Location: Volta SA Director's Office (The « Bunker »), Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: Spring 1995.
Viewpoint: Internal (Lazare Bonaparte).
Spring 1995 bathed the Parisian suburbs in a soft light, warming the steel and glass of the Ivry-sur-Seine factory. Inside the air-conditioned and pressurized executive office, the seasons did not exist.
Only the clock cycles of the processors dictated the passage of time.
Édouard Renault-Tessier paced the room with an energy unseen since the repayment of the €12.2 billion to the French Ministry of Finance. Freed from the banks' control, the CFO of Volta SA behaved like an explorer discovering a virgin continent.
He spread out dozens of files with colorful covers, emblazoned with the logos of emerging companies and obscure acronyms, across Lazare's vast mahogany desk.
« This is the great turning point, Lazarus, » exclaimed Edward, tapping a report with the tip of his gold pen. « Telecommunications networks, the TCP/IP standard, the World Wide Web … The world is being wired.
We have colossal cash reserves, billions lying dormant in our trusts. We must diversify our empire beyond the silicon smelter. »
The former investment banker wore the feverish smile of a professional gambler in front of a roulette table.
« Look at these files, » he insisted, pushing a cardboard folder toward his boss. « I've identified startups in California and Northern Europe. They're talking about second-generation mobile telephony, encrypted cellular networks, and even e-commerce platforms.
It's a minefield, extremely volatile. Nine out of ten projects will collapse within two years, but the one that survives will dominate the century. The risk is absolute, but the return on investment could be infinite.
Now's the time to play, Lazarus. »
Lazare Bonaparte, sunk into his black leather armchair, looked at the files without making the slightest move to take hold of them.
His face, sculpted in the marble of a deceptive youth, expressed neither the excitement of a conqueror nor the prudence of an industrialist. It expressed only an abyssal emptiness. An unfathomable and appalling weariness.
Lazare brushed aside the names printed on the cardboard folders. He saw the beginnings of companies that would build the commercial internet. He saw the protocol schemes that would revolutionize mobile telephony.
Edward saw a fascinating fog of war. Lazarus, on the other hand, saw only a desperately clear sky.
He suffered from the worst affliction that can befall a strategist: the total disappearance of randomness. He knew .
He knew that mobile telephony was going to explode, that GSM would become the norm. He knew which e-commerce companies would survive the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, and which would burn through billions before disappearing into oblivion.
He knew the exact dates of stock market crashes, the emergence of search engines, the ballistic trajectory of every technological innovation up to 2026.
« This is not a game, Edward, » murmured Lazarus, his voice flat and devoid of any hint of desire. « Playing implies the possibility of defeat. »
The finance director stopped, disconcerted by his boss's deathly coldness.
« Invest two hundred million in this Finnish telecom start-up, » Lazare ordered, mechanically glancing at a file. « They'll dominate the European mobile market before the end of the decade.
Buy this encrypted payment protocol platform; it will be the standard in five years. Ignore this web portal project; their server architecture is a dead end, they'll be bankrupt in eighteen months. »
Edward frowned, the nib of his pen hovering above his notepad.
« Lazare, with all due respect to your technological foresight... No one can say that with such certainty. The market is irrational. You can't predict... »
« Do as I say. Buy what I've designated. The return on investment will be around one thousand percent by the year 2000. »
The banker nodded slowly, fascinated and slightly frightened by the Builder's demiurgic confidence, before gathering his files and leaving the room to carry out the orders.
The massive padded door closed.
Alone in the pressurized silence of his Bunker, Lazare closed his eyes and let out a weary breath, laden with a metallic melancholy.
Capitalism, without the thrill of risk, was nothing more than a vulgar administrative chore. Investing billions to reap a hundred times more required no genius; it was the financial equivalent of filling out a multiple-choice form with the answer key already in front of you.
For years, ever since his traumatic awakening on a Bali beach in his child's body, survival had kept him on high alert. The asymmetrical fight against CIA assassins, the bloody rescue on Avenue de Marigny, the race against time to design the SONG chip , the threat of the American embargo, and the fight to regain his freedom from the French state...
Every day had been a deadly equation where the slightest miscalculation meant the annihilation of his clan or the destruction of his empire.
The adrenaline rush of near-death had made him feel alive.
But today, the original war was won. The fortress of Ivry was impregnable. His parents were safe.
His factory was running at full capacity. His patents were strangling Silicon Valley. The French nobility groveled at his feet.
Europe and Asia depended on his lines of code.
The Ogre of Ivry had just vanquished the pack. And now, sitting untouchable at the top of the global food chain, he was discovering the silent torment of the gods: the absolute boredom of omniscience. The curse of certainty.
There were no more enemies capable of surprising him. There was no longer a fog of war to conceal the contours of the future. He was no longer a general waging battle; he had become a mere archivist condemned to validate, day after day, a future he had already lived.
Lazare opened his eyes and gazed at his own hands, resting on the cold wood of the desk. Hands that held the keys to the twenty-first century, but which, deprived of the vital need to fight, were slowly beginning to go numb in the void of their own omnipotence.
Location: Apartment of the Bonaparte family, rue d'Assas (Paris 6th arrondissement).
Date: Spring 1995, late evening.
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Lazarus and Eleanor).
The sanctuary on rue d'Assas was steeped in the thick stillness of Parisian nights. Auguste and Madeleine had retired to their apartments several hours earlier, leaving the vast living room and the adjacent library in silence.
Since the night of the Sainte-Geneviève library, Aliénor de La Rochefoucauld had taken possession of the former office of the DST colonel. Her forced exile had transformed into a studious retreat. Excommunicated by her blood, hounded by her brother's resentment, the young woman had found behind the Bonapartes' armored doors a paradoxical freedom that no Loire Valley château could have offered her.
When Lazare returned from Ivry-sur-Seine, he did not head towards his room. Attracted by the thin ray of golden light that filtered under the double doors of the library, he approached silently.
He remained for a moment on the threshold, motionless, observing the scene.
Eleanor sat in a deep leather club chair, her legs tucked beneath her. A notary's lamp illuminated a thick volume of Latin chronicles resting on her lap. She wore a simple light cashmere sweater, her chestnut hair held back with a casual clip.
She no longer resembled the aristocrat on display; she was a researcher immersed in the ruins of the past.
Lazarus felt a strange pinching at the base of his sternum. A rhythmic anomaly.
In his world, everything was governed by equations, capital flows, and clock frequencies. Every engineer in Ivry was a cog in the machine, every minister a variable, every competitor an obstacle to be compiled and destroyed.
But Aliénor didn't fit into any of these categories. She was the only human being whose brain sought neither to please him, nor to steal from him, nor to analyze him in order to destroy him.
« You have the quietest step I have ever heard from a man of your stature, » murmured Eleanor without looking up from her book, breaking the silence.
Lazarus walked into the room and sat down on the opposite sofa.
« Occupational hazard, » he replied in a low voice, devoid of the metallic tension he displayed at the Bunker. « Survival requires not announcing one's presence before assessing the room's layout. »
Eleanor gently closed her book and removed her reading glasses. She fixed her blue eyes on the young CEO. She had learned to read under Lazarus's mask.
She immediately noticed the imperceptible slump of his shoulders and the mineral shadow that darkened his pupils.
« Have you won another war today? » she asked with gentle irony. « You look like a man returning from a funeral. »
« Worse, » admitted Lazare, leaning back and crossing his long hands on his chest. « I'm returning from a mathematically inevitable victory. »
The young historian inclined her head, intrigued. — Yet inevitability is the ultimate goal of any strategy, isn't it? Justinian didn't build walls for the suspense of seeing if they would hold.
« Stone walls, no, » Lazarus conceded. « But economics, technology, war… What gives meaning to conquest is the presence of chance.
The fog. The risk that the enemy is more intelligent, or that the wind will change. »
He stared at the dying embers in the fireplace, his face sculpted by the melancholy of the ancient gods.
« Today, Édouard Renault-Tessier presented me with Volta's investment plans for the next decade. Telecommunications networks, the beginnings of the Internet. He was buzzing with excitement.
He saw a new world to explore, full of dangers and opportunities. »
« And what did you see? »
« Just a simple attendance sheet, » Lazare snapped, his voice thick with desperate cynicism. « I looked at those files and I knew.
I knew exactly who would survive and who would die. Omniscience is a curse, Aliénor. When you already know the ending, what's the point of reading the intervening chapters?
Uncertainty is the only thing that keeps us alive. I'm dying of boredom. »
Aliénor de La Rochefoucauld observed the engineer in silence. She did not mistake his words for childish arrogance or the ravings of a megalomaniac. She perceived in them genuine pain, the distress of a mind too vast, trapped in a body too young, crushed by the perfection of its own mechanics.
She got up from her armchair and sat down on the sofa, just a few inches from him. The physical proximity wasn't fraught with the awkwardness of adolescent seduction; it had an almost diplomatic gravity.
« You suffer from Alexander's vertigo, » she theorized gently. « Alexander the Great wept as he gazed at the horizon, not because he had lost, but because there were no more worlds to conquer. Your intellect has modeled the future with such precision that you have locked yourself in a prison of certainties. »
Lazare turned his head towards her. Aliénor's subtle perfume, mingled with the scent of old library paper, momentarily short-circuited his thoughts.
She was only half wrong. She believed that her omniscience stemmed from a superhuman analytical intelligence, an extraordinary ability to read the markets.
Lazarus then felt the terrifying, crushing weight of the secret that dwelled within him.
He watched her, this brilliant, poised woman whose mind fascinated him. He realized she had become his only true anomaly. She was the only variable in his daily life he couldn't pre-compile.
He never knew exactly what she was going to say, how she was going to interpret her actions. She wasn't part of the history books of technology he had read in his former life. She was a radiant shadow in his deterministic universe.
But this proximity highlighted the insurmountable wall that separated them.
Lazare Bonaparte was a sixty-year-old man who died in 2026, awakened in the body of a child decades earlier. How could he confess this to her? How could he explain that he didn't « see » the future, but that he remembered it ?
How could he talk to her about the fall of the Twin Towers, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the artificial intelligence war, and climate famines?
If he revealed the truth to her, she would think him mad. If he proved it to her, he would destroy her by imposing on her the same burden of prescience that was consuming him.
He was condemned to the solitude of the time traveler. He could share his fortress, his money, his security, and even absolute intellectual intimacy with Eleanor, but he could never share his true nature.
He was a man outside of time, playing a part in a play for which he was the only actor to possess the complete script.
Eleanor perceived the fracture in Lazarus's gaze. For a split second, she saw the invincible Ogre falter, overcome by a sadness of unfathomable antiquity.
Driven by an instinct that transcended the constraints of her former social class, she slowly raised her hand and placed her slender fingers on Lazare's hand, which remained clenched on the leather sofa. The contact was electric.
The young woman's organic warmth permeated the engineer's pale skin, forcing him back to the immediate reality.
« You're not a god, Lazarus, » she murmured, her thumb gently brushing the back of her hand. « You can foresee market crashes or the rise of networks. But you couldn't have foreseen that you would find yourself this evening, in this living room, with an aristocrat disowned by her own people.
History is never fully written. There's always a line of code that escapes the architect. »
Lazarus lowered his eyes to their clasped hands.
She was right. Aliénor was the system error, the grain of sand in the quantum mechanics of his destiny. The only proof that he wasn't entirely trapped by the determinism of the year 2026.
Lazarus raised his head. The melancholy that weighed down his features evaporated, replaced by a new glimmer. A predatory, sharp glimmer, awakened by the warmth of this contact and the accuracy of this revelation.
If the future he knew bored him to death... there was only one solution left for him to rediscover the thrill of survival.
He was supposed to destroy the future.
He was to use the titanic power of the Volta Empire not to patiently recreate the world of the 2000s, but to obliterate it. He was to accelerate innovation at such a breakneck pace, to launch research into such radical and precocious technologies, that the timeline itself would be fractured.
If he created the unpredictable, if he forced humanity into an era it had not known in its first life... then randomness would return.
The fog of war would once again obscure the horizon. And Lazare Bonaparte would finally feel alive.
« You're right, Eleanor, » he breathed, a predatory grin, almost frightening in its determination, stretching his lips. « History is never fully written. Especially when you have the means to burn the script. »
He gently squeezed the young woman's hand before standing up. Lazarus had just found a cure for his boredom. And the world would soon tremble at what Lazare Bonaparte was about to unleash.