Warning: Rated 'M' for horror-genre violence, adult situations and adult language.
The main characters of this story are based on characters from the cartoon 'Code Lyoko.' I do not own, nor do I claim, any copyright to these characters.
Certain characters have been adapted from 'The Stand,' by Stephen King, and he is the copyright holder of these.
Certain characters are based on 'Hikaru No Go' by Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata. I do not own, nor do I claim, any copyright to these characters.
Brief references are made to a character from 'Watership Down,' by Richard Adams, and he is the copyright holder of this character.
The school year was over at Kadic Junior High, and most of the boarding students had left for the summer. Ulrich Stern, Jeremie Belpois and Odd Della Robbia, however, were not among that fortunate majority. Ulrich's parents were away from home on business for the summer; Odd's parents couldn't bring Odd all the way home for two months, then send him back, and Jeremie's parents were having some kind of problem Jeremie wouldn't talk about, and couldn't bring him home for the summer.
There were two bright spots in the boy's bleakness. Yumi Ishiyama wasn't a boarding student at Kadic, her parents lived in Paris. Yumi had been friends with the boys for several years now, and her presence made the summer tolerable. Especially to Ulrich.
The other bright spot was Aelita. She had enrolled at Kadic at the beginning of the year, but the boys and Yumi knew her well before that. Aelita came from a, different place, called Lyoko.
Lyoko was a virtual world, one created and maintained by a powerful supercomputer located in an abandoned factory close to the school. Some years before, Jeremie made contact with Aelita in that world, and got to know her. And her problems.
The biggest problem was a program/virus called XANA. Somehow, XANA became self-aware, and was trying to get out of the virtual world of Lyoko, and into the real world.
XANA succeeded.
Before the beginning of school last year, Jeremie found a way to bring Aelita into the real world. He and the others forged together some documents and somehow got Aelita enrolled at Kadic. The only problem was, when she was de-virtualized, XANA did something to her that still kept her tied to Lyoko. Jeremie's original plan was to get Aelita out of Lyoko, the shut the supercomputer down in order to destroy XANA.
Until recently, Jeremie thought that XANA had placed a virus in the program that de-virtualized Aelita. If he could find that code, he could remove it and free her from Lyoko and XANA forever.
With the help of notes left by a man named Franz Hopper, Jeremie discovered that XANA did not put something into Aelita's program, he took something out. Her memories.
They first thought that Aelita was a virtual construct, an Artificial Intelligence program capable of mimicking human thought and emotion. It turned out that Aelita was really human, and Franz Hopper's daughter. Years before, he took Aelita and escaped into Lyoko to avoid some sort of trouble. Somehow, XANA captured and imprisoned him somewhere in the supercomputer.
It also turned out that Hopper created XANA to help him probe and shutdown another program, one that could disrupt communications worldwide. As Hopper improved the XANA code, XANA achieved self-awareness, and gained a desire to escape the supercomputer.
What XANA needed to do that was the access keys securing the interfaces to the real world. The program got half of those codes when he captured Franz Hopper.
Aelita had the other half.
Just a week ago, XANA got the other half of the access keys from Aelita, a process that seemingly killed her. Somehow, her father managed to revive her, and give her all of her memories back.
Aelita was despondent because of XANA's escape. She also wasn't sure whether or not her father survived the memory transfer. She also was depressed because it seemed that the fighting she and the others did was for nothing, and it was going to go on forever. Even though all of the friends vowed to help her continue, they all were depressed.
After that afternoon in Jeremie's room, they drifted apart. They milled about the campus like the walking dead. They barely spoke with one another. They were waiting for The End to come.
There was one other student at the school in a funk. She was Sissi Delmas, the principal's daughter. Summers were always boring for her. She was always around the school, since she lived there, but there was not a lot to do. Her father was always busy making sure all of the students got home alright, doing principal-like things to make sure the school was ready for the next term, and generally running here, there and everywhere doing anything except spending time with her.
During the school year, she hung out with some "friends," Herve and Nicholas, but they, like so many others, had gone home for the summer. They weren't really friends however, just hangers-on. But she would even settle for hangers-on right now, anyone!
The one she really wanted to hang on to was Ulrich Stern. She had had her eye on him for years, but he wouldn't hardly give her the time of day. And those friends of his!
Well, really, she wished she could hang out with them too. They always to have such a good time together.
Before XANA escaped Lyoko, you could hardly pry Jeremie away from his computer. He was almost always connected to the supercomputer where Lyoko was housed, trying to write a program to stop XANA from whatever it was trying to do. Several times he found himself in some kind of trouble because he was on his computer or laptop and not doing what he was supposed to be doing.
But since the day XANA escaped, he dreaded looking at it. It sat on his desk, like an executioner waiting to swing the ax down.
One day, soon, if he was lucky, it was going to warn him of an attack by XANA. He had no idea what he would do when or if that happened.
So he avoided his room. He would meet up with Ulrich and the others for meals, but afterward would take off on his own. To the Library.
He spent his time in the library reading to try and take his mind off of The End. Strangely enough, the title of a book caught his eye, and he started reading it.
"The Stand," by Stephen King.
Now, this wasn't a book that would normally interest him. Jeremie had no love of horror stories because the images they painted in his mind tended to give him nightmares.
But, somehow, the book caught his imagination. It was a more adult book than he had read before, and some of the scenes embarrassed him, as well as excited him. But he was mesmerized by the story of a small group of people who had to fight the ultimate evil at the end of the world.
In his room, at night, he would pull the book out and read and re-read it. Something almost drove him to devour the story, to try and make it a part of his life.
On a dark Friday night, a week after XANA escaped, he succeeded beyond his wildest imagination.