Episode 8: XANA's Pawn Part 1

This is probably going to come as a surprise to you people, the way this takes off. I added a brand-new character with the help of my editor/proofreader, and the entire storyline has been altered.

EDIT 10/9/2014: After several mental roadblocks and other difficulties, I've decided to split this chapter, which would have been massive in one chapter. Yay for updates.

FLASHBACK: Ten years before Jeremie discovers the supercomputer, May 1994

Krishnavich Zhdanov, Krishna for short, was a brilliant prodigy student at his school. He specialized in machinery and computer programming, with a very keen interest in physics. But his entire world was changed in a few short weeks after his fourteenth birthday.

Krishna had scoured the depths of the Internet, trying to learn from its wealth of information. He found what seemed to be a virtual reality prototype in his search. Upon trying to regain access to the computer, he found he was unable to locate it. All the data his computer contained began disappearing.

For six months, Krishna forgot about this occurrence. He grew tired of life at his current school. It was barely enough to present a small challenge to him.

However, there was a prestigious academy called Kadic in the suburbs of Paris. His foster parents wouldn't care if he transferred there anyway.

Kadic had a very thorough physics department, Krishna had heard. The professor teaching the subject, Franz Hopper, was one of the best in the region. He forged his adoptive parents' signatures and sent his papers to Kadic. In less than two weeks, the principal of Kadic Academy accepted Krishna and requested he come to Kadic for an orientational meeting.

When the time came to talk to Jean-Pierre Delmas, Krishna had perfected a slew of possible alibis. Once he settled here, he would tell Olivier and Yvette. He dared not refer to them as his parents. They wouldn't care about his dishonesty, and would let him be for another year.

Arriving in Paris on a metro, Krishna opted to walk to Kadic. Using his large sum of money would draw attention. When he finally reached the arch of Kadic Academy's entrance, he felt a small wave of fear. Krishna reassured himself that his plan was infallible, and so were all of his backup plans. Krishna entered the principal's office, and Jean-Pierre jumped straight into the conversation.

"So, Mister...er..." Jean-Pierre fumbled with the name Krishnavich, even more so his last name.

"Krishna," he said, easing the principal's pronunciation troubles.

"Right. Mister Krishna. I'm very excited that you chose to come to Kadic Academy. A brilliant student such as you will excel here. Do you think you and your parents would be ready to move you in soon?" Mr. Delmas asked.

"Yes sir," Krishna responded dully and monotonously. "They faxed all my papers to you at your request."

"Everything does seem to be in order, and your grades are exceptional. I'll make the final adjustments and put you on the rosters. Here are your keys, your dorm is 103. You can survey your room."

Within weeks of enrolling at Kadic, Krishna once again gained the status of brightest student at his school. To his dismay, he found that Professor Hopper no longer worked at Kadic Academy. Instead, his physics teacher was Professor Hertz. Krishna breezed through physics and all the other classes he took, but he still felt unaccomplished.

Krishna was walking by himself in the courtyard, as usual. It seemed that he was considered a condescending person. So holding intellectual conversations fell under the "condescending" category? The only person who would hold a conversation with Krishna was Jim Morales, the physical education.

While not the brightest of people, Jim was a kind-hearted person with good intentions. The two would sit in Jim's dorm while Krishna explained his own thoughts about life, physics, and anything else he felt like theorizing about. Jim made a valiant attempt to comprehend Krishna's formulas and theories, but a majority of it passed over his head. Still, the companionship was good for both.

As Krishna passed by the cafeteria, he saw two students talking. Nothing was out of the ordinary for two people to be talking. However, they gave the impression of secrecy, looking over their backs and hiding next to the stairs.

"…there were all kinds of machines there. We tried to get the elevator to work, but it didn't do anything."

Krishna casually walked by, taking his pencil out of his pocket and dropping it. He continued walking until nearly out of earshot, then pretended to notice he had dropped his pencil and returned.

"…the sewers. The old factory on the Seine."

So that's what they were talking about. He had heard of an old factory on the Seine some of the other students had explored.

The factory was an abandoned Renault factory that had stopped production decades ago. The main road to it was blocked off, but some claimed the sewers led to a manhole behind the barricade. It was rumored that there was an elevator that led underground, but no one could get it to work.

A challenge. Krishna would gladly take it on. When the activity had died down in the dormitory that night, he snuck out to the park. With his flashlight, Krishna searched for a manhole to the sewer. In a clearing, surrounded by oak trees, was one such manhole, oddly placed among the natural scenery. He pried the cover off and climbed down into the sewer system.

The smell was absolutely repulsive. What had he expected? This was the sewer after all. After a short walk, he found himself at an intersection in the system. The factory was straight in the direction he was headed, he was sure of that. But to cross to the other side of the walkway, he would have to wade through the…

Krishna shuddered. But his curiosity far exceeded his squeamishness. He stepped into the disgusting waters, trying to ignore the thickness of it. He splashed out of the water and continued on, only to find himself at another intersection.

Wonderful.

After four more ventures into the waters of the sewer, Krishna arrived at a grate. A ladder headed up to the surface. It was the only way to go, other than backwards. Krishna climbed up the ladder and pushed the manhole cover off. Clambering out of the hole, he found himself on a small bridge. Ahead was the factory, and behind him was the barricade that led to the road. The rusted supports of the bridge plunged into the Seine below.

Krishna briskly walked across the bridge and into the open door of the factory. He stood on a walkway that extended all around the factory above the main floor. Two metal ropes hung down from the ceiling, the only way to the floor below, as it seemed the staircase had long been gone.

Krishna took a deep breath, grabbed a rope, and swung to the floor. His hands screamed, as did he, as blisters formed on his palms. Krishna landed rather ungracefully, placing his hands on the ground to keep from falling on his face.

The factory was massive. He checked all the rooms on the main floor, but found nothing. He decided to try the elevator. He hit the lift button, but the elevator wouldn't come up. He opened the control panel and found a keypad. Krishna smirked, amused by the fact that someone thought a keypad would keep people out.

"Nothing a little rewiring won't fix," Krishna said to himself as he pried off the cover. He took the wires and bypassed the keypad, directly linking the elevator to the button.

He pressed the button again. The elevator was functional now, and brought him down to the first underground floor. When he stepped out, he found himself in a large room with a monitor and a large circle it revolved around, a projector of some sort. He tried the monitor, but it didn't come on. The computer must've been off.

Krishna stepped back in the elevator and went down to the next level. Three large tube-like structures stood in the room. He'd get back to those later. Krishna went to the lowest level. He stepped out of the elevator, and the cold hit him. A large device was lifted out of the ground. The realization hit Krishna as he took in the sheer size of it: this was a supercomputer. He stepped out of the elevator and up to the switch on the computer.

Krishna swallowed his fear and pulled the switch down. The room lit up with a flash. A wind blew from the ventilation ports on it. He went back up to the lab.

Krishna stayed at the factory all night. He returned to Kadic the next day. The other students were all buzzing about the courtyard. He steered clear of them. Krishna had a general distrust for people his age. He ran straight into Jim, patrolling the recreation yard.

"Uh…Krishna, where were you last night, mister? I pounded on your door for a good five minutes trying to wake you up."

"Sorry, Mr. Morales, I'm a heavy sleeper. Why did you need to see me?"

"Krishna, we've been over this. Call me Jim. You left your computer in the gym yesterday. It's in my room if you want to come with me and get it."

That would be a good idea for tonight, Krishna thought to himself. He followed Jim to his dorm and retrieved his laptop, then returned to his room. Overnight, he had discovered that the supercomputer was connected to large scanners under the lab. Their function, he was not sure of. Krishna had not attempted to use the scanners yet, but he planned on doing so tonight. He left just after all the other boarders had gone to bed.

When he got back in the computer lab, Krishna began testing the programs of the supercomputer. There was an amazingly effective decryption program, background programs that allowed him access to government websites, and then a few that puzzled him. Programs entitled things like "Carthage Security Program" or "Desert Way Tower Energy Backup". He opened a program called Scanner Virtualization Timed or something of the like. He entered some commands, and a timer appeared.

Krishna quickly climbed down the ladder to the scanner room to see what was happening to the scanners. Nothing was visible at a glance, so he decided to take a look inside. He stepped in and looked around.

Then the doors closed. Krishna tried prying them back open, to no avail. He panicked. What was about to happen? What if this was a particle accelerator? What if it was a gamma ray chamber? A bright flash, and then…

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Krishna was floating in darkness. Suddenly, vast amounts of code flashed into existence, spread out everywhere. He saw his name in several of the lines. This was his code, he realized. That could only mean…

No, that wasn't possible. He couldn't really be inside of the computer. Krishna looked to his body as he began flickering in and out. A panic came upon him. What was this computer doing to him?

At that moment, Krishna dropped into a vast maze of floating interfaces. He approached one and soon found his way to the coding. He was in some sort of virtual reality. But, if this was a game, then why was this so dark and empty? Why was he flickering? Then he remembered the two codes he had input on the monitor.

.150%=FALSE

.50%=TRUE

He was going to have the computer shut itself down so he could leave. But that was before he was actually inside of it. This was a game, right? He wasn't going to just vanish…was he? The structures around him were disappearing one by one, crackling out. Krishna drifted through the emptiness for what seemed like forever. The supercomputer was slowing down.

More code appeared. Whoever was entering the commands entered several more.

DEVIRT(KRISHNA)

TRANSF(XANA)

TRANSF(CARTHAGE)

TRANSF(1)

The world flickered, and the interface buzzed and crackled. The supercomputer wasn't computing the process; it was too close to shutdown. The last two lines disappeared, as well as the "DEVIRT" command. There was a bright flash, and then...

Nothing.

PRESENT

Jeremie was at the supercomputer working on the clone of Ulrich. After a week at Kadic, things were going badly. Ulrich's clone was faring worse than expected. It was overly flirtatious and it lacked common sense. Jim somehow had taken a liking to the "new" Ulrich Stern, mainly because it had won every martial arts match he put it in. Jeremie was determined to lower the suspicion the clone was causing.

He found the clone's tower in Carthage. Neither XANA nor the other members of the gang were aware that when Jeremie recreated Sector 5 again, he added more than one tower. In fact, it had more than ten towers. The number constantly fluctuated, and the towers were located all in the Core Zone and the Labyrinth.

Jeremie quickly cut off the energy supply to the tower. It instantly deactivated. He pulled up the clone's program. Everything was in order. He didn't understand why the clone was acting so funny. It was nothing like Ulrich's personality. Jeremie pulled up the program for William's clone and activated it. That would be less obvious for the time being. He uploaded Ulrich's scanner ID to the clone, to change its appearance.

Jeremie activated the program and sent energy back to the tower. The attempt failed. The screen blew up with anomaly windows. The virtualization window pulled up. But someone was materializing on Lyoko, not Earth.

"What?" Jeremie sat puzzled as a blue-haired figure's ID scanned and sent him to Lyoko. He virtualized in the Ice Sector.

On Lyoko, the blue-haired boy stood up. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there. All he knew for certain was his name: Krishna.

KADIC, NEXT DAY

The gang discussed the previous night's happenings the next morning at breakfast. Ulrich's clone sat with them, as dumb and flirty as before.

"Last night, I went to the factory to improve the clone's personality," Jeremie began. He couldn't contain himself as he explained the odd events that puzzled even him. "I couldn't find what went wrong in its programming, so I decided to use William's clone as the base for it. I activated the tower, and bam! Errors all over the screen! All I saw was an avatar materializing onto Lyoko."

"Do you think it might have been XANA?" Yumi asked.

Jeremie shook his head. "I don't know. He's been too quiet lately, so it seems plausible. But what could he be doing? Creating avatars to battle you on Lyoko?"

Odd gestured wildly, trying to speak with a mouthful of croissant. He swallowed quickly and started talking.

"What if it isn't XANA? What if it's actually someone being virtualized onto Lyoko? We can get into XANA's Replikas, maybe someone can get to Lyoko."

Jeremie adjusted his glasses as he thought about it.

"I don't think anyone has access to virtual worlds like Lyoko besides XANA and us," Aelita suggested. "There may be other supercomputers out there, but I doubt they have the capability to virtualize people into them."

"Aelita's right. It was probably XANA. We'll go back to the factory tonight to check it out," Jeremie said. The bell rang for first period. The group went off to their respective classes.

At the end of last period, the group met up at the drink machines. All except Odd, that is.

"Odd is one of the least dependable people I know!" Yumi sighed. No one said anything. Yumi was getting more strung out lately, and the others had decided not to do anything that might rile her in the slightest way. It was obvious that Ulrich's XANA-fication had an impact on her.

Jeremie began walking to the park. Aelita followed.

"We're not waiting for him!" Jeremie called over his shoulder. William and Yumi followed after the two. Aelita, William, and Yumi went to the scanner room after Jeremie got out at the lab.

The three landed in the Ice Sector, in an open arena of glacial debris. The orb of Sector Five glowed brightly in the distance.

William hefted his sword over his shoulder and looked to the other two. They waited for Jeremie to instruct them.

In the lab, Jeremie pulled up his saved coordinates, where the avatar had spawned. He quickly memorized them and opened the communication link to Lyoko.

"The spawn point of the avatar was 81 degrees of your current position, about half a digital-klick away." Jeremie informed them. "Get there and check it out."

The three warriors headed off in the direction indicated by Jeremie. The sector was unusually still and calm.

"I don't like this," William said. "It's too quiet. XANA has to be up to something." Suddenly, the sector began shaking. A large creature erupted from the glacier they stood upon. The monster resembled a flying quadruped skeleton, lined with large bone-like appendages all along its sides. Three large claws hung on its underbelly and a domed skull connected to its spine.

"Woah!" William instinctively ducked. The giant bony skeleton ignored the three Warriors and headed off in the direction of Sector 5.

"Jeremie?" Yumi held her Tessen fans, ready to strike if need be.

"I've got no idea what this is, but it's glowing with XANA's signature. Follow it and see what he's up to, this may be the cause of the avatar materialization."

Aelita, William, and Yumi took off after the rapidly receding figure of bone skeleton. They eventually caught up, as the monster had stopped, and now hovered over a tower. Appendages extended from the vertebrate on its back and stuck to the tower. The tower's aura turned red, then a menacing black.

"This is weird," said Jeremie. "No other monsters on the radar. See if you can go deactivate the tower."

Aelita ran to the tower, flanked on the left by William, and on the right by Yumi. She focused and walked up to the base. Aelita promptly bounced off of the tower.

"What?" She tried again, only to receive the same result as before. "I can't enter the tower, Jeremie." No response.

"Jeremie!" Yumi cried.

"I'm working on it!"

The monster let out a deafening growl as Jeremie attempted to gain access to the tower once. The Supercomputer kept giving him anomaly windows. Jeremie pounded his fist on the keyboard.

"It's no use! XANA's got the tower locked up!" Jeremie tried to reroute power from another tower to this one. It was to no avail. "That monster must be encrypting it or something!"

"I can take care of it." William leapt up, turning into thick black smoke, traveling towards the menacing white skeleton. He materialized and fell on its back, only to be hurled backwards by an invisible force. On the Supercomputer, William's ID card began flashing, along with his entire avatar.

"William, you've lost 60 life points, what just happened?" Jeremie cried. Things only got worse by the second.

"I touched it and I got propelled away," William said as he staggered up after impacting on the ground of the sector. "It didn't even do anything."

That sounded familiar. Jeremie knew exactly why I did, too. It was the same sort of shield system that he had programmed into the Skidbladnir when he had first developed it.

"It's the same way the Skid shields worked. You can't touch it or it'll overcharge you."

Jeremie fretted over this new development. How were they to engage the gargantuan monster if they couldn't get near it? As Jeremie tried to find a solution, another blip appeared on his screen. He selected it for analyzing.

The same avatar from before appeared on the screen. Whoever this was, they were headed straight for the Lyoko warriors, and fast.

REVIEW.