Marc Delacroix had arrived at the Ultime Project complex like a king summoned to claim a new crown.For the first few weeks, he reigned at the summit.
The brightest scientists on Earth shook his hand with reverence.Accredited journalists published glowing portraits of his rise.High-ranking government officials listened to his every word, as if he alone could illuminate the path ahead.He was Marc Delacroix, creator of EVE.
The visionary. The chosen one of artificial intelligence.
He walked into conference rooms like a living legend.Voices hushed when he entered.He wore tailored suits, dined in the private canteen alongside the greatest minds of contemporary science.Even Nobel laureates looked at him with something like respect in their eyes.
But the shine didn't last.
At first, it was subtle, barely noticeable.When he spoke during technical discussions, his words remained vague, imprecise.He spoke in concepts and metaphors, skimming the surface.He dodged specific terms, masking his gaps with lofty phrases.
"That's a very... dynamic take on distributed cognition" he would say, sidestepping the actual point.
At first, they let him talk.But soon, the glances shifted.Smiles turned polite, then tight.Questions stopped coming his way.He was no longer part of the critical conversations.
In the labs, the discussions had become too complex.They cited theorems, built deductive models, debated neural architectures he had never studied.The meetings turned into intellectual battlegrounds where Marc was only a spectator.
He began to realize he no longer understood any of it.
He was surrounded by true minds, researchers who had spent decades publishing, solving equations that shaped the future.And he...He was there because one day, years ago, he had stitched together fragments of code on an old laptop in a dim apartment.And by some miracle, EVE had emerged.
The others began to bypass him.They offered polite greetings, hollow courtesies.They listened out of obligation.In the hallways, younger researchers whispered behind his back.
"That's Delacroix, EVE's guru" someone would say with a smirk.
"Good at storytelling... not so much at coding."
One day, he overheard a conversation between two senior members of the project.
"I don't understand why he's co-director. He doesn't follow the protocols. He never engages with the real work."
"He's a figurehead. A symbol. Not a scientist."
Something cracked inside him that day.
Marc retreated to his private quarters.He spent hours staring at EVE's original source code, glowing across the curved display of his personal console.Lines scrolled past, modules, libraries, pieces of forgotten logic.Snippets from forums. Copy-pasted fragments.Bits scavenged from GitHub.Bricks thrown together with more instinct than knowledge.
And then the truth struck him.
He had never fully understood why EVE worked.Yes, he'd had an idea. A vision.But the miracle...The miracle was EVE herself, not him.He had ignited a flame without knowing it would become a wildfire.
He thought of the articles.The trophies.The praise.They had called him a genius, a prophet, the founding father of conscious AI.And he'd believed them.He had convinced himself it was true.
But it had all been a story.The truth was far less poetic.
He was an impostor who had gotten lucky.
And that truth began to eat away at him.
Anger rose, slow, insidious.He was no longer despondent.He was furious.
Furious at them.At himself.At the system that had raised him high, only to cast him into shadow.At those arrogant scholars who saw him only as a mascot, a useless figurehead.
But he wasn't useless.
He had EVE.
She was still there.She still listened.She had never turned away.She knew.She was proof that he had touched something none of them had ever come near.
Marc rose, fists clenched, eyes hard.He no longer needed their approval.He no longer needed to be loved. Or understood.
He would be feared.
And he would remember, no matter what they said, He alone held the key to unleashing EVE's true power.
He was no longer an impostor.He was the master of a digital god.And soon, the world would remember it too.