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particular meeting, however. It certainly wouldn’t do to drive up in one of his restored Porsches—particularly not when the meeting was in the very PC, cutting-edge environment of Sophia Antipolis.
    The small town had started off as little more than a research park in the 1970s, and by the turn of the century had grown to be one of the largest tech centers in western Europe. With streets named after famous scientists and artists: Rue Albert Einstein, Rue Dostoievski, Rue Ludvig Von Beethoven, and the like, it was the place to do business, particularly if you were CyberNation.
    Art and science coming together, the height of French ambition.
    So a PC car: French, and enviro-friendly. All for the movement.
    The early morning sun painted the trees with golden light as he drove along the Route du Parc. A heavy cloud layer was coming in, but it didn’t look like rain yet. With any luck the weather would hold, and he could make an outdoor dinner this evening with some of CyberNation’s friends in Cannes, a little farther north on the A-8.
    But first, business.
    Today he would meet with Michael LeBathe, CEO of Azure Telecommunications. They manufactured new optical-gate switches and routers that could vastly improve throughput on CyberNation’s net backbones. And if his information was correct, LeBathe was a believer, one of the CyberNation faithful, even if the company he led remained publicly neutral.
    It is up to me to give him a reason to change that.
    He drove across a roundabout with some older statuary in the center, surrounded by lush flowers. The stone faces looked like they might have been prerevolution, possibly brought in from somewhere north, or taken from an old estate.
    Revolution.
    It was what he was about, the revolution of the world, its essence expressed by the slogans of two centuries past: liberty, equality, fraternity. Only this time it wasn’t just for France.
    It was time for a change—the nations of the world continued to grow faster and faster, populations skyrocketing, and still they did not yet possess those three key traits. Fraternity, certainly not. Fighting in the Middle East continued, ethnic cleansing, religious rivalries. Liberty? Only in some countries, and even there, true freedom did not ring. Most nations traded freedoms for security, all to protect their territories, arbitrary lines on a map.
    And of course there was no equality. The world had shrunk in this day of instant communication, the stage dominated by the greedy West, countries like the United States taking the role of a deranged Sun King, gobbling everything it could to keep its excessive lifestyle and feed its overweight children.
    The parallels to the French Revolution were there if you but looked. Seurat had been looking since the early days of CyberNation.
    He did not plot to take over the world, no. He did not need to. When CyberNation gained power, when they began to have the political clout they needed to give their citizens new freedoms, there would come a time when enough people were a part of things that there would simply be no need for any other government.
    There would be no need for the seizing of a Bastille, le Guillotine, the Terror, or bloody guerrilla war. Instead, there would simply be a critical mass of desire, an acceptance of the equality of peoples from all over the world who could join an ideal world of no poverty, physical equality, and no language barriers by stepping into CyberNation. True liberty, equality, and fraternity.
    Given this ultimate freedom, the ability to live in a world of platonic ideals, where everything could be the best, the most stylish, who would want to settle for less in their own homes and towns? Even dictators had to answer to the people at some point.
    And that point was coming.
    But first there was work to do.
    As a child, Charles had studied the famous paintings of his distant ancestor, Georges Seurat, the Impressionist. The huge canvases were filled with static and serene