Part 3: Aelita
The old decrepit building, "the factory", loomed menacingly up in front of us, nothing but a black, dimly-lit shadow half-shrouded against the cloudy night sky. The bridge between us and the giant building sagged nearly to the surface of the water underneath it. Even more graffiti had been added to the exterior walls, and the sewers were so backed up we had to swim through them to get to the factory.
Odd pulled himself up the ladder and Ulrich pushed the manhole cover into place. For a while we did nothing but sit there in silence, staring up at the crumbling factory. Then the beeping started and I screamed and jumped to my feet. Simultaneously, Odd jumped a mile and Ulrich braced for attack, as though they were expecting an attack-a-la-XANA.
"Calm down, guys, it's just my Laptop," Jeremy said, partially blushing. "I guess I forgot it was still on when I decided to bring it with me."
He shut the machine down and we started toward the crumbling factory. The bridge sagged even further under our combined weight, and threatened to finally collapse. Fortunately it did not, and we continued into the factory. We noticed that the ropes we had used in the past to get to the ground level had been broken off of the support beams holding them up, and all three lay in a tangled heap on the ground below us. Jeremy's computer began beeping again, like a child screaming with frustration when no one is listening to him or her. Jeremy pulled the machine out of his handbag and opened it up to find the reason for the beeping.
"That's funny," Jeremy quipped as he shut the computer and lowered it into his saddlebag.
"What?" Odd replied, then turned and started toward one end of the platform.
"The Tower just deactivated itself," Jeremy answered, then bolted off after Odd. And as Ulrich and I jogged to catch up, I heard Jeremy add under his breath, "I swear I shut down the super-calculator that day. I remember it like it was yesterday." I remembered it as well. Jeremy had tried to send a virus onto Lyoko to destroy the rest of it, but failed; so he simply shut down the super-calculator instead, and unplugged all of the scanners so none of XANA's minions could bug us in the real world.
Sure enough a ladder had been erected near the end of the platform, and within ten seconds we stood on the ground below the platform. The elevator door was wide-open and we started slowly toward it. Three steps later, how-ever, all four of us stopped dead in our tracks. The building was rumbling. At first I thought it was an earthquake but the rumblings seemed more like XANA's now defunct pulsations than a quake.
"I've seen XANA do some crazy things before," Odd quipped as we start-ed toward the elevator again, "but this is by far the craziest. It's downright senseless on his part!" Everyone gave him a Look as we climbed into the elevator and Jeremy pushed the button. And as the elevator began its shaky descent to our scanner room, I began thinking about our recent "anomalies." I knew for certain that the last time I deactivated a Tower, one year ago, I had deactivated XANA and what was left of Lyoko as well. But that did not explain the beeping of Jeremy's Super Scan program. How could there be an activated tower in . . . nothing? Something told me we were about to find out . . .
The elevator doors slid open, at half-speed and double-volume, as the machine reached its first stop. Slowly, perhaps doubting every detail of this impromptu mission to a nonexistent Lyoko, he stepped out of the elevator. "Odd, Ulrich, head down to the scanner room and wait for further instruction. Melita, head down tot he super-calculator room and check the server for me. If it's on, just join Odd and Ulrich . . . "
"Wait, what about Yumi?" Ulrich borke in suddenly, and I realized what had felt so wrong about this place. Where was Yumi, anyway? Was she ground-ed? Home-schooled? Did her parents move away? I opened my mouth to voice these questions to Ulrich but Jeremy broke in before I could so much as sound out the first letter of the first word.
"She's been absent for months now . . . I hope nothing's wrong. I'll try to get a hold of her." With that he disappeared into his gigantic revolving lab chair and the elevator continued on its way. The trek between the lab and the scanner room usually took no more than three minutes but today that seemed like three hours. Three hours of Odd squeezing his fingers so hard into his ears I was sure they'd get stuck and started to voice this thought to him, stopping short on the first word after he managed to yank them out with considerable ease. Three hours of Ulrich complaining about the deafening squeaks which seemed to be amplified a thousandfold as they traveled up and down the shaft. Three hours of me simultaneously trying hard not to gag at the sight of Odd's fingers and not to go insane at the deafening squeaks of the elevator.
Finally it came to a shuddering halt at the bottom. Odd and Ulrich step-ped up to the scanners and prepared to enter them, and I pressed the button once more and the elevator descended even further down the shaft, all the way to the bottom. As the doors slowly slid open I was half-expecting some kind of gory scene in lieu of Yumi's death one year ago, the only death which had ever been reversed through a Return to the Past; then again, maybe I would come upon an empty room. The super-calculator had been shut down for a year, after all.
But the super-calculator was not nonexistent, nor covered in anyone's blood; in fact, the whole room was spotless, spiderweb-free when compared to the rest of the lab. That wasn't what made me stop dead in my tracks as I stepped out of the elevator, however; the super-calculator was spotless, brilliantly lighting up the room, something it would never have been able to do had it not been . . . up and running.
"Jeremy, you're not going to believe this!" I announced ten minutes later following a deafening ride up the shaft which made the descent look dead silent. The blonde computer genius had been in the midst of announcing Odd's virtuali-zation onto the remains of Lyoko; thus, he jumped a mile, nearly through the holographic map in the center of the room, as I made my announcement.
"AELITA!" he screamed after he had landed back in his chair. "Don't you see I'm in the . . . ?!?" He stopped as he realized what he was going to say, then turned to his array of computer monitors. "I mean, I have something to show you, too. Look at this." He typed something into his computer, his hands moving so fast over the keys I wondered how his fingers remained attached. A popup appeared on screen, showing a live image of Lyoko.
The moving image resembled the holographic map's almost exactly. I could see the giant hole that had been the Desert sector but was now no less than three thousand, six hundred and seventeen small islands scattered about an outrageously sized hole nearly double the size of Sector Five; the Ice sector, pockmarked with potholes from XANA's full-army attack. Some of the potholes seemed to have potholes in them; and even some of these had potholes. The Forest, where half the trees had been obliterated by the oversized Scyphozoa. The Mountains, with the holes still visible in the ground from where the Towers had been.
And a huge eye with an uncanny resemblance to XANA's, forming in the giant hole left by the monster Scyphozoa.
"What the heck is that thing?" I shrieked, intentionally defying the ques-tion which was balancing on the tip of my tongue so as not to scare Jeremy with the uncanny resemblance between the XANA's Eye before us and the one from my dream several nights ago.
But Jeremy did not give the answer I expected; rather, he just went on ahead with the coordinates for the activated Tower. "The Tower's at 62 West, 43 North, in the Forest sector. Get over there ASAP. There may not be any monsters now, but anyone who knows XANA knows he can't last five minutes without sending out his monsters. Ready to join them, Aelita?"
"Certainly," I lied, and headed for the secret ladder to the scanner room, to avoid the squeaking elevator. I certainly did not feel like scaring any of my friends with my dream and the gigantic XANA's Eye on Lyoko. But I was going to have to tell them sometime, and I decided I had to do so right after we had deactivate this Tower . . . or if (when) they came across it on Lyoko. I stopped outside of the north scanner and waited for Jeremy to open it and give the order to step inside. Three seconds later the scanner opened and I stepped inside.
"Transfer!" Jeremy shouted over the loudspeaker outside the scanner, and I began to float up inside it. "Scanner!" And suddenly his voice became static as everything simply stopped short. I stopped in midair, collapsing to the floor of the scanner. The dim lights inside flickered out, then three seconds later back on.
"Aelita, are you okay?" Jeremy's voice asked.
"I . . . uh, yeah, I'm fine!" I lied, hiding my sudden nervousness. "Perfectly peachy. Now how about you get me to Lyoko now, okay?"
"Okay . . . " Jeremy said, hesitating on the word. "Transfer! Scanner! Virtualization!" And with that a bright light filled the scanner and I dropped onto the virtual surface of Lyoko.
And as I sat there, staring up at the sky, I had no idea it would be my last time ever coming to Lyoko . . .
Part 4: Jeremy
"Hey Einstein, how's about sending us our vehicles?" Odd's voice came over the connection from Lyoko, and I typed in the appropriate code to do so. I watched the three climb onto to the vehicles — Odd onto his Overboard, Ulrich onto the Overbike, and Aelita onto Yumi's Overwing — and speed off in the direction of the Tower. I kept the live image of Lyoko on-screen, allowing it to follow Aelita and the guys on their trip to the Tower.
The three reached the Tower in record time. I watched Aelita dismount the Overbike, stagger to the Tower, and hesitate. I assumed she was just wait-ing for XANA to finally give them someone to fight, or something unexpected to happen, or at least a punch line from Odd the amateur comedian; but she neither moved nor spoke. Nor did Odd and Ulrich, who seemed equally puzzled as they stared at something invisible in the live image — which faced backward at the time — with puzzled expressions on their faces.
"Jeremy . . . " Ulrich finally stammered. "Are . . . are you sure this is the Tower?"
"Of course," I answered. "The Super Scan gave me the exact coordinates. That should be it!"
"Well, either XANA's lost his touch or you've lost yours," Odd retorted, but of course, no one laughed at the lame punch line. I'd heard better punch lines than that from Sissi and her cronies. I started to ask what he meant by that, but stopped short when the live image rotated around to face the Tower; for it was nothing but a normal Tower. No red hue, no hue of any other color — it was a normal Tower, one which looked as though it hadn't been activated in years.
"Oh . . . well, in that case, I'll transport you all back to Earth so we can make it back to school in time for lights out. Last time we were late for that Jim almost had my head!" With that I typed in the code for materialization. I watched Odd and Ulrich vanished from Lyoko, and Aelita into the Tower. Three seconds later Odd and Ulrich arrived in the elevator, and joined me at the computer.
"Jeremy, it's almost lights out, let's go," Ulrich said, and I rose from my chair and started after the guys to the elevator. But something wasn't right, and whatever it was bugged me like a recurrent flu. And then I stopped dead in my tracks as I realized: Aelita had not accompanied the guys on the return trip.
"Uh, guys . . . ," I stammered as I spun around and returned to the monitor, "where's Aelita?"
Ulrich froze in fear and confusion. "Uh . . . I — I thought she was with you! I thought she went back to Kadic to study for that science exam tomorrow!"
"I haven't seen her since I sent you guys to Lyoko," I hypothesized. "Maybe her materialization program's just taking a bit more time than usual to initiate because of our yearlong hiatus from Lyoko and the supercomputer. I'll run a scan of Lyoko to see if I can find her."
Breakfast at Kadic is normally the same gross green slop they call pan-cakes and sausage, but that morning I actually recognized it as pancakes and sausage, fresh pancakes and sausage, for once. The room was filled with the usual tidbits of conversation, as well as the loud outbursts from Sissi of, "MOVE OUTTA MY WAY!" which had become commonplace in our overcrowded buildings.
"So, any word on Yumi?" Odd was asking Ulrich as I squeezed between two seriously overweight sixth-graders and plopped down next to Ulrich with my tray full of the fresh pancakes and sausage they had given us today.
"Well, I called her yesterday to see what was going on, if she had recovered from that flu she caught three days ago . . . " He allowed his voice to trail off there. I could tell he was in deep thought, and he wasn't thinking about his dream trip to Lyoko where they would find a way to heat up the Ice Sector and transform it into one gigantic beach.
"And . . . ?" Odd broke in.
"She said her dad got transferred back to Japan for work, and they would be leaving right . . . AAAUUGH!" The startled boy rocketed out of his chair and nearly through the roof as his eyes came upon me. "JEREMY!! When the heck did you get here?!?"
"Uh . . . about five minutes ago," I answered when Ulrich had returned to his seat.
"Oh . . . uh . . . well . . . any word on Aelita?"
I gulped down half a sausage link and three pieces of pancake, then, "Well . . . I ran at least a hundred scans of Lyoko and . . . "
"And what?" Odd and Ulrich asked simultaneously.
I intentionally took a long time to reply, at least five minutes, in fact. When I finally did, Odd and Ulrich reeled back halfway across the room, vanishing into the crowd at had been the lunch line before Sissi had literally begun crying over spilled milk.
"I can't find Aelita anywhere!"