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5

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Sissi felt herself jump a bit as the elevator abruptly started down. Odd reached out to slowly rub her back a bit, trying to reassure her. She'd made her choice, and now the group was on their way down to…wherever the elevator was taking them. Everyone was keeping quiet, but despite her nervousness about what awaited, Sissi's feeling of dread was oddly gone.

The elevator finally came to a smooth halt, and the large doors cranked open. The others all moved out of it and into a well lit room with white walls. Sissi stepped out as well, feeling her mouth opening. In the center of the room was what almost looked like a round raised stage, with a cylindrical tower stretching up from its center. The enormous object was mostly plated in gold and black metal save for some exposed computer parts, and light seemed to flow through it in yellow and blue lines at varying intervals. Around the base of the thing were what looked like thousands of electrical cords running into the floor in a ring, with thick glass windows plated over the jumbled mess.

Jeremie moved up to the object and put a hand on it, looking back at her. "This is a quantum supercomputer. So far as we know, it may be the only one ever made. You could probably run most of the infrastructure of France and a fair portion of the United States off this one machine, with the right installation. Anyways, the point is, it's very powerful." He paused and took his hand off the machine. "Unfortunately, when we discovered it, something else had found out how powerful it was, and was putting it to use."

Sissi gave the boy genius a confused look. "Something else?"

"XANA. A malevolent computer virus."

The words came from Aelita, and as Sissi turned to look at her, she felt an odd and unpleasant sensation; like Aelita wasn't really looking back at her, but somewhere else, somewhere a lot more…painful.

"Originally, XANA was a simple program, designed to oversee operations of the supercomputer. Over the years, with the size of the supercomputer, it began to expand and grow in strength. Eventually, it became self-aware, and began to learn. And once it did that...it corrupted, and began to lash out at people." Aelita's distant gaze seemed to refocus, and she looked at Sissi directly. "Now, XANA is hatred. It hates all people, everywhere, and it wants them all either suffering or dead."

Sissi shivered as she listened to Aelita, looking back at the strange computer; where before she'd found it intriguing and oddly pretty with all the gold, now it seemed to glitter with malice.

"A lot has happened since we first found the computer." Now Yumi had joined the conversation. "The supercomputer is strong enough that it powers a lot of really advanced tech here in the factory. We use that technology to fight XANA, and to try and stop him from attacking the rest of the world."

Sissi felt a small laugh leak out. "What, like superheroes or something?"

Ulrich's answer was firm. "It wasn't what we planned to do, but that's how it happened."

Odd put a hand on her shoulder. "I know this'll be a lot to take in. We can prove it though."

Another short elevator ride up, and they had stepped into another room. This one was lit by a green hologram in the middle of the room, with metal plates on the walls and floor, and a circular track both above and below holding a mess of wires attached to a keyboard and computer screen and a raised techy-looking chair respectively. Jeremie took a seat and typed a few keys on the keyboard; the dim hologram suddenly lit up brighter, and Sissi found herself staring a strangely shaped sphere with what looked almost like pieces of shattered glass stretching out from it's center in four jumbled plates. On closer inspection though, she realized that each of the four was distinct and different from the rest; one looked like icebergs, one had tall skinny trees, one had flat plains and rocky outcroppings, and one looked like the peaks of mountains. At the center of it all was a smaller sphere in blue, seeming almost serene compared to the chaos around it.

"This is how we've fought XANA for a long time." Jeremie explained, typing at the computer more. "This is a virtual world that was on the supercomputer. Think of it kind of like the operating system on a PC, like Windows. Except this one, we call Lyoko."

He put on a headset and looked to the others. "So who's doing the demonstration?"

Yumi raised a hand. "I'll go for it. Drop me in the plains, it'll be the easiest one to track visually." She headed into the elevator and the doors closed behind her; Sissi could hear it descending. A few moments later, a screen had opened on the hologram showing a room with three golden cylinders inside; apparently a camera from another room. Sissi watched as Yumi entered the view, and stepped inside one of the cylinders. It closed behind her, and Jeremie tapped at the keyboard again. "Transferring: Yumi. Virtualization."

In another moment, the hologram had zoomed in to the segment covered with plains and rocks, and something popped into view on one of them. A window opened next to it like the view from a video camera, and Sissi could see that the figure was Yumi, though unlike she had ever seen the girl; her black clothes had been swapped for a dark mauve and black bodysuit crisscrossed with pink accents, as well as combat gloves and boots. Yumi was speaking aloud but there was no sound; Jeremie replied from the chair into his headset. "All clear here Yumi, we can see you fine."

"So is this like…a computer game or something?" Sissi asked, more confused than ever. "I'm sorry, I don't think I'm grasping this. This all looks like computer game stuff."

Aelita looked to her again, her tone patient. "It's not a game at all. XANA uses technology to launch attacks on the real world. It does that by activating towers dotted across Lyoko's map, which lets it tap into things like the local power stations or phone signals. There aren't any real limits to what it can do; it's even taken over a military satellite before."

"Okay, hang on." Sissi felt another nervous laugh come out, and felt her own irritation rising inexplicably. "You're talking about a computer program hacking the government? That's not possible."

"Why not?" Ulrich asked, his voice challenging.

"Because! It's the government! People can't do that, how could a program?"

Ulrich scoffed. "Tell that to the Americans."

Sissi halted for a second, then continued quickly. "Okay, so governments can get hacked yeah, but…a program doing stuff on it's own? Like, future artificial intelligence stuff? I mean, next you'll be saying that it can make fish fly around or Aelita's from another planet or something!"

There was a long silence in the room, and Sissi suddenly felt cold. The longer it went, the worse she felt, and as she played back her response over the last few minutes, she realized how much she sounded like her old self. She looked at Odd, and the tight look on his face as he looked away a bit. She looked to Ulrich, and the frustration on his face. She looked to Jeremie, and the sadness on his face. Then she looked to Aelita, and saw…something else entirely that made her feel even worse.

When Sissi spoke again, her voice came out very small. "A…Aelita?"

"…I was kept a prisoner in Lyoko by XANA for ten years. My last name isn't Stones; it's Hopper. My father, Franz Hopper, created Lyoko within the supercomputer. People came from the government to take it away from him, and that's when XANA struck. My father tried to hide himself and I inside Lyoko to avoid them. XANA killed them all, then imprisoned us there and wiped my memory of him. A failsafe shut the supercomputer down, and XANA kept me there in stasis for the next decade." Aelita swallowed, before looking up at Jeremie. "The next time I saw or heard anyone's voice was when Jeremie found the supercomputer and turned it back on. He found me, he talked to me, and when XANA woke back up and came after me, he brought the others in to help fight XANA and protect me. And then, eventually, he managed to write programming to reverse the virtualization process…and bring me back to the real world."

Sissi suddenly felt like an enormous chunk of something had fallen into place in her head. If this is all true…then that totally explains why she's the way she is about him. She also felt another pang of shame for her outburst.

Aelita seemed to see it on her face. She walked over and put a hand on Sissi's shoulder. "This is all new, I know. You don't have to process it all right away. Take the time you need. But trust me when I say, it's all true."

Sissi nodded slowly and mutely, starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. Her mind still tried to come up with excuse after excuse for what she was seeing, trying to explain it away. But when she turned and saw Odd, and saw the nervous concern on his face as his eyes met her, she was able to begin pushing it all aside for one simple fact; Odd wouldn't lie about something this big. Neither would Aelita. And if they wouldn't, neither would the rest of them.

But that didn't change that it was a huge amount to take in. "Is it alright if I sit down?"

Odd took her hand and led her over toward one of the walls, sitting her down against it before joining her, as Aelita and Ulrich joined Jeremie at the computer to talk to Yumi. Odd took Sissi's hand in his, giving it a light squeeze.

"Are you doing okay?"

"I don't know. I mean, I feel like I just got about sixteen carpets yanked out from under me and my stomach is in free-fall." She shook her head a bit. "When you said there was something going on, after all the action getting here and the factory and all, I thought it was going to turn out that you guys all did some kind of crazy parkour stuff or something." She leaned back to look up at the thick cords twisting around the ceiling of the room. "This…I never could have guessed at all of this."

Odd nodded. "If it helps, I felt basically the same way when I first found out. When Jeremie tried explaining what he'd found on the computer, I thought he'd gone nuts and that Aelita was some thing he'd programmed on a screen." He laughed suddenly. "The only reason that I even ended up believing it was because they stole Kiwi to test the virtualization scanners and I scooped him out of it and got trapped myself and ended up on Lyoko!"

Sissi laughed a little, trying to reassure herself further. "So, about this XANA thing…you guys said it attacks the real world?"

"Yeah. XANA's a mean piece of work. He's done all kinds of stuff. He tried to blow up the nuclear power plant once, he took over a bunch of rats and set them on the school, heck one time he even took over Milly's teddy bear and tried to smash the school prom with it just to get at Ulrich and Yumi."

"Hang on, what?" Sissi's voice became incredulous again. "There's no way all of that could have gone on without anyone knowing about it."

"Oh, that's because of the Retu-oh." Odd ground to a halt, realizing where the conversation was going and suddenly feeling very uncomfortable.

"The what?" Sissi prodded.

Odd paused, then called out to Jeremie. "Hey Einstein, you're going to need to explain Return to the Past."

Jeremie looked up from the computer, seeming to hesitate for a moment before answering. "One of the abilities of the supercomputer is a brief time reversion of two days."

Sissi tilted her head. "Time…reverwhat?"

"The supercomputer can cause an event where time is turned back by a maximum of two days."

"What, like time travel?"

"Time wiping. Whatever point it goes back to, all those events never happened. No one knows they happened. The only people who keep their memories are the people who have virtualized into Lyoko and thus the supercomputer. Everyone else doesn't remember any of the more serious attacks."

A sudden thought came into Sissi's head. The thought quickly became all dominating and after a moment she began to panic. She stood up quickly from the floor, almost stumbling, and Odd tried to rise after her as she moved halfway toward the computer. "Nobody remembers when you do it? Nobody at all? Everyone gets wiped?" Her voice rose in pitch and shakiness with every question.

Jeremie looked up at her, looking a little sad, but he replied firmly. "Yes. Everyone who hasn't entered Lyoko gets that time wiped."

"Including me?" Sissi demanded, her hands shaking now and a cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. "Did I get wiped? How many times did I get wiped?"

Jeremie suddenly seemed to clam up with uncertainty. Sissi quickly looked to Ulrich, who looked away, then to Aelita, who also looked away. Suddenly everything in her head was screaming to leave, right away, and without being able to think straight, she obeyed in a panick; in a moment, she'd bypassed the closed elevator door and rushed off down a hallway off the computer room, disappearing into the factory.

Odd quickly gave chase even as the others called out behind him. He ran after Sissi, catching a glimpse of her disappearing around a corner ahead, then as he rounded that corner she had vanished from sight. "SISSI! Come back!" His voiced echoed back to him, followed by a clang; he ran off in the direction of the noise, rounding another corner just in time to see Sissi picking herself up from the floor ahead, having tripped over a low pipe, before she took off running again and around another corner. He leapt over the pipe and continued after her, calling out to her again. "SISSI!" The chase continued, with him barely catching glimpses of her at intervals as the two barreled deep into the factory. The longer it went, the more Odd began to fear getting lost in the maze of pipes and hallways and overhangs; it was easy to forget just how enormous the factory was.

Suddenly ahead there came a scream, and Odd felt a surge of adrenaline and charged around another corner. The passage had opened to a larger room with a catwalk over a darkened room below, but the catwalk was rusted over and had given way, leaving a twisted edge jutting out over the blackness.

Clinging just barely to that metal grated catwalk with one hand was Sissi, hanging over the dark drop below.

Odd didn't even slow down; even as his ears registered her frightened gasps, he dove onto the catwalk front-first and grabbed her wrist with both hands. "Sissi! Give me your other hand!"

Sissi was looking down at the blackness below, her eyes panicked, and Odd saw that one of her shoes was gone and a sock was torn with a red blot forming on it; twisting his head back, he saw a jagged chunk of the former catwalk poking up and realized what must have happened. He looked back to her, keeping his hold on her wrist tight.

"Sissi! Look at me! Don't look at the fall, look at me!"

Sissi looked up at him, her eyes still wild and fearful, and Odd suddenly felt awful for ever bringing up this entire ordeal to the group. Then some of the terror leaked out of her eyes, and she bit her lip, slowly getting her other arm up. As soon as it was within reach, Odd grabbed it with a hand. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he began to pull her back up. It took time; he wasn't nearly as strong as he wished he was. As he pulled, he moved up to his knees, then leaned back, being mindful of the jagged edge Sissi had apparently caught her shoe on.

Finally he pulled her all the way up, laying all the way back on the catwalk with Sissi laying on top of him. She clung to him tightly, shivering, and soon small sobs began to shake her slim frame.

"I-I-I-I'm s-s-s-sorry…" Her words came stuttered between the quiet sobs.

Soon enough Odd felt himself tearing up, and he held her tightly and close, pushing everything else out of his mind but her, sniffling even as he tried to speak softly and reassuringly, just holding the girl he loved close, and beating himself up inside for ever doing something to lead to her being hurt like this.

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