Location: Restaurant Le Taillevent (Paris 8th) / Volta factory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: October 1985
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The autumn of 1985 covered Paris with a blanket of dead leaves and cold rain, but in Ivry-sur-Seine, there were no more seasons. There was only the binary and deafening rhythm of the war machine.
The Volta S.A. factory had changed. Under the iron fist of René Castella, the party walls had been torn down. The warehouse had tripled in size. Two hundred and fifty workers, divided into three shifts that took turns every eight hours, were busy around the five huge wave welding machines repatriated from Germany at a high price. Castella paced the assembly lines like a galley captain, barking orders, checking the tin baths, tyrannizing the adjusters so that the polymerization furnaces would spit out their quota of black monoliths without the slightest interruption.
Public money was pouring in. The company's account at the Banque de France was visibly swelling. The billion equation was becoming a reality of flesh, silicon and resin.
Yet Lazare Bonaparte knew full well that prosperity based on a single customer was a deadly illusion. The state was a generous Leviathan when it was afraid, but it could change its government, its minister or its priorities overnight. To make the Volta empire truly immortal, it was necessary to lock the country's financial arteries: the private banking sector.
And in this very hushed world of high finance, secrecy is a commodity that quickly expires.
Financiers, IT directors and senior civil servants crossed paths in the same circles, the same dinners in town, the same dressing rooms at the Opera. Very quickly, a rumour spread. The Ministry of Defense and the Quai d'Orsay had suddenly equipped themselves with an absolute cryptographic shield, provided by a phantom company that no one had heard of a year earlier. Worse still, the general staff boasted that this system rendered IBM and Bull equipment totally powerless in the event of an intrusion.
The panic had then changed sides. The banks, terrified of being the last easy prey for industrial hacking, began to look for this mysterious supplier.
This is how on a Thursday lunchtime in October, Lazare Bonaparte found himself sitting at the Taillevent, one of the most starred and exclusive restaurants in the capital, a stone's throw from the Champs-Élysées.
The nineteen-year-old CEO wore a charcoal gray suit made of cold wool, tailor-made by one of the best tailors on the rue de la Paix. He stood out in the middle of the pot-bellied fifty-somethings who populated the room, but his look and posture commanded immediate respect from the maître d'hôtel.
Opposite him, sweating slightly in his double-breasted suit, stood François Vasseur, the all-powerful Chief Information Officer (CIO) of BNP.
Eight months earlier, this man had ordered security to throw Lazarus and Karim out of his office, calling their V-1 module a "toy for pimply students."
Today, Vasseur had paid the bill for a Burgundy grand cru even before the starter was served, and his obsequious smile betrayed absolute despair.
"It's a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Bonaparte," the bank's CIO began, wiping his forehead with a damask linen napkin. "I must admit that your meteoric rise is admirable. The whole of Paris only talks about the "Volta shield". »
Lazarus does not smile. He did not touch his glass of wine or bread. He looked at Vasseur with the coldness of an entomologist observing a pinned insect.
"You are not here to admire my ascent, Mr. Vasseur," Lazare interrupted, his curt and professional address establishing an insurmountable distance. "You are here because your Board of Directors has learned that Crédit Lyonnais and the French State secure their transactions with our architecture, and that your own servers are bare in the face of industrial espionage."
The banker swallowed. Lazare's lack of tact shattered the codes of courtesy of his midfield, but Vasseur was not in a position to be offended.
"Listen... The CIO stammered, trying to find a negotiating tone. "During our last meeting, I was perhaps a little hasty. You see, with the weight of American manufacturers, it is difficult to trust an emerging technology. But I was able to recognize my mistake. I am ready to sign you a purchase order today. »
Vasseur took out an elegant Montblanc pen and placed a leather notebook on the immaculate tablecloth.
"BNP has a core network of five thousand critical terminals. We want your V-1 modules to be deployed. I have heard from my contacts at the Ministry of Finance that the price granted to the State is around twenty thousand francs per unit, including the license and the installation. Given our volume of group purchases, I propose that we align ourselves with this preferential rate. One hundred million francs, immediate signature. »
Vasseur leaned back in his chair, convinced that he had made an offer that a young company could not refuse. A cheque for a hundred million francs on a restaurant table was the dream of every boss.
Lazarus remained motionless. He stared at the banker for long seconds. The silence stretched out, heavy, almost palpable, muffling the clatter of the silverware in the dining room.
"You have misunderstood the nature of this transaction, Monsieur Vasseur," said Lazare at last, his voice so low and harsh that the banker had to bend over to hear him.
"Excuse me?"
"Twenty thousand francs is the rate of blind trust," explained the sixty-year-old engineer, dictating his own economic laws. "This is the prize I have given to the Republic because it has understood the urgency of its survival. You, on the other hand, called security when I came to offer you this survival. You are not buying technology today. You buy the right to repair your strategic incompetence. »
Vasseur's face decomposed. The flush of anger and humiliation rose to his cheeks.
"What do you mean by that?" he choked.
"I mean that the unit price of the V-1 module for BNP is not twenty thousand francs," Lazare announced placidly. "It is thirty-five thousand francs. In addition, there is a mandatory annual software maintenance fee of fifteen percent of the overall contract. »
The bank's CIO dropped his pen. The Montblanc rolled over the tablecloth.
"Thirty-five thousand?!" choked Vasseur, briefly drawing attention from the next table. He lowered his voice, whistling between his teeth. "It's absolute delirium! This is almost double the price of the State! That's one hundred and seventy-five million francs for the order! Not to mention the licence fee! It's pure and simple racketeering! »
"It's the tax of arrogance," corrected Lazarus, uttering these words with diabolical clarity. "Last winter, you told me that we had never been fired for buying IBM. If you leave this lunch without my signature, the rumour of your refusal will leak into the financial press before the end of the week. Your shareholders will know that BNP refuses to equip itself with the state security standard out of simple stinginess. On Monday morning, your institutional clients will withdraw their funds for fear of being hacked. On Monday afternoon, you will be fired. »
Vasseur was trembling. He looked at this kid in the gray suit as if he were looking at the Angel of Death. Lazarus had cornered him. He had turned the bourgeois prudence of the banker against himself.
"You... you are enjoying your monopoly," murmured Vasseur, with a defeated look and his shoulders slumped.
"That's the definition of monopoly," the Shadow Builder confirmed, pulling out of the inside pocket of his jacket a two-copy contract, already prepared for the exorbitant amounts he had just announced. He placed it on the tablecloth, next to the CIO empty plate.
"You're lucky that the Ivry plant still has a production margin, thanks to my production manager's three-shift system," Lazare continued, standing up. "If you wait until next week, Société Générale and Crédit Mutuel will have saturated our order books. The price will increase to forty thousand. »
Lazarus buttoned his jacket with icy elegance.
"Read the contract. Sign it at the bottom of each page. You will send him by courier this evening to the headquarters of Tolbiac. I'll let you settle lunch, I'm afraid I have very little confidence in beef tartare. »
The young CEO turned on his heels, sliding between the tables of the Taillevent with the silent majesty of a sovereign, leaving the senior banking executive petrified in front of the contract that had just cut his budget by nearly two hundred million francs.
When Lazare walked through the glass doors of the restaurant and found the October freshness on Friedland Avenue, his personal chauffeur (a novelty that Castella had forced him to hire for reasons of standing and security) opened the door of a black German sedan.
Lazarus rushed to the rear.
"To the factory, boss?" the driver asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
"No," replied Lazarus, loosening his tie slightly. "At the new research centre. It's time to warn Karim that he's going to have to spend the money I just found for him. »
The domino effect was recorded. The private sector, terrorized by the rumour and taken hostage by the state's switchboard, was going to bend, bank after bank. Volta was not going to be satisfied with the billions of the administration; it was going to siphon off the treasury of the capitalist economy.
But Lazarus never lost sight of the final objective. Selling blocks of resin armed with an EPROM chip was a tactical victory. It was a material armor.
However, in order to win the strategic war, to definitively cut France off from American dependence, it was necessary to attack the very foundation of the machines. We had to take control of the ghost in the machine.
The software war had just begun.
Location: New R&D laboratory of Volta S.A. (Ivry-sur-Seine) Date: October 1985 Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Karim Belkacem)
Only a few streets from the main factory where René Castella made the welding machines scream under the smoke of the epoxy, Lazare had acquired a second building. A former printing press, discreet, almost invisible from the street. It was Karim Belkacem's new sanctuary: the Volta Research and Development Center.
The contrast with the industrial hell of Castella was absolute.
Here, the air was conditioned and purified. The floor was covered with a thick grey antistatic carpet that muffled the slightest sound of footsteps. Large bay windows let in the autumn light on dozens of immaculate benches. On these desks sat the most powerful and expensive UNIX stations money could buy in 1985.
Karim was sitting in a luxurious ergonomic leather chair. He was wearing a midnight blue cashmere sweater and a Swiss watch on his wrist. Outside, parked in the private courtyard, awaited her first great folly: a brand new BMW 323i, whose gray body shone under the overcast sky.
The scholarship holder from the rue Mouffetard had won. He was no longer hungry, he was no longer cold, and his code revolved to the very heart of the secrets of the Republic.
He was nonchalantly tapping on his mechanical keyboard, optimizing a few side lines of the V-1's priming routine while listening to classical music on a high-end cassette player. The factory was producing. The money was falling. The product was perfect. The war seemed to be won, and Karim savored the peace of the victors.
The secure door to the lab opened with a slight pneumatic hiss.
Lazare Bonaparte entered. He took off his suit jacket, placed it on the back of an empty chair, and walked over to his technical director. He had just returned from his lunch at the Taillevent with the CIO of BNP.
Karim took off his headphones with a big smile.
"So, boss? Was the tartare good? The student said, in a playful mood. "The guy from BNP cried when you told him the price?"
"One hundred and seventy-five million francs for the initial order, plus the software fee," Lazare replied with absolute neutrality, leaning against the edge of Karim's desk. "He signed. The private sector will follow within six months. Our material monopoly is validated. »
Karim hissed in admiration, clapping his hands.
"Magical! We robbed the market, Lazare! The factory runs on its own with Castella, the cash is overflowing. We can make only minor updates to the V-1 for the next five years. We are ahead of everyone. It took the Americans years to understand how encapsulation was armored. We can finally breathe. »
Lazarus looked down at his partner. The sixty-year-old engineer felt a hint of annoyance at this cozy naivety. The comfort zone was the graveyard of technological empires.
"In technology, Karim, stagnating for five years is like shooting suicide," Lazarus snapped in a polar voice that instantly froze the young man's smile. "IBM, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard... Do you think they are sleeping? Do you think they accept that a French start-up comes to parasitize their processors and humiliate their engineers? As we speak, in labs in California, their best architects are dissecting the market. »
Lazarus pointed to the UNIX station on which Karim worked.
"Our V-1 module is a masterpiece, but it's just a leech. A sovereign and armored leech, certainly, but it needs a host to exist. It doesn't care about the data buses of American computers. What will happen next year, or in two years, when IBM decides to physically change the architecture of its motherboards and encrypt internal communication between its own components? »
Karim frowned. Lazarus' implacable logic had just struck his sense of security.
"If IBM shuts down hardware access... Our module will no longer be able to intercept the flow at the source. The V-1 would become obsolete overnight. »
"Exactly," said Lazarus. "We built the physical fortress, but the laws that govern the inside of that fortress — the operating systems — are still written in English. The material is not enough, Karim. For sovereignty to be total, we must have the ghost in the machine. You have to control the software layer from end to end. »
The young CEO straightened up. His dark eyes burned with that all-consuming ambition that had terrified and fascinated Karim since day one.
"The V-1 was just a financial launchpad. We are going to use the billions of the state and the banks to start the real war. I am launching phase two. The VoltaOS project will no longer be a simple security kernel that parasitizes a host. It will become a complete Operating System. Autonomous. Graphic, multitasking, and natively encrypted from its foundations to the user interface. »
Karim sank into his leather armchair, gasping for breath.
"A complete OS? Lazarus, you have lost your mind. Coding a one-megabyte encryption kernel took me whole nights, and we did it together. A complete operating system is millions of lines of code! You have to manage the memory allocation, the display drivers, the file system, the task scheduler... It's a titanic task. Even Microsoft and Apple are struggling with armies of developers! »
"Apple and Microsoft code for the general public. They code to be compatible with disposable bricks," Lazare retorted, brushing the argument aside. "We're going to code for the elite. For state servers and banks. A proprietary, closed system of absolute stability. And you won't code it on your own. »
Lazarus turned to the huge empty space of the R&D lab. Dozens of blank straw mattresses were waiting to be occupied.
"Do you remember the glass ceiling we faced against the bankers? The world of white-collar workers and fifty-somethings? The code has the same problem, but reversed. Large companies such as Bull or Thomson hire keyboard officials. Slow, procedural engineers, who hold meetings to validate an "If" loop and who clock in at 5 p.m. »
Lazarus' gaze returned to Karim.
"I don't want hundreds of engineers. Massive armies are slow and predictable. I want a commando. A praetorian guard of the code. »
"A Praetorian Guard?" repeated Karim, fascinated by Lazarus' military semantics.
"I'll give you an unlimited budget, Karim," the CEO solemnly announced. "You have carte blanche. You're going to scour the Île-de-France. I want you to find the five to ten best brains available. I don't want good developers. I want abnormals. Prodigies. »
Lazarus stepped forward, his face coming alive with a ferocious intensity.
"Find me the mathematicians who are bored to death on the benches of Jussieu. Find me the hackers who hack into the Transpac network from their rooms at night. The obsessed with the Assembler, the autistics with the algorithmic. This laboratory must become the haunt of the absolute elite. Offer them double the salary of Bull engineers. Give them the best machines in the world. If they want to code at night while listening to music loudly, let them do it. The only law that will reign here is that of extreme optimization. »
Karim felt his heart quicken. The idea of leading your own pack of geniuses, pushing the boundaries of pure programming without any budget constraints, was the ultimate dream of any computer scientist.
"Five to ten very high-flying guys," Karim whispered, his brain already starting to make a list of obscure names, students he had met in clandestine programming competitions or on the first telematic forums. "It's going to be unmanageable personalities, Lazare. Marginalized people. Wild animals. »
"The factory is the domain of the iron men. The laboratory must be the domain of wild spirits," Lazarus confirmed with a thin smile. "Let me manage their financial whims. You, manage their genius. You have eighteen months to release the alpha version of VoltaOS. A system capable of running any bank terminal with native tamper-proof. Then we'll make our own machines to run it. We will become the judge and the law. »
Karim looked at his beautiful UNIX station. The tranquility of the BMW and the cashmere sweater had evaporated. Lazarus had just rekindled the fire of creation. Rest did not exist in the Volta empire; there was only the next conquest.
"Eighteen months," Karim repeated, nodding slowly, a predatory smile rising on his lips. "You'll have your commando by the end of the month, boss. We're going to siphon off the brains of this country before Americans even have time to learn how to pronounce our name. »
Lazarus resumed his jacket. The alliance between the man of strategy and the genius of code was stronger than ever.
"Money is just ammunition, Karim," Lazarus reminded as he walked out of the lab. "Prepare your lieutenants. The war of matter is stabilized. Now we are going to attack the mind. »