Ch 4
Robots Reboot
"…And you have two weeks to work on this assignment. Mr. Fugi, the computer teacher will be available during afterhours to help you program your robots outside of class. You may work in groups of two, three, or by yourself. However you may not work with students in other periods. This is not an excuse to get you or a friend out of another class." Miss Lemoine stated. Miss Lemoine was a thin teacher with blonde hair which she wore in a tight bun.
The bell rang, "Now everyone remember that you have a test over basic electricity concepts this Friday so make sure you study."
Champagne walked out of the room with a small smile on her face. She learned how to program before she learned how to hack. The project was going to be super easy for her. She figured she could use the old robot parts she found in the factory, which meant more excuses to sneak away and find out more secrets about that computer.
She walked out of the building and toward the park. She was glad that science was the last class of the day; it meant that she could easily get to the park and down the manhole before anyone saw her. It also meant less people would be around to see her.
She climbed down and started to walk through the sewers towards the factory. She figured she'd smoke while gathering the parts she'd need for her robot, then she'd go down and visit the computer and its AI program. She wished she knew what it did. It was awkward thinking of the cat-guy-program as AI. She'd come up with a better name, which she'd put toward the AI today, to see if it was able to be renamed.
She climbed up the ladder near the factor, stopping once she got to the top to light up a cigarette. She puffed out a small amount of smoke before she headed into the factory. It took her about forty-five minutes to find where the spare parts were kept, and to her disappointment it seemed like most of the parts had been picked through already. She couldn't find the parts that she'd wanted to use in the spare parts boxes. She did find an old tool box, which had some old tools in it. "Well if the spare parts aren't available, then I'll just have to take the already used parts." She took the tool box out to the main floor and started her collecting.
After she'd gathered the parts into a suitable box she pulled out her box of cigarettes and gave it a casual drag. She'd have to get more from her friends back home, at this rate the ten packs she had wouldn't last. Especially since they helped her with hard programming challenges. The class project wasn't hard, but cracking the AI in the computer would be.
She traveled down to the super computer area and sat in the chair. Since her last few excursions she'd found the chair would move on its own. It had needed some tuning up, but it seemed like who ever had abandoned the factory had done so in a hurry. They'd left lubricant for the chair in a closet. She hooked up an adapter to her headset so it would work in the older computer, and put the antique one aside. Her's was pink; it had been a gift from her father who always gave her pink things. Color aside though, it was one of the best ones out there, with sound block and outside interference allowances and the microphone could be programed to only recognize certain voices.
She brought the computer out of sleep mode, to find that the AI program was gone. This was a normal occurrence. Apparently the program could browse the internet at its leisure, even when the computer wasn't on. Almost like a virus, yet as far as she could tell it did nothing negative to the sites it visited, and seemed to visit it through a modified browser program.
"AI please return to main screen," Champagne said as she started to methodically go through the other programs on the computer, none which seemed to make sense. The window for the AI stayed silent though, "Hmm? AI please return to main screen," she repeated trying to be more articulate.
There was still no response, and champagne started to become concerned. Had the AI gotten damaged? Would she have to manually retrieve it? She didn't even know where to start.
"Boo!" The suddenness called Champagne to give out a startled cry as the AI program finally showed his face, "Did I scare you?"
"More like startled me," Champagne told him quickly grabbing her cigarette which had landed on the keyboard. "What gave you the idea to do that anyways?" She didn't expect the AI to respond. She figured maybe he was programed to do that occasionally.
"Oh I saw it in a movie once. Or was it YouTube?" The program assumed and thinking posture, complete with scratching his head.
"YouTube?" Champagne asked. A program set to watch videos and then to mimic what it 'learned' from them? Seemed very science fictiony. She decided to not tell him about the horror genre, who knows what the computer could be attached too.
"Oh yeah lot of good stuff on there! It's one of my favorite places in the internet!"
"Just don't hang out there too often, that kind of stuff will rot your brain," Champagne replied as she pulled up a program that seemed to utilized the big tubes she'd found just one floor below. Scanners according to the programmer, though all the tiles that seemed to determine what was being scanned were locked and images showed up as not loading.
"Hey what about you though? Cigarettes rot your lungs."
Champagne let out a puff of smoke, "What are you my mother?"
"I hope not I feel very masculine," the AI replied.
"Which reminds me, you need a name, and since I have no idea what you do, other than pull random things from the internet, I'm thinking of calling you after a Greek warrior called Odysseus?"
"Odysseus from the Odyssey? That put me to sleep. Oh well better than you calling me AI all the time. It's like I'm going by initials or something. Hey want to see something cool?" Odysseus asked.
"It's not a YouTube video is it?" Champagne asked as she started pulling up some blank tablets into the program she found. The scanners said it went to a place called Lyoko, but Champagne couldn't determine if that was a program, a folder, or a hard drive. She figured she'd have to test it in order to figure it out.
"Nope! But since you mention it," A random browser window with black and white puppies showed up on one of the screens. "LOOK PUPPIES!"
Champagne looked and rolled her eyes, "Very nice Odysseus why don't you show me what you wanted now?"
"Well I've found that not all avenues to the internet are optimal for the different types of browsing that I do, so when one give me trouble I go to another one, like this. A visual of a dark room showed up, with a walkway to a wall. The camera started to move toward the wall and Champagne figured that this was a visual from the AI's perspective. In the top left corner where numbers designating x, y, and z coordinates, and the word Lyoko.
Odysseus went through the wall and was suddenly in a cybernetic floating forest. He ran through it at a relatively leisure pace coming to a white tower outlined in blue. He went through the wall and was once again in a room with a walkway to the center.
"See? The place is really cool, but I can only use some towers to teleport to other ones in other places."
"Other places?" Champagne asked.
"Yeah like one's real mountainous, the other the ground is ice and another one has sand."
"A desert, ice flow area, mountain and forest? Sounds like a video game," Champagne said as she reviewed the scanner program. It was set up for living things to go through. So Odysseus had to be part of the area. Maybe it was an unfinished video game and someone's sloppy coding and left leaks in Odysseus' programing that allowed him to learn but nothing to learn from.
After their final goodbyes, Champagne carried her parts down into the sewers and back to school. She'd missed dinner, not that she cared, but she'd have to be careful. The English teacher was known for giving students detention for breaking curfew. She carefully snuck into her dorm building and walked into her room to find it occupied by her roommate and two boys.
"Oh hey Champagne," her roommate said waving at her, "didn't realize how late it was. They'll be leaving shortly. We were just planning out our robot."
"Oh really? Well good luck then," Champagne set down her parts and opened up her laptop and started working on the blue prints she'd need for her own.
"Not very talkative is she?" Cedric asked.
"No not very," Akioneko responded, "unless it's about my snake Lichi."
"Really but how she likes snakes too?" Guy asked.
Champagne turned around to correct him when she saw he was actually holding the creature in his hand. The snake was out of her container. Champagne let out a shriek.
William pushed the door open to hear a tirade coming from the pink haired girl about keeping a slimy creature behind glass where it belonged. Preferably in a zoo. He saw his son handing a white snake back to a girl who seemed to be the other girl's roommate.
"What is going on here?" he asked.
"Mr. Dunbar she won't keep her snake in the tank where it belongs!"
"She needs time out her cage to stretch; I was letting my team mates for the robot project hold her as we designed our robot. Champagne just came back to the room and started screaming-"
"Okay, okay that's enough," William said holding his hand up, "Now it seems you all forgot a rule, no one of the opposite sex in your room after nine. Now since it's the first week that we are allowed to do group projects I'll let you go, but don't let me catch you guys at this again."
The boys got up and quickly left as Akioneko set her snake down in the tank. "As for you two try and get along, champagne if you don't like the snake it's not fair to shriek if you come in to find that someone else is holding it, and Akioneko? Try to not hold it when she is around?"
The two girls nodded, silently glaring at the other one.
William left the room and shook his head, "Teenage girls. Wonder why they can't just all get along." William glanced at his clipboard to write a note next to their names for the warning when as he wrote he glanced at their last names. "Stern and Bel Pois. Stern and Bel Pois?" he muttered to himself. He knew very well of that feud, tried very hard not to get dragged into it. Both of those girls' fathers would have a conniption if they knew the other ones kid was here. William made a note to watch them if they came for parents day. Last time they were in the same room, their graduation from Kadic, Bel Pois and Stern had gotten into a fist fight. It would have been no contest if Jim hadn't stepped in to fix it.
Well there you go over 1900 words of code lyoko goodness. The second part to this chapter will be up the nextime my beta, bat-dove, gives me a deadline for this story. Let me know what you think, love it, hate it, took too damn wrong to write it? Tell me.