Interlude
It was a silent night in Bolougne-Billancourt.
This was not wholly unusual. Much the area's active nightlife was in Paris, and very few other businesses of repute remained open at 3:30 on a Wednesday morning. The shops were silent, the skyscrapers were dark, and there was no visible movement anywhere anyone lived – whether in apartments or secondary school dormitories. The loudest noises in the town had to be the sleeping citizens' snores – or in the sleeping citizens' dreams.
The last place anyone expected to see any activity, day or night, was the abandoned Renault factory. No one even expected the eyesore of the Seine to be torn down. But, on this silent night of all nights, deep in the bowels of the old, dark factory, a supercomputer's interface monitor flickered to life.
A progress bar worked its way across the screen and vanished. Multiple displays flew up from nowhere, along with a dialog box full of letters and numbers. The lines of text rushed across the screen in a torrent for almost an hour before the box was closed. Almost instantly, another box took its place. This one was rather different – it contained seven smaller, card-shaped boxes. Each card had a small, square picture, a name, and a number - a bare minimum of information.
The first card held no data at all – it was greyed out, and a large question mark was pasted over the picture area. The next five cards were all blue, and had the names and pictures of all the Lyoko Warriors. The second card had a picture of Aelita. The third, Odd. The fourth, Ulrich. The fifth, Yumi. The sixth, Jeremie. The seventh card had a face as well, William, but his card was bright yellow rather than blue.
The computer beeped twice quickly, and another progress bar sped past. The first card lit up, turned bright red, and began pulsating, accompanied by soft, rhythmic beeps. This went on for about ten minutes before a loud, angry beep signaled that the program had given up. The card went dark again, darker than it had been before, and the second card lit up in its place. This one only glowed for five seconds before another dialog box opened up over the screen. Twenty-five seconds later, there were six dialog boxes on the screen – five blue, one yellow – and the card box was gone.
All six of the boxes were full of strings of code – sequences of seemingly meaningless letters, numbers, and even a few characters that weren't on the supercomputer's keyboard at all. One box's lines were entirely vertical, while another one was arranged in spirals. The five blue boxes scrolled though all this information at top speed, going forwards and backwards and around in circles, sometimes highlighting whole sections at random intervals. The yellow box remained still, but did not close.
Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the boxes vanished. The computer was still working, but its processes were hidden to the eyes of the interface. In another dimension, a tower turned from white to red. A floor below the computer's interface, three scanners flew open.
And the abandoned factory was alight with noise.