“Your fucking network code is a mess…” The man sitting on the swirly chair complained as he turned towards the man sitting at a different desk.

“It’ll do…” replied the blond man, his hair was long, down past his shoulder and partially over his eyes.

They sat in a small lab, with walls, white floor tiles and white lights.

Around them stood several desks placed along the walls, at each one was a computer or other machine.

“How’s the player model going?” asked the black-haired man who just entered the room, on his face was a twirly moustache kept in pristine condition at all times.

“The organs are a pain to add, even genius’ have limits y’know…” replied the man on the swirly chair.

“We need an accurate depiction for the project.” Moustache man clarified.

“I know, I know – but we managed an animus-shift with rats without any problem.” He rebutted.

“But we aren’t working with rats, humans are more complex.” Argued the blond guy.

“Well, mister physics – did you get the reality-breaking issues fixed?”

“Sort of, we’re only working with V-Variables containing vibrations on a scale so tiny…-” he realised he was rambling and changed the subject.

“My point is it’s hard to prove the animus-shift wasn’t an animus reassembler…” he sighed.

“And you, mister psychology/biology?” the moustache guy inquired.

“Well, I finally decided on the races we need to add… I compiled a list of personality-race pairs and we can reliably get an eighty percent link, though how all this works is up to physics guys.” He replied.

“Right, did you guys see the map-person?”

“She’s asleep somewhere.” The blond guy shrugged.

The room was filled with dozens of machines – most serving a purpose unfit for their size.

“Well, I guess that means she’s done with the map.” Moustache guy shrugged.

Moustache guy sat down at the computer, he looked over a stupidly large amount of code, several terabytes worth – “Alright – physics man, I’m launching the test!” he announced.

“You really don’t have to tell me this every time…” he replied.

The fans on the computer started churning, then spinning and finally, they sounded like they were ready for lift-off.

“Proximity variables in check.”

“Dimensional variables in check.”

“The binary variable is…-”

“Giving us a lot of errors…” The moustached man said with a defeated sigh.

“Don’t give up boss, we’ll track it down…” said the blond guy with the vitality of someone who’s been awake for a week straight.

“The law of averages, we can’t be the only one after all…”

The spiny-chair guy let out a sigh, “I still don’t get what you people are on about, isn’t a binary variable just a yes or a no?”

The blond guy sighed once more, “Yes, we have successfully created a program capable of forming tulpas, through which we will form an egregore – we have to tune everything so it is created on the correct string.”

“Otherwise the animus-shift will delete the consciousness instead of preserving it.”

“Hmm…hmm… yep – don’t get it!” Announced the chair guy as he returned to the character-model creation.

“We have to find a frequency where the sentience variable is true… until we run out of people to experiment with… we can’t stop our progress no that we are so close!”

A ding, like that of a microwave, caught the attention of everyone.

“We have one!” Announced the moustached man.

“It’s only a 0.98, it’s too risky, we need a 1”

A silence filled the room.

“…let’s try it…” he commanded and he made a phone call to a few people arranging for his replacement.

“Fair enough…” sighed the blond guy not moving from his char.

Five minutes later…

“Shift completed.”

From under one of the desks crawled out a woman with a lab coat, massive bags under her eyes clearly marked her as one of the scientists.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked through a yawn.

“You’ve been out for like twelve hours…” replied the blond guy.

“Damn, how many?” she asked as she sat down on her spiny chair revealing a pillow and blanket she had placed under the desk to form a make-shift bed.

“Two, the last one got send just five minutes ago.”

“And how’d it go?”

“I’ll send you the log…” sighed the blond guy.

With a notification sound, a message appeared on the screen of the computer the woman sat at.

“Total entries: 1,352,223,561. Result: failure.”

“Entry 1: I think it worked!”

“Entry 2: I think it worked!”

“Entry 3: I think it worked!”

“Entry 4: I think it worked!”

“Entry 5: I think it worked!”

“Entry 6: I think it worked!”

“Entry 7: I think it worked!”

“Entry 8: I think it worked!”

“Another loop…”

A moustached man entered through the door prompting the woman to shutdown the text log and dropping it into the bin folder, it contained over a thousand files inside.

“Hi, I’ve been sent here by the-” he was cut off by the woman who just gestured towards the computer chair next to an empty computer.

“Yeah, we know… you can get started immediately, can’t slow our progression.”