Location: Volta SA Executive Office (The « Bunker », Level 4), Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: Spring 1995, 4:00 AM.
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Lazare Bonaparte and the Japanese delegation).
The air on Level 4 was usually thick with a sterile tension, the kind found in nuclear operating rooms or command centers. But on this late spring night, the atmospheric pressure in Lazare Bonaparte's office had subtly shifted.
Seated in deep black leather armchairs, the three titans of Japanese industry awaited the verdict: Akio Ohga of Sony, Mr. Sato of Toshiba, and Mr. Makihara of Mitsubishi.
Three men whose decisions usually sent shivers down the spines of Asian stock markets, silenced within Lazare's fortress.
They had prepared for the worst. They had studied Lazare Bonaparte's file. They knew the brutality with which he had crushed Intel, the inflexibility with which he had constrained François Mitterrand, and the blind fury with which he had, a few hours earlier, dismantled the French aristocracy.
In the minds of the three patriarchs of the Land of the Rising Sun, the Ogre of Ivry was going to demand its tribute. It was going to behave as the Americans had during the disastrous semiconductor deals of 1986.
They expected it to demand exorbitant royalties, unilateral technology transfers, and the power of life or death over their own assembly lines. They were ready to bow down, to accept financial vassalage to salvage what they could of their industrial empires, brought down by the end of the Japanese economic miracle.
But when Lazare Bonaparte rose from his mahogany armchair, the icy aura that usually preceded him had evaporated.
He didn't look like a tyrant about to dictate a treaty of surrender. His obsidian eyes no longer held that cold, unfathomable, lifeless mineral quality. On the contrary, a bright, almost feverish flame danced in his pupils.
For the first time in months, the engineer's jaw wasn't clenched with paranoia. His shoulders had relaxed. The adrenaline of pure creation, the thrill of a blank page finally opening before him, radiated from his entire being.
He did not remain entrenched behind his desk. Animated by a visceral, almost passionate energy, Lazare went around the massive piece of furniture to stand directly in front of them, abolishing the symbolic distance of power.
« You're waiting for me to present you with the bill, aren't you? » Lazarus exclaimed, the timbre of his voice vibrating with an intensity that surprised the young translator, who had to clear his throat to relay the Builder's emotion.
The three presidents exchanged an imperceptible glance. Mr. Makihara, the oldest, nodded cautiously.
« You possess the standard of tomorrow, Mr. Bonaparte, » the interpreter translated. « We are pragmatic industrialists.
We know the price of defeat and the value of the technology you hold. Dictate your terms. We are ready to hear the percentage you will demand on our sales. »
Lazare let out a laugh. It wasn't the cynical, gravelly laugh that accompanied his financial executions. It was a clear, almost youthful laugh, charged with passionate incredulity.
« Dictate my terms? Bleed you dry? » Lazare repeated, pacing the space before them, his sweeping gestures betraying the fervor of his mind.
« That's exactly what Silicon Valley would have done! That's what Bill Gates or Andy Grove would have done! »
He stopped abruptly, fixing his burning gaze on Akio Ohga's.
« Why do you think the American Eagle is choking on its own talons, gentlemen? Why does the whole world secretly hate transatlantic monopolies? Because they confuse domination with suffocation!
They create closed, tyrannical ecosystems. They force their partners to become mere executors, squeezed dry until the last drop of profit margin. They want to own one hundred percent of the pie, the software, the hardware, the network, and the air you breathe! »
Lazarus leaned forward, placing his hands on the back of an unoccupied seat, his face lit by the vision of an alternative future.
« This is utter strategic madness, » he insisted passionately. « If Volta SA behaves like a colonial power of technology, if I demand royalties that bankrupt you and prevent you from growing, what will happen in five years?
In ten years? »
He didn't give them time to respond, carried away by the flow of his own brilliance.
« I'll tell you. Japanese pride will awaken. Resentment will fester in your laboratories.
You will begin funding secret projects to circumvent my patents. Your governments will pass antitrust laws to dismantle my empire. By trying to seize everything, I will create the very conditions for my own destruction.
Absolute tyranny always breeds absolute rebellion. I categorically refuse to make the same mistake as the Americans! I refuse to be the jailer of my partners! »
The three Japanese leaders were petrified. Lazare's fervor held them glued to their seats. The translator struggled to keep up with the breathless, passionate pace of the French engineer, but the raw energy and visceral sincerity of his rejection of the American imperialist model transcended the language barrier.
Mr. Sato of Toshiba, whose company had suffered greatly from Washington's sanctions, felt a shiver run down his spine. He no longer saw a fierce competitor; he saw an industrial revolutionary.
« So what do you propose, Monsieur Bonaparte? » asked Sato, his voice suddenly imbued with a respect no longer dictated by mere politeness, but by genuine fascination. « If you don't intend to dominate us through income, what is the basis of this symbiosis you speak of? »
Lazarus sat up straight. His eyes shone with the spark of true creators, those who prefer to plant a forest rather than erect a lonely tower.
« I propose shared hegemony. An organic alliance, » Lazarus announced, each word ringing with absolute clarity.
« I don't want you to be my subcontractors, gentlemen. I want you to be obscenely rich. I want Japan to reclaim its position as a technological predator, and I want it to do so by wielding my weapons. »
He returned to his desk and picked up a stylus, drawing the outlines of his new world in the air.
« Here is the agreement. Volta SA will always retain the fundamental intellectual property. We will develop the core of the RISC architectures, the instruction sets, and the VoltaOS kernel .
But I am granting you today a global, universal, and unlimited manufacturing and optimization license. »
The three presidents' eyes widened. In the semiconductor industry, licensing a manufacturing license for a cutting-edge technology that had recently achieved success was considered commercial heresy.
« You won't be buying my chips just to painstakingly integrate them into your televisions or computers, » Lazare explained with growing fervor. « You're going to manufacture your own Volta-compatible chips!
You'll take my basic VESLA architecture , and your engineers at Sony, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi will have the right to modify it, adapt it, and hyper-specialize it for image processing, low power consumption, or home automation. »
Lazare slammed his fist on the table, a gesture of pure conviction that startled the translator.
« And the best part for you, gentlemen? You'll keep almost all the profits! I'll only take a token royalty on volume, just enough to fund our basic research.
If you sell millions of televisions or devices equipped with Volta-derived processors, Japan will reap the profits. You'll build the factories, you'll create the jobs in your own country! »
Mr. Makihara, whose face was usually impenetrable, revealed utter astonishment. The economic model Lazare had just described was suicidal for a typical Western accountant, but an absolute stroke of genius for a geopolitician of technology.
In his previous life, Lazare had studied how Intel, despite its flaws, had been forced to allow AMD to exist and use the x86 license to circumvent antitrust laws and stimulate innovation through controlled competition. But Lazare went infinitely further.
He wasn't inventing a compliant competitor; he was creating a national ecosystem, linking Japan's destiny to his own.
« Forgive my insolence, Mr. Bonaparte, » Akio Ohga interjected, his voice trembling with a mixture of disbelief and hope.
« But if you offer us the keys to manufacturing and renounce capturing the bulk of the material value… where is your advantage? Why make us giants if not to fleece us? »
Lazarus's eyes lit up. This was the crucial question. The moment when Lazarus's vision took on its full demiurgic dimension.
He approached Akio Ohga again, the man who had reinvented portable music, and looked at him with fraternal intensity.
« Because the value of the next decade won't reside in the piece of silicon itself, Ohga-san! » Lazare exclaimed, using the Japanese honorific suffix to emphasize the intimacy of the pact. « The value will reside in the standard ! »
He spread his arms wide, embracing the invisible space of future networks.
If all of Japan, if your three immense conglomerates, begin flooding the world with electronic products running on Volta architecture and our operating system... then Volta will become the air humanity breathes. Developers worldwide, from San Francisco to Bangalore, will be compelled to code for our ecosystem, because you will have placed a Volta chip in every home on the planet.
America will be isolated on its old continent with its outdated x86 architecture, while we will have woven the universal web.
Lazare lowered his voice, his tone becoming that of a confidant, of an architect sharing the plans of his cathedral with his master builders.
« I don't want to be a hated monopoly, threatened from all sides. I want to be gravity. No one rebels against gravity.
If you make billions from my technology, if your factories are running at full capacity, and if your engineers thrive working on our architectures… you will become my fiercest protectors. If tomorrow Washington tries to destroy Volta SA, it won't just be a European problem.
The Japanese government will go to war to defend the technology that sustains its own country. »
The engineer straightened up, his breath coming in gasps, buoyed by the majestic clarity of his plan.
« That's what symbiosis is. By making you rich and powerful, I make myself immortal. And together, we will erase the nightmare of American supremacy.
We will build a world where technology is not used to crush allies, but to elevate them so that the global structure is indestructible. »
The silence that fell over the room had nothing to do with fear or anticipation. It was the sacred, almost religious quiet that follows a major revelation.
The three Keiretsu presidents had straightened up in their chairs. They had spent their lives negotiating with Westerners. They knew the arrogance of Silicon Valley bosses, the contempt of officials at the US Department of Commerce, the rapacity of New York bankers who treated Japan like a gigantic factory to be exploited at will.
They expected to find a tyrant in Europe. Instead, they found a passionate visionary, a man capable of sacrificing immediate and petty profit for the sake of a total and shared victory. Lazare Bonaparte was not offering them a subcontract; he was offering them a blood alliance, a strategic partnership of unprecedented scope in modern industrial history.
Mr. Makihara, from Mitsubishi, was the first to rise. His dark eyes shone with an emotion he struggled to conceal beneath the veneer of Japanese reserve.
He no longer saw the Frenchman's youth. He saw the soul of a Shogun.
He slowly buttoned his suit jacket, then bowed deeply, at a ninety-degree angle. A reverence of absolute, total respect.
Sato and Ohga rose in turn and imitated him, bowing before Lazarus's molten spirit. The translator, overwhelmed by the historical scene unfolding before his eyes, stammered out a translation of Makihara's words.
« » Mr. Bonaparte… We accept your vision. The Empire of Japan will put all its industrial power, all its intelligence, and all its workforce at the service of the Volta standard.
You are right: the American Eagle has bled us dry enough. It is time for the Rising Sun to join forces with the genius of Europe. We will forge this gravity together. « »
Lazare looked at the three men bowing before him. Adrenaline continued to surge through his veins. The passion hadn't subsided.
The morbid boredom that had gnawed at him over the past few weeks had been completely vaporized by the lightning bolt of this alliance.
By refusing to apply classic capitalist tyranny, by choosing the intelligence of the ecosystem rather than the ease of monopoly, Lazare had irrevocably fractured the timeline. The world of the 2000s, as he had known it, would cease to exist.
He had just invented a new trajectory for humanity.
But for this symbiotic pact to truly make sense, for Japan and Europe to definitively overcome American inertia, it wasn't enough to simply join forces on desktop processors. They needed to conquer the frontiers of tomorrow, those the world had yet to discover.
« Get up, gentlemen, » Lazarus ordered, his voice thick with frenetic excitement, his eyes sparkling with a fierce, creative impatience. « The pact is sealed.
But the night is still young, and we have no time to lose. The basic silicon war is already behind us. If we want to bury the American model for good, we must open the doors to the future before our enemies realize they exist. »
He turned towards the wall of his meeting room and grabbed the remote control for the holographic projectors embedded in the ceiling.
« Follow me to the tactical projection room, » he invited, a broad, enthusiastic smile lighting up his face. « Forget desktop computers. Let me show you what the world will look like in fifteen years, and how we're going to build it together in less than five. »
Location: Tactical projection room (Level 4) / Apartment on rue d'Assas.
Date: Spring 1995, 5:00 AM.
Point of view: Internal (Lazare Bonaparte) then Omniscient.
The tactical projection room in the Bunker was unlike any other room in the Ivry-sur-Seine complex. Windowless and lined with black acoustic panels, it gave the illusion of floating in the void of space.
At its center stood a huge circular table of frosted glass, surmounted by ultra-high-resolution projectors.
When Lazare Bonaparte activated the system, the room was suddenly flooded with the bluish light of a three-dimensional wire world map. Thousands of luminous nodes pulsed across the surface of the globe, connected by thin electric arcs.
The three Japanese presidents, taking their places around the table, contemplated the map with silent fascination.
« The whole world, and America in particular, is obsessed with the desktop computer wars, » Lazare began, positioning himself in front of the hologram, his face bathed in the blue glow of the screens. « Intel, Microsoft, Apple… They're all fighting to see which beige box will grace the desk of the accountant or the student. »
He swept the air with a sharp backhand.
« This is a war of dinosaurs, gentlemen. A war for a world that, in terms of innovation, is already dead. I'm telling you now that the desktop PC is just a transition.
A primitive stage. The future doesn't lie in the isolated power of a machine sitting on a table. It lies in the network. »
With a press on a touch console, Lazare zoomed in on the globe over the United States and Europe, where the luminous nodes were visibly becoming denser.
« What you're looking at is the Internet. The World Wide Web . Today, it's just a toy for academics and a few military personnel.
But in a few years, it will be the nervous system of the planet. The economy, culture, diplomacy... Everything will pass through this network. »
Lazare looked intently at Sato, from Toshiba, and Makihara, from Mitsubishi.
« For this global network to function, billions of terabytes of data per second will need to be stored, encrypted, and distributed. This will require building what I call » server farms «—metal cathedrals containing thousands of interconnected machines, operating day and night.
This is where the first pillar of our alliance comes in. »
He approached the two men.
« I want Toshiba and Mitsubishi to immediately create a joint research center with Volta SA, dedicated exclusively to the design of ultra-high-density servers. We will supply modified VESLA processors for massive parallel processing, and you will provide the thermal engineering, ultra-fast hard drives, and hardware architecture.
If we flood the global market with Franco-Japanese servers that are infinitely more powerful and secure than American machines, then the physical heart of the internet will beat to our rhythm. The United States will build the highways, but the tolls, the warehouses, and the asphalt will belong to us! »
Sato and Makihara nodded, overwhelmed by the scale of the ambition. This was no longer consumer electronics; this was the construction of a planetary infrastructure.
Lazare then turned to Akio Ohga. The head of Sony was observing him with particular acuity, sensing that Lazarus was now speaking directly to his creative soul.
« Ohga-san. Your company revolutionized the twentieth century by creating the Walkman. You took music out of the living rooms and into the streets.
But physical media – the cassette, the CD – is a prison. »
Lazare produced on the glass table the three-dimensional sketch of a thin, black rectangle, devoid of any mechanical reader, equipped only with a screen and a few keys.
« The second pillar of our war is absolute mobility, » announced Lazarus with visionary fervor. « We are going to open a secret laboratory in Tokyo. The goal is to create a new generation of portable devices: digital music players capable of storing thousands of songs in flash memory.
But this is only the beginning. Eventually, these devices will have to connect to the network wirelessly. Music, voice, messaging, access to information… Everything will have to fit in a person's pocket. »
Lazare pointed a finger towards the hologram of the black rectangle.
Volta knows how to design ultra-low-power chips. Sony possesses the genius of miniaturization, ergonomics, and design. Together, we will invent the post-computer device.
We will bypass the PC by putting computing power directly into the user's hand.
To top it all off, Lazare turned to Mitsubishi again.
And to connect these devices, we won't pay any tolls to American equipment manufacturers like Motorola. Mitsubishi will lead a consortium to develop next-generation cellular telecommunications infrastructure, 2G and 3G, natively integrating Volta's cryptographic encryption.
We will impose this standard on Europe and Asia. America will be isolated on its own technological island.
Lazarus fell silent, letting the room's stillness absorb the dizzying impact of his revelations. In the space of an hour, he had sketched the architecture of the next decade. He hadn't simply proposed a partnership; he had entrusted them with the plans for the time machine.
The three Japanese leaders rose as one. There was no longer any doubt, no more restraint. The loyalty of industrial Japan had just definitively shifted to the Parisian suburbs.
They bowed one last time, their faces marked by the grave excitement of those about to overturn the world order, before leaving the screening room under the escort of Commander Vauquelin.
As soon as the solid doors closed, Lazarus remained alone amidst the swirling holograms.
He could feel his pulse pounding frantically against his temples. The boredom, that icy leprosy that had been gnawing at him for weeks, had disintegrated. By forcing the march of history, by launching the development of the internet, smartphones, and mobile networks five to ten years ahead of its original timeline, he had just thrown his own memories into the fire.
He no longer knew what tomorrow would bring. The game was once again deadly. He was alive again.
The door to the room flew open. Karim Belkacem burst in, a mug of coffee in hand, his dark circles deepened by yet another night of recording. He had crossed paths with the Japanese delegation in the corridors of Level 4.
« Tell me I'm dreaming, Lazarus, » the coding genius blurted out, his eyes wide. « Who were they? They looked like the bosses of Sony and Mitsubishi.
Don't tell me you just sold the VESLA architecture to the Japanese? »
« I didn't sell it, Karim, » Lazare smiled, deactivating the holograms. « I inoculated it.
Prepare your teams. We're going to open two massive joint research centers. One on ultra-high-speed servers, the other on embedded ultra-miniaturization.
You'll have to split VoltaOS to create a server version and a mobile version. »
Karim's brain seemed to freeze for a second, unable to absorb the pace imposed by his boss.
« What? Are you completely insane? » Karim choked out.
« We've only just stabilized the VESLA-III architecture for our supercomputers! The Huawei plant is barely up and running! We can't open three major innovation fronts at the same time!
It's physically and humanly impossible! We're heading for an aneurysm, Lazarus! »
Lazare approached his lifelong friend, placing a firm hand on his shoulder.
« Walking is no longer enough, Karim, » Lazarus murmured, a feverish glint in his eye. « If we merely walk, we will end up becoming what we fight against: a fat, predictable, and arrogant empire. We must run.
We must run to escape our own shadow. Asia has just awakened, and we will arm it to crush America before it even knows what battlefield we are on. »
Karim lowered his eyes, breathing heavily. He knew that tone. It was Lazarus's tone when the machine went haywire, that terrifying moment when Lazarus's spirit left the stratosphere to attack the stars.
« You're going to kill us with work, » Karim murmured with a tired smile, already mentally calculating the memory allocations needed for a mobile OS.
« I will make you immortal, » Lazarus gently corrected.
A few hours later, as day broke over Paris, Lazare's armored Mercedes came to a stop in the courtyard of the building on rue d'Assas.
The engineer went up to the family apartment. The tranquility of the sanctuary welcomed him. Crossing the wide corridor, he spotted Aliénor de La Rochefoucauld in the living room.
She was standing by the window, a cup of tea in her hand, watching the city awaken.
When she heard his footsteps, she turned around.
The young historian, whose world had crumbled the day before under Volta's bureaucratic onslaught, possessed exceptional reading skills. It took her less than a second to scan the time traveler's face.
The stony shadow that had weighed down his features for days had vanished. The weariness of the all-knowing gods had evaporated. In its place, she saw the sharp glare of a hungry predator, the vibration of a man who had just jumped into the void without a parachute.
« You don't look like a bored man, » she observed gently, placing her cup on the coffee table.
Lazare stopped a few meters from her. He unbuttoned his double-breasted jacket, feeling for the first time the real weight of physical fatigue seize his muscles, but his mind was dancing.
« I just set fire to the only history book I knew, » confessed Lazare, his gaze fixed on hers.
Eleanor smiled. A knowing smile, shining with the intelligence of those who understand that order is a deadly illusion.
« And how do you feel in the middle of the flames? » she asked.
« Blind, » replied Lazare Bonaparte, a triumphant grin finally stretching his lips. « Magnificently blind. »
He had deliberately disrupted the clockwork of his own destiny. The alliance with Japan and the rapid pace of the digital revolutions had just generated dozens of unknown variables, possible futures that no algorithm could calculate.
History had gone wild again. And Lazarus, finally freed from his certainties, was preparing to devour it.