Location: Grilles de l'École Alsacienne (6th arrondissement), Paris
Date: September 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
On the morning of the start of the school year, the air in Paris had regained that lively and metallic freshness that announced the end of summer. In front of the high gates of the Alsatian School, one of the most famous and bourgeois colleges in the capital, a human tide pressed on the sidewalk of the rue d'Assas.
It was a chaotic ballet of anxious parents, brand-new leather school bags and teenagers loudly calling out to each other after two months of separation.
In the midst of this crowd, standing near a large chestnut tree, Lazare Bonaparte observed the scene with a slight vertigo.
The man who, a few days earlier, coldly orchestrated the programmed destruction of the Silicon Valley monopoly, suddenly felt tiny. Here, he was no longer the fearsome Chairman and CEO of Volta S.A. He was no longer the visionary engineer terrifying the French state. He was simply a young adoptive father barely twenty-three years old, drowned in a sea of forty-something executives and mothers in suits.
Since their return from Asia in the summer of 1986, Lazarus had assumed full legal and moral guardianship of Minh and Linh. Auguste and Madeleine pampered them in the sanctuary of the rue d'Assas, but it was he, Lazarus, who had forced fate and the administration to tear them away from the orphanage of Đà Nẵng. They were his adopted children. The equation of his blood. And today, they were entering middle school.
"Lazarus... Do you think I look weird? »
Linh's thin voice pulled him out of his thoughts. The young girl was nervously tugging at the sleeves of her navy blue cotton sweater. She scanned her gaze at the groups of little Parisian girls gathered near the gate, observing with her usual coldness and her strategic eye their shoes, their bags, their way of tying their scarves.
The trauma of war, hunger and refugee camps seemed to have metamorphosed. Physical survival was no longer an issue; it had been replaced by an anxiety infinitely more banal, but just as all-consuming for a girl entering adolescence: social survival. Integration. The visceral need not to stand out in this privileged environment.
Lazarus squats down slightly to be at her level, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The former agent of the DGSE's Action Service felt a burst of irresistible tenderness crack through his armor of cynicism.
"You are perfect, Linh," he said to her with the unwavering gentleness he always reserved for her. "You look like a completely normal schoolgirl. Don't try to be exactly like them. Your mind is your weapon, and that's fine. »
Linh nodded, unconvinced, and readjusted the strap of her backpack.
"Is it okay, can we go? We're going to be late. »
The voice that had just been raised was no longer that of the terrified little boy compulsively dismantling broken Soviet radios. Minh stood a meter away, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, his chin slightly raised.
The physical metamorphosis had begun during the summer. His features hardened, his voice sometimes went off the rails, and above all, his attitude had changed radically. Minh's entry into secondary school was accompanied by a fierce desire for independence, which bordered on adolescent revolt.
"The gate doesn't open for five minutes, Minh. Relax," Lazare tempered, taking a step towards him to put the collar of his jacket back in place.
Minh stepped aside, dodging his adoptive father's hand with an annoyed shoulder movement. He glanced around in panic, terrified that one of his future classmates would witness such a display of paternal authority from a guy who looked like a student.
"It's okay, Lazarus, stop," Minh hissed in a low voice. "I'm not a baby anymore. No need to accompany me to the door, I can see very well where it is. »
Lazarus let his hand fall back to his side, taking the blow in silence. The rejection was frontal. The boy who had clung to him three years earlier now demanded that he be allowed to cross the threshold of the big league alone. The sixty-year-old spirit, trapped in its own temporal paradox, measured the banal cruelty of fatherhood.
"Very well," Lazare agreed, swallowing his instinct for absolute protection. He forced a serene smile. "I'll leave you here, then. Pay attention. I will come and fetch you presently. »
Linh quickly threw herself into his arms to give him a muffled hug, whispered a hurried "See you tonight," and ran to the school gates without looking back.
Minh, on the other hand, contented himself with a brief nod, trying to give himself a virile countenance. He turned on his heel and plunged into the crowd of students, his bag casually thrown over one shoulder.
Lazare remained planted on the sidewalk of the rue d'Assas for long minutes, watching their silhouettes melt into the mass of schoolchildren. They became insolent, anxious for appearances, ungrateful. They behaved like perfect Parisian bourgeois teenagers.
It was a dull pain in the hollow of his chest, but above all it was the most beautiful of his victories. The equation of their rescue was perfectly solved. Lazare turned away from the school, pulled up the collar of his jacket and went to the nearest metro station to reach the "Bunker" of Ivry. Little did he know that Minh's intellectual arrogance would soon spark sparks within the institution.
Here is the complete rewrite of Part 2, refocused exclusively on the father-son relationship, with an ending where Minh retains all his adolescent insolence. The text has been considerably fleshed out to approach the requested length, diving deeper into the psychology of the characters and the tension of the face-to-face.
Location: Office of the Director of the Alsatian School / Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
Date: End of September 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The family lull had lasted only three short weeks.
Lazare Bonaparte was sitting on a chair with uncomfortable upholstery, in the center of the hushed office of the director of the Alsatian School. The place smelled of beeswax, polish, old yellowed paper, and the unshakeable certainty of the Parisian bourgeois elite. The tall solid oak bookcases, filled with bound editions, and the austere diplomas framed on the walls exuded an age-old authority. It was a temple of tradition, a place designed to intimidate students and remind parents of the immense privilege they had to have their offspring sitting there.
Facing Lazarus, behind a monumental Empire-style desk, the director of the establishment, a man with a shiny baldness and a strict suit, readjusted his tortoiseshell glasses with a long sigh of deep exasperation.
To Lazare's right, Minh stubbornly stared at the tips of his sneakers, his arms firmly crossed over his chest, his jaws clenched. The twelve-year-old's face was closed by a pout of sheer rebellion, a mask of cold contempt that refused the slightest contrition.
"Monsieur Bonaparte," began the principal in a pursed, nasal voice, tapping the open school file in front of him with the tip of his fountain pen. "I take into account your very family situation... and of your young age to assume such a fatherhood. The faculty was also briefed on your adopted son's difficult past and the tragic ordeals he went through before arriving in France. The Alsatian School prides itself on tolerating certain intellectual eccentricities, on cultivating atypical minds. But what it does not tolerate under any circumstances is outright insubordination. »
Lazarus slowly crossed his legs. He instantly adopted the annoyed and respectful expression of a young father overwhelmed by events, anxious to conform to the rules of the institution. The man who, a few weeks earlier, had designed a computer architecture capable of pulverizing the hegemony of Silicon Valley, the man who trapped the NSA and commanded squads of military cryptanalysts, was keeping a low profile in front of a simple civil servant of the National Education. The absurd irony of the situation did not escape him. His sixty-year-old mind, enclosed in this twenty-three-year-old body, observed the scene with an almost clinical detachment.
"I understand your requirements perfectly, Mr. Director," replied Lazarus with measured compunction, his voice composed. "I apologize for this inconvenience. Can you explain to me what exactly happened this morning? Did Minh show physical violence? »
"No. Fortunately. If there had been any physical violence, he would already be fired permanently and we wouldn't be discussing it," the director said, in a dry tone. Verbal and psychological violence. It was during the introductory technology course. Mr. Vernier, a seasoned teacher, respected by his peers, who has been teaching within our walls for nearly twenty years, presented to the sixth grade class the operation of the computers of the Computer Plan for All. He explained the architecture of the Thomson MO5, the way the microprocessor communicates with the RAM, the usefulness of the peripherals... A basic, educational introduction, designed for children of this age. »
The manager paused, glancing Minh over his bifocals. The young boy shrugged imperceptibly, a smirk stretching the corners of his lips ever so slightly. He did not avoid the director's gaze; he faced it.
"Mr. Vernier was explaining the role of the Motorola processor," the manager continued, his voice trembling with an indignation he could barely contain, "when your son got up from his chair uninvited. He calmly walked to the blackboard, literally ripped the chalk out of his stunned teacher's hands, and began to cross out Mr. Vernier's explanatory diagrams in front of the whole class. »
Lazarus closed his eyes briefly, inhaling slowly through his nose. He felt the catastrophe looming with mathematical clarity.
"According to the detailed report given to me by Mr. Vernier," the director continued, lifting a sheet of paper covered with tight writing, "Minh then undertook a veritable lecture of unheard-of arrogance. He said, in front of his comrades, and I quote: "The architecture of the Motorola 6809E is a ridiculous antiquity," "The data bus is a pathetic bottleneck," and "The lack of cache memory makes this machine just good for serving as a paperweight for the ignorant." »
Minh let out a small sniff of validation, a sound that was brief but audible enough to echo through the office. Lazarus silenced him with a sharp and brutal elbow in the ribs, without even turning his head towards him.
"But it didn't stop there, Monsieur Bonaparte," the director was offended, leaning forward, his hands folded on his desk pad. "When the teacher, shocked by this irruption, tried to regain control of his classroom and ordered him to sit down immediately, Minh looked down on him. He told him, in front of thirty hilarious and stunned students, that he was only a "notorious incompetent who repeated outdated textbooks". He added that "the future belongs to the RISC architecture," and that what they were being taught here was a "tech bin for retarded kids." He humiliated a man of fifty. It's absolute squabble. A destructive insolence that undermines the very foundations of our authority. »
In Lazarus' hyper-analytical mind, the equation was solved instantly. Minh had invented absolutely nothing. The twelve-year-old boy had done nothing but spit out, word for word, with the sharp arrogance typical of pre-adolescence, the technical monologues that Lazare himself held at the evening table on rue d'Assas, or when he dissected the competition in the secret laboratory of Ivry-sur-Seine.
The engineer suddenly realized the gaping flaw in his father's pedagogy. By raising his adopted son in the cult of absolute excellence, by teaching him at such a young age the secrets of the processors that would dominate the next century, he had forged a formidable sword for him. But he had tragically forgotten to teach her how to keep it in its scabbard. He had not taught him not to use them to behead unarmed civilians. Minh had become the distorting mirror of Lazarus' own arrogance, the unfiltered version of the Builder.
"This is indeed unacceptable," Lazarus said in a tone of abysmal gravity, straightening up in his seat.
The smooth façade of the contrite young father faded for a second to reveal an authority so cold, so deeply rooted, that it caught the director off guard. The atmosphere in the room dropped several degrees. The former DGSE killer regained control.
"There is no valid excuse for this behavior," Lazare continued, staring the warden straight in the eye. "Mr. Director, what disciplinary sanctions are planned?"
The sudden change of aura of this young man in front of him destabilized the head of the school. He expected the father to look for extenuating circumstances, to plead intellectual precocity or to try to justify the unjustifiable.
"Given that his academic record has been irreproachable so far and given the strictly verbal nature of the incident, I have decided not to convene the disciplinary council," the principal announced, trying to regain his official posture. "But Minh was given three days of temporary exclusion, accompanied by a solemn warning written in red in his file. If he repeats this kind of outrageous behavior, if he disrespects a member of my teaching staff again under the false pretext of his superior intelligence... he was definitively expelled from the Alsatian School. Intellectual genius does not excuse coarseness, Monsieur Bonaparte. Education takes precedence over instruction. »
"I agree with you completely. I give you my word that this will not happen again. »
Minh opened his mouth to let out a scathing retort, ready to defend his technical point of view in front of what he considered to be an assembly of ignorant people. But the dark gaze, charged with murderous electricity and a promise of destruction that Lazarus made weigh on him, nailed him to his chair. Lazarus knew how to terrify a man without raising his voice or making the slightest gesture. On a twelve-year-old teenager, the effect was paralyzing. Minh closed his mouth, his teeth clenched until his enamel broke, and looked away.
Twenty minutes later, after signing the administrative documents of exclusion, Lazare and Minh passed through the heavy wrought iron gate of the school and found themselves on the sidewalk of the rue d'Assas.
The air of late September was crisp and spicy. He swept the first dead leaves on the Parisian tarmac in a melancholy whirlwind. Lazarus did not say a word. He didn't even look at his son. He turned his back on the school and began to walk with a fast, military, cadenced step towards the high golden gates of the Luxembourg Gardens, located a few hundred meters away.
Minh trotted a step behind him, dragging his class backpack over one shoulder, his classroom arrogance fighting against the heavy, almost tangible silence imposed by Lazarus. The teenager knew his adoptive father. He knew that loud tantrums, hysterical screams, and slammed doors were not part of his emotional repertoire. Lazarus was a man of ice. His punishments were surgical, his silences more frightening than screams.
They entered the majestic park. The long geometric alleys, lined with chestnut trees with scorched leaves, were almost deserted in the middle of this autumn morning. Only a few pensioners read their newspapers on green chairs. Lazarus chose an isolated bench, away from the marble statues and the large central basin. He sat down with his back straight and waved briefly to Minh.
The boy complied, sinking into the wooden bench at the other end, his knees tucked in, creating as much physical distance as possible. He adopted a defensive posture, his chin tucked into the collar of his jacket.
The wind made the branches tremble above their heads. The silence stretched for one, then two long minutes. Lazarus stared into space, letting the psychological pressure do its work.
"You were silent earlier because we were in front of the director and you had to be a good parent," Minh finally spits, unable to bear the silence any longer. His tone was aggressive, choppy. "But admit that I was right! This teacher was telling other people anything! The MO5 is an absolute antique! You told Karim yourself last week! You said in front of me that it was an insult to the history of computing! I only told the truth! »
The teenager was looking for confrontation. He wanted Lazarus to validate his intelligence, to recognize that they both belonged to a higher caste, the one that understood the machine.
Lazarus turned his head very slowly towards him. Her black eyes, of an unfathomable depth, landed on the child with the intensity of a laser.
"Yes," Lazarus replied calmly, his voice cutting through the cold air. "On a purely technical level, you were right. The architecture of these computers has been obsolete since the day they left the factories. The memory bus is indeed narrow and the processor is too slow to handle complex calculations. The professor was probably wrong in his explanation of the registers, because he is not a systems engineer, Minh. He is a technology teacher at the college. Its purpose is not to create an operating system, but to explain to children how to type on a keyboard. »
Minh smirked, a dry chuckle escaping his lips. "See! You agree with me. This guy is an idiot who thinks he's an expert. Someone had to show him that he was wrong. »
"I'm not done," Lazare cut in, his voice suddenly scathing like a razor blade.
Minh's grin disappeared.
"You were right technically. But humanly, socially, you have been miserable," said the young patriarch with such cold contempt that he pierced the boy's armor. "You behaved like a little intellectual striker. Worse, you behaved like a petty bourgeois spoiled by talent, who crushes those who have less than him simply to shine in front of a gallery of ignorant kids. »
Minh took the blow, but instead of collapsing, he scrambled himself. His eyebrows furrowed furrowed in rage.
"Intelligence without wisdom is pure arrogance, Minh," Lazare continued, implacable. "Being right does not give you any divine rights over others. Knowing the truth about a complex subject never allows you to publicly humiliate a man who is doing his best. This man, Mr. Vernier, gets up every morning for a miserable pay, confronts classes of thirty dissipated kids, to try to open their minds. And you, under the pretext that you have the insane privilege of living under my roof and hearing industrial secrets that the American government itself ignores, you call him incompetent? Do you humiliate him in front of his own students? This is the attitude of a coward. »
Minh sat up abruptly on the bench, his fists clenched, his face flushed with anger and resentment.
"Stop your moral lessons, Lazarus!" the twelve-year-old boy exploded, his voice quavering but full of defiance. "Are you talking to me about crushing others? But that's exactly what you do every day! »
Lazarus squinted imperceptibly, letting the teenager vent his frustration.
"I hear you and Auguste talking at home in the evenings!" Minh continued, pointing an accusing finger at his adoptive father. "I hear you talking about Microsoft, Intel, Apple! You don't just want to make good computers, you want to destroy them! You want to humiliate the Americans, you said you were going to ruin their businesses and bring them to their knees! Why do you have the right to do it? Why can you call Bill Gates incapable and crush everyone, and I should shut my mouth in front of a teacher who says? »
The attack was precise and scathing. Minh had hit the nail on the head. It highlighted the hypocrisy inherent in Lazarus' double life: a predatory and ruthless industrialist, who demanded from his son a humility that he himself did not apply on a macro-economic scale.
Lazarus remained silent for a few seconds, watching Minh's chest heave to the rhythm of his gasping breath. The sixty-year-old engineer felt the weight of his own reincarnation, the burden of his past and present violence. The creation of the Volta Empire required a brutality that his son was imitating without understanding the nuances or deadly stakes.
"There is a fundamental difference between what I am doing and what you did this morning," Lazarus replied, his voice becoming low, almost cavernous. "I don't destroy our competitors to inflate my ego. I do it because it's a war. A war of sovereignty. If I don't crush Intel, they will crush us, and France will end up vassalized. I play with empires, Minh. You, you played with the dignity of an innocent man in a classroom. »
Lazarus leaned forward, anchoring his gaze in his son's, refusing to let him escape.
"When I launch an attack on Silicon Valley, I do it in the shadows. I don't stand up on a table and shout that I'm the smartest. I build my weapon, and I strike when they can no longer defend themselves. You, you took out your sword to parade. It's vanity. And vanity, in our world, is a fatal flaw. »
"It's easy to say that when you're the boss," Minh retorted, looking away at the fallen leaves, his tone still imbued with rancor and insolence. "They treated me like an idiot. This teacher spoke to me as if I were five years old. I just wanted to show them that I knew more than all of them combined. That they respect me. »
"Respect is not extorted by humiliating the weak, Minh. It is earned by example, or by the fear of what you are capable of doing if you are pushed to do so. By showing everything you knew, you didn't earn anyone's respect. You just proved that you were dangerous and uncontrollable. The world forgives wealth, it forgives cruelty, but it never forgives ostentatious arrogance. The day you stumble, no one will help you. »
The teenager did not answer. He crossed his arms again, sinking into his silence, his jaw still clenched. He refused to capitulate. He wasn't crying. Cold anger had replaced the terror of the little Vietnamese refugee. He had become a son of the Rue d'Assas, proud, intelligent, and convinced of his own superiority.
The engineer understood that the moral lesson had not penetrated. Minh was too smart, too hurt by his own past to let go of that sense of superiority that acted as a shield. The human equation turned out to be infinitely more complex, more reluctant than the source code of an operating system.
"Write your letter of apology to Monsieur Vernier this evening," Lazare ordered coldly, noting the failure of the discussion. "You will drop it off at the secretariat tomorrow morning."
"If it's to be hypocritical, you might as well not write anything," Minh muttered between his teeth.
"You shall write it because I command you," Lazarus said in a voice that would not admit of any reply. "And as for your three days of exclusion, you won't spend them at home listening to music or reading. You are coming to the Ivry factory with me tomorrow at seven o'clock. »
Minh finally looked up, raising his eyebrows slightly. He expected to be punished, deprived of going out or of his computer. Going to the Volta factory, the technological sanctuary, almost felt like a reward.
"Great," the teenager said with thinly veiled sarcasm. "I'll be able to show you how to really optimize a memory bus, since your team seems to be rowing on V-Office."
Lazarus got up from the bench, buttoning the top of his jacket to protect himself from the wind, and looked at his adopted son with icy pity.
"You shall not touch any keyboards, Minh. Karim's team doesn't need another arrogant kid in their paws. You're going to spend your three days of exclusion in the basement. You'll unpack the boxes of copper cables, sweep the floor of the server room, empty the wastebaskets in the open-space and clean the coffee cups embedded in my engineers. You will clean for ten hours a day. »
Minh's mocking smile faded instantly. The supreme insult. He, the precocious genius, reduced to the role of a surface technician in the middle of the brain of the Volta empire.
"Are you kidding me?" protested Minh, his voice rising to the high pitches. "Are you going to humiliate me in front of your employees?"
"No. I'll show you where arrogance leads," Lazarus replied as he began to walk towards the exit of the park, leaving him on the bench. "Do you think you're above everyone? So you're going to clean up the shit of those who, unlike you, know how to use their brains to build something concrete instead of destroying out of vanity. Be ready tomorrow morning at six-thirty. »
Minh sat on the cold wooden bench, alone in the middle of the Luxembourg Gardens. He watched his adoptive father's back pull away into the center aisle. He clenched his fists until his knuckles were whitened. The moral lesson had slipped over him, but the punishment sounded like a declaration of war.
He got up abruptly, kicked angrily in a heap of dead leaves, and set off to catch up with Lazarus, rage in his stomach, his face still masked by this insoluble insolence that was to grow ever larger. The Builder had created silicon monsters, and he now realized, with frightening lucidity, that he might be raising one under his own roof.