Yeah, yeah, I know, the summary's probably gonna suck.

Apart from that, welcome to this fanfiction. Especially my very first fanfiction ever written (I started writing very recently, and I'm also trying to write a book on my own. Yeah, I'm deep in shit.)

Moreover, English is not my mother tongue (I'm Italian), so forgive me for some oversight of translation.

Having said that: The Fanfiction wants to act as a sequel to the series (like probably 99.99% of Code Lyoko fanfictions. I'm very original, aren't I? :( ). But instead of starting it all at Kadic, I preferred to think of a slightly different beginning: in the series and in the books the presence or absence of supercomputer prototypes in other hypothetical detachments of the Carthage Project has never been specified. So... why not create one?

Rating T because who knows, we will see later.

I've talked too much, I'll leave you to chapter one. Please review the fanfiction, even if there were a need for insults about my (probable) inability :)

Rome

16 August 2019, 16.20

(Background music: Ocean Drive - Miami Nights 1984)

As the sun's rays forcefully penetrated through the open window of that room located in the boundary between the Ostiense District and the Old Town, a 14-year-old boy, with mahogany hair (almost black, not being hit by the light) disheveled after a half hour's sleep, was enjoying one of his main hobbies when he was at home: surfing the Deep Web.

But certainly not to explore sites selling drugs and untraceable weapons, or sites ... "sick".

What really interested him were the ridiculously strange sites: where you found new cults, conspiracy theories or even just the craziest nonesense. Among the pseudo-Satanic sects, attempts to organize raids against secret military areas and geometric designs that, if deciphered (i.e. never), would have to prove your high IQ, there was a lot of fun all day long.

"Ahhh it's a pity that this stuff isn't available on the everyday Web: you could meme it until the next century." he said it out loud, overpowering the background music that, before now, was the only source of noise in that room. Along with the mouse clicks.

Oh, yeah. He's Jacket.

Or rather, he calls himself Jacket: technically his name was Richard, but only his family call him by name. His close circle of friends gave him that nickname because of its peculiarity: no matter what season it was, every time he went out he always had a jacket with him. It was his hallmark, which allowed you to recognize him at first glance, also because his tastes in terms of clothes were quite unique: in winter he wore American or British military jackets (even better if they had fur on his collar), while in summer he had a Varsity Letterman, which seemed taken by a former player of the football team of a high school in '83.

While trying not to spit his Pepsi can on the web page in front of him (a black background page on which there was an image of Adam joining his finger to a pile of floating spaghetti), Jacket noticed an anomaly: in a fraction of a second when he had passed his mouse pointer over the black background, he seemed to have glimpsed the icon indicating text.

Jacket placed the can on the table, next to a manual of "Warhammer" ("a grim world of perilious adventures") and the related campaign notes. Then, with a deliberate exaggeration, he counted the fingers of his right hand. The choice was not random.

"..4 and 5. Okay, I'm still lucid, and normally there should be no text icons in the background of a web page..."

Suddenly he started to "sift" with the mouse the whole background of the page to find that anomaly. It took only a few seconds to find what looked like a hidden link in the HTML code. The only problem was that it redirected to a page that was denied access.

"Hmm, the network has no problems, and the site says no more than "ACCESS DENIED"... I think it's time to force my hand a little. "

Among the various interests of Jacket, one in particular has proved to be a useful skill: hacking. Of course he would never have been able to penetrate extremely protected government systems, but he managed to get around most of the protections.

Now he had to "brute force" the server. So Jacket first started a program, created by him, that connects the computer to about twenty networks and PCs in the world; in this way it's much more difficult to find the source of the attack, thus allowing the hacker to penetrate the system, steal its data and detach himself away in total peace of mind. Combined with his periodically changing IP address, Jacket was virtually trace-proof.

The result of this "computer home invasion" was a PDF file, so he used another program of his to scan the file, to make sure it was not a virus, or even just corrupted.

The check was passed with flying colours.

At this point Jacket opened the file, finding something inside that was worth more than a hundred gold mines.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

PROJECT CARTHAGE-ITALIAN DETACHMENT

CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION

This was what you read on the first page of the file; as intriguing as it was already, that page was only the prelude to a sensational discovery.

The file revealed an entire government war project, developed for the Cold War, which consisted of two quantum supercomputers: the main one was located in Paris, hidden under an old abandoned factory, while there was also a prototype that, to Jacket's amazement, was right in Rome, inside an old World War II bunker, hidden under a now disused building, only a couple of blocks from his house!

And that wasn't all: the file also gave information about the creator of the project, including the name and current status of himself and his family.

Waldo Schaeffer: Missing, probably dead.

Anthea Schaeffer: Disappeared.

Aelita Schaeffer: Unknown

Attached was a photo of the family: Waldo Schaeffer, the moustached and bespectacled scientist, along with his wife Anthea , with long pink hair ("Who knows if they're natural...") and finally a little girl with short hair, pink like her mother's, intent on discarding her Christmas gift; Jacket assumed that it was Aelita Schaeffer.

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At this point a normal person would have deleted the file and forgotten the matter for fear of possible trouble with the government. But Jacket was the last person to care about things like laws or common ethics, and frankly he didn't understand blindly following them.

It was time "to make a nice trip" to the building. But not without proper preparation.

After dressing up, combing his rebellious hair decently, and greeting his cousins and current guardians, he made a stop at the garage for a moment: he put a torch, a crowbar and some snacks in a fairly large and resistant backpack (the day could be long). Then, he got on his bike.

Destination: abandoned building!

"Cousins and current guardians"? Well yes.

At birth Jacket was diagnosed with a psychological condition partially attributable, in some respects, to a slight sociopathy: lack of understanding of respect for moral ethics, laws and politically correct.

This is reflected in his way of speaking: dialogues with very referential jokes, often full of rough (though never racist or sexist) "Black Humour" and a strong lack of "education". Both qualities inherited from both the London father (in terms of black humour) and the Scottish mother (in terms of... strong words ...).

And it is this condition that has led the mother to leave in France, dragging her husband -by the not very strong authority- with her , and leaving the child to older cousins. The only calls Jacket receives are from his father, who wants to ensure that his son is always well.

It only took half an hour to get in front of the place concerned: a building with peeling walls and a couple of broken windows. After tying his bike to a pole, Jacket, with his backpack, entered the courtyard full of weeds, finding an open door leading to a basement: the smell of damp overlooked the entire room, lit only by a tiny filthy window, and whose decor consisted only of a couple of broken bikes and a pile of sandbags for constructions.

Jacket then began to inspect the entire floor and walls, looking for hatches or secret passages on the walls. Apparently the room didn't have any of this, but the boy's gaze fell on the sand bags: driven by curiosity he started to move them away, revealing a trapdoor embedded in the ground: it wasn't even closed by a padlock.

Then Jacket lit the torch and opened the trapdoor. A staircase led to what looked like a long, completely dark corridor; at least there was no smell of mold in there. After the stairs, Jacket walked down the underground tunnel, walking through what seemed to him to be 15 minutes, after which he arrived in front of what seemed to be a sliding door, next to which there was a worn and dusty numeric keypad.

"Shit, you need an access code..." thought Jacket, who was not amused by the situation. So I try to insert the date wrote in the PDF file: 1979. He had a little hope that he'd got the right code for luck. When the last number was entered, a pre-recorded voice came out of the device's speaker: the only problem was that the audio was unlistenable, completely out of phase and corrupted. In addition, the door had started to open, only to block after a few seconds, leaving a gap as the only opening.

Jacket then deduced that it didn't matter if the code was correct or not: the door would freeze anyway. Luckily, he had a crowbar with him; putting a lot of strength and, above all, a lot of patience into it to avoid accidentally injuring himself, he managed to move the door, and then push it until it opened enough to pass through.

After recovering for a moment from the fatigue, Jacket resumed the torch and pointing it towards the hall, intent on going to the end of this matter.