Location: Management Office, Headquarters of Volta S.A. (The "Bunker"), Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: April 15, 1992.
Point of View: Omniscient (Focus on Karim Belkacem).
On April 15, 1992, the sky above Ivry-sur-Seine weighed down like a leaden cloak, pouring a fine, uninterrupted, and icy rain that completely transformed the roofs of the red suburbs into a vast ocean of dull sheet metal. Inside the "Bunker"—the unofficial nickname of Volta S.A.'s world headquarters—the atmosphere was no less stifling.
Standing in front of the large bay window of his office overlooking the main workshop floor, Karim Belkacem silently contemplated the utter shipwreck of his own logistical genius.
Below, the massive Line 4 no longer looked like a high-tech assembly line. It had become a crude electronic slaughterhouse. "Operation Scavenger"—the desperate, incredibly costly idea he had devised two weeks earlier to alleviate the U.S. embargo on living memory—was in full swing. Nearly two hundred workers, dressed uniformly in their white antistatic coats, were furiously attacking mountains of colorful plastic carcasses. Entire pallets of brand-new video game consoles—freshly imported Super Nintendos, cheap Taiwanese PC clones, downgraded office equipment—were being unceremoniously ripped open.
Even through the thick, soundproof double glazing of the director's office, Karim thought he could vividly smell the pungent stench of burnt rosin, overheated solder flux, and melting plastic.
Workers wielded industrial hot air irons, heavy heat guns, and desoldering braids to literally rip the precious DRAM chips out of consumer motherboards. It was grueling, brutal work, of an aberrant rusticity for a company that openly prided itself on designing the most advanced RISC architecture in the world. Each chip that was successfully torn off had to be painstakingly cleaned of its tin residue, electrically tested for viability, and then re-soldered with maniacal care onto the circuits of the sovereign IMPERATOR servers and the computers actively being assembled in Huabei.
Karim pressed his burning forehead against the cold glass. He watched technicians throwing entire handfuls of blackened, ruined components into large yellow plastic waste bins. The severe thermal stress of desoldering destroyed nearly one in two chips. The silicon cracked; the delicate pins melted entirely. The massacre was total.
Behind him, the heavy oak door opened with a sharp click.
Édouard Renault-Tessier, Volta's Financial Director, entered the room. The former investment banker, usually so obsessively meticulous about his appearance, seemed to have aged ten years in just a few weeks. His silk tie was slightly loose, and he clutched a dark, leather-bound dossier to his chest as if it were a literal death sentence.
"Stop looking at that, Karim," Édouard whispered, stepping toward the large mahogany meeting table. "You're only hurting yourself for nothing. The global supply chain will not fix itself just by staring at it."
Karim slowly turned away from the window. The deep, dark circles under his eyes testified to a horrific, unsustainable consumption of caffeine and a severe lack of sleep that now bordered on clinical torture. Ever since the CIA's bullets had nailed Lazare to a medical bed in the Val-de-Grâce, the young software architect had carried the crushing weight of an industrial empire under siege on his shoulders entirely alone.
"What is the scrap rate this morning?" Karim asked in a hoarse, grating voice, totally ignoring his CFO's remark.
"Sixty-eight percent," Édouard replied, displaying the cold, unfeeling precision of an accountant of the apocalypse. "For every single megabyte of working RAM we manage to successfully extract from these electronic corpses and inject into our own machines, we completely destroy almost two. The base cost of acquiring the raw material has increased fivefold. The exorbitant overtime for the night work of those two hundred workers is exploding our fixed costs. Our gross margins—which were widely admired by the European financial press just a month ago—are now being literally vaporized. Operation Scavenger is not a cure, Karim. It is a tourniquet that we are actively tightening around our own neck."
Karim stepped forward, leaning heavily on the back of an armchair, his joints turning white from the tension.
"It's a tourniquet that will buy us a few more weeks, Édouard. The critical deliveries for the DGA and the Deutsche Bundespost are leaving on time. The Americans thought they would block Huabei instantly; we are proving to them that Volta knows exactly how to feed on carcasses if necessary. But it is only a last resort, I know that. Tell me that you have good news from Grenoble. Tell me that the Europeans have finally accepted our offer and that we will soon be able to produce our own silicon."
Édouard Renault-Tessier placed his heavy file onto the polished mahogany desk. He did not open it immediately. He held Karim's feverish gaze with a look of resigned sadness—that specific look peculiar to men of numbers who clearly see the inevitable far before the engineers do.
"The board of directors of the European SGS-Thomson consortium met late last night. The official response arrived this morning at seven o'clock sharp, by encrypted fax on my direct line."
The CFO paused, his Adam's apple bobbing painfully.
"No, Karim. A categorical, unanimous, and absolute definitive refusal. They reject our injection of two billion francs in cash. They completely refuse to transfer our ASML lithography machines into their clean rooms. And as a direct result, they refuse to guarantee us the slightest volume of RAM production for our factories."
The news hit Karim with the kinetic force of a water hammer. Suddenly out of breath, he staggered backward slightly, releasing his tight grip on the leather of the chair. His safeguard plan—this masterful counter-offensive that was supposed to seamlessly transform the American embargo into a historic opportunity to create a totally independent European microelectronics industry—had just collapsed entirely like a fragile house of cards.
"No?" Karim exploded, his voice suddenly piercing, echoing violently in the perfect acoustics of the large office. "What do you mean, no?! I offered them two fucking billion francs on a silver platter! A monumental, liquid cash flow that they have been crying on their knees to Brussels and Paris for years to secure just to complete the construction of their Crolles factory! I offered to propel them to the absolute global forefront of engraving right under Intel's nose! These are companies subsisting entirely on a state drip, Édouard! France and Italy explicitly hold their capital! How can they possibly spit on a sovereign bailout?!"
Édouard let the engineer's outburst of anger subside, fully respecting the deep pain of his incomprehension. Then, with a measured, deliberate gesture, he finally opened his file. He extracted from it not complex technical documents, but detailed stock market statements, complex capitalization tables, and official extracts from the American Securities and Exchange Commission.
"Because you reasoned like an engineer, Karim. And not like a financier," Édouard explained softly, spreading the sheets out across the table. "You believed, completely wrongly, that technological superiority and a mountain of billions were enough to instantly buy Europe's loyalty. Lazare had heavily warned you, though. Do you remember the precise structure of our own company? Do you remember why Lazare has always point-blank refused, with almost fanatical violence, to allow Volta S.A. to be the subject of an IPO?"
Karim narrowed his eyes, his brain buzzing with the chaotic rush of adrenaline and fatigue.
"Because he wanted to maintain absolute control. He holds eighty-five percent of the shares in his own name, I have held ten percent of the capital since the creation of the company, and the remaining five percent is distributed in a tightly closed pool of employee stock options. Lazare has always said that stock market transparency is a mortal weakness. He vehemently refused to depend on quarterly dividends and to have to justify our strategic secrets to bloodsucking investment funds. Volta is not listed. No one can buy us out."
"Exactly," Édouard agreed, pointing his Montblanc pen directly at the documents. "Volta is a ghost fortress. The U.S. government cannot secretly buy us out, nor can it launch a hostile takeover bid on us, because our capital is securely locked in from within in a tribal manner. Eighty-five, ten, and five. Not one single percent floats in the public markets. But the SGS-Thomson consortium is not a fortress, Karim. It is an open city. It is a massive group actively listed on the financial markets. And contrary to what you think, the French State is not their only master."
The Financial Director dragged a shareholder distribution table, heavily populated with colorful pie charts, toward Karim.
"I had the exact composition of the European champion's free-floating capital deeply analyzed last night. Nearly twenty-five percent of their total capital, and a colossal share of their direct voting rights, are held tightly by immensely powerful institutional pension funds and sprawling investment banks. Massive Wall Street entities. Fidelity Investments, The Vanguard Group, State Street, Goldman Sachs."
Karim felt his insides completely freeze. The insidious, invisible mechanics of the trap began to appear to him in all its immaterial hideousness. The noose was not tightening on the assembly lines; it was tightening directly on the computers of the trading rooms.
"You mean that the Americans have..."
"The George Bush administration didn't need to threaten any European government officially," Édouard stated, begrudgingly admiring the enemy's maneuver in spite of himself. "The Pentagon has not sent aggressive diplomatic emissaries to the Élysée Palace. They have not threatened direct trade sanctions or crippling embargoes explicitly voted on in Congress. The President simply made a few highly discreet phone calls to Wall Street."
Édouard leaned forward, his voice dropping low, tracing with deadly precision the exact outline of the financial assassination.
"Forty-eight hours after we had placed our formal offer of two billion francs on the desk of the senior management of SGS-Thomson, the major American funds directly contacted the European board of directors. The message, passed quietly under the table, was absolutely clear: 'If you accept the money from Volta S.A., and if you divert your fledgling production lines to provide RAM to Lazare Bonaparte's company to circumvent our embargo, we will instantly, aggressively liquidate all of our positions in your capital.'"
Karim turned noticeably pale. As a novice in the intricate world of stock markets, he clearly saw the nature of the threat, but Édouard took it upon himself to fully quantify the impending shockwave.
"A massive, coordinated, and highly aggressive sale of twenty-five percent of the free float in a single trading session, Karim, causes an immediate systemic crash for the targeted stock. If these funds had carried out their threat, the stock market valuation of the European champion would have been viciously cut by forty percent even before the closing bell of the Paris and Milan stock exchanges. It would mean the total annihilation of the enterprise. It would mean the ruin of their small shareholders, the instant freezing of their credit lines. The European leaders looked at Volta's proposal on the one hand, and the weapon of financial mass destruction pointed directly at their heads by Uncle Sam on the other. They panicked. They folded."
Édouard closed the file with a sharp, decisive gesture that clicked loudly in the silence of the office.
"Lazare was completely right from the very first day. The stock market is not a great financing tool for corporate growth; it is the ultimate Trojan horse of American diplomacy. Washington does not need to pass clumsy embargo laws to effectively isolate us on our own continent. The so-called free market and transnational capitalism gladly do the NSA's work for them. The American octopus has closed its tentacles tightly on Europe without our own ministers even realizing it."
Karim stepped back slowly, as if physically stunned, and collapsed deeply into the large leather armchair that rightfully belonged to his convalescent friend. He buried his face heavily in his hands, frantically rubbing his violently throbbing temples.
The plan had been absolutely perfect on paper. It possessed an implacable industrial logic. But it had just crashed with heavy losses and a deafening bang against the macroeconomic reality of the 1990s. The world was not made up of patriotic engineers ready to do absolutely anything to build beautiful material architecture. It was made up of terrified shareholders fearing the loss of their dividends, and cowardly managers strictly subject to the laws of public listing.
They were alone.
Totally, completely alone.
The Wintel alliance (Andy Grove and Bill Gates) had successfully padlocked the Asian foundries of Seoul and Tokyo with massive amounts of federal subsidies. And now the American financial world was actively preventing continental Europe from coming to the rescue of the Ogre of Ivry, strictly forbidding France and Italy from producing the memory that Volta so desperately needed.
Karim's thoughts drifted irremediably down to the basement of the building, to the highly secure Level 4 of the Ivry factory.
There, far from the light of day, an army of two hundred coders, high-cost elite hackers, and mathematicians had fully completed the mutation of VoltaOS-M's core. The cyberattack had not yet taken place. But the software weapon of mass destruction was fully finalized in its digital forge. The highly stealthy code that would soon infiltrate the deepest mysteries of the U.S. National Security Agency and aggressively eviscerate U.S. geopolitical secrets was entirely ready to be deployed. Karim virtually held the launch codes to the greatest cybernetic apocalypse in history.
But the cruel irony of the situation made him profoundly nauseous.
What was the point of owning the absolute most lethal weapon of the decade if your army literally starved to death before it could even deploy it?
What was the point of threatening to completely paralyze Washington's servers, if the Huabei factory shut down for good, if the gigantic European sovereignty contracts were blown to pieces, and if Volta's monstrous cash reserves melted away in pathetic, highly destructive rescue operations like Operation Scavenger? Without raw materials, without RAM to properly build the IMPERATOR servers and computers that were destined to mesh Europe together, the company would rapidly collapse in on itself. They essentially held a live nuclear warhead in their hands, but they had absolutely no metal left to build the missile that was to carry it across the Atlantic.
The furtive, devastating attack—that purifying digital fire which was supposed to violently avenge the atrocious death of Alexandre de Vigan and the blood shed by Lazare—was indefinitely suspended. Karim had not yet received formal authorization from the Élysée to strike the NSA, and every single day that passed without a massive delivery of Asian or European RAM brought Volta a little closer to total, unrecoverable asphyxiation.
"What are we going to do, Karim?" asked Édouard softly, breaking the funereal silence that had fallen heavily over the presidential desk. "The financial pace of Operation Scavenger is completely untenable over time. In three weeks, maybe four at the absolute most, we will have totally exhausted all stocks of old consoles and PCs that can be recovered from the European gray market. Huabei's assembly chain will stop for good due to a total lack of components. And the Washington alliance will pop champagne over our corpse, without even having to publicly assume responsibility for our killing."
Karim raised his head. The despondency had suddenly disappeared entirely from his features, swept forcefully away by an implacable coldness—that dark, almost fanatical radiance, inherited directly from his years spent at Lazare's side, which was gradually transforming him into a true warlord.
Since the frightened European industrialists and pension funds had refused to fight out of sheer cowardice, the State would have to be violently forced to use its supreme force. François Mitterrand had promised him sovereignty. It was time to aggressively ask him to go to the diplomatic checkout.
"The senior managers of SGS-Thomson have folded entirely out of fear of the collapse of their share price on Wall Street," Karim said, standing up suddenly like a block of granite. "It is pure accounting cowardice. Very well. But the French State heavily remains their reference shareholder. The President of the Republic possesses the absolute power, strictly in the name of national security and the pure and simple independence of France, to explicitly impose a production decree. He can aggressively block stock market maneuvers, or even nationalize what needs to be nationalized, to force these factories to provide us with our living memory."
Édouard's eyes widened, genuinely horrified by the colossal, irrational dimension of what the young engineer was boldly proposing.
"Karim... That is pure madness. We are no longer in the software business! You are talking about intentionally triggering a major state crisis, invoking reasons of state to brutally force a civilian conglomerate into open, declared war with the United States!"
"We are at war, Édouard!" Karim growled, brushing aside the objection with a wave of his hand. "A war that the Americans explicitly started with lead and hollow-point bullets in Eindhoven! Prepare the helicopter, the car, or the motorbike, I don't care how, but get me out of Ivry-sur-Seine right now."
He frantically buttoned up his suit jacket, his gaze twisted menacingly toward the gray, rainy horizon of Paris, where supreme power sat.
"I am going to see François Mitterrand. The Sphinx listened to me once when I presented him with the mutation of our code. He will have to listen to me a second time. And if it is necessary to violently twist the arm and break the kneecaps of the entire European industry to save our production lines and our independence, I will have it done directly from the Élysée Palace. If Wall Street is the Trojan horse of the Americans, the Republic will be our battering ram."
Location: Élysée Palace, office of the President of the Republic (Paris).
Date: April 17, 1992.
Point of View: Omniscient (Focus on Karim Belkacem).
On April 17, 1992, precisely forty-eight hours after the final collapse of negotiations with the European consortium SGS-Thomson, Karim Belkacem purposefully crossed the heavy wrought-iron gates of the Élysée Palace.
The rain, which had violently drowned the capital since the beginning of the week, had not stopped for a single second, completely transforming the immaculate gravel of the main courtyard into a screeching, gray mud. Closely escorted by two impassive Republican Guards, the young Technical Director of Volta S.A. climbed the wide steps of the porch with a heavy, mechanical step. His long, dark wool coat was totally soggy, clinging tightly to his shoulders, but he no longer felt the biting cold of this rotten spring. He felt only the absolute urgency—that sharp, acid burn deep in the stomach that always precedes last-ditch battles.
He had explicitly used the absolute emergency channel. An encrypted telephone line that François Mitterrand himself had granted him during their last tumultuous meeting. Karim knew perfectly well that he was burning his absolute last political cartridges. "Operation Scavenger," which consisted of desperately sucking up the chips of old game consoles, was bleeding Volta's treasury completely dry, and the huge assembly plant in Huabei, China, was about to sink into permanent, irreversible silence.
The usher with the silver chain ushered him directly into the presidential office without uttering a single word.
The vast corner drawing-room, lined richly with gold, precious woodwork, and fine silks, perfumed heavily with old wax and the reassuring, smoky smell of a fireplace. Behind his huge Empire-style desk, François Mitterrand was waiting for him. The President of the Republic, with his waxy complexion and features increasingly hollowed out by the cancer that he fiercely, stubbornly concealed from the country, nevertheless kept completely intact this aura of an ineradicable republican monarch. His eyes, full of a dark, unfathomable, reptilian intelligence, stared intently at the young engineer from the red suburbs with an acuity that completely belied his physical fatigue.
"You possess the singular gift of demanding my immediate attention in the absolute darkest hours, Monsieur Belkacem," murmured the Sphinx in his slow, gravelly, slightly nasal voice. "Sit down. You look exactly like a soldier who has just crossed a live minefield blindly."
Karim didn't sit down immediately. He walked aggressively to the edge of the heavy presidential desk, his jaws clenched tightly until his enamel threatened to break, totally ignoring the puddle of rainwater that was rapidly forming at his feet on the priceless Savonnerie carpet.
"We are dying, Mr. President."
The twenty-six-year-old engineer forcefully dropped all polite formulas and diplomatic circumlocutions. The time for institutional kowtowing was deeply buried on a dark motorway in the Netherlands, alongside the bullet-riddled body of Alexandre de Vigan.
"The George Bush administration has entirely locked down all RAM production capacity in Asia," Karim spat, his voice vibrating with raw rage. "They have utilized tens of billions of dollars of highly hidden federal funds to completely dry up the global market. Without these critical components, without these specific RAM sticks, our highly advanced VESLA processors absolutely cannot boot. Our assembly plants are in utter agony."
Mitterrand calmly joined the tips of his pale fingers in a pensive pyramid. He didn't seem surprised, nor was he shocked.
"I am perfectly aware of the aggressive maneuvers of the Wintel alliance, Monsieur Belkacem. My dedicated services at the Ministry of the Economy are closely following the curve of world DRAM prices hour by hour. It is a formidable, highly calculated war of attrition. Very... American."
"I had found a perfectly viable solution," Karim continued, firmly placing both his hands flat on the leather of the desk to keep himself from violently trembling. "I explicitly offered two billion francs in pure cash, drawn directly from our own coffers, as well as the complete transfer of our cutting-edge lithography technologies, to the European consortium SGS-Thomson. We could have fully financed the rapid completion of their factory in Crolles. In exactly one year, we were highly capable of creating a completely sovereign European tech sector, from base software design straight through to silicon foundry."
"A genuinely brilliant idea," the President conceded with a slow, deliberate nod of approval. "Entirely worthy of the architectural genius of Lazare Bonaparte."
"They refused!" Karim exploded, his voice cracking severely under the massive weight of his frustration. "And they did not refuse for any logical industrial reasons. They explicitly refused because Wall Street firmly has them by the throat! The big American pension funds aggressively threatened to completely liquidate all their shares and instantly collapse their stock market price if they dared to provide us with the slightest memory chip. The Americans are weaponizing the free market and the stock market as a true weapon of mass destruction!"
Karim leaned even more heavily on his arms, plunging his feverish, burning gaze directly into the imperturbable stare of the head of state.
"Mr. President, the French State and the Italian State are massive reference shareholders in this consortium. It is time to aggressively use public power. I ask you, strictly in the name of the technological sovereignty that we have painstakingly built for you with our very blood: explicitly impose a production decree! Force the SGS-Thomson board of directors to totally ignore American blackmail. Invoke national security! Nationalize their production lines immediately if necessary! Heavily hold them to Volta's contract."
Karim forcefully caught his breath, playing his absolute last card.
"If you don't step in, we will not have any more machines to equip your National Defense. Our ultimate cyber-retaliatory weapon—this highly mutant code that we are actively preparing in our basements to bring the NSA to its knees—has not yet been launched. And it will never be! We will simply die of asphyxiation far before we can ever fire that first shot, because we won't even have the physical, hardware equipment to host our own attack!"
Silence fell heavily over the presidential desk—a silence of unbearable density, disturbed only by the dry crackling of logs in the hearth and the relentless pounding of rain against the high windows overlooking the park.
François Mitterrand did not blink once. He took the time to meticulously measure the distress, the pure rage, and the appalling political incomprehension of the young man who was fiercely facing him. Then, with exasperating, calculated slowness, he leaned back in his chair, his face totally frozen in an age-old impassibility.
"Sit down, Karim."
It was no longer a cordial invitation. It was an absolute, unyielding order, emanating directly from the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
The engineer obeyed, utterly overcome by the crushing weight of presidential authority, and sank deeply into the stretched leather seat.
"You are a genuine genius software architect," Mitterrand began, his voice lowering a full semitone, adopting the specific inflections of a stern history teacher addressing a highly gifted student who remains blind to the brutal realities of the world. "You brilliantly master the language of machines, the poetry of complex encryption algorithms, and the sheer brutality of hardware architectures. But you absolutely do not understand the complex grammar of empires, young man."
Mitterrand placed his hands flat on the armrests.
"You dare to march into my office to aggressively accuse me, in barely veiled words, of inaction. Do you truly think that the French Republic idly watches Lazare Bonaparte bleed without lifting a single finger?"
The Sphinx's gaze suddenly lit up with a dark, terrifying glow. The old politician's smooth façade heavily cracked to reveal the ruthless head of state.
"Do you happen to know what the French Government did the very day after the brutal ambush at Eindhoven? Do you know exactly what I ordered the very second I was told that the CIA had explicitly shot Monsieur de Vigan and heavily riddled the Builder of our sovereignty with hollow-point bullets?"
Karim swallowed hard, caught completely off guard by the raw violence contained in the President's voice.
"I came dangerously close to an absolute, total diplomatic break with the world's leading superpower," Mitterrand stated, deliberately detaching each syllable like a meat cleaver. "The U.S. Ambassador was aggressively summoned to the Quai d'Orsay in the absolute middle of the night and heavily threatened with immediate, unceremonious deportation. I explicitly ordered the unilateral and immediate suspension of all our joint military exercises currently in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. I have had our senior defense attachés recalled directly from Washington. I explicitly ordered the DGSE to immediately, permanently cease all vital information sharing with Langley. I completely froze crucial NATO channels."
Mitterrand leaned heavily forward, his index finger pointing sharply at Karim.
"I have actively placed the French state apparatus in a position of severe crisis that this country has not experienced since General de Gaulle forcefully expelled the American bases from our soil. I made it extremely clear to George Bush that the blood spilled in Europe would carry an exorbitant, crippling geopolitical price. But what you are aggressively asking me today, Monsieur Belkacem, is no longer a matter of mere diplomacy or military posture. You are actively asking me to declare an all-out, total economic war."
"If they cheat using the stock market to explicitly crush us, we absolutely must retaliate with sovereign law!" Karim protested loudly, desperately clinging to his engineer's logic.
"But they don't cheat!" replied Mitterrand, his voice suddenly cutting off the protest. "This is exactly where your tragic, profound naivety lies! What the American administration has just done to Volta S.A. is of an unprecedented violence, yes. But it is a perfectly, utterly legal violence in the blinding light of the rules of capitalism that they themselves have meticulously written. They have absolutely not violated any established trade treaties. They have not declared any official, sanctionable embargo before the United Nations. They have expertly used the massive firepower of their pension funds and the natural, inherent cowardice of European shareholders to perfectly isolate you. It is a highly calculated economic assassination completely behind closed doors."
The President leaned back again, slowly calming his own heavy breathing.
"If I sign a sovereign decree to forcefully coerce SGS-Thomson—a publicly traded corporate entity—to explicitly ignore the directives of its majority shareholders, if I heavily distort the free market through a literal state coup, by initiating a highly punitive nationalization simply to provide Volta with living memory, do you know exactly what will happen? I will hand Washington exactly what they are waiting for. I will explicitly offer them the absolute perfect casus belli."
"They will do absolutely nothing more!" Karim argued fiercely. "They already deeply hate us!"
"You heavily underestimate the American monster," sighed Mitterrand deeply. "Our economy, Karim, is brilliant, it is highly refined, but it is intrinsically, dangerously fragile in the face of the massive Leviathan from across the Atlantic. We are not the Soviet Union. We simply cannot survive total autarky or an absolute blockade. France desperately needs to aggressively export itself in order to survive."
Mitterrand opened one of the drawers of his desk, took out a highly thin file prominently stamped with the seal "Confidentiel Défense," and slid it purposefully across the leather toward the engineer.
"I personally received Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador, exactly three days ago. In the absolute greatest secrecy. She absolutely did not come to speak to me of you, or of Lazare Bonaparte. She came to aggressively talk to me about the upcoming GATT negotiations, our vital aeronautical exports, and the European Common Agricultural Policy."
Karim's blood instantly ran ice-cold. The brilliant mind of the network architect completely understood, even before Mitterrand fully finished his demonstration, the terrifying extent of the global blackmail in which Volta had just been deeply engulfed. It was absolutely no longer a microprocessor war; it was a massive, macroeconomic hostage-taking.
"The explicit message from the White House, delivered with exceptionally big smiles, was crystal clear," the President continued, his face severely hardened by the sheer humiliation of impotence. "If the French State goes aggressively beyond its strict role as a shareholder to highly protect Volta S.A. by blatantly violating the rules of free trade on the stock market, the United States will not hit Ivry-sur-Seine. They will absolutely hit the rest of France."
Mitterrand enumerated the implicit threats with the clinical, terrifying coldness of a doctor explicitly announcing a terminal phase.
"They will entirely block access to the U.S. domestic market for our Airbus aircraft, strictly for the exclusive, massive benefit of Boeing, by loudly invoking illegal state subsidies. They will immediately impose highly punitive tariffs of one hundred percent on our wines, our spirits, our cheeses, and our entire luxury industry. They will instantly close their borders to our massive pharmaceutical exports. They will aggressively destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs on French soil in the space of a mere six months. They will completely bring our trade balance to its knees and cause a severe political recession from which my government will absolutely not recover."
The Sphinx anchored its deeply tired, predatory gaze strictly in Karim's.
"You are actively asking me to choose directly between the survival of your server factory—as brilliant and incredibly crucial as it is for our military sovereignty—and the sheer survival of the economy of the entire French Republic. You are asking me to explicitly sacrifice the workers of Toulouse, the farmers of the Rhone Valley, and the craftsmen of the Marne simply for your Korean memory bars. My choice is made, Monsieur Belkacem. It was entirely done the exact second I fully understood that we had absolutely no real allies."
"No allies?" Karim whispered, completely devastated. "And what about Europe?"
"Europe is a complete commercial illusion," Mitterrand stated with absolute, biting cynicism. "The British are Washington's obedient poodles. The Germans are absolutely terrified of losing the American nuclear umbrella as they heavily struggle to digest their recent reunification. And the Italians are currently drowning in their own massive political scandals. No one, please completely understand me, absolutely no one on this continent will actively ally with France to wage a frontal, total economic war against the United States strictly in the name of a computer."
Karim looked heavily down at his own hands, resting on his knees. They were visibly trembling with severe exhaustion and heavily pent-up rage. Lazare had repeatedly told him this dozens of times when they were coding deep in the cellar of the rue de la Glacière: States are not friends. They are obese and deeply fearful customers. And customers do not die for their suppliers.
He had genuinely hoped that François Mitterrand's patriotism would easily transcend the deadly, cold accounting of the economy. The stark reality of Realpolitik had just violently broken his spine.
"So you're explicitly asking us to simply die in total silence to save Airbus," Karim stated in a highly sluggish voice, entirely devoid of any emotion.
"I have clearly told you: I have strictly defined the absolute limits of public power. I have fully covered your aggressive maneuvers since day one. But the State has officially reached its physical limits. I cannot perform literal magic."
Mitterrand pointed sharply to the heavy telephone resting on his desk.
"You keep endlessly talking to me about your cyberattack. From this highly mutant VoltaOS-M code developed by the Directorate General of Armaments that you keep tightly in reserve to aggressively eviscerate the NSA's servers and violently avenge the blood of your friends. You eagerly wait to ask me for the direct order to strike. But you have just explicitly confessed to me the very paradox of your situation, Karim."
The President allowed himself a deeply sad smile, heavily laden with biting, cruel irony.
"You possess the absolute weapon. But it is a weapon you literally cannot fire, because you do not have any more bullets in the magazine. If you launch this massive attack without having the necessary hardware capacity to resist the inevitable aftershock, without having the IMPERATOR servers to properly host our own defense explicitly due to a total lack of RAM, you will sign the digital death warrant of France entirely. The massive cyberattack can only be launched if the Volta Empire is physically, totally invulnerable. And today, you are completely on your knees."
Mitterrand stood up slowly, clearly signifying the absolute end of the interview. His figure, despite the severe illness, retained an overwhelming, crushing size.
"I strongly suggest that you do exactly what Lazare Bonaparte has always heavily trusted you to do, Monsieur Belkacem. Be absolute geniuses. Invent a radical solution completely outside my borders. You actively amassed seven billion francs in pure cash in your coffers during the Eindhoven crisis. If Western Europe is heavily terrorized by Wall Street and Asia is completely locked down by Washington's massive checkbook, find a place in this wide world that absolutely does not obey the strict laws of the American stock exchange."
The Sphinx walked slowly around the desk and approached Karim.
"Find a desperate ally who has absolutely nothing left to lose. An ally who is far hungrier for your billions than afraid of George Bush's massive reprisals. The hearing is over. May your mathematics deeply protect you, Karim. Because the Republic has officially laid down its arms."
Karim stood up with the absolute stiffness of an automaton completely without power. He did not bow. He did not utter a single other word. He turned sharply on his heel and heavily left the presidential office, leaving far behind the smell of wax and the shattered illusion of state protection.
When he heavily crossed the massive gate of the Élysée Palace again, the rain violently lashed his face with completely redoubled violence. Police sirens blared loudly in the distance directly on the Champs-Élysées. Paris aggressively continued to live, comfortably, deeply blind to the war of extermination that was being violently played out in its industrial shadows.
The engineer walked heavily to his company car, the collar of his coat pulled up tightly against the severe downpour. He was alone. The Volta Empire was totally, utterly alone.
Europe comfortably watched them suffocate entirely from the stands, deeply paralyzed at the mere idea of offending Uncle Sam. The institutional and diplomatic channels were definitively, totally dead and buried.
If he truly wanted to deeply save the monumental work of Lazare Bonaparte, if he passionately wanted to successfully wrest the explicit right to unleash his devastating cyberweapon directly against the CIA and the NSA, Karim had to entirely stop looking for clean, perfectly legal partners. He desperately needed a heavily ostracized ally completely rejected by the nations. A fallen, broken empire that still possessed massive factories, brilliant Soviet engineers, vital raw materials, and above all, a visceral, deeply historical, and totally unquenchable hatred of American hegemony.
Karim climbed heavily into the cockpit of his sedan. He tightly closed his eyes, entirely isolating his highly active mind from the relentless sound of the rain. His software architect brain rapidly began to meticulously scan the geopolitical map of the world with the absolute, terrifying coldness of a search algorithm.
The West was an absolute stock market trap. Capitalist Asia was completely bought out.
There was only one single direction left.
The East.
Far beyond the rusted remnants of the former Iron Curtain, deep in the snowy immensities and the still actively smoking industrial ruins of what had been, just a few short months earlier, the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Karim opened his eyes directly in the pitch darkness of the car. The terror had completely left him, rapidly replaced by a chilling, absolute determination. The child of the red suburbs had just deeply understood that in order to truly defeat the perfect capitalist system, it was absolutely necessary to violently ally oneself precisely with those whom this system had entirely defeated and totally excluded.
"Hang on, Lazare," he whispered fiercely in the total silence of the cabin, sharply turning the ignition key. "If the West is far too cowardly to actively take our money, we are going to offer it directly to the devil."