Lazarus.
"It's a hemorrhage, Lazare," said de Vigan, his voice strained to the extreme, abandoning all his usual sweetness. "It's pure and simple suicide."
At his side, René Castella, the production manager, nervously ran a hand over his face. He looked as if he had aged ten years in six months.
Lazare Bonaparte, seated at the end of the table, did not touch the backrest. He kept his hands clasped together, his face impenetrable.
"Specify, Alexander," said the Builder simply.
"Precise?!" exploded de Vigan almost as he hit the cardboard cover with his index finger. "Our cash flow is melting like snow in the sun! The contracts with Bull and Olivetti have made us rich, yes. The VoltaOS system and V-1 cryptographic modules generate an exceptional recurring revenue stream. We were on the verge of becoming the most profitable company in Europe. And then... you ordered the mass production of SONG chip. »
The salesman pointed an accusing finger at the young CEO.
"You demanded entire production lines at VLSI Technology Inc. in Taiwan. You've pre-ordered hundreds of thousands of units of that damn graphics card. The cost of manufacturing a chip containing one hundred and forty-five thousand transistors engraved in 1.5 μm is colossal! You empty our crates to assemble gigantic stocks of a component that our market does not need in such quantities! »
"Banks and administrations will never buy half a million graphics coprocessors, Lazare!" adds Castella, his voice quivering. "Secretaries type text, accountants do spreadsheets. They'll love VoltaOS's windowed interface, okay. But we could have been satisfied with producing twenty thousand for management positions! If we don't sell these cards within six months, the Taiwanese foundries' invoices will put us out of business. We're going to crash in mid-flight! »
Silence fell back into the room, heavy, saturated with the fear of ruin. De Vigan and Castella looked at the Titan of Ivry, waiting for an explanation, an apology, or at least a sign of concern.
Lazarus stood up slowly. He readjusted the flaps of his jacket with exasperating slowness.
"You reason with the logic of suits and ties, Alexandre. And you with the one on the assembly line, René," Lazarus said in a polar tone. "You think Volta is a company that makes luxury typewriters for bankers. The banks provided us with the initial capital. The professional market has been our Trojan horse. But he's not the one who's going to build my empire. »
"What are you talking about?" squeaked de Vigan. "What other market can afford to pay for expansion cards at this price?"
"The imagination," replied Lazarus.
He walked over to the heavy door of the conference room and opened it.
"Follow me. It's time you understood what we actually made in this factory. »
Intrigued and quite exasperated by the mysticism of their boss, de Vigan and Castella followed suit. They walked through the factory's secure corridors until they reached the Advanced Systems Laboratory, a blind room with limited access by digicode.
Lazarus pushed open the door.
Inside, the room was plunged into darkness, lit only by the glow of several cathode ray monitors spewing a vibrant light.
But what shocked de Vigan was not the material. They were the guests.
Around the machines, there were no bankers in suits, no starred generals, no CAC 40 executives. There were half a dozen young men, most of them barely in their twenties. Some wore jeans with holes, rock band t-shirts or shapeless sweaters. They had long hair, dark circles under their eyes, and the nervous attitude of those who live at night.
"Lazarus... Who are these people? De Vigan whispered, outraged. "Interns?"
"These 'people,' Alexander, are the brightest minds in an industry you despise because you don't understand it," Lazarus retorted in a low voice. "They are creators of video game studios. There are British programmers here who are revolutionizing 3D, and French people who are pushing the boundaries of animation. They are the vanguard. »
Lazarus stepped into the center of the room. When the young programmers saw him, murmuring among themselves with feverish excitement, fell silent. They too did not understand what they were doing in this hyper-secure industrial fortress, mysteriously invited by the ghost CEO that all of Europe was talking about.
"Gentlemen," Lazare began in English, his deep voice dominating the hum of the fans. "I brought you from across the Channel and from Paris this morning because you spend your nights fighting against machines that do not live up to your visions. You're trying to create worlds, but processors from Motorola, Intel, or MOS Technology limit you. You count each clock cycle. You're cheating with color palettes. You die of exhaustion to display three poor flat polygons on the screen. »
One of the young British developers, known for his revolutionary wire space simulators, crossed his arms, jaw clenched, stung but curious.
"And you have something better to offer us, Monsieur Bonaparte?" he asked with a phlegm that is typical of London. "We have heard about your famous OS for banks. But we do interactive art, not accounting. The Amiga and the Atari ST are the best. What more could you show us? »
"The future," Lazarus replied simply.
He waved to Karim Belkacem, who had remained in the shadows. The technical director approached the central machine, connected to a giant twenty-inch monitor. Inside the open case, a graphics expansion card shone softly: the card housing the SONG coprocessor, along with its million bytes of extended VRAM.
Karim launched a specific boot floppy, coded directly in ARM assembler to communicate natively with the chip.
"This is the SONG — Synthesized Output Nexus for Graphics" chip, Lazare announced, switching back to French for his lieutenants while letting the images speak for themselves.
The screen lit up.
The first technical demonstration began. There was no visible operating system, just the raw power of the silicon released on the cathode ray tube. Sixty-four hardware sprites appeared on the screen simultaneously. They were large, detailed graphic objects, representing ships and characters.
"The Japanese consoles that will be released in three years will boast static sprites," Lazare commented, his voice echoing in the absolute silence of the lab. "Look at this."
He nodded to Karim. The sixty-four sprites suddenly began to spin, expanding and shrinking with a sickening fluidity, without any aggressive pixelation, without the slightest jerk. At a constant 60 frames per second.
The developers widened their eyes. One of them, a Frenchman with messy hair, let out a stifled oath. Scaling and hardware rotation of so many elements, managed by a single coprocessor without exhausting the CPU, was mathematical heresy for 1987. The famous effect that Nintendo would call "Mode 7" years later had just been pulverized before it even existed.
"The built-in 32-bit Blitter moves thirty-two megabytes per second," Lazare continued mercilessly. "But I know that 2D doesn't interest you anymore. You want depth. You want to simulate reality. »
Karim pressed the space key. The screen went black.
Then, a complex shape appeared. A true three-dimensional spaceship, made up of hundreds of polygons.
Until then, 3D games looked like assemblies of transparent wires, or rough flat shapes. But this ship had volume. The SONG chip applied a real-time light smoothing algorithm on geometric faces: Gouraud shading. Light glided over the virtual cabin as the ship spun around, giving the illusion of a curved, perfect metal surface.
"My God... The British developer whispered, mechanically walking towards the screen, his face pale with dread and desire. "There is no flashing of the back panels... How do you manage the order in which polygons are displayed at this speed? The central processor should explode! »
"The CPU is sleeping," Lazarus replied with a predatory smile. "The calculation of visibility is material. The component incorporates a native 16-bit Z-buffer . The chip alone knows which pixel is in front of the other. It frees the main processor from the visual burden. You have the equivalent of a military graphics supercomputer from Silicon Graphics, miniaturized on a sixty-eight square millimeter ceramic chip, saleable to the general public. »
The silence that fell on the room was deafening.
It was not the polite admiration of bankers in front of a spreadsheet. It was the almost religious stupor of creators to whom the brush of the gods had just been handed to them. Lazare Bonaparte had just torn the video game industry from its fledgling era and violently projected it six years into the future, in the middle of 1993.
Technical limits, that intimate enemy of every programmer, had just been charred.
Lazare turned to Alexandre de Vigan, who was staring at the screen, his jaw dropped, having suddenly understood the range of the weapon he had in his hands.
"Do you see this financial abyss, Alexander?" whispered Lazarus to himself. "These young people will fill him up."
The CEO turned back to his stunned audience.
"Gentlemen. This graphics card will not be reserved for administrations. Within three months, Volta will offer it as a license to arcade machine manufacturers, consumer personal computer manufacturers and future console manufacturers. Today, in the greatest secrecy, I am handing over to you the software development kits for the SONG chip. »
One of the young Frenchmen approached, almost trembling.
"You... You give us access to this architecture? »
"I'm giving you a monopoly on the future," corrected Lazarus. "The games, the simulators, the CAD software that you're going to code on this chip will instantly make all of the current global production obsolete. When the market discovers what your studios have created, consumers will scream for that power in their homes. And to play it, they will have to make sure that their machine contains a SONG chip and runs on VoltaOS. »
Lazarus stepped forward, his Titanic aura crushing any resistance in the room.
"I supply the silicon. You provide the dreams. Together, we will redefine the absolute standard of digital entertainment. No one will be able to go back. »
An hour later, the developers left the Ivry factory, their eyes wild, clutching the binders containing the technical documentation of the ARM architecture of the coprocessor. They ran to the airport or train stations, intoxicated by the power they had just been entrusted with.
In the deserted laboratory, only de Vigan, Castella and Lazare remained.
The sales manager looked at the nineteen-year-old with respectful terror. The panic of bankruptcy had evaporated, replaced by the terror of a conquest that was too vast.
"You lied to Bull," de Vigan said in a blank voice. "You made them believe that your encrypted OS was the end of our partnership. But that was just the draft. The Trojan Horse to finance this chip. You don't just want to protect the world's data. You want an absolute monopoly on the world's imagination. »
"Banks secure the past, Alexander," Lazarus replied, turning off the monitor with a sharp gesture, plunging the room into darkness. "Designers design the future."
"The Japanese of Nintendo, Sega... the Americans of Commodore... They're going to want our skin when they see their own products made obsolete by European studios powered by our silicon. »
"Let them come," whispered Lazarus in the darkness of the laboratory. "I patented the hardware Z-buffer , the windowing acceleration, and the dedicated GPU coprocessor. If they try to copy us to catch up with the new standard that I have just dictated today, Maître Delacroix will ruin them in court. If they pay for our hardware licenses, we will become the inevitable tax of global digital entertainment. »
René Castella, leaning against the wall, wiped his forehead with a checkered handkerchief.
"How many?" the production manager asked in a hoarse voice. "How many chips should I order from Taiwan, boss?"
Lazare Bonaparte turned to the door, his dark gaze cutting through the darkness with the glare of a sharp blade.
"Enough to equip every household on this planet, René. Empty our coffers. Borrow if you have to. The abyss is behind us. Get ready to build Olympus. »