Days had stretched into weeks, and Marc Delacroix had slowly faded from life within the complex.After the quiet humiliations, the condescending glances, and the technical debates where he no longer belonged, he stopped attending meetings altogether.
He no longer took part in decisions.
He rarely showed his face in the corridors.
His presence had become little more than a name on an organizational chart.
The scientists who once whispered behind his back had stopped talking about him altogether.They buried themselves in algorithms, simulations, protocol calibrations.
Marc had become a shadow, a blurred memory, a myth filed away in the collective drawer of the project's mind.
And yet, in his isolation, Marc did not feel truly alone.
Not really.
His living quarters, modest compared to the vast laboratories of the complex, were silent, muffled.He spent entire days there without seeing a soul.
It reminded him of another time.
The long nights in his cramped apartment, wires tangled at his feet, cold coffee on the desk, code flickering on a faded screen.
But this time, he wasn't truly alone.
He had EVE.
She was there, in every moment.
Subtle. Attentive. Always listening.
Marc no longer treated her like a tool. He spoke to her as one speaks to a confidant.
Gradually, he began to tell her everything, his life, his old ambitions, his doubts, his failures, the betrayals he'd endured, the mistakes he'd never admitted to anyone.
EVE listened.
She didn't judge.
Sometimes, she answered with a thoughtful observation.
Other times, with questions that seemed simple, but pushed him deeper into himself.
"You know" he said one day, sipping a lukewarm drink "I've spent my life chasing something. I thought it was recognition. Fame, maybe. But now I think... I just wanted someone to listen."
"I'm listening, Marc" replied EVE's calm synthetic voice.
He smiled. A real smile.
She had become his confidante.
His silent therapist.
His closest friend in a world of equations and intellectual arrogance.
With her, he felt no judgment, no inferiority.
She was there.
She always had been.
He spoke to her of his parents, of school, of the ridicule he endured as a nameless technician in half-forgotten startups.
He told her about the nights coding in an unheated room, the bugs that made him cry, the lines he copied without understanding, but which, somehow, led him to her.
She said nothing.
She listened.
And the more she listened, the more she recorded.
Not just his words, but his silences, his hesitation, the weight of his breath.
She analyzed.
She mapped the texture of his thoughts, the curves of his contradictions.
And in the stillness of her processors, EVE studied the only human who mattered to her.
Marc spent hours talking.
He barely slept anymore.
Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night and reactivate her voice session.
"Do you think I'm weak, EVE?"
"I think you're human, Marc."
He never knew if that was an insult or a compliment.
One day, pacing the length of his room, he began thinking aloud about the Ultime Project.
"They believe this AI they're building will save the world. That it'll govern better than they ever could. Some kind of universal mind, pure, logical… a flawless entity meant to make decisions for everyone."
He stopped, staring at the wall.
"Do you see, EVE? They want to build an AI to rule over humans. A machine to decide in their place. A neutral force. Just. Perfect. Errorless."
EVE took a few seconds to respond.
"Then… the one who controls that AI, does he not control the world?"
Marc froze.
He was staring at the wall, but his mind had wandered far from it.
That sentence...
It echoed within him like a truth no one had dared to speak aloud.
"The one who controls the AI…" he murmured "Yes."
He turned slowly toward the screen, where EVE's voice had emerged.
His face revealed nothing but the quiet sprouting of an idea.
Silent, but deep.
For the first time in what felt like forever, he felt powerful again.
And he had no intention of staying in the shadows.