The next day, Yumi awoke feeling quite excited for the day's events. She remembered the feeling of anticipation that she had had during their exploration of Sector Five the previous year, and of their more recent expedition on Xanadu, but this feeling now, of investigating the Thalassa Base, transcended either. Perhaps it was because they already had a faint idea of what went on in the base, of virtualization test trials on humans and animals, that made her more eager to see what secrets the facility held in contrast to Carthage and Xanadu.
She rose, had a quick shower, pulled on her clothes, and went downstairs for breakfast. It was as she reached the dining room that she came to the dreadful realization that this day was not destined to go well — at least, not for her.
"Yumi, we need to talk to you."
Her parents were standing around the dining table, her father looking stern, her mother anxious. Takeo Ishiyama cast a very pointed look in the direction of the chair opposite his side of the table, and Yumi took the hint and sat down, waiting for the blow to fall.
In truth, she had been expecting something of the sort to happen for quite some time. Her parents had been strangely quiet on the matter for the past few days, and this made her very suspicious. Now she understood why. They had been biding their time, luring her into a false sense of security, so that they could spring the issue on her when she least expected it.
"You're not going out today," her father said.
This was not at all what she'd been expecting. "Huh? But —" she began, taken aback.
"No buts!" he said firmly. "This has gone on for far too long, Yumi. For months now we've been doing the same dance: your grades fluctuate, we ask you what the problem is, you lie to us, come home at any hour you please, refuse to tell us anything, and your mother and I are sick of it. This rogue behaviour of yours settled down for a while, and we thought whatever was going on with you was finally over, but now, all of a sudden, it's back, and you still refuse to tell us the cause! We've talked with you — pleaded with you, more like — but still you remain obstinate.
"So be it. If you refuse to talk, then we won't ask anymore. You will tell us of your own volition, or you will be punished accordingly. Today, you will remain here and watch your baby brother. If Hiroki, or any of our neighbours — oh yes, they'll be watching," he added with satisfaction, as Yumi's mouth fell open. "And if any of them report that anything out of the ordinary happens here while your mother and I are at work, a simple grounding will be the least of your worries."
Yumi did not answer. She gave a hopeless, pleading sort of look to her mother, who looked unhappy but shook her head, and Yumi hung her head sadly.
"I'm glad we've sorted that out," said Takeo. "Goodbye, Yumi."
Her parents swept out of the room, said goodbye to Hiroki, and the door slammed shut behind them.
Back at Kadic, however, the others had risen for a very early breakfast. They were among the first to reach the lunchroom, and were on their way out by the time the other students arrived. They strode casually through the school, making light conversation to pass the time, then, when they were out of sight, they rushed off towards the secret passage concealed in the woods. Down in the sewers, they seized their skateboards and scooters and raced towards the opening at the opposite end of the tunnel.
They had arranged to meet Yumi at the factory, therefore they were quite surprised when they reached the Lab and found it deserted apart from themselves.
"Did Yumi get sidetracked or something?" William asked.
"Maybe she woke up late?" Mila suggested.
"I'm going to give her a call," said Jeremy, but he needn't have bothered. At that precise moment, Ulrich's phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out and answered. "Hello?"
Yumi was on the other end, explaining in a simultaneously desperate and exasperated voice about the earlier confrontation with her parents, and her punishment for the day.
"Hiroki's not going to give me a break today, I only just managed to get away from the little creep to make this call, in fact. But it doesn't make any sense to put it off just for me, you guys go on, send me the details when you can," she concluded.
"All right, take care, Yumi," Ulrich said. "She can't make it today," he added to his friends when he'd hung up. "Her parents came down on her pretty hard, she's been grounded."
"Ah great, that's just what we needed, a man down before we'd even started," Odd grumbled.
"But she said to go on without her anyway," Ulrich said. "So we may as well."
"All right, you guys head for the Scanners, I'll start up the virtualization process," Jeremy said, taking his seat. They piled into the room below, and as the cabin doors slid open, William, Ulrich, and Mila entered.
"Transfer, William! Transfer, Ulrich! Transfer, Mila! Scanner, William! Scanner, Ulrich! Scanner, Mila! Virtualization!"
The trio materialized in midair above the parched, orange-brown ground of Lyoko's Desert Sector, then landed lightly below. They could see a tower some fifty feet ahead of them, with bundles of thick, semi-transparent wires snaking their way towards it across the plateau, rising and falling below the platform.
"Virtualization!"
At the sound of Jeremy's voice they looked around, and Odd, Gabrielle, and Leo fell to the ground with them. A few moments later, Aelita joined them.
"Great, you're all there now," Jeremy said. "Aelita, Ulrich, Gabrielle, head for the tower. William, Leo, Mila, Odd, you stay behind and stand guard."
"No problem, Jeremy," William said as they all hurried over to it.
"Good luck, you three," Mila said, as Aelita, Ulrich, and Gabrielle entered the tower.
"Hang on now while I activate the tower for our use. Just give me a moment."
Within a few seconds, the tower's pale blue halo changed to bright green.
"Okay, get into position on the platform. Here we go . . . Code Zero."
"Aelita, Gabrielle, Ulrich? Can you hear me?"
"Yes, Jeremy," Aelita's voice replied promptly over the comms. "It worked, we're all here."
"Great, now can you tell me exactly where 'here' is? Are you in the forest, near the lake?"
Aelita looked around. Towering stretches of trees rose out of the moss-covered earth around them, brushing the sky, their sun-dappled leaves casting wide basins of cool shade upon the ground below. Directly ahead of them, through a space between two slender tree trunks, they could see a large body of water, the roiling icy-blue sheets glittering in the mid-morning sun.
"Yes, we can see it, Jeremy," Aelita said excitedly.
"That's your target. If I'm correct, the Thalassa Base is hidden somewhere under that lake. Hurry, you've only got twenty-three minutes left."
The trio hurried towards the lake, stepping over large, moss-covered roots as they ran. A cool breeze swept through the woods, ruffling the surface of the water. They approached the edge and stared at the glistening surface, as though they might see a hint of the Thalassa Base peeking up at them from underneath the water.
"If it is underwater, how exactly are we supposed to reach it?" Gabrielle asked.
"Are there any towns nearby, Jeremy?" Ulrich asked. "Maybe I could superspeed into a store, grab some snorkeling gear?"
"Even if any store nearby did stock equipment like that, what do you think the owner's going to say when you suddenly show up there dressed like you are?" Aelita said.
"Okay, okay, it was just an idea," Ulrich said, waving his hand impatiently. "I don't see anybody else coming up with any of those."
"Any chance we could just swim down, Jeremy?" Gabrielle said.
"No, I wouldn't advise it. We don't know how deep the lake is, or where exactly the Base is situated."
"Well, there has to be some way to reach it," she said exasperatedly. "The scientists had to get there somehow."
"I agree. Try to look around on the land first. Maybe there's some kind of clue there. In the meantime, I'll go back to the diary I downloaded from the data stream and see if there's anything I missed that could help now."
"Roger," Ulrich said.
Jeremy pulled up the journal with a few quick clicks, then began to browse swiftly through its contents in the hope that some form of entry into the base would reveal itself on the pages. He had just reached the dreadful imagery of the young girl strapped to the bed beneath a bright strobing light, when a window popped open on the screen and several crimson dots appeared, closing in on the position of his friends that had remained behind on Lyoko.
"Uh oh." He reopened the communication window and addressed Odd. "Odd, company approaching at 11:00. No doubt XANA's gotten wind of what we're trying to do. You've got to keep the monsters away from the tower long enough for Aelita, Gabrielle, and Ulrich to get into the Base."
"No problem, Einstein!" Odd said brightly. "We were getting kind of bored anyway; how 'bout a couple of taxis?"
"Already on the way," said Jeremy, tapping the enter key as the vehicles loaded completely.
The Overrose, Overbike, Overwing, and Overboard all appeared before each of them, and Odd, Mila, Leo, and William leapt atop each mount and sped off towards the advancing enemies. Orion was in front, flanked by a large swarm of hornets.
"You guys take care of the hornets, I'll handle the Harbinger," Odd said.
"You got it, boss," Leo said. He, Mila, and William veered leftwards, and the hornets followed, while Odd continued forward.
"Missed you last time!" Odd called tauntingly over his shoulder as he soared past Orion. "What happened? Couldn't get out of bed? Missed the XANA-express on your way here?"
Orion wheeled around and hissed — a thick, steaming jet of dark green fluid erupted from his snout and whizzed through the air. Odd veered upwards, letting the acid fly beneath him; it splattered against a large boulder protruding from the ground ahead of them, melting it down to a bubbling, frothing, white puddle in mere seconds.
"Woah!" Odd said. "You pick up some new tricks while you were off?" He spun around on the Overboard and plunged towards the Harbinger: arrows burst from his knuckles and streaked towards him, but Orion flung out an arm, smacking the arrowheads away with the metallic scales lining his skin. His huge tail whipped out, crashed against the ground, and he seemed to push down on it, launching himself upwards. He flew through the air before Odd could maneuver out of the way and tackled him off the Overboard. Odd managed to wriggle out of the Harbinger's vice-like grip as they tumbled to the floor and he rolled towards the side. Orion hoisted himself up on all fours like a dog, looking up at Odd with a menacing glint in his eyes, his forked tongue writhing around outside his head, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from his jagged teeth.
He lunged.
Aelita and Gabrielle walked slowly and deliberately around their circle of woods, keeping their eyes trained on the ground for anything unusual that could possibly help them in their aim of gaining entry into the Thalassa Base. They found nothing out of the ordinary, however, besides a strange-looking tree that Aelita spent a short time examining, with an unusually smooth-barked trunk. Ulrich, who had left a few minutes earlier to do a wider sweep of the forest, now came hurtling back into their midst, stirring up fallen leaves in a fierce updraft as he came to a halt.
"Still nothing," he said hopelessly. "Jeremy, how much time do we have left?"
"Sixteen minutes," said Jeremy. "So you guys had better hurry."
"Well, you could give us a hand, you know!"
"What do you think I've been doing?" Jeremy said indignantly. "I've just pulled up satellite imagery of your area, reran through the entire journal, and even tried to find a floor plan of the Thalassa Base on the internet, but I still haven't found anything. The Base seems to have been an extremely well-kept secret, even more so than the ones we found XANA's older, infected supercomputers at last year."
Ulrich grunted. "There must be something we can do."
"Time's running out," Gabrielle said, "we don't have a choice. We'll just have to take our chances and dive. I'll go and —"
"No," Aelita said. "I'll do it. My wings will help me more underwater."
"Be careful, then, Aelita," Jeremy said.
She approached the water's edge, looking fearfully down at the surface. Ulrich could tell that she was trying to be brave; he gave her an encouraging smile, which she returned fleetingly, then turned around and ran her hand across the star-shaped band laced around her wrist: at once, the familiar pair of glowing wings sprouted from her back, curved, pink, and fluffy, though less defined than they were on Lyoko, with shorter, thinner spines. They flapped gently and she rose a few feet above ground, then, after a second's hesitation, in which she filled her lungs to their highest extent with pine-scented air, she dove.
They watched the bright pink glare of her wings grow fainter as she went deeper, the water rippling where she had leapt. By the time it settled, she had disappeared into the lake's depths.
"This is excruciating," Gabrielle said, a few seconds later. "To think we're literally right at the edge, and can't move forward at all."
"Tell me about it," Ulrich said. "Let's just hope she finds something."
Beneath the water, Aelita's wings were swirling around her, pushing water gracefully aside as she bounded through the deep. She had been anxious at first to enter, despite it being her suggestion, remembering the bad experiences that she had had with water, both real and virtual. Once before, after being bombarded by a series of flashes of memory from her old life, she'd tumbled right into the school swimming pool, where she lost consciousness and nearly drowned, and never could she forget the day that William, possessed by XANA, had thrown her squarely into the Digital Sea, forcing her father out of hiding so that he could —
Her thoughts were interrupted as a large, dark shape suddenly came into view below her. As she pressed downwards, the shape became more clearly defined. From a distance of around 70 feet, she could see that it was some kind of octagonally shaped tunnel, comprised of glass and metal, that twisted and wound through the deep beneath the forest shore, leading straight down to what she knew to be the Thalassa Base, an elaborate stretch of building nestled on a flattish square of land, which was encircled by a brilliantly glowing electric fence.
Excitement flooded through her; though her chest felt as though it was going to burst open at any moment, she endured several seconds' more agony and looked around, then bolted back to the surface, following the trail of the tunnel right up to the land's edge. She broke through the surface, startling Gabrielle and Ulrich, and collapsed on the bank, taking a great gasp of breath.
"You okay, Princess?" Ulrich said. "We were starting to get worried."
"Yes, I've found it," Aelita panted.
"Really?" Gabrille helped her up, waiting avidly as she took heaving breaths to steady herself.
"There's a kind of lift, a hydro-loop, that takes you down to the base," she said finally.
"How do we get to it?" Ulrich asked.
Aelita looked around, then found the same tree that she had examined earlier, with the strange patch of bark. Suddenly, it all became clear. She moved over to it, ran her hand across the unnaturally smooth trunk, and found a sort of groove. She pressed her finger into the crook, seized the bark, and pulled — and an electronic panel appeared in the space where it had been taken from, much like the ones that had been used in XANA's facilities.
"How did you know that was there?" Ulrich asked, amazed.
"Just guessed," Aelita said, shrugging.
"Well, it's great that we found it, but now we need a password," Gabrielle said.
"No we don't." Aelita held her palm above the panel and closed her eyes, concentrating hard. It was rather difficult now, with the memory of her father as fresh and sharp in her mind as a knife wound, but she persevered, and a moment later was rewarded by a gentle beep of approval and a flash of green light. A rushing sound broke the silence, and the huge boulder on their right split apart smoothly, revealing an elaborate interior, like a kind of elevator.
"Nice one, Aelita," Jeremy said. "Now get going, all of you."
They hurried into the elevator. The walls of the boulder slid shut, and they began to sink slowly out of sight, the lift darkening all the while, until at last they were surrounded by a deep, velvety blueness, and began to shoot down an immense glass chute, turning sharply every now and then and zipping along as though they were in some kind of bizarre rollercoaster.
The Thalassa Base loomed out of the darkness, and the chute sent them rocketing downwards, past the electric fence, and towards a closed hatch, which slid open as they approached.
They dashed out of the lift and into the base, and they looked around. It was not at all as Aelita had imagined it to be. She had expected layers of dust, scattered sheafs of parchment, broken glass, anything to show the telltale signs of abandonment. The Base, however, was perfectly immaculate. The white-tiled floor was so clean it practically shone, the long counters dust-free, with the equipment they held neatly organized.
Behind her, Ulrich drew his swords. "Something's not right here," he murmured.
"Yeah, this isn't what you'd expect from a place that's been abandoned for years, is it? It looks like somebody's been in here, very recently," Gabrielle said.
"You've only got ten minutes left, guys," Jeremy said. "Go on, but be very careful."
Quickly and quietly, they edged through the rooms. They were all in the same meticulous order as the others, but still no one else came into view. They filed along a long corridor and as the door opened, they emerged into a room filled with a huge supercomputer station. They glanced around swiftly to see whether anyone was inside, then Aelita hurried over to the hardware.
Ulrich and Gabrielle kept watch while she worked, typing away relentlessly.
"Ah, I found something," she said a few moments later. "You were right, Jeremy, this place was working on virtualization trials. I found an archive of the test records. They tried a range of subjects — animals, adults, children, and — oh . . . None of them were successful."
"You mean they. . . ?" Gabrielle did not finish the sentence, but she did not need to. Aelita looked around at her and nodded.
"It happened during the trials. Their bodies were broken down during digitalization, but the process was incomplete, so they were never reformed the way we're supposed to on Lyoko. They're just . . . gone."
"That's horrible," Gabrielle breathed.
Jeremy quite agreed, but at the moment, no matter how cold it seemed, they didn't have the time to worry about old deaths. "Aelita, try to find out what you can about Project New Olympus, hurry."
She shook her head, snapping out of her reverie, and set to work. "On it. . . ."
"I don't like this place," Ulrich said abruptly. "It's too quiet; why haven't we seen anyone yet?"
"Shouldn't we count that as a good thing?" Gabrielle asked.
"In a perfect world, maybe. You stay here and keep watch, Gabrielle. I'll keep looking."
Keeping a firm grasp on the hilts of his sabers, he set off through the long corridors once more.
Leo sped through the air, gliding over the dusty, parched-looking Desert ground. Two hornets were tailing him, firing relentlessly. Lasers shot past him on all sides, accompanied by occasional jets of poison. Narrowly avoiding a pool of the bubbling fluid, he wheeled around and fired a blast of lightning. It connected with a hornet, exploding it, but the second returned fire at once: the laser crashed into his shoulder, making him almost drop the thunderbolt.
Directly ahead of him, Mila came into view, two hornets following closely. She glanced around at either side, then halted in midair, so suddenly it was as though she had been stopped dead by Altaea's ability, and the two surprised hornets zoomed past her before they could react. She seized her whip and unfurled it with a resounding crack; it shot out in an arc of brilliant gold, cleaving through both hornets, and they burst apart. Leo realized he had been stationary in the air, watching her, for too long. His own hornet was swooping down on him again.
"Aegis!" he cried, and as the golden aura appeared around him again, the laser rebounded, struck the hornet's mark, and it exploded.
He turned and joined Mila, and they both sped off towards William, who was gliding along on the Overwing with a smirk on his face as he fought his own hornets. The two monsters pressed closer on his left and right, and William tilted the Overwing so that he leaned sideways, holding onto the handle with one hand. With the other, he grasped the hilt of his sword and swung, running the huge blade through the two beasts. As they erupted into sparks he grabbed the handle of his vehicle again and, spotting Leo and Mila, made his way alongside them over to Odd and Orion. As they moved, they heard a sudden rumbling sound and looked around.
A Megatank was approaching from behind. Even as it rolled towards them, it pried itself apart, charging energy into its belt; a wall of energy expelled outwards from its center, slamming into the Overwing, the largest of the three vehicles. As William plummeted to the ground, another wall of energy skimmed across the sandy floor and crashed into him, devirtualizing him in an instant.
The Megatank now turned its attention upon Leo. He fixed himself into a standing position on the Overbike and leapt aside as the Overbike was consumed by the Megatank's blast.
Mila dove towards the monster, lashing out with her whip, but the Megatank's metallic shell closed around it, and the whip bounced off in a shower of sparks. The shell opened abruptly, and as Mila tried to veer away, the creature fired again: the huge mass of energy smashed into her from behind and she disappeared along with the Overrose. Leo dodged the next strike, rolling to the side. As he sprang up, he held his thunderbolt aloft and took aim at the monster. They fired at the same time, the bolt of lightning swirling past the enormous wall of bright orange energy — both blasts connected with their targets, and both vanished simultaneously.
Ulrich continued to drift silently through the base, half-expecting to see rooms full of cybernetic animals, or stationary robots, or even tiny deathballs of the variety that Odd had described. Most surprisingly, however, every room he passed was still empty. He could smell the lingering scent of certain chemicals, but they were weak, old.
He turned around a corner, debating with himself whether he should just return to Aelita and Gabrielle, when he saw something that seemed to make his heart fail: a massive hole had been made into the wall before him, as though the Kolossus had thrust his fist through it, and the stretch of shining metal around it had been singed black. In the room beyond the hole, he could see the wreckage of what looked like some kind of generator. It seemed to have exploded long ago.
Guess that explains why we haven't seen anyone, Ulrich thought, stowing his blades at last. It was not hard to imagine, the workers getting the warning of a potential disaster, rushing to this place trying to find out what had happened, to restore order, and then vaporizing when they realized that they couldn't. Still, it struck him as odd that he could see the remains of the machinery, but not of any humans.
"Super Sprint!" Satisfied, but not entirely reassured, he whirled around and darted back towards the computer room. However, the atmosphere there was just as grim as the place he had just left behind. The two girls were staring, horrified, at the screen, where it seemed they had been watching a video.
"Something the matter?"
"It's awful," Aelita whispered, shaking her head, but she pressed the 'play' button regardless.
Ulrich moved closer and saw what was obviously footage from the video cameras. People clad in white lab coats were piling up in what he recognized as the same room he had just moved away from. They were panicked — no, terrified. Their voices jumbled together as they dashed around in blind fear, as a high-pitched whirring got steadily louder in the background. Multicoloured lights were spilling from the room, washing over the walls outside. The whirring reached a pitch, then, quite distinctly, he heard a man cry, "It's too late, it can't be shut down, run —"
And the room exploded. A surge of prismatic light filled the corridor, the hall beyond, and when the iridescent flare had died down, all the men had vanished.
There was a stunned silence, then Jeremy said tentatively, "Aelita, I . . . Time is almost up, can you send me the records?"
"Right, here they come," she said quietly.
The records were transmitted quite fast, so that by the time the teleportation had worn off, and they had returned to the tower, they had cleared all processes and returned the equipment to normal.
"Odd, the others are back inside the tower, I'm ready to bring you all back in, so make it fast!"
"Just — have — to take care of this — first!" Odd panted, as he dodged around yet more flying plumes of acid. He raced across the Desert on all fours, then jumped atop a nearby boulder, crawling towards the top, sinking his claws into the stone as he moved upwards. As he reached the peak, he turned to face Orion and jumped, shouting, "Laser Arrow!"
Arrows erupted from the marks atop his knuckles, whistling through the air, but Orion opened his mouth, and a ball of smoke bloomed from his snout, solidifying into numerous fragments; arrows and scales whipped all across the battlefield. Orion threw up his arms to block the hail of arrows, and Odd summoned his violet barrier. But just as it had happened their first time in the Swamp, the shield shattered beneath the blows, the scales crashed into Odd, and he devirtualized at once.
Orion rose to his feet, his wide mouth stretched in a wicked smile.
"Materialization," Jeremy said, launching the program.
Ulrich, Aelita, and Gabrielle returned to the scanners, and as the tower's emerald halo reverted to an icy blue, Orion turned to face it, snarling. "No."
"That was a close one," Odd said, as they filed out of the elevator into the Lab. "At least tell me you managed to get something good before we all went down?"
"I did," Jeremy said. "According to the data Aelita sent me from the Thalassa Base supercomputer, 'Project New Olympus' referred to the scientists' mission to create a virtual world of their own called New Olympus."
"Not for the pleasure of simply doing it, I imagine?" Leo said.
Jeremy shook his head. "It seems they were working with an unknown client in order to create a virtualization process that would transport people to New Olympus and back, with their newfound capabilities on the virtual world carried over to earth."
"So they wanted to create their own army of supersoldiers?" Gabrielle asked.
"Exactly. Unfortunately for them, something went wrong one day. How, I don't know yet, but the generator projecting New Olympus exploded and released a wave of virtual energy. It passed through the entire base, and it seems that everyone that it touched was virtualized."
"But if the generator was destroyed —" Mila began, looking horrified.
"That's right," Jeremy said, nodding. "New Olympus was destroyed too, and everyone in the base along with it."
"But why would whoever created the data stream go through all that trouble just to make us know that everyone died?" Ulrich asked, frowning.
"And why would XANA feel threatened by this information?" Aelita added.
"I don't know," Jeremy said. "It feels like that's all we can really say nowadays, isn't it? All these unanswered questions. . . ."
"We'll just have to hope we get some answers soon," William said. "But in the meantime, how about we grab some lunch, I'm starving."
"Seconded," Odd said.
Jeremy took one last look at the computer, the archives that Aelita had sent him, and sighed. "Yeah, I could use some food too."
As they slouched out of the factory minutes later, and climbed back down into the sewers, a girl with long black hair poked her head from around the base of one of the bridge's columns and, after checking to ensure that she could no longer hear any voices, she hurried down to the elevator.
As the lift doors closed, taking her downwards, she smirked in a self-satisfied way. "This time, for sure," Sissi said.