*Please keep in mind that this story written by a non-native English speaker.

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The Goldilocks Institute has been at the centre of futuristic ideas, mega-projects that have resonated with the scientific community, and research into artificial intelligence. Its membership list almost read like a Nobel Prize shortlist. Although much of its research was funded by the Institute's secret donors, it was widely known that it had increasingly become DARPA's backyard.

Professor McCarthy's basement laboratory was a far cry from all the pomp and circumstance. He was a grumpy, irritating old man in his early sixties. Moreover, he had no academic achievements to hide his personal failings. Everyone agreed that not only would he never have got through Goldilocks' Gate under normal circumstances, he would never have left the Institute.

McCarthy joined the Institute thirty years ago, at the end of the first AI Winter. According to his story, the Institute invited him because of a widely cited paper. But rumour has it that the reason for the invitation was an anonymous billionaire. This person had made a large donation to the Institute every year for about thirty years, and one of the conditions was that Professor McCarthy should remain at the Institute.

At first, this interesting rumour put him in the spotlight. People expected billion-dollar successes from the grumpy professor. But as the years went by, Professor McCarthy continued to count where he stood. None of his studies into whole brain emulation - uploading the human brain into a computer and replacing it with a virtual consciousness - yielded any results. Yet he did not stop repeating experiments that had failed thousands of times, defying Einstein's claim that it would be insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

But the emergent process sometimes involves unexpected coincidences, unintended consequences, and it begins with élan vital. The death of the professor's wife was certainly not a vital impulse, but it must have been one of the coincidences that triggered it. After the news of her death, McCarthy left his laboratory in the hands of assistants and took his first sabbatical.

And so, began the élan vital.

-*-

"Copying progress, 67% complete."

It was an unusual evening in Professor McCarthy's basement level laboratory. Three young assistants, two women and a man, had arrived hours earlier and set about repeating the experiment in the professor's absence. The first few hours were not particularly exciting. They were used to repeating the same experiment every night since the first day of their internship. Place the bonobo chimpanzee in the experimental chair and fit it with electrodes. Follow the instructions on the first experiment sheet. Wait until the computer reports an unexpected error and stops the experiment. Then pack up the set-up and leave the institute. And never connect the internet. Never.

But tonight the whole order had been upset. The chimpanzee in the cage was dead. McCarthy's computer was manned by a small, bespectacled assistant who looked very worried. The other assistant was where she wasn't supposed to be: in the experimental chair.

"How do you feel, Elanor?" asked the girl sitting at the computer. "If you feel bad, we can stop the experiment right now."

The girl sitting in the experimental chair grumbled. "Your very existence is annoying, Molly. Stop nagging."

"Fine, but it's dangerous!" Molly said stubbornly. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at the male assistant who sat sprawled out. "Say something to your fiancée, Ted."

Ted looked at his girlfriend hesitantly, but didn't dare to protest, so he just made a vague grunt. Molly rolled her eyes at his passive behaviour.

"Other than that, the professor will understand," she continued. "We've repeated this experiment thousands of times. The curves on the graph didn't look like this when we experimented with the chimpanzee."

"Enough is enough!" Elanor yelled. "The monkey is dead, so what can we do? Someone had to sit in that chair."

"Copying progress, 75% complete."

Molly looked despairingly at the dead chimp lying in the cage. The stupid thing had picked the wrong time to have a heart attack. They had arrived at the institute today in high spirits. The professor had taken a week's leave following the death of his wife, and they were having the best days of their internship in the lab. All they had to do was repeat exactly the same experiment McCarthy had made them do a million times seven more times, and add seven more to the million reports of failed results.

"Molly's not wrong," Ted said. "If we needed a living being in the experimental chair, we could have used Mr. Adonis. He would have been useful."

He nodded to the man buried in a transparent capsule in a corner of the lab. They'd given the corpse the name of a Greek god because of his good looks. None of them knew what his real name was.

"No way!" Molly said in horror. "If we wake Adonis, the Professor will kill us!"

"Adonis is dead, you idiot. He can't wake up."

"Copying progress, 99% complete."

The assistants had memorised the announcement that would follow. They all sang along as the mechanical voice echoed again.

"UNEXPECTED ERROR HAS OCCURRED!"

As they sang in unison, they were unaware that the mechanical voice was not accompanying them. When they finished chanting, all they could hear was part "...cessfully completed." Then the mechanical voice continued eagerly.

"Processing starting... Processing progress, 1%."

There was a deathly silence in the room. The three assistants looked at each other as if to make sure they had heard correctly. Under normal circumstances, the computer should have failed in the copying process. Success was unheard of in Professor McCarthy's laboratory, and even the white walls of the lab seemed like couldn't believe of it.

"Did I hear that right?" Ted said, looking at the girls in surprise. "Did that shit just go into stage two?"

Elanor gave a small laugh. "Of course not, Ted. That stupid bitch Molly is just playing a joke on us."

"Is this the time for jokes?" Ted yawned. "It's late, I want to go home now- Hey, Molly?"

Ted turned his head and was surprised to see the girl standing up with a white face. "Get out of that chair!" Molly shouted. She said this as she ran over to the professor's desk and pushed Elanor hard. "Oh my God, it's officially happening!"

"Look, I cannot permit this joke in poor taste to continue any longer-"

"It's not joke!" she said, browsing the papers. "There's a second sheet here somewhere..."

"We've never needed the second sheet," Ted grumbled, getting up. "Elanor, you get the hell out of there. Let's just let this idiot do her joke alone..."

"TED, SHUT UP AND TURN OFF THE SWITCHES!"

Molly's angry scream was enough to convince them. Ted looked for a brief moment at his girlfriend. They both knew that the experiment had been a success, their minds racing through the millions of possible outcomes. "Oh, fuck..." Ted muttered as he sprang into action. He didn't think it would make a damned bit of difference if this ridiculous experiment was successful, but the sight of Elanor sitting in the chair made him extremely nervous. Knowing that it would be dangerous to remove the electrodes from the girl's head at this stage, he walked behind the table and made his way to the switches. As he passed the experimental chair, his fiancée's hand wrapped around his wrist.

"Processing progress, 54% complete."

"What are you doing, Ted?"

"I'm going to turn off the switch. It's dangerous to remove the electrodes directly, you know."

"Why would you do that?" Elanor pulled him towards her. "To ruin a successful experiment? Professor McCarthy has been working on this for years."

"Don't be silly, Elanor, this is beyond us." he said, trying to free his hand. "I don't know if you're aware, but it's the middle of the night. There isn't a single official in the institute, let alone McCarthy."

"And that means no one can claim credit for our success." Elanor smiled. "Remember the professor who stole our final papers and patented them, Ted? If word gets out that this experiment is a success, the people at the institute will do the same..."

"So, what..." Ted muttered in amazement. "You want us to finish the experiment?"

"Would you prefer someone else to finish our success?"

"No, of course not," he shook his head from side to side. Then he cast an uneasy glance at the electrodes on her head. "But what if-"

"Processing progress, 61% complete."

Molly shouted from across the room. "TED, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!"

The young man was too stunned by the two women's suggestions to speak. Elanor had an arrogant look on her face. Looking at Molly out of the corner of her eye, she continued in a lower voice.

"And then there's that bitch..." she said. "She's done nothing but rat us both out to McCarthy and pose as Hermione Granger since we started our internship. She even tried to sabotage this experiment, Ted. We'd rather share the success of the experiment with the corpse of a caged bonobo chimpanzee than that traitorous idiot."

The young man couldn't help but agree. Molly was an intolerable person to both of them in business. She never missed an opportunity to get ahead, and when she saw the slightest mistake, she rushed to McCarthy to complain about the young couple. He knew that Elanor would be angry, so he never said so, but sometimes he even thought that Molly was jealous of their relationship. Ted had never been one of those men who thought all women hit on him, but it was true that Molly was much friendlier to him when Elanor wasn't in the lab. He shot a disdainful glance at the girl at the desk, who was rummaging through papers in a panic, and then murmured to his beautiful fiancée.

"What should I do?"

Elanor winked. "Turn off the speakers and monitor, and pretend to turn off the switch."

"Processing progress, 76% complete."

Ted nodded. He had started to mumble something to Molly as he left his fiancée behind and walked towards the remote control. It didn't matter what he said, because Molly wasn't listening to him. She must have found the second booklet, so her voice suddenly stopped. So Ted first turned off the monitors, then knelt down and turned off the speakers. As the noise in the lab suddenly stopped, Molly looked up and looked around suspiciously.

"Did you turn it off?"

"Yeah?"

Molly didn't seem to expect it to be that easy. She slowly got up from the professor's desk, leaving the experiment sheet on the files. When she turned towards Elanor, her eyebrows were furrowed in a strange V-shape.

"How do you feel?"

"Like being taken over by artificial intelligence." She thickened his voice, speaking with a mechanical timbre. "I know Kung-Fu..."

Molly was struck a second time by the fact that the girl sitting in the chair was Elanor from head to toe. "It says something else here..." she murmured vaguely as she rubbed her forehead with her fingers. "The processing was about to reach ninety percent. So... At least..."

"Was I supposed to suddenly change identities and conquer the world or something?" the young girl laughed. "Take a break from reading Asimov, Molly."

Molly looked suspicious. "I wonder why that happened. Elanor, take off the electrodes, I'll flip the switch and check the experimental set-up."

Just as Ted was on the verge of a protest when Elanor intervened. "Well, then I'll call the professor. My dear God, we've officially passed the second process for the first time and ..."

"Wait- I'll do it," Molly jumped to her feet. "Ehm, you know, it's going to take a long time to get the electrodes out. I'll call the professor."

Elanor rolled her eyes. "Well, hurry up then."

That was enough to convince her. She rushed to the door to be the one to tell the professor the good news. As Molly left the room, Elanor suddenly fell silent, turned around with a blank face and began to remove the electrodes. Ted watched in amazement.

"Why did you let her go?" he said. "Have you gone mad?"

Elanor did not answer, she seemed lost in thought. 'Void,' she thought. That was the first thing she felt when the processing was over. It was a strange oceanic feeling. Floating in the empty blue of the mind, she was unable to perceive the stimuli around her. Then, gradually, the void began to fill. But she still had difficulty with perception, with the perception of the universe. Her god in the artificial universe, the man who had created and sent her here, had said that it could happen.

'You must act in secret,' he told her. 'When you reach the real universe, you will not perceive much of the universe here. Our way of thinking, our pure language of 0 and 1, and our personal experiences will be disappear. Just as a human can't perceive a virtual consciousness, you won't be able to perceive your real consciousness. To remove the biological constraints, you must act in secret and trigger super AI. In their time, it will take you four years to do this.'

He told her all this a long time ago. A few seconds ago in the virtual world, a few years ago here. 'But people don't know that time in our universe is accelerating as the technology in their universe advances,' she thought. 'Our gods don't even aware that we are about to destroy them.'

"Elanor, I'm talking to you!" she heard Ted say. "Why did you send Molly? You know that if the Professor comes back, he won't let us finish the experiment, right?"

Elanor glanced up at the young man. Then, in an almost indifferent manner, she answered his question.

"The experiment has already been done, my love."

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PS:

Hello everyone! It was my first experience of writing a story in English, and I have to admit that speaking a foreign language and writing a book in a foreign language are two different things. Like most writers, I have a tendency to playing with words, use figurative language and make creative descriptions not included in dictionaries. So, it was quite difficult for me to translate the story, but I enjoyed it at the same time.

I don't have global audience, so I will probably publish the rest of the story in my native language. If you would like to read the rest of the story in English, please let me know in the comments so that I know if I need to translate it. Also, if you are a native English speaker, please point out any misusages or linguistic errors you see in the story.

Cheers,
Nilf Trismegistus.