Location: R&D laboratory (Ivry-sur-Seine) / Family apartment (Paris 6th)
Date: December 1987
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The silence that reigned in the high-security laboratory in Ivry-sur-Seine had an almost religious density. In December 1987, as melted snow swept through the industrial windows of the Volta factory, the air inside the clean room seemed to be suspended, electrified by the imminence of a revelation.
In the center of the large antistatic bench, under the harsh light of halogen neon lights, a small box lined with honeycomb foam had just been opened with the precaution reserved for sacred relics. Inside, set like rough diamonds of the new era, lay three squares of black ceramic, of absolute geometric perfection. Each of these squares was flanked by one hundred and twenty-eight tiny golden pins in PLCC (Plastic Leaded Chip Carrier) format.
The package had crossed the oceans by secure diplomatic mail, directly from the Californian and Taiwanese clean rooms of VLSI Technology Inc., one of the few foundries in the world capable of accepting the insane specifications required by Volta.
Lazare Bonaparte approached the table. For the first time since he had opened his eyes again at that time, the steel shell of the young Chairman and CEO cracked. His hands, usually as immobile as marble, trembled very slightly. The mask of the financial predator had evaporated, devoured by the pure ecstasy of the creator. He wasn't looking at a commercial product; he was watching the culmination of his first physical miracle.
He delicately grasps one of the chips between the tip of his thumb and index finger, feeling the cold touch of the ceramic.
SONG. The Synthesized Output Nexus for Graphics. The twin. His very first personal material creation in this world.
In his previous life as a twenty-first-century engineer, Lazarus had overseen the creation of thousands of processors. But here, in 1987, designing this chip had been a technological ordeal, a titanic struggle against the limits of the material of its time. Inside this dark square of sixty-eight square millimeters, Lazarus had succeeded in the heresy of enclosing one hundred and forty-five thousand transistors engraved with a finesse of 1.5 μm CMOS. It was a tour de force that defied the understanding of the engineers of his day.
There was more than just a simple display circuit in this silicon. Lazare had hidden a real simplified 32-bit ARM RISC core, clocked at 16 MHz, whose sole purpose, the only reason for existing, was to sequence colossal visual operations without ever daring to use the computer's main processor. It was the ancestor of a technology that would not be called "GPU" until many years later.
"She's gorgeous, boss," Karim Belkacem whispered, standing a meter away. The technical director had his voice choked with emotion and his eyes circled by months of sleepless nights. He didn't dare take another step, terrified that a simple discharge of static electricity from his clothes could wipe out the prototype.
"Let us see if she speaks," replied Lazarus.
A genuine, almost childlike smile, of a purity rare in him, illuminated the hard features of his face.
He approached the prototype of a graphics expansion card that René Castella had had soldered the day before with the precision of a goldsmith. The long dark green circuit board featured 512 KB of ultra-fast VRAM memory and gold-plated connectors. With infinite caution, holding his breath, Lazarus pressed the SONG chip into its central holder. A sharp and satisfying click confirmed the mechanical lock.
He inserted the board into the expansion port of the Bull development machine open on the test bench. The computer was interfaced with the machine's main 32-bit CPU. Lazarus put his hand on the external power switch.
"Food," he says simply.
He pressed. The fans roared. The oscilloscope screen jumped, indicating a paltry 0.8 Watt power consumption for the graphics card, another theoretical impossibility that Lazare had just realized.
The CPU woke up. He loaded the lines of code from the secure kernel of Volta OS. Then, the boot routine met the new graphics card on the bus. In accordance with the code written by Lazarus, the main CPU instantly delegated to him, via the MMIO memory area, the entire visual burden.
The imposing color CRT screen lit up suddenly, chasing away the shadows of the laboratory.
There was no stark text start screen. No flashing command lines.
A real graphical interface appeared in a fade of disturbing perfection. The screen displayed a dizzying resolution for the professional world of the time: 640 by 480 pixels. The colors weren't the garish, slobbery hues of home computers, but a subtle palette of 256 colors displayed simultaneously, picked by the chip's RAMDAC converter from a mind-boggling spectrum of 262,144 shades thanks to 18-bit coding.
In the center of the screen, the cursor of a mouse was resting, sharp, motionless. It wasn't a block of pixels painstakingly redesigned by the processor. It was a sprite managed materially by the internal engine of the SONG chip.
Lazarus put his hand on the wired mouse on the bench. He made a sharp movement. On the screen, the cursor obeys instantly, without the slightest latency, without the slightest phantom trail, with an insolent fluidity.
The engineers in the room held back a cry of amazement.
Lazarus clicked. He opened one window, then two, then three. He grabbed the title bar from the larger window and slid it violently across the screen.
The SONG chip's internal 32-bit Blitter began to howl with joy in the world of the infinitely small. It moved, redrawn, and recomposed blocks of pixels at a speed of 32 megabytes per second. The image doesn't quiver a fraction of a millisecond. There was no tearing of the image, no slowdown. It was digital silk.
"Push her," Karim whispered, mesmerized, finally approaching, drawn to the light of the screen like a moth. "Make her sweat."
Lazarus typed a command line into a prompt terminal to launch the secret three-dimensional test routine, engraved in the test ROM.
The screen dims for a microsecond. Immediately, dozens of polygons appeared, assembling to form a perfect sphere. The sphere began to rotate on itself. The SONG chip applied real-time Gouraud shading to the geometric facets, calculating light from a virtual source. It managed the test of the hidden faces itself thanks to its 16-bit hardware Z-buffer, a technology that until then had been science fiction for microcomputers. The 64 hardware sprites swirled around the sphere, undergoing scaling and rotating with diabolical ease.
"Intel Central is barely at two percent load... Julien, the team's chief mathematician, stammered, as he read the diagnostic data on a second monitor. His glasses slipped over his nose. "It's... It's unreal. Commodore's Amiga and Apple's Macintosh are completely dead. The graphics mode of future Japanese consoles is buried before it is even born. We have just killed industry. »
Lazarus placed both hands flat on the bench. His breath was short. Adrenaline flooded his veins with the violence of an equinox tide. He had just done it. He knew full well, thanks to his memory of the future, that this chip placed Volta S.A. at the very least six to seven years ahead of the world industry in technology. The scaling and rotation of its hardware sprites humiliated the famous "Mode 7" that Nintendo was still struggling to develop in its secret laboratories in Kyoto. As for the hardware acceleration of windowing and 3D, no one would seriously think about it for PCs until the mid-90s.
But as he savored this crushing victory, a thought of polar coldness crossed his mind, instantly freezing his victorious smile.
He looked down at the black silicon square on the motherboard.
The material is copied. As soon as the SONG chip was marketed, on a large scale, to equip European machines, IBM, Intel, Motorola and Apple would buy whole pallets of it through shell companies. Their armies of engineers in the pay of Silicon Valley would plunge Lazarus' PLCC box into baths of boiling nitric acid. They would dissolve the ceramic and epoxy resin shell. They would put the core of the ARM architecture under scanning electron microscopes. They would photograph every layer of doping, every copper track, every polysilicon grid.
In the space of twelve to eighteen months, America would have reverse-engineered its genius. They would change the layout of fifteen percent of transistors to circumvent direct plagiarism, and they would flood the market with their own clones, crushing French innovation under their industrial firepower.
The excitement suddenly gave way to the Builder's ruthless survival instinct. Joy evaporated from the laboratory. The air became heavy and stifling again.
"Karim," Lazarus ordered, his voice becoming as sharp and cold as the edge of a scalpel.
The technical director jumped.
"You unplug this card immediately. You remove it, and you lock these three prototypes in the level 4 safe. No one, I mean no one, has the right to manipulate them without my presence. »
"What... what? Karim stammered, roused from his ecstasy. "Lazare, we have to start the endurance validation tests! We have to prepare the assembly pilot for Castella! »
"The physical trade secret won't last a year against American reverse engineers," Lazarus said, buttoning his suit jacket curtly. "If we start production now, we're giving them the keys to the next decade on a silver platter. Our weapon to protect silicon will not be industrial secrets. It will be the law. »
Without an extra glance at the screen where the 3D sphere was still spinning in its fluid arrogance, Lazarus turned on his heel and stormed out of the lab.
He returned to his home, to the vast apartment in the Rue d'Assas. And it was there, in the hushed silence of the family home, that the most intense, craziest and most exhausting phase of his life began.
What Madeleine Bonaparte, observing her eldest son with increasing anguish, would soon call "fever".
Lazarus shut himself up in his room. He pulled back the heavy velvet curtains, isolating himself from the natural cycle of day and night. He plunged into a memory trance of unprecedented psychological violence. The sixty-year-old engineer, locked in this body that was still struggling to reach his twenties, had to force open the doors of the safe of his own mind.
To protect his silicon baby, to ensure Volta's hegemony, he was going to have to go much further than just protecting the SONG chip. He was going to have to patent the future of all humanity. It was going to lay legal minefields on all possible technological trajectories of the next thirty years.
On his large solid oak desk, reams of white paper with blank letterheads were piled up by the dozens. Under the yellow and harsh light of an architect's lamp, fueled by black coffee, forgetting to eat and sleeping only in erratic two-hour increments, Lazare began to write.
He did not write like an enlightened inventor. He wrote with the diabolical precision of a specialized lawyer, using the arid, interlocking and inviolable jargon of international patent claims.
He first wrote, in about a hundred pages, the complete specifications of the SONG coprocessor. In it, he described in suffocating detail the concept of hardware windowing acceleration (BitBLT), the design of the hardware Z-buffer integrated into a consumer graphics chip, and the revolutionary principle of adding a RISC core dedicated solely to display interruptions. Anyone who wants to make a 2D or 3D accelerator graphics card in the future will inevitably impale themselves on this patent.
But the fever did not stop there. Anticipating the hardware response of Intel and Motorola, which would eventually increase the power of their central processors, Lazare designed the complete architectures of 64-bit memory addressing. In 1987, computers were still struggling to handle a few megabytes of RAM, and the idea of breaking the theoretical barrier of 4 gigabytes seemed absurd. But Lazarus described with mathematical accuracy the extended registers, the memory pointers, and the necessary pagination tables. The 32-bit wall would come down in fifteen years, and when the industry looks for the solution, it will discover that it already belonged to Volta.
Seized by an absolute visionary fury, his eyes burned by lack of sleep, he attacked the connectors. He hated the slow cable clumps, COM serial ports, and Centronics parallel ports that cluttered the back of the computers of his day. He put down on paper the complete plans of an Asynchronous Universal Serial Bus. A standardised connector, symmetrical in its controller logic, capable of carrying both high-speed data streams and a 5-volt power supply, allowing the connection of peripherals "hot" without restarting the machine. He had just forged, from scratch, the legal and technical foundations of the USB standard.
And then, in the second week of his isolation, he tackled the ultimate Grail: mobility.
Telephony in the late 1980s was based on heavy, unstable and easily hackable analog radiotelephone networks. Lazarus knew that the future would belong to a hyper-connected and cellular world. Filling entire notebooks with arithmetic formulas, he laid the theoretical foundations for a purely digital global cellular network, based on time division multiplexing (TDMA).
He wrote the voice encoding protocols, the intercellular transfer schemes (the handover allowing the switch from one antenna to another without cutting off communication), and the frequency hopping algorithms for safety. To cement the spectral efficiency of his system and nail the beak of future patent office examiners who would consider the idea "far-fetched", he blackened pages with the strict application of the fundamental law of information theory. With a sharp stroke of the pen, he scribbled Shannon-Hartley's formula at the heart of his demands:
$C = B \log_2\left(1 + \frac{S}{N}\right)$
He mathematically demonstrated how the capacity of a communication channel ($$C) depended on bandwidth ($$B) and signal-to-noise ratio ($S/N$), justifying that its digital cellular architecture was not only viable, but the only logical evolution possible. He laid the foundations for GSM, the standard that would soon connect billions of human beings.
During these weeks of all-consuming fever, the only person in the entire apartment, and in the entire Volta Empire, to be allowed into the sanctuary of Lazarus was Linh.
The eight-year-old girl obviously did not have the level of mathematics to understand differential equations, the laws of thermodynamics or the parallel bus architectures that her adoptive father spat on paper with the urgency of a damned man.
But his presence was vital.
Linh entered quietly, dressed in comfortable clothes. She sat cross-legged on the old carpet in a corner of the room, her heavy leather notebook on her knees. She was studying her own basic algebra lessons, learning how to manipulate numbers.
But above all, she was the watchman of Lazarus' soul. She was watching him. Sometimes, when the temporal vertigo threatened to engulf the Builder's mind — when he no longer knew whether he was writing the story of 1987 or plagiarizing his own memories of 2015 — Lazarus would stop. His hand, clenched on his fountain pen, trembled above the paper. His black-rimmed eyes stared into the void. The paradox of his existence threatened to crush his reason.
It was at these precise moments that he sought Linh's gaze.
The little girl raised her black eyes, as deep as obsidian. She didn't judge. She didn't ask him to rest, because she knew, from her own past as a survivor, that some wars had to be fought until they were completely exhausted. It simply offered him a solid, silent and irrefutable anchor in the present. She was the living proof of the reason why he inflicted this torture on himself. He wasn't building this patent wall for his ego alone. He built it so that no god of industry could ever come and destroy the sanctuary he was building for his children.
Soothed by the benevolent coldness of this child's gaze, Lazare took up his pen again. He plunged back into the equations. They were two halves of a divine brain: one writing the laws of tomorrow's physics, the other guarding the door to the present behind closed doors.
On the morning of May 5, 1987, the first rays of the spring sun pierced the gap in the heavy velvet curtains, hitting the oak desk.
The fever fell as suddenly as it had appeared.
Lazarus' fountain pen, emptied of its last drop of ink, rolled on the wood. Exhausted, drained of substance, his muscles atrophied by prolonged immobility, the Builder slowly leaned back against the back of his leather chair. He ran a trembling hand over his pale face, feeling the abrasion of a burgeoning beard that he had forgotten to shave for days.
In front of him, distributed and classified with maniacal rigour in six heavy archive boxes of strong cardboard, lay thousands of pages of diagrams, descriptions and technical claims.
This pile of paper represented the heist of the millennium.
In the decades to come, anyone who wants to build a modern graphical interface for consumer computers will impale himself on the SONG patent. Anyone who would like to connect a mouse or keyboard with universal asynchronous connectivity would come crashing down against Lazare Bonaparte's patents. Whoever wants to make wireless phone calls in any country on the globe would have to pay an invisible but very real tithe to the company Volta S.A.
Lazarus stood up, his joints cracking painfully. He looked at Linh, who had fallen asleep, curled up on the carpet, her notebook pressed close to her. He approached, covered her gently with a wool blanket, then walked to the bathroom.
He turned on the cold water and sprayed his face. Looking at his reflection in the mirror, he saw the eyes of a man who had just sealed the future of humanity.
He donned an impeccable gray suit, adjusted his tie with military precision, and hid the vestiges of his exhaustion under the unalterable presence of the Titan of Ivry. He left the room carrying the first two boxes of archives. It was time to summon the lawyers. It was time to unleash the dogs of intellectual property on the world, and to transform this memory fever into an impassable legal fortress.
Location: Delacroix & Associés Law Firm (Avenue Hoche, Paris 8th)
Date: May 1987
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Maître Armand Delacroix)
Before launching his global offensive, Lazare Bonaparte had made a one-hour stop at the home of Maître de La Roche, a Parisian notary renowned for his absolute discretion. There, in the silence of a centuries-old study, he had half of his original manuscripts sealed in wax, establishing an indisputable anteriority of invention in the eyes of French law.
But the anteriority was only a shield. To conquer the world, a sword was needed.
At ten o'clock sharp, the heavy mahogany door of the Delacroix & Associés firm opened.
Sixty-year-old Maître Armand Delacroix, with a silver mane and rapacious eyes, was one of the most feared intellectual property lawyers in Europe. His firm billed for his consultations at a rate that would make a minister pale in comparison, and his clients were called Dassault, L'Oréal or Aérospatiale. He never received young entrepreneurs who were barely twenty years old.
But the young man who had just entered his vast office, flanked by two porters carrying six heavy boxes of archives, was not a simple entrepreneur. It was the CEO of Volta S.A., the company that had just brought the French state and Bull to heel.
"Monsieur Bonaparte," Delacroix greeted, rising from his upholstered leather armchair. He pointed to the boxes that the porters had just placed on the large conference table before retiring. "I must admit that your call yesterday intrigued me. My secretariat told me about urgent international patent filings. »
"Very urgent, Master," replied Lazarus, taking his place facing the lawyer.
His marble face perfectly concealed the abysmal exhaustion that gnawed at his bones. He placed his hands flat on the table.
"The technology industry is on the cusp of a cataclysmic shift. I have come to bring you the plans for this change. I want every concept, every hardware architecture and every algorithm contained in these boxes to be patented at the European Patent Office in Japan, and most importantly, at the USPTO in the United States. »
Delacroix smiled politely, tinged with an ounce of patronal condescension.
"Mr. Bonaparte, an international patent is a complex, long and costly procedure. It is not enough to have a vague idea. We need precise demands, viable industrial application schemes... »
"Open box number one, Master," Lazarus interrupted in a polar voice that froze the lawyer's smile. "Read."
Stung to the quick by this imperious tone, Delacroix stepped forward, lifted the lid of the first box, and drew out a thick bundle of documents.
From the first page, the cynicism of the old jurist wavered.
The document was not a Sunday inventor's draft. It was a masterpiece of legal and technical writing. The claims were formulated with surgical precision, locking in all possible avenues.
" Patent for an Independent Graphics Coprocessor with RISC Architecture and Hardware Acceleration of Windowing..." murmured Delacroix as he read the title. He turned the pages, skimming over the schematics of the hardware Z-buffer and the 32-bit Blitter of the SONG chip.
Although a lawyer, Delacroix had a solid engineering background. His analytical brain immediately hit the viability of the thing.
He grabs a second folder at random from the next box.
" System and Method for a Universal Asynchronous Serial Communication Bus with Built-in Power Supply," he read, frowning. "You propose to replace all the world's connectors with a single standardised cable? It is... It's titanic. The industry hasn't even considered it yet! »
"She will look at it in eight years," replied Lazarus with the tranquil certainty of a soothsayer. "And when she does, she'll find out that the catch already belongs to her. But go on, Master. Take box number four. »
Delacroix, suddenly shortened of breath, opened the box indicated. The documents inside were about telecommunications equations.
" Digital Cellular Network by Time Multiplexing and Frequency Hopping..." The lawyer's eyes widened as he saw the variations of information theory applied to the world's mobile telephony. "Monsieur Bonaparte, it's pure science fiction! Mobile phones weigh three kilos and work on local analogue networks! You describe here a global, purely digital network... »
"The law allows the filing of a patent for a functional theoretical process, even if it is not yet industrialized on a large scale, is it?" cut Lazare in.
"Yes, of course, if the claims are applicable and not obvious to a person skilled in the art, which is undoubtedly the case here. But... »
Delacroix dropped the files on the conference table. He looked at the young man of nineteen with a dread mingled with absolute respect.
"But if I file all this under the name of Volta S.A. in the United States," the lawyer continued, his voice dropping a tone, joining the atmosphere of an industrial conspiracy, "you will trigger an earthquake. IBM, AT&T, Motorola... When their technology watchmen read these patents at the USPTO, they will understand that you have just turned the technological roadmap of the twenty-first century. They will unite to destroy you. They will drag you into annulment lawsuits for ten years to dry you up financially. »
Lazarus leaned back slowly in his seat. The trap was set. He needed the lawyer to close it.
"This is exactly why Volta S.A. will not file any of these patents in its own name," the Ivry Titan announced.
Delacroix narrowed his eyes, captivated.
"You're going to create a labyrinth, Master Delacroix," Lazarus ordered, dictating his strategy with the coldness of a general deploying his troops. "I want dozens of shell companies. Holding companies in Luxembourg, foundations in Liechtenstein, trusts in the Cayman Islands and empty shells in Delaware. »
He pointed to the boxes.
"You're going to fragment these patents. The SONG GPU will be registered by a company. The Universal Bus by another. The GSM cellular network by a third. U.S. companies should only see a multitude of small, independent entities filing notional patents with no apparent connection to each other. They will not be suspicious. They will let them be validated by patent offices, thinking they are academic eccentricities. »
The business lawyer felt a shiver run down the back of his neck. It was the perfect obfuscation.
"And when they start developing these technologies themselves in a few years, convinced that they invented them... Delacroix murmured.
« ... the shell companies will merge, will be grouped under a single holding company belonging to Volta," Lazare finished mercilessly. "The trap will close. They will already be in production, with billions of dollars committed to their assembly lines. And we will present them with the bill. They will no longer be able to back down. They will pay for the licenses, or they will destroy their own factories. »
Armand Delacroix remained silent for a long minute. He looked at this kid in the gray suit, realizing that he was not facing an industrialist from 1987, but an emperor playing with the space-time continuum of the world economy.
"This is a shadow war on a planetary scale, Mr. Bonaparte," the lawyer finally said, pulling a heavy Montblanc pen from the inside pocket of his jacket. "Filing fees, the creation of holding companies, technical translations for Japan and the United States... This is going to cost you a colossal fortune in legal fees today. »
"Money is no longer a problem for Volta," Lazarus said. "I want absolute confidentiality, and I want the offensive to start tonight. Are you the man for the job, Master, or should I go to a Swiss firm? »
Delacroix let out a short, ferocious laugh. The promise of astronomical fees and the excitement of being the legal architect of the millennium heist had totally won him over.
"I am your man, Monsieur Bonaparte. The American industry will not even know what struck it. »
Lazarus got up. The pact was sealed.
He left the six archive boxes on the mahogany table—the blueprints of the future, cut out and ready to be scattered in the world's administrative wind. The SONG chip could now face the light of day. His genetic code was protected.
The Builder left the law office and returned to the spring sun of the Avenue Hoche. He inhaled the air of Paris. The fever had left him. The time lock was in place. All that remained was to melt the empire into matter.