Location: Flight Air France AF030 (Paris-Charles de Gaulle to Chicago O'Hare)
Date: July 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The Air France Boeing 747 had just crossed its cruising altitude, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of more than ten thousand meters. In the hushed cabin of first class, the regular murmur of the four engines was barely audible.
Lazare Bonaparte, seated in a large beige velvet armchair, closed the heavy technical file he was reading and inserted it into his leather satchel. He turned his head to the right.
On the adjacent row of two seats, Minh and Linh were absorbed in their respective occupations.
The twins had just celebrated their eleventh birthday. It was the first time they had boarded a plane since the military flight that had rescued them from the hell of Đà Nẵng three years earlier. But the contrast was total. Gone are the anguish of abandonment, the cold of the holds and the uniforms of the army. Minh wore a clean polo shirt and comfy canvas pants, and Linh a light blue summer dress.
Minh was kneeling in his seat, his nose glued to the oval window. He kept a small spiral notebook in which he drew the shape of the wings and frantically noted the angles of the flaps of the aircraft. An hour earlier, he had driven the purser crazy by asking him diabolically precise questions about the landing gear hydraulics.
Linh, sitting quietly next to him, the tablet unfolded, was immersed in her box of travel watercolors. She painted the sea of cottony clouds that stretched as far as the eye could see.
Lazare watched them for a moment, a slight smile on his lips. He had kept his promise.
The previous Christmas, in the warmth of Éléonore's house in Rouen, little Linh had made her promise not to lock herself up in her "fortress" in the Ivry-sur-Seine factory. The summer holidays had just begun. The Volta S.A. Empire was now running at full speed, fueled by the secret contracts of the DGA and the space monopoly of Kourou, closely monitored by the pragmatism of Alexandre de Vigan and the experience of his father, Auguste.
But Lazarus had to go to the United States. He was scheduled to attend the Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago, the world's largest gathering of the civil technology industry. Since he refused to betray his promise and let the children be bored at his mother's house for weeks, he had made a decision that had puzzled de Vigan: he would take them with him.
"Have you finished your sketch, Minh?" asked Lazarus in English, to get them used to the language they were going to have to speak.
The boy turned around, his eyes shining with excitement.
"It's unbelievable, Lazarus!" exclaimed Minh, still in English. "The wing is weakening! I measured with my finger in relation to the horizon. It moves almost one meter upwards. It's dangerous? Will the metal break? »
"No, it was done on purpose," replied Lazarus gently. "If the wing was totally rigid, it would break under the air pressure. It is the flexibility that allows it to withstand turbulence. Like a reed. »
Linh lifted her head from her painting, looking at her brother seriously.
"Don't we do like the Americans, Lazare? Are we not going to hide? She asked, her big dark eyes fixed on him.
The question, imbued with that troubling lucidity characteristic of children who have known war, made Lazare smile. Auguste had to explain to them in part why their older brother had not worked with certain American companies since the spring.
"No, Linh. We are not going to hide," Lazare reassured her. "We are going for a walk in broad daylight. Nobody knows us there. We are just tourists who have come to see computers and video games. »
The girl nodded, satisfied with the answer, and took up her brush again.
While the flight attendant served them fruit juices, Lazarus thought back to the purpose of his trip.
The first phase of his grand plan was completed. The French institutional market was locked. Kourou, the DGA, the CEA... The French government had become dependent on the IMPERATOR architecture and the CENTURION chip. He had expelled IBM and Cray from the Republic's critical servers and trapped the European telecoms market with the GSM standard.
But the billions of defense and the institutional monopoly were only a launching base. To truly bring down American hegemony, he had to attack their heart, their real cash cow: the civilian market. Office automation. The personal computer (PC). The general public.
That was where the tens of billions of dollars were. It was where empires like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM built their cultural and financial dominance over the entire planet.
He needed to know exactly where they were. What was their actual level of software development? How did they optimize their graphical interfaces on low-powered machines? If it released a "civilian" version of its technology — an affordable desktop computer running VoltaOS — would it simply take market share, or would it completely redesign the industry?
Summer CES in Chicago was the perfect place to take the pulse of Silicon Valley without being noticed.
He looked out the window. The coasts of the American continent were beginning to be outlined through the clouds.
The CEO, whose name was probably already circulating in the internal notes of the CIA and the NSA under the seal of absolute secrecy, was preparing to set foot on their soil. But in Chicago, drowned in the crowd of geeks, international buyers and tourists, he would be just a twenty-two-year-old young man in jeans and sneakers, flanked by his little brother and sister. The perfect spy, advancing in the open in the capital of American consumption.
Location: McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Date: July 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The air in Chicago in that July was heavy, sticky, saturated with the overwhelming humidity that evaporated from Lake Michigan. But inside the huge McCormick Place complex, North America's largest convention center, industrial air conditioning was blowing an icy breeze.
The 1989 Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) covered tens of thousands of square meters. It was the high mass of consumer technology, the temple where Silicon Valley and the Japanese electronics giants came to present their visions of the future.
As soon as they walked through the doors of the great hall, the twins were struck by a sensory wall.
The din was deafening. Hundreds of loudspeakers spewed synthesizer music, over-the-top announcer voices, and video game sound effects. The space was a maze of garishly colored carpets, flashing neon lights, aluminum structures, and walls of cathode ray screens stacked on top of each other.
Minh stopped short, wide-eyed, almost letting go of his older brother's hand. The eleven-year-old boy, who had spent his early years in the devastated streets of Đà Nẵng before discovering the bourgeois calm of the Odeon district, had just been propelled into the epicenter of entertainment capitalism.
"It's... it's giant," Minh whispered in English, his mouth half-open, his gaze caught by a giant Sega-themed inflatable hot air balloon floating above a booth.
Linh, on the other hand, tightened his grip on Lazarus' hand. She was not frightened, but observed this frenzy with the caution of a cat. She took her sketchbook out of her small backpack, fascinated by the reflections of the strobes on the Plexiglas display cases.
Lazarus smiled. Dressed in simple faded Levi's jeans, a white cotton t-shirt and a pair of Nike sneakers, he blended in perfectly with the tens of thousands of visitors, developers and journalists who walked the aisles. He wore a standard visitor badge around his neck, obtained under the name of an import-export shell company domiciled in Luxembourg. No one, in the middle of this crowd obsessed with the screens, paid the slightest attention to this young twenty-two-year-old Frenchman and his two little Asian brothers and sisters.
"What do we start with?" asked Lazare, leaning towards Minh.
The boy immediately pointed a compelling finger at the video game sector, where the lights were most intense. "Over there! They have bollards with guns! »
For the first hour, Lazarus played the role of the big brother with absolute patience. The digital entertainment industry was undergoing a revolution in the summer of 1989. Nintendo was dominating the world with its NES console, but Sega was fiercely counterattacking with its new 16-bit machine, the Genesis, which was about to invade the American market.
Lazare bought typical Chicago hot dogs — loaded with yellow mustard, neon green relish, chopped onions and chili peppers, without a drop of ketchup — which they ate standing in front of a giant screen. Minh was mesmerized. Lazare managed to find a place for it on a demonstration terminal of Nintendo's future portable console, the Game Boy.
Rather than just play Tetris, Minh turned the heavy gray plastic brick upside down. He examined the compartment of the four AA batteries, squinted at the greenish monochrome LCD screen to try to understand the refresh matrix, and tested the resistance of the directional pad. The engineering spirit that Lazare had been passing on to her for two years took precedence over simple playful fun.
"It's well put together," the eleven-year-old thought seriously as he handed the console back to the booth host. "But the screen drools when the blocks go down too fast. The refresh rate of liquid crystals is too slow. »
Lazarus burst out laughing and ruffled Minh's black hair.
"You are a formidable critic. Listen to me, both of you," said Lazarus, crouching down to get down to their level. "I have to go and see some machines that are a little more boring on the other side of the hall. Desktops. You're not going to be interested. »
He pointed to a huge, fenced and guarded VIP area at the Nintendo booth, set up with giant beanbags, TV screens and dozens of free-to-air consoles. There were already several children of journalists or exhibitors who played there under the supervision of hostesses.
"I'll leave you here. Do you have the badges I hung on you? »
Linh and Minh nodded, pointing to the plasticized plastic squares with their names and Lazare's hotel number on them.
"Perfect. I'll be back in forty-five minutes, not a minute more. Do not leave this square of red carpet under any circumstances. If someone annoys you, you show your badges to the lady with the red cap there. Is that understood? »
"Yes, Lazarus," replied Linh, who had already spotted a quiet corner to draw.
"Don't worry," Minh added, his eyes already glued to a Super Mario Bros. 3 cabinet.
Once assured that the twins were safe and absorbed in their activities, Lazarus sat up. The affectionate smile of the big brother faded instantly, replaced by the analytical coldness of Volta's Chairman and CEO.
He left the entertainment hall and entered the more sober and quieter aisles reserved for micro-computing. The floor was no longer covered with fluorescent carpet, but with a professional grey covering. Here, the hostesses in scantily clad outfits gave way to men in suits and ties discussing distribution margins and software licenses.
It was the heart of Silicon Valley that was on display here. IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and dozens of Asian clone manufacturers presented their beige cases.
Lazare approached a large booth where the latest models of IBM-compatible PCs, equipped with Intel 80386 processors, were displayed. These machines were sold at a high price to the wealthiest American companies and families.
He stopped in front of a Compaq Deskpro desktop computer. The CRT display displayed the latest version of Microsoft's graphical interface: Windows 2.1. A representative in a striped shirt was trying to convince a group of buyers of the fluidity of the system.
Lazarus put his hand on the square beige plastic mouse and took control of the demonstration machine. The representative, thinking he was dealing with a curious student, let him do so with a condescending smile.
Lazarus' first tactile and visual impression was a painful confirmation. The mouse responded with noticeable latency. The white cursor jerked on the screen with each quick movement. Lazarus double-clicked on the word processor icon, and then, without waiting, clicked on the drawing application and the file manager.
The machine's hard drive began to scratch frantically, making a mechanical rattling sound. The screen froze for three long seconds. The graphical interface, heavy and poorly coded, was displayed in jerky blocks.
Lazarus analyzed the disaster with the eye of a forensic doctor examining a corpse. He knew perfectly well the limits of what he touched. MS-DOS, the underlying system, was unable to handle memory beyond 640 kilobytes without resorting to laborious software tricks. Worse still, Windows was not a real operating system, but a simple graphical overlay that operated in cooperative multitasking. This meant that if a single program decided to take over the CPU, everything else on the machine stopped working.
He opened a DOS command window and typed a few queries to check the RAM allocation and access to the Intel processor registry.
It was a terrifying tangle of legacy code. Intel's x86 architecture, on which this entire industry was based, was a millefeuille of compromises. To remain compatible with the old software of years past, American engineers piled new instructions on dilapidated foundations. The processor was heating up to perform basic tasks because it spent its time decoding complex and redundant instructions.
They're bogged down, Lazarus thought, releasing the mouse. They build skyscrapers on swamps. Their code is heavy, their memory bus is narrow, and they have no dedicated chip to relieve display computation.
He left the Compaq booth under the annoyed gaze of the representative who had to restart the machine that Lazare had just crashed by saturating his RAM with three too many clicks.
The engineer walked down the aisle to the sleekest, whitest, and most enclosed booth at the show: Apple's.
Since the ouster of Steve Jobs a few years earlier, the Apple firm, led by John Sculley, had been betting everything on its colossal profit margins. On the immaculate displays were the Macintosh SE/30 and the heavy Macintosh IIcx, equipped with Motorola 68030 processors.
Lazarus approached a Macintosh IIcx displaying the "System 6". The machine cost a whopping five thousand dollars. An exorbitant price for the time.
He picked up the one-button mouse. The experience was undeniably superior to that of the PC world. The interface was cleaner, more consistent, and the cursor responded more smoothly. Apple had the merit of controlling its own hardware and software.
But in a few clicks, the varnish cracked under the expertise of the VoltaOS designer.
The Macintosh had no protected memory space. Lazare launched a spreadsheet computing application, opened a word processing document, and voluntarily requested an unallocated memory address via a development keyboard shortcut.
The screen froze instantly. A small white window appeared in the center, displaying the tragic icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, accompanied by the message "Sorry, a system error occurred".
The entire machine had just collapsed due to a single application failure. The computer had to be physically restarted. The lack of protected memory and the lack of preemptive multitasking made the flagship of Silicon Valley a magnificent but pathetically fragile house of cards.
Lazare took a step back, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He watched as shoppers crowded around these machines, marveling at the smoothed fonts and trash can icons.
The audit was complete. The diagnosis was made.
In the Ivry-sur-Seine factory, Lazare Bonaparte produced the VESLA-II processor. A pure RISC architecture, free of all the legacies of the past, capable of executing one instruction per clock cycle. It produced the SONG-II graphics chip, which natively managed millions of display calculations, completely freeing up the central processor. And above all, it had VoltaOS, a system with a truly multitasking kernel, with a strictly partitioned memory, capable of running military cryptanalysis software without ever crashing.
If it decided to miniaturize the components of its IMPERATOR server into a civilian desktop personal computer, it would not be satisfied with competing with IBM, Microsoft or Apple.
He was going to eviscerate them.
He was going to sell for three thousand dollars a machine ten times faster, infinitely more stable, and graphically superior to American computers that cost twice as much. Consumers would not have to hesitate; it would be a technological breakthrough so violent that it would relegate the PCs of 1989 to the rank of electric typewriters.
A cold shudder, devoid of all human emotion, ran down the engineer's spine. He had just quantified the weakness of his future enemies. The microcomputer market was a ripe fruit, full of billions of dollars, just waiting to fall into its hands. It would be enough for him to launch the production of a Volta "Personal Computer" in the autumn of 1990 to cause a stock market cataclysm in California.
The objective of his journey having been achieved, Lazarus looked at his watch. Forty-two minutes had passed.
He turned on his heel, abandoning the crashed machines and sweaty sales reps, and walked quietly back to the video game hall.
He found the twins exactly where he had left them. Minh wore a triumphant smile: he had just won an improvised Super Mario tournament against three American teenagers older than him, and had been offered an official cap and a large bag full of stuffed animals from the Japanese brand. Linh, sitting cross-legged on a pouf, had almost finished a watercolor depicting the hustle and bustle of the living room, bathed in the blue and red lights of the neon lights.
"So?" asked Lazarus, holding out his arms to help them to their feet. "Did you have a lot of fun?"
"It was great!" enthused Minh as he adjusted his new cap, which was much too big for him. "I beat a boy who was fifteen years old. He said a bad word in English when I jumped over him. Were your computers good? »
"Very instructive," replied Lazarus with a gentle smile. "They look great from the outside. But inside, it's still a bit messy. »
"Can we go eat ice cream now?" asked Linh, carefully putting away her brushes, tired from the noise.
"Of course. A giant ice cream, with three scoops and chocolate coulis," Lazare promised, taking Minh's bag of stuffed animals in one hand, and Linh's little hand in the other.
They left the grounds of McCormick Place, sinking into the golden light of the late Chicago afternoon. Lazarus was walking in the middle of the street, surrounded by the laughter of his little brothers and sisters, looking like any other young European tourist enjoying the American summer.
The dramatic irony of the situation was absolute.
At the same time, a thousand miles away, on the East Coast of the United States, the corridors of the National Security Agency's headquarters at Fort Meade resounded with paranoid tension. Director Vance and analyst Richard Hayes were probably sweating under the neon lights, spending millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars chartering CIA agents in Asia. They scoured the shipping records of Taiwan and Singapore, desperately searching for traces of a clandestine industrial complex and an army of silicon engineers that threatened the national security of the United States.
They were looking for a ghost in the China Sea, terrified by the name of Volta S.A.
Meanwhile, the ghost in question, the unique mastermind that had just locked down the French military defense, amputated the American telecoms market, and which had just decided, thirty minutes earlier, on the programmed extinction of Silicon Valley, was physically on their soil. The most dangerous man for the American economy was eating vanilla ice cream on the sidewalk of Michigan Avenue, explaining to an eleven-year-old boy how the compression of gas in a refrigerator compressor worked.
Lazarus Bonaparte's Empire did not need secret bunkers or shadow shenanigans to infiltrate the United States. He was already there, invisible, patient, and ready to strike.