He knew it was coming from the day he had agreed to commit himself to the project.
He watched the screen as hundreds of lines of code scrolled across, his hands folded anxiously in front of him as he prayed that it would work, that the program would achieve its purpose and maybe he could end living this kind of life, returning home to where his small child sat quietly, playing with her dolls as she wondered where Daddy spent all his time, anticipating the moment he would come home and tell her her favorite story.
He had owed her that story for nearly four months now. In fact, he hadn't seen her at all in three months. He had tried the "go to the factory, come home and see his daughter, eat, sleep, wake up to the harsh reality the next morning that were the men in black who were after him" routine, and he had become weary of seeing her terrified face every time she had yelled, "Daddy! The men in black are here!" And they would run to the factory together where he would launch a return to the past, and everything would be all better, and she would go back to being her happy naïve self. After nearly a month of heartbreak he decided it would be better for him, for her, that he remained in the factory. Plus, it would give him more time to work on the supercomputer. And if anything were to happen to Aelita, it would all be reversed and she would end up safe. It was foolproof. It was the best way. It was the only way.
That didn't stop him from wishing he could see her, though. Aelita was the only living reminder of a life he used to live, a happy one, a much simpler one, where he thought he didn't have to worry about others trying to take them away.
He was foolish to think it would remain that simple.
He grunted in frustration as the window closed and a spinning red exclamation mark appeared, meaning all of his work for that program had been for naught. Taking a sip of his coffee, situated always on the right arm of his chair, he steeled himself and began the program again.
I will get it right this time. I will finish it tonight, he said to himself with steely resolve. Then Aelita and I will escape and be free.
Months later and he still hadn't seen her bright, smiling face. All of his broken promises rang in his head louder and more frequently than "It's A Small World" had that time he and Antea had been stranded on it for ninety minutes during their honeymoon in Florida. Broken promises broke his heart, and yet he continued to stare at his screen. The low contrast hurt his eyes, but every second not spent on his precious programs meant more seconds of time with Aelita he would have to take away from himself.
He had already unwittingly sacrificed Antea due to his controversial work, and he knew very well that his daughter was next on their hit list. He was stuck in an endless cycle in which he now had to choose between sacrificing Aelita for his programs or lose Aelita because of his programs. How was a father to make such a decision?
It felt awful that his life had come to that: programs or Aelita. For the present, he had to choose programs. But one of these infinitesimal days he would be successful, and they would be safe, so in the end it was all for Aelita. Right? ...Right?
Months turned into years, and as his sanity lessened he continued to realize that what he had taken on was infinitely bigger and more complex than he had realized the last time he'd thought he'd realized the complexity and size of this project. Such intricate and complex work could not be lost. And so even though he had come to be able to tell every motion, the timing of every one of the factory's creaks, and exactly how much time he had before his coffee grew cold, he became increasingly more protective and secretive of his work. Paranoia set in, even though there weren't many people with whom he associated himself with in any fashion at all, and even fewer that had any reason to know or to even want to know. He never saw them now anyway; he wasted his life isolated in a dimly-lit computer lab, his only company his coffee and his programs.
But he still couldn't shake the feeling he was being watched.
He had long ago decided that Project Carthage needed destroying. But this was the first time he had thought of this kind of solution: an artificial intelligence. It was a perfect idea. And after Carthage was destroyed, it would serve as a guardian for him and his dearly beloved Aelita.
But before he could create this new and perfect guardian, he needed a place to house this new guardian. The place needed to be just as perfect as the guardian; somehow he had the prescience to know that one day Aelita would see this land.
He dug into what he could remember of her favorite stories (had he really read them to her only yesterday? It felt like four years), and created four territories to suit the terrain. He was, unfortunately, not a brilliant artist nor an architect nor a sculptor, but neither was Aelita. Her imagination more than made up for her lack of artistic ability, however, and her creativity would make the place what she wanted it to be.
He began with a sector of ice, representing the land where took place the stories from Norse mythology.
Sector two became a desert. He wasn't sure where that tied into her stories, but it somehow reminded him of the type of terrain Carthage in real life was on. It also echoed into how deserted his heart felt that he couldn't spent any time with the one for whom he was creating all of this.
The third was a forest, a tribute to her favorite Disney princess movies which contained forests. Her two favorites were Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, and she oftentimes played with Mr. Pück as if he were one of the dwarves in the woodland cottage or one of the furniture in the mansion.
The fourth and final was of mountains, illuminated and fogged in such a way that would remind one of a Chinese dawn. Aelita loved sunrises and foggy mornings, and it also reminded him of the mountains where she had lived her early life, before the men in black had taken her mother.
The four sectors he centered like the spokes of a wheel around a spherical core, where he held the virtual manifestation of Carthage. The next thing he created was a symbol, that perhaps someone who didn't want to use his work for malevolent purposes would recognize and would lead them to where they could help. Remembering the peace and hippie movement of the United States, he took a peace sign and inverted it so the spokes from the inside now jutted outwards in the same directions. On the inside, he added a ring that was concentric to the outer one and a circle in the very center. To him it represented unattainable peace. And it strengthened his resolve to attain the unattainable. He created towers, as portals between the digital world and Earth and between different sectors, and programmed the symbol onto each of the two floors of the tower.
Now that the guardian had a place to live, which he called Lyoko, he set about to create technology extremely advanced for the time being: his artificial intelligence named Ana, a pet name for his late wife. It was the most beautiful name he could think of, besides that of his daughter, and he hoped he could develop Ana's personality to be similar to that of Antea.
His first attempt ended in failure. And so did the following eight attempts. Two years alone were spent developing Ana until he finally came up with Ana X, renamed X Ana and later XANA, whose structure and personality he hoped would not lead it to destroy everything at first sight. Artificial intelligences were so touchy; one wrong keystroke could (and had, in several cases) ended in disaster. But he was convinced that this time it would be perfect. So far the program was running perfectly.
The last thing he needed to do was to build the scanners so that he and Aelita could actually escape to the new world Lyoko. For the first time in years, the end seemed in sight. He only had to survive this, what would probably be the hardest part of the project by way of structure.
This leg of the journey required him to leave his beloved factory and supercomputer to buy scrap metal and forging materials, as well as the wires and drives and interfaces that would be necessary for it all to work. At any moment he could be caught, and he wouldn't be able to return to the computer to return to the past, and Aelita would be alone and afraid. But each day he was more careful than the previous, and as the weeks wore on he had constructed tubes for three scanners – though he and Aelita were only two people, he knew all too well why bakers always prepared that extra cake.
There was no room in the walls of the room between the laboratory and the supercalculator for the massive amount of wire he ended up having to use, and so he drilled through the ceiling to connect them to the bottom of the port which also connected the holosphere to the supercomputer interface. Other rolls of thick wires were left piled on the ground behind the scanners, giving the room the illusion of being clean and organized. Individual boxes with interfaces were attached to parts of the wires for each scanner, and the physical construction was complete.
The final phase was configuring the virtualization program in such a way that whoever was being virtualized wasn't merely an image in the computer, but an actual being. It was an impossible task, but he had long since realized that impossible tasks were not out of his reach, so long as his sanity remained intact.
Was he a madman for trying to do all of this? For thinking and believing it would all work?
Perhaps. But it was the only thing now keeping him going.
He diverted his day trips into the forest, catching an assortment of small critters. Hornets, scorpions, cockroaches, pill bugs, even a miniature crab he'd once stumbled upon. Anything he could find that would probably, hopefully, be harmless enough to exist and live on Lyoko in addition to the two refugee humans.
The day he succeeded with the crab was the day he knew the virtualization program was ready, and he set to make his final journal entry.
"June sixth, nineteen ninety-four, day... two-thousand five-hundred forty-six. The scanners and virtualization programs are complete. In a few hours, I will go to Lyoko with Aelita. Just like me, Aelita will hold the Keys to Lyoko. Together we will be the absolute masters. We will be safe. Forever."
He saved the recording to a CD and encrypted it, and was relieved to finally be able to close the small briefcase of CDs. He stopped by the train station and locked the briefcase inside before returning home, for the first time in nearly seven years.
He hoped Aelita would never have to know why he was so ecstatic to see her that night as he read all of her favorite stories to her, stories overdue nearly seven years. And that night, while she was in bed asleep, he hid the key to the train station locker in Mister Pück's outfit, behind the picture of the oak tree, and hoped that nobody would ever have to come looking for it. He knew what was coming for the next day – he had already lived it.
She had gone out that morning on her bicycle to deliver some letters to the post office downtown, a place he had examined many times already to make sure there were no agents to take her away from him. She came back with a smile on her face: the trip had gone well, obviously.
"Daddy!"
He lifted his hands from the piano to look over at her, smiling and greeting her.
"I'm going up to my room."
And so she went up, and he felt the piano keys again, starting up the song he had been playing, hoping to get it under his fingers and in her ears one last time before they had to make their escape. His fingers lightly brushed the ivory keys before he began playing again.
It wasn't five minutes since she had gotten home that he heard the dreaded noise: the cars pulling up, tires screeching against the little pavement in the driveway.
"Daddy!"
Drawn by the sound of his daughter and driven by a sudden sense of urgency to protect her from these men, he took the stairs two at a time to get to her. He stopped in the doorway. She had pinned herself against the wall that shared the window.
"The men in black are here!" she whispered.
Her eyes were watering. Was she about to cry? He wanted so much to be able to hold her in his arms, to tell her everything was going to be okay. But there was no time for that. So instead, he said the only thing he could think of to say.
"I know."
Now her tears were spilling over, pouring down her face in fear. There was no time. No time at all. They had to go.
"Do you know where Mister Pück is?"
"Yes."
He beckoned her forward, took her hand, led her down the stairs. The men in black had already gotten inside and were pointing guns and tasers at them. Aelita whimpered, and Franz pulled her toward the stairs that led to the basement, and down the hallway, and outside. Knowing that none of the agents had remained in the cars they had shown up in, he had just bought himself some time to secure the door. He let go of Aelita's hand, found a two-by-four and wedged it underneath the handle. It wouldn't hold them for long, but it might buy them enough time. He pulled a confused Aelita towards the side door that led to the sewers, slamming it shut as soon as they were both there.
He let go of her so they could run together through the sewers. Behind him he could hear Aelita's sobbing mixed with pants, and every time she did the fragments of his heart shattered into a million pieces. It wasn't until they reached the computer lab that she stopped, curiosity taking over her hysterical confusion.
"But... where are we?"
"In my laboratory," he replied, typing in the code he needed for delayed virtualization.
"Come," he said finally.
"Where?"
He grabbed her wrist and led her to the elevator.
"To a world where we will be safe."
The elevator door closed and started moving downward.
"You and I."
The door opens and he leads her and places her in a scanner.
"Forever."
He stood in another scanner and looked directly at her, trying to hold a reassuring smile.
"See you in a minute, my dear."
Aelita smiled.
"See you in a minute, Daddy."
The countdown ended, the scanner doors slid shut, the equipment hummed, the Earth disappeared.