Location: Mergers & Acquisitions Department, Usine Volta S.A., Ivry-sur-Seine
Date: February – March 1990 Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Auguste Bonaparte)
The war was no longer won only in the sterile laboratories of the Bunker; it was now fought on the thick carpets of law offices and in the back of armored limousines.
While Jerry Sanders whipped AMD's Texas factories to melt the first batch of V-1000 chips, and Eckhard Pfeiffer put Compaq's assembly lines under martial law, Auguste Bonaparte unleashed the largest takeover offensive in the history of European technology.
The mergers and acquisitions department of Volta S.A. had been created from scratch in less than forty-eight hours, occupying an entire floor of the Ivry-sur-Seine plant. Former directors of Paribas, business lawyers poached at high prices from Lazard and Rothschild, and ruthless auditors were crammed into it. Ashtrays were overflowing, international phone lines were crackling constantly, and fax machines were spitting out letters of intent to purchase twenty-four hours a day.
Augustus, dropping off his jacket from his diplomat's costume, led this army of white-collar workers with the coldness of a marshal of the empire. His mandate was simple: to empty the war chest of one and a half billion francs, and to bring back brains.
The Acquisition Blitzkrieg
London | Polygon Dynamics: A development studio founded by Oxford gifts, pioneering geometric 3D. They were secretly developing a revolutionary physics engine for the Amiga 500 and MS-DOS PCs. Volta's bankers offered an acquisition premium of 200%. The catch, enforced by the "clause of Lazarus": destroy all code for MS-DOS, Apple, and Commodore, relocate to Paris, and optimize the engine exclusively for VoltaOS. A glimpse of the future SONG-III chip evaporated any purist resistance. They became the foundation of Volta Entertainment.
Munich | Klangwerk: A start-up specializing in MIDI sequencers and multitrack digital audio recording, acquired in forty-eight hours. The German music industry would now have to switch to Volta workstations to use their favorite software.
Paris | Lumière Numérique: A small special effects studio founded by television advertising dissidents. They had the talent but lacked computing power. In exchange for unlimited access to Lazarus' RISC architecture, they became the spearhead of Volta's Creation Division, tasked with proving to Hollywood that French machines would calculate the dinosaurs of tomorrow.
Geneva | Kryptos: The most complex takeover. A cybersecurity auditing firm founded by former Swiss military cryptographers who initially refused French money. Lazare Bonaparte intervened personally. After a three-hour closed-door meeting, the Swiss emerged livid and signed. Kryptos became the Black Operations Division of Volta S.A., responsible for armoring the VoltaOS kernel for future international military contracts.
In six weeks of financial blitzkrieg, the impossible had happened.
Auguste Bonaparte entered his adopted son's laboratory at the end of March, with a thick file under his arm. He looked exhausted, his features drawn, but his gaze triumphed.
Lazare was working on the design of the masks of the future GPU. He raised his head.
"The war chest is invested," Auguste announced, throwing the file on the desk. "Exclusivity contracts are cemented by our lawyers. The transfer of intellectual property has been completed. We have brought back nearly four hundred top European engineers, programmers, and artists to our new premises in the southern suburbs."
The former diplomat sat down, breathing deeply.
"Studios are already developing on VoltaOS's architecture kits. Karim oversees the integration. You have succeeded, Lazarus. You created a closed software ecosystem from scratch that Microsoft took fifteen years to build organically. The garden is enclosed. We have video games in the works for the Sony deal, video editing software, an office suite, and a military shield. Hardware and software become one."
Lazarus looked at the file. He had used the brutality of capitalism to force the course of history. By enclosing these brains in his architecture, he ensured that the day the Compaq computer equipped with the Volta chip hit the store, users would not find themselves in front of a blank screen. The machine would be a living fortress.
"Excellent work, father," replied Lazarus calmly. "The armor is forged."
"The COMDEX show opens in a little over two weeks in Chicago," Auguste recalled, the tension suddenly rising to the surface. "Are the two hundred thousand Compaq machines pre-positioned? Have Sanders' factories kept up?"
"Logistics are taking their course. Jerry Sanders is a killer. He has fulfilled his part of the contract."
Auguste nodded, reassured, and left the laboratory to collapse from exhaustion in his own office.
Lazarus was left alone. Silence reasserted itself in the sterile room. The battle plan was perfect. The diplomatic dodge had worked, raw materials were pouring in from the USSR, the software was infallible, the ecosystem was bought, and the alliance with the Texan manufacturers was locked. Intel was about to walk straight into a minefield.
And yet, in the loneliness of the night, the Builder knew that no war ever went exactly according to plan. There was always a grain of sand. An anomaly.
And this grain of sand would manifest itself a few days later, in the middle of the Parisian night, in the form of a ringing telephone.
Location: Management office, Usine Volta S.A., Ivry-sur-Seine Date: Early April 1990, 4:12 a.m. Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
It was twelve minutes past four in the morning. The hour of the wolf.
Outside, the Paris suburbs were plunged into the silent, icy darkness of early April. The world was asleep. Even the Volta factory, usually so bubbling, seemed to catch its breath. Only the muffled purr of the generators of the Bunker, thirty meters below, testified to the incessant underground activity of the Defense servers.
In the vast director's office on the first floor, a single desk lamp projected a halo of white light on the huge mahogany table.
Lazare Bonaparte had not slept. He hardly slept anymore. His twenty-four-year-old physical body cried out for rest, but the spirit of the old man who inhabited it was fueled by absolute urgency, consuming the energy of his youth as one burns kerosene.
The young CEO was hunched over a large sheet of graph paper. The North American launch, scheduled for less than two weeks away at the COMDEX trade show in Chicago, was no longer on his mind. For the Builder, the war of April 16 was already won. Compaq had assembled the machines. The blind stocks were full. Intel was a dead man who was still walking.
His mind was already projected the following spring.
Under the tip of its silver mechanical pencil, the architectural diagrams of the future VESLA-III processor were taking shape. He designed the tiny logic gates of the Ethernet controller that would allow his future machines to connect natively to the nascent global network. Next to it, the specifications of the BBI bus and the SONG-III graphics card were spread out in an equation of absolute dominance. He was weaving the web in which humanity would soon be enclosed.
Suddenly, a shrill and shrill noise broke the silence of the night.
Lazare raised his head, the lead of the mechanical pencil freezing on the paper. It wasn't the classic phone in his office. The sound came from a small red device, without a dial, placed on a separate console.
This was the transatlantic cipherline. A direct cable, secured by the new algorithms of the Kryptos division, linking exclusively Ivry-sur-Seine to Jerry Sanders' office in Austin.
Lazarus looked at his wristwatch. Four hours and fourteen in France. Which meant it was a little after twenty-two o'clock in Texas.
The former Service Action agent stood up slowly. A ringtone in the middle of the night triggered old paranoid reflexes in him. Had the "Dell clause" been discovered? Had the Pentagon finally found a legal loophole to block the sale of the chips? Had a fire broken out in the Houston warehouses?
He unhooked the heavy red Bakelite handset and put it to his ear.
"Bonaparte."
"Lazarus—"
Jerry Sanders' voice echoed through the earpiece, distorted by the faint echo of encryption. But it wasn't the voice of a man calling to announce an industrial disaster. There was no panic or dejection. On the contrary, the American's breath was short, choppy, charged with a wild electricity. It was the pure adrenaline of a wild beast who has just smelled the smell of fresh blood in the arena.
"It's twenty-two o'clock in Texas, Jerry," Lazare said calmly. "Are the Houston plants on schedule?"
"The factories are perfect, Lazarus. The two hundred thousand machines are under tarpaulin. But that's not why I'm calling on the red line... You are not sleeping, I hope?"
"I never sleep. What's going on, Jerry?"
A silence of a few seconds stretched on the transatlantic line, punctuated by the hurried breathing of the AMD CEO.
"That's it, Lazarus..." The dam has broken, Sanders murmured, his voice vibrating with excitement he struggled to contain. "It leaked. I don't know if it's a Compaq employee or a Texas contractor, but someone has spoken."
Lazare froze, his eyes riveted on the black reflections of the bay window of his office. A leak, twelve days before the COMDEX. The absolute surprise effect had just evaporated.
"To what extent?" the Builder asked coldly, already calculating the geopolitical shockwaves. "Did the computer press have the specifications of the RISC?"
"The computer press is in a mess," Sanders laughed nervously. "No, Lazarus. It's much bigger than that. Much crazier. Turn on your secure line with the speakerphone. Sit down. You absolutely have to hear that..."