Location: R&D laboratory / Volta S.A. plant (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: February 1986
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazarus Bonaparte)
On the immaculate bench of the R&D lab, under the harsh light of an articulated halogen lamp, lay a square of grayish ceramic lined with dozens of tiny golden brooches. The object measured no more than a few centimeters on each side. It seemed harmless.
However, in the mind of Lazare Bonaparte, this small square of silicon had just hit the Volta empire with the force of a magnitude 9 earthquake.
It was a pre-production sample, obtained at a high price through a network of clandestine importers operating from California. The Intel 80386 microprocessor. The famous "i386".
Around the table, the Praetorian Guard of the Code — the five asocial, pale, over-caffeinated geniuses whom Karim had poached from the four corners of the Île-de-France — watched the flea with religious silence. Karim himself nervously ran his hand through his hair.
"Thirty-two bits..." whispered one of the coders, a thick-bespectacled former mathematician from Orsay. "They've really doubled the width of the data bus. It's not just an evolution, it's a complete paradigm shift." »
Lazarus, with his arms crossed, stared at the American processor. The sixty-year-old engineer who inhabited his body knew history. He knew that this architecture would define the standards of computing for decades to come. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand transistors. Millions of operations per second.
"If the Defense Staff or BNP buy computers with this chip at the end of the year, what happens to our current V-1 modules?" asked Volta's CEO coldly.
Karim swallowed.
"Our V-1 is calibrated to intercept and encrypt 16-bit streams. If we plug it into a 386 machine, the data stream will overwhelm it. It will create a monumental hardware bottleneck, and the system will crash. Worse: if the computer uses 32-bit memory addressing, our module will be unable to read half of the information. The stream will go to free-to-air. »
The sentence fell in dead silence. The inviolable shield of the French state, the billion-franc contract, had just been rendered obsolete by a Californian foundry. American technological supremacy was advancing like a steamroller.
Lazarus showed no panic. He turned away from the table.
"Don't move from here. Get your compilers ready. »
The young man left the muffled silence of the laboratory and crossed the paved courtyard to reach the industrial hell of the main factory.
As soon as he opened the heavy metal door, the din hit him. The five assembly lines were running at full speed. The smell of ozone and burnt epoxy resin caught his throat. Dozens of workers in antistatic gowns were busy under the neon lights, feeding the insatiable beast.
Lazare walked with a military step to the nerve center of the workshop, where René Castella was yelling instructions to a foreman over the noise of the welding machines.
The CEO didn't say a word. He approached the main power console of Line 1, raised his hand, and brought the flat of his palm down on the large red emergency stop button.
The howl of the machine died away with a mechanical groan. The conveyors stopped dead in their tracks. About fifty half-welded modules remained frozen in their tin baths. Lazare walked towards Line 2. CLAC. Emergency stop. Then Line 3.
In less than thirty seconds a clamor of stupor arose on the floor. Castella, red with anger, his face stained with sweat, rushed at Lazarus.
"For God's sake, Bonaparte! You've gone crazy?!" The old steel wolf yelled, pointing a trembling finger at the polymerization furnaces that were starting to cool. "What the hell are you doing? You've just screwed up three full batches! I have a quota of forty-five pieces a day to take out for the Ministry of Defense! I'm losing money by the second!" »
"The factory is at a standstill, René," Lazare decreed, his voice cutting short the ambient hysteria. "Until further notice, not a single module leaves these walls."
Castella almost choked. The workers around them had frozen, no longer daring to make the slightest move.
"We have signed contracts! BNP is expecting its first delivery on Friday! If we don't deliver, penalties will rain!" »
"If we deliver the current equipment, we're dead in six months," Lazarus said, staring his black eyes into those of his production manager. "The Americans have just doubled the size of their digital highways. The V-1 we make today has become a bottleneck. I refuse to deliver obsolete equipment. The state doesn't pay us for plastic, it pays us for the myth of absolute inviolability. This myth must not suffer from any flaw. »
Lazarus then addressed Castella with surgical precision, stating the orders for a forced march that would shake the entire factory.
"Karim and his engineers will go down to the floor this afternoon. They will modify the motherboard routing scheme to integrate multiplexers capable of handling 32-bit. You will purge the stocks of old components and contact our suppliers in Germany so that they can send us new microcontrollers as a matter of urgency. »
Castella ran a massive hand over his face, trying to calculate the financial disaster.
"Modifying a production line along the way... it's going to cost us millions. And we've already delivered two thousand modules to the ministry in the last three months. What do we do with those?" »
"We call them back," replied Lazarus with absolute coldness. "All of them. Without exception. We will send our technicians to replace them on the spot." »
"Replace them? At our expense?!" choked the director. "We're going to have to bear the cost of two thousand modules, transport, dismantling labor... We're going to burn our profit margin!" »
"This is the price of sovereignty, René. The State must understand that we are always one step ahead, even over the manufacturers of their own machines. We will take care of this massive update. No additional cost for the customer. This is the birth certificate of our reputation. Execute. »
Leaving no room for discussion, Lazare turned on his heels, leaving a pale Castella in front of his paralyzed assembly lines.
Back in the silence of the R&D lab, the atmosphere was electric. The five elite coders chatted loudly in front of a whiteboard, scribbling 32-bit memory architecture diagrams.
Lazarus entered and locked the door behind him. The rattling of the bolt immediately caught the attention of Karim and his Praetorian Guard.
"I've shut down the factory," Lazare announced, throwing his jacket over an armchair. "You have forty-eight hours to fix the V-1 hardware so that it can handle the i386 flows. But it's just a band-aid. The real problem lies elsewhere." »
Lazarus stepped into the center of the room. His aura literally crushed the oversized egos of the geniuses he had hired.
"The arrival of this American chip changes the schedule, gentlemen. Intel and Microsoft will use this power to impose new software standards on the whole world. If they manage to lock down their operating systems to 32-bit before we do, VoltaOS will be nothing more than a historical anecdote. »
He turned to Karim, his gaze charged with implacable intensity.
"The two-year deadline for VoltaOS is dead, Karim. The deadline has just been shattered. »
"What?" stammered the technical director, feeling the ground give way under his feet. "But Lazare, we have only just written the task scheduler! We are in the early stages of the core!" »
"You don't have two years anymore. You have six months. »
Murmurs of indignation and panic ran through the Praetorian Guard. One of the hackers, a waxy prodigy, shook his head.
"It's mathematically impossible. Coding a complete OS compatible with this new architecture in such a short time is suicide. We're going to make mistakes, the code will be unstable... »
"The code will be perfect," Lazarus cut him off in a voice that would not admit of any reply. "Because you are the absolute elite of this country, and I pay you the price of a minister to accomplish the impossible. I don't want to see anyone go home again." Camp beds will be set up in the break room. Food will be delivered to you. You will eat, breathe, and vomit 32-bit code until this system is up and running. »
Lazarus approached the table, resting his finger on Intel's small square chip.
"The Americans have just erected a silicon wall in front of us. It's up to us to prove that the French genius is capable of smashing it. Let's get to work. »
The forced march had just been ordered. The R&D laboratory was going to turn into a cauldron of psychological pressure. But Lazarus still didn't know that the real enemy was not going to be the lack of time or the exhaustion of his men. The enemy was hiding at the very heart of matter, in the secret architecture of American silicon.
Location: Volta S.A. R&D Laboratory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: March 1986
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Karim Belkacem)
The month of March 1986 never saw the sun enter Volta's R&D laboratory. The large blinds with slats were constantly drawn, plunging the old printing house into an artificial half-light only disturbed by the green flicker of the cathode ray monitors.
Lazare's "commando" had been working for four weeks straight. The elegance of the early days had evaporated. The anti-static carpet was littered with empty soda cans, boxes of cold pizzas and cups of coffee whose bottoms had dried up. The air was saturated with the smell of cold tobacco, the five geniuses recruited by Karim smoking cigarette after cigarette to stave off exhaustion.
Sitting in the center of this chaos, Karim Belkacem stared at his screen, his eyes burning, bloodshot. He had not slept for nearly forty hours.
"Restart the core compilation," he croaked, his voice hoarse with fatigue.
A few feet away, Marc, a long-haired, greasy Assembler prodigy, struck the Enter key on his keyboard brutally.
"Compilation complete," Marc announced curtly, the tension palpable in every syllable. "I run the injection on the 386-equipped test board. Booting... Loading into memory... Launching the RSA cryptographic module. »
The five coders held their breath. The prototype's fan purred louder. The American processor swallowed VoltaOS's lines of code.
Then the nightmare began again.
The main screen froze. A series of absurd hexadecimal characters flooded the debug console, followed by an absolute black screen.
Fatal error. Stack overflow. Core panic.
"Holy shit!" exploded Julien, Jussieu's former mathematician, violently throwing his pen against the glass wall. "It's been seventy times! Seventy fucking times we've rewritten this loop! The algorithm is perfect! On paper, it's unbreakable!" »
"If it were perfect, the system wouldn't crash in the middle of the multiplication of keys!" yelled Marc back, his nerves on edge. "Your code is heavy, Julien! You're saturating the CPU registers!" »
"My code is a masterpiece! It's your memory addressing architecture that screws up in 32-bit! »
"Your faces!" shouted Karim, banging his fist on his desk with a violence that made the screens tremble.
Silence fell back into the laboratory, heavy, sticky. Karim dropped his head between his hands, massaging his aching temples.
The crisis of confidence was total. For a week, the team had been stumbling against an invisible wall. Every time the VoltaOS kernel asked the processor to perform the complex mathematical calculation necessary to generate the encryption keys—an operation vital to the security of the system—the machine fell into a coma.
The elite of French programming, paid a high price by Lazare, was tearing each other apart. Egos were bleeding. Karim himself was beginning to doubt. Had he gone too far? Had he assumed his strengths? Was the 32-bit architecture too complex a monster for the young scholarship holder of the rue Mouffetard?
The secure door to the lab opened.
Lazare Bonaparte entered, dressed in his eternal white shirt, his collar immaculate. He advanced in the midst of overflowing ashtrays and evasive glances with the imperial calm of a general visiting a field hospital after a defeat.
"A problem, Karim?" asked Lazare softly, observing the distorted face of his technical director.
"We're at an impasse, boss," Karim admitted, his voice breaking, abdicating his pride. "The system crashes. The encryption code requires colossal multiplications. As soon as you send the instruction to the 386 processor to calculate in 32-bit, it crashes. We've tried everything. We've rewritten the routine, we've lightened the variables, we've split the calculations... Nothing works. »
Mark, the Assembler specialist, snorted contemptuously.
"The code is rotten, that's all. That's the problem with mathematical theory, it never survives the reality of silicon. »
Lazarus paid no attention to the coder's insolence. He approached the dot matrix printer that sat in the corner of the room.
"Print me the memory dump. The exact hexadecimal reading of the machine to the millisecond before the crash. »
"That's three hundred pages of numbers, Lazare," Karim sighed. "It's unreadable for a human being. We have debugging software for that." »
"Software looks for software errors. Print it out. »
Karim shrugged, resigned. He started the order. The dot matrix printer screamed for twenty minutes, spitting out a mountain of continuous paper striped with green and white, covered with thousands of blocks of numbers and incomprehensible letters.
Lazarus took the thick bundle of paper under his arm.
"I'll be in my office. Don't let anyone disturb me. Go get four hours' sleep. It's an order. »
The CEO locked himself in the small glass room that served as his office at the back of the laboratory. He drew the blinds, turned on his banker's lamp, and placed the three hundred pages on his desk pad.
For six hours, the sixty-year-old engineer disappeared into the matrix.
He didn't read code like a programmer from the 80s. He read it with absolute knowledge of the history of computing. His eyes scanned the hexadecimal lines, mentally translating the instructions sent to the Intel processor's registers. He isolated the fateful loop. The exact moment when VoltaOS asked the processor to multiply two huge 32-bit integers (the MUL instruction).
He did the mathematical calculations by hand, on a notebook, in base 16. The logical result was perfect.
Then he looked at the response returned by the processor in the memory register just before the crash.
The machine's answer was wrong.
Lazarus stopped breathing. He double-checked his calculation. He repeated the operation three times. The logic of Karim and his mathematicians was crystal clear. The code had no bugs.
The error came from the microprocessor's internal adder.
A slow, frightening smile, without the slightest trace of joy, stretched over the teenager's face. The memories of his first life came to the surface. The urban legend of Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara firm's best-kept industrial secret in 1986.
The latent defect.
Lazarus got up and opened the door of his office violently.
The developers, who were dozing on their armchairs or on the cots, jumped. Karim straightened up, wiping a trickle of drool from the corner of his lips.
Lazarus walked to the center of the room and violently threw the heavy pile of paper onto Karim's desk. The sharp sound made the laboratory resonate.
"Your code is perfect, Karim," Lazarus' voice said, sounding like a divine judgment.
The technical director blinked, dazed. Julien, the mathematician, smiled triumphantly at Marc.
"If the code is perfect, why does the machine crash, Bonaparte?" asked Marc, defensively in his voice.
"Because the throne on which we want to establish our sovereignty is rotten from the inside," Lazare replied, pointing accusingly at the square Intel chip on the bench. "The bug is not in our software. It's etched into American silicon. »
The five geniuses froze. Accusing the processor of making a mistake in a basic mathematical calculation was like blaming gravity for ceasing to work. It was absolute heresy in computing.
"It's impossible..." Karim whispered, standing up slowly. "A processor doesn't make a mistake. It's hardware. Logic gates are physical." »
"Intel's engineers botched the arithmetic unit of their chip to be the first in the 32-bit market," Lazare revealed with overwhelming contempt. "When the CPU is called upon for heavy multiplying operations in 32-bit mode—exactly what we need to encrypt the secrets of French defense—the physical architecture of the processor goes into overdrive. It returns an erroneous result, which corrupts the memory and crashes our kernel. Intel has brought a defective component to market. »
The silence in the laboratory became absolute, heavy. The revelation was cataclysmic. They had been trying for weeks to build a shield on crumbling foundations.
"But then..." Karim stammered, despair taking hold of him. "We're screwed. If the basic hardware our customers are going to buy is defective by design, VoltaOS will never work. You can't fix a processor! You can't modify silicon!" »
The sixty-year-old engineer swept away the panic with his hand. His dark eyes shone with the ferocious excitement of impossible battles.
"The material is fallible, Karim. The mind is not. We are not going to capitulate to the incompetence of Silicon Valley. »
Lazarus approached the whiteboard. He grabbed a marker and began to draw a new diagram of execution flow, of dizzying complexity.
"Since we can't trust the multiplication unit of their chip, we're going to bypass it. You're going to write a low-level software patch. An assembler patch. You're going to intercept the multiplication instruction before it's even sent to the physical processor, and you're going to compute it software, through a series of offset additions, without using their faulty circuitry. »
"Calculate a 32-bit multiplication by software addition?" choked Marc. "It's going to slow down the execution of the encryption by at least thirty percent! The system will be heavier!" »
"I prefer a French system slowed down by prudence than an American system struck by its arrogance," Lazare cut off in his Builder's voice. "Execute. Outflank the enemy." »
Lazarus turned to Karim, placing a firm hand on his partner's shoulder.
"That's why VoltaOS must exist, Karim. Do you understand now? We are not only fighting against Russian hackers or foreign spies. We are fighting against the very foundations of the technology that is imposed on us. We must protect the French state from its own suppliers. »
Karim looked at his keyboard, then at the American chip, then at Lazarus. The doubt had evaporated, pulverized by the incredible turn of events. They were not incompetent; they were the only ones who had seen the flaw in the industrial giant.
The young man cracked the knuckles of his fingers and let himself fall back into his chair.
"Come on, the Guard," Karim said, a predatory smile finally stretching his tired features. "We're going to teach this American flea how to do math in Paris."
The frenetic noise of keyboards resumed in the laboratory. The silicon wall had not stopped the empire. It had only sharpened its rage to win.