Location: Bonaparte family manor, Rouen (Normandy).
Date: December 3, 1996.
Point of view: Internal (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte).
The oak and beech forest that stretched behind the family manor in Rouen was frozen under a blanket of frost. Behind the thick bay window of the library, Lazare Bonaparte watched the slow ballet of the first snowflakes of December.
The silence that reigned in the vast room, lined with antique bookbindings, was almost unreal in its density. It wasn't the clinical quiet of the MegaFab's clean rooms, nor the electric, paranoid stillness of the Bunker at Ivry-sur-Seine.
It was the hefty, indifferent, age-old muteness of nature. An absolute stillness that clashed violently with the hysterical pace of the century it was forging.
On Tuesday, December 3, 1996, Lazare imposed a statistical anomaly on himself: a day of rest.
Dressed in a simple dark cashmere turtleneck sweater, freed from the armor of his double-breasted suits, Lazare held a cup of black tea, its steam curling against the cold windowpane. He had fled Paris, escaping for a few hours the calls from the Ministry of the Economy and the reports from its directors.
Yet his mind, a superscalar machine incapable of truly shutting down, refused to surrender to contemplation. The Norman landscape was merely a backdrop against which the geopolitical specters of the past year were projected.
Deep within Europe, its new Omega Data Centers roared silently. The infrastructure of the future Cloud was built, and inside these cathedrals of refrigerated concrete, the immaterial world was gestating.
Under the leadership of Karim Belkacem, the teams at Volta Software and Xavier Niel's developers were currently compiling the first routines of the sovereign search engine.
Free Search and Volta's relevance algorithm weren't yet online. The ultimate indexing weapon was being designed, forging in the shadows the matrices that would soon map the entirety of human knowledge. The web was being woven, line by line of code.
Lazare knew that when this portal opened, the attention of the entire planet would be his. The advertising machine was ready to print billions.
But the thought of those virtual billions inevitably brought the Ogre's mind back to the burning wound of 1996.
Korea.
The crisis had certainly eased. Seoul's sovereign default had been narrowly avoided, the won had stopped its freefall, and Samsung's factories, now under its control, were churning out CELLA-64M memory modules at an impeccable industrial pace to satisfy the hunger of AXIOM computers .
On paper, the rescue was a success.
But Lazare never looked at the balance sheets with the blissful optimism of politicians. He gazed at the scars.
He had underestimated the fragility of Asian finance. Driven by a pure thirst for punishment, to avenge the theft of his architectural legacy, he had unleashed a domino effect that ruined millions of lives, destroyed families, and plunged thousands of South Korean executives into the icy waters of the Han River.
This was no longer the surgically precise shadow war he had mastered; it was an uncontrollable cataclysm. Lazarus had played the avenging god, and fire had burned his fingers, reminding him with stinging cruelty of his own fallibility.
And the price of this miscalculation carried an exact figure.
Thirty-five billion Euros.
Lazare rested his forehead against the icy windowpane, closing his eyes. Thirty-five billion in debt, syndicated with Japanese government banks. To save Asia from the tutelage of the American IMF, he had had to accept Tokyo's leash.
For the next thirty years, a colossal fraction of Volta SA's profits would go directly to enriching the reserves of the Bank of Japan. He was the undisputed master of European silicon, the man who equipped the armies and homes of three continents, the owner of Earth's orbit thanks to ASTROLABE .
He was the giant who made Bill Gates and Andy Grove tremble.
But in macroeconomic reality, it was the golden vassal of the Japanese archipelago.
The Empire was a Leviathan, an overwhelming burden to bear. Hypergrowth, 150,000 employees, pressure from the Élysée Palace, the constant threat of assassination by the CIA—all of it rested exclusively on his shoulders.
The machine demanded to be fed, every single day, with his clear-sightedness and ruthlessness.
Lazare opened his eyes again. The snow was falling more heavily on the manor grounds.
The silence of the Normandy forest should have soothed him. Instead, it only deepened the vertiginous abyss in his conscience. For amidst these processor equations, these power struggles, and these billions of dollars in debt, an irrational anomaly had just erupted into the system.
A variable he had neither calculated, nor foreseen, nor desired.
A first name echoed in the emptiness of the library, shaking the very foundations of his clinical paranoia.
Eleanor.
Location: Library of the Bonaparte family manor, Rouen (Normandy).
Date: December 3, 1996.
Point of view: Internal (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte).
Eleanor.
The name floated in Lazare Bonaparte's mind, seeping into the mechanics of his thought with the insidious sweetness of a slow poison.
Standing before the large bay window of the Rouen manor's library, the engineer closed his eyes. He tried to summon his usual defenses. He attempted to mentally project the database structure of the future Free Search engine , to visualize the graphs of the relevance algorithm, to calculate the amortization rates of the debt contracted with the Bank of Japan.
Ordinarily, mathematics was his refuge, an icy fortress where no emotion could reach him.
But the equation slipped away. The nodes of the network dissipated. The coldness of the numbers was swept away by the olfactory memory of a light perfume, a note of amber and white tea, and by the echo of a clear laugh that belonged to no matrix.
Lazarus opened his eyes again and stared at his reflection in the window, superimposed on the Norman forest frozen by the frost.
What he saw terrified him deeply. The surface of the glass reflected the image of a twenty-eight-year-old man. A face with aristocratic, impeccably sculpted features, whose square jaw and obsidian eyes fascinated magazines worldwide.
It was the face of absolute genius, the emperor of silicon, the man who had bent the White House and Silicon Valley to his will.
But Lazarus knew that this reflection was a biological fraud. A monstrous anomaly.
Behind those dark pupils, there was not a young man in the prime of life. There was the soul of a ghost. A man who had lived through the end of the twentieth century, survived the following decades, aged, killed, betrayed, and who had finally been torn apart by the fire of a terrorist attack in Bali in 2026.
Adding the sixty years of his first existence to the twenty-eight of this one, the spirit that inhabited this perfect physical shell was exactly eighty-eight years old.
Eighty-eight years of wear and tear, geopolitical cynicism, unresolved grief, and dried blood on his hands. He was a time vampire, a paranoid and murderous old man trapped in the body of a Greek god.
And it was this monster, this tired leviathan, who today found himself counting the hours separating him from his next encounter with a twenty-four-year-old woman.
Aliénor's intrusion into his world hadn't been a typical security breach. If the CIA had sent a Mata Hari to seduce him, their protocols would have identified and crushed her within hours. No.
Aliénor had arrived through the channels of normalcy, introduced into his inner circle by chance encounters that even his hyper-control hadn't been able to filter out.
She was the absolute antithesis of his world. She understood nothing of superscalar architectures, she knew nothing of the Bundesbank's key interest rates or the life-or-death struggles with the Pentagon.
She moved in the world of art, of painting restoration, of light and pigments. She belonged to life, real life. The life Lazarus had forbidden himself to live in order to forge the armor of Europe.
He turned away from the window and began to pace the vast library.
The distraction she was creating was becoming a deadly danger. For weeks, in the middle of board meetings, while Édouard Renault-Tessier dissected the collapse of the South Korean won, Lazare had found himself no longer listening.
His attention, usually capable of isolating the smallest comma in a three-hundred-page contract, had drifted to the memory of a moment they had shared a few days earlier.
It was a Thursday evening in late November. It was pouring rain in Paris.
He had met her again at closing time at her workshop, near the Marais. There was no visible escort, as Commander Vauquelin had reluctantly agreed to hide his men on the other side of the street to give her the illusion of a normal walk.
They had taken refuge in a small, deserted café.
Lazare recalled the scene with a precision that caused him physical pain.
They were sitting side by side on a worn moleskin bench. She was telling him about a nineteenth-century painting she was trying to save from oxidation, describing the chemistry of varnishes with a passion that lit up her face.
At one point, to show him the angle of a crack, she leaned forward. Her shoulder brushed against his. Her hair grazed Lazare's cheek.
Lazarus, the man who ordered the breaking of his enemies' bones and who decreed the bankruptcy of Asian nations, had frozen. His heart, whose rhythm he controlled even under the RAID's gunfire in Bièvres, had begun to pound wildly with the violence of a teenager.
He had fallen silent. He hadn't listened to a single word of his explanation about nail polish. He had simply absorbed the warmth of his presence, registered the curve of his neck, the gentleness of his breath.
For forty minutes, in that dingy café, Lazarus had no longer been the master of the world. He had been nothing more than a man desperately thirsting for light.
This loss of control fascinated him as much as it terrified him.
Lazare stopped in front of the imposing stone fireplace where a log fire was slowly burning. The heat bit his clasped hands.
How could he love her? The moral dilemma was eating him up inside, scratching at the walls of his conscience.
She saw in him the young prodigy, the brilliant, secretive, sometimes taciturn, but ultimately human industrialist. She was unaware of the unfathomable abyss that constituted his true nature. If she knew that he had watched Alexandre de Vigan bleed to death on a highway to protect patents.
If she knew that he had ordered punitive raids, that he possessed the soul of a man born in the 1960s of the previous timeline. If she perceived the clinical coldness with which he calculated the value of a human life versus the preservation of the Empire... she would look at him as one looks at a Frankenstein's monster.
A sociopath. «I am a biological fraud ,» Lazarus thought with dizzying disgust. « I am deceiving her with my mere physical form.» He recalled another night, even more intimate. A transgression of his own sanctuary.
It was in October. Under a false pretext, she had come to meet him at Volta headquarters late in the evening. He had opened the doors to Level 4 for her, forbidding security from approaching her.
He had ushered her into his vast executive office.
He had to finalize the routing protocols for the ASTROLABE constellation before dawn. He sat down at his desk, typing his lines of code. Aliénor settled onto the massive black leather sofa, a book in her hand.
The contrast between the coldness of the flashing satellite screens and her presence was surreal.
Around two in the morning, the silence of the Bunker was broken by the steady sound of her breathing. She had fallen asleep, curled up on the leather, the book lying on the rug.
Lazarus had stopped typing.
He rose silently and approached her. He stood there for over an hour in the dim light, gazing at her. The supreme architect observed her utter fragility.
Her sleepy, relaxed face, free of social defenses, radiated an innocence that tore at his very core.
At that precise moment, he felt an irresistible, almost painful need to lie down beside her. To rest his head against hers, close his eyes, and let the Empire crumble. To abandon everything.
The factories in Huabei, Japan's debts, the war against the NSA... everything suddenly seemed trivial, sterile, compared to the visceral truth of his sleep. He brushed a strand of her hair. She sighed contentedly in her dream, unconsciously seeking the warmth of his hand.
The temptation to give up had bitten him until he bled.
But Lazarus hadn't touched her. He had recoiled, terrified by the power of that instinct to surrender. He had returned to his armchair, turned his screen back on, and resumed his password, his heart charged with a steely sadness.
He knew that abandoning her to normality was a forbidden luxury.
In the Rouen library, Lazarus moved away from the fireplace to resume his feverish pace. The snow continued to fall, erasing the outlines of the outside world, as if to imprison him with his own judgment.
The equation was a dead end.
If he gave in. If he let her into his life permanently. If he made her his official partner, he would be committing the ultimate crime. He would be dragging her into the eye of the storm.
Lazare knew the laws of asymmetric espionage. He was familiar with the practices of the CIA, British MI6, and the secret services of the humiliated Korean chaebols . He was a man without apparent weaknesses.
His enemies wore down their teeth on Volta SA's armor because it offered no vulnerable points. He had no worldly vices, no addictions, no paralyzing civic attachments.
To include Eleanor in his life was to draw a red and scarlet target on the back of the only person capable of bringing light into his darkness.
She would become the lever. As soon as the Wintel alliance or the American government realized that the silicon monarch cherished a civilian more than his own factories, Eleanor would cease to be a young woman.
She would become a pawn in an extortion racket. She would be followed, listened to, photographed. Her phone would be tapped, her apartment bugged.
And the day the technological cold war turned deadly, she would be the one to pay the price. A car pushed into the Seine. A poisoning disguised as a heart attack.
An industrial «accident.» «They will skin her alive to make me give in ,» thought Lazare, his jaws clenched so tightly they felt like they were going to break his enamel, a wave of preemptive hatred flooding his mind at the mere reflected that she might be threatened.
He remembered the words of Vauquelin, the head of security, when he had to justify the protective surveillance around his brother Victor and Camille: «Total innocence is the best cover... The American agencies know that the only way to breach the walls of this fortress is to enter through the main gate, invited to our own table by ties of blood.» Protecting her would mean keeping her under house arrest.
If he took her with him, he would have to turn her into a paranoid. He would have to impose bodyguards on her at all times, forbid her spontaneity, dictate her social interactions. He would transform her light into anguish.
He would make her the gilded prisoner of an empire that wasn't hers. It was a mutilation of the soul that he refused to inflict upon her.
But the alternative... the alternative was a personal death sentence.
Push her away. Cut ties. Take this sweetness, this escape, and stifle it with his own hands to send her back to the normal world, far from him.
If he did that, Lazare knew perfectly well what awaited him. He had already accepted it by signing the pact with de Vigan in the cellar of the Icehouse, but he had never fully grasped the physical torment it would cause.
Without it, he would return to his original emptiness. He would become the machine forever. Lazarus would ultimately devour the last vestiges of the young man's humanity.
His nights would be nothing but a succession of financial reports, intrusion alerts, and crushing geopolitical maneuvers. He would condemn himself to the absolute freezing of his feelings.
He loved her. He loved her with the gravity of an eighty-eight-year-old man looking at spring for the last time, and with the brutality of a twenty-eight-year-old who wants to burn the world to protect her.
Lazare stopped again in front of the bay window.
He raised his right hand and pressed his palm against the frozen surface. The condensation of his breath created a fleeting cloud on the glass, blurring the view of the forest buried under the snow.
Behind that window, the winter of 1996 was settling in. Europe was preparing to close its books on the victory of the IMPERATOR servers , the hegemony of the Compaq AXIOM , and the imminent launch of the Volta Search engine , which would definitively seal the subjugation of global knowledge.
Lazarus had won on all fronts.
But in the solitude of that great library, amidst the ancient books and the silence of Normandy, the master of time realized he lacked the power to alter the simplest of human laws. He could not possess both love and empire.
The weight of the crown demanded the exile of his feelings.
Lazarus let his forehead fall against the cold glass.
He closed his eyes, feeling the pain radiate into his bruised shoulder, a physical echo of a sacrifice he was about to repeat on a spiritual level.
Lazarus knew what he had to do. For her to live free, he had to die inside. The decision hadn't yet been put into words, but the coldness of the windowpane was freezing the answer in his soul.
The century belonged to him, but he would live through it alone. Utterly alone.