He was born up there, in one of those villages of the Vercors where the cliffs serve as walls and silence as a neighbour. Mid-eighties. The world below was discovering the first Macintosh computers, but here, the event of the week was still the storm over the plateau or the postman's round. His father smelled of resin and fresh-cut wood. His mother had the patience of mountain women — those who know that winter always passes eventually.

The child grew up among the combes and the scree fields, with perpetually scraped knees and that wild freedom known only to those who had an entire massif for a playground. Then one day, in a corner of the house, there appeared a Minitel. A beige, austere block, ugly as a shoebox, but which contained — he sensed it without understanding it — another world. He typed things. Things appeared. It was magic, the first he recognised as such.

After the Minitel came a computer. After the computer came code. After code came a strange and definitive certainty: he belonged to two worlds that did not speak to each other. The one up above — the limestone, the wind, the marmots, the frost on the windowpanes at dawn — and the one of screens, command lines, that invisible architecture where everything is logical and nothing truly is. He spent his life shuttling between the two, without ever quite choosing.

He came down, of course. One always comes down. Grenoble first, then other cities, other screens, other projects. He learned languages his parents would never understand, built things that existed nowhere but on servers humming on the other side of the world. He doubted — often. Started over — always. That is the nature of code, as it is of the mountain: you fail, you fix, you set off again, and the ridgeline is never where you imagined it would be.

But every time he looked up from his screen, every time fatigue or doubt weighed a little too heavy, he thought of the cliffs. They were still there. They would always be there. Indifferent to his bugs, his deadlines, his sleepless nights. They waited, patient as his mother, for the prodigal child to come back up.

And sometimes, he did.

Paul.