January 22nd, 1939. World War II has not reached America. In fact, it had barely started in Europe. The new German Chancellor, a man by the name of Adolf Hitler has just started his campaign for the Aryan “master race” to rule Europe and the world, by breaking international law and invading the nation of France. Just east of that nation is the neutral nation of Switzerland, known for knives, watches, and chocolate. Though the nation did not know it, a child was being born that would one day invent time travel and artificial intelligence and start a project that would secretly change the world.

“Push, Mrs. Hopper, Push!” The doctor stood in front of an auburn haired woman whose face was contorted in pain and covered in sweat. A brown haired man stood next to her, his face also painful, but that was only because his hand was being squeezed to death. The woman was breathing fast and gave one great push, and the sound of a crying newborn was heard. Mrs. Hopper soon joined in the crying, her eyes welling with tears of joy and relief. “What will you name this child?” The doctor asked, holding it upside down and spanking it. The woman thought for a moment and said “Franz.” The man nodded. “I like that. Someday, people all over the world will know the name Franz Hopper.”

Dr. Daniel Hopper did not know that his words would be so true. He assumed his child would be smart because he himself was rather smart, a college professor at the University of Bern. He taught geometry, and was one of the more respected teachers at the school. He was considered almost a genius in mathematics, ever since he was young. Born in England, he skipped the last two years of attending a prestigious Swiss high school to go to college, but not before he met the love of his life, Frieda, who was now holding her newborn child.

As little Franz grew up, it was apparent that he had the intelligence of his father, he was walking by his first birthday. However, by then the Axis was practically surrounding the tiny nation of Switzerland, so the Hoppers decided to pack up, sell their house and leave the country, fearful that tiny, neutral Switzerland could be the Reich’s next target. They decided to move to the close, stronger country of France. It was the most unintelligent decision of Daniel Hopper’s life. They had just left a large house in safe Switzerland to a cramped apartment in Paris, and within a few months, France was defeated and Paris was under Nazi control.

However, one of the happiest days of the Hopper family’s life was June 6th, 1944; D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy. By that August, Paris and all of western France had been liberated, and the Hoppers could live freely again. Franz would start his second year of school- having started at age 4- and all would be well. And they did live very well until 1949.

Franz was ten, and came home from school one day to find his mother screaming at his father, both in tears. Next to Dr. Hopper was a blonde woman who Franz had always thought was a close friend and colleague from the University of Paris where his father worked. She was wearing skimpy clothing and his father was in nothing more than a bathrobe. Franz was young but got the point- his father had been having an affair.

There was a divorce and Frieda Hopper- now returning to her maiden name of Müller- received full custody. Dr. Hopper and his new fiancée Jeanne kept the apartment, so Franz and Frieda moved into Frieda’s brother’s house, just south of Paris in a town called Boulogne-Billancourt. Uncle Jonas was a lawyer, and lived in a big house on the river. He had a wife named Jacqueline and a child on the way. Jacqueline was a teacher at a very good private school in the city called Kadic Academy. Thanks to payments from Dr. Hopper and the generosity of his aunt and uncle, that is where Franz would go to school.

Franz stayed at the school as a boarder, making a few friends and excelling in academia. He was a little shy and although some people thought him weird as “the brown haired Swiss boy with big glasses” he wasn’t necessarily hated. The teachers loved him; he was intelligent and even humorous at times. In his last year at Kadic, ninth grade, he met the woman who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Her name was Antea.

Antea DuPont was a beautiful woman, tall, thin, and she always had a smile on her face. She was intelligent, always enjoying a good discussion about such things as physics with Franz. She was also interested on the new, relatively unknown science of mechanical computing. She had an unusual hair color- bubble gum pink- and she asserted that her hair color was natural. She, too, lived in Boulogne and had divorced parents. Franz loved her with all his heart and she loved him.

All through high school they went out, many guys asking Franz how he got such a beautiful woman. His reply was always the same: a shrug. On Franz’s eighteenth birthday, January 22nd, 1957, he spent every single penny he could to purchase a diamond ring and gave it to her on one knee at his birthday dinner. She accepted.

They were married after their first year of college, Franz majoring in Physics and Education and Antea majoring in Chemistry, and even managed to find a program about her obscure hobby, computing. At the wedding, two important things happened. One, Franz and Antea said “I do” and were married. The date was June 6th, 1958, on the anniversary of D-Day to celebrate the beginning of their married lives and the beginning of the end of World War II. Two, Dr. Hopper and Freida Müller met and made up for their misgivings, as it seemed that Jeanne had left Daniel for a Spanish woman. It truly was the happiest day of Franz’s life.

Antea left school after the standard four years and found a job in a pharmaceutical laboratory. Franz continued to go to school, hoping to get a PhD like his father, his life-long goal. In 1964, that dream became a reality. Antea had earned enough money so they could move from the busy Parisian suburb, so they moved to a home in the French Alps, similar to Franz’s first home that he didn’t remember. Franz began working as a high school teacher, while working on equations at home. For a decade, the two lived together in the mountains, Antea with her medications research and Franz with his physics equations. The two wanted to have children, but as scientists they were very busy.

It was now the seventies, and computing was finally evolving the point of recognition. Antea discovered that a university near where they lived was going to be building a computer. She jumped at the opportunity to help, and was hired. Although the family now worked with less money, as Franz was a teacher, they managed. Franz wasn’t necessarily interested in the big clunky machines, but he had to admit they were intriguing.

In 1976, Franz decided to come to visit his wife at work. She was the head of the team at the computer lab, and showed Franz that her computer could process even physics problems and evaluate them. Very intrigued, Franz ran home and showed Antea his massive equation, the one he had been working on. The computer could take months to process it, but Franz was very happy to have help. In two months, the computer not only processed Franz’s equation but provided the answer that he had been trying to find for 12 years. It gave both Antea and Franz moderate attention in the scientific community. Franz began to work with computers as well, Antea being a better teacher of computers than Franz was in physics.

Later that month, two agents in suits came knocking on Franz’s door. They said they represented a government project so secret not even the President knew nothing about it. It was called “Project Carthage” and was an attempt to disrupt Soviet communications using computer sciences. They wanted Franz, now an expert in computers and physics, to be its civilian leader. It was not a request.

Franz told Antea that he had been offered a job in Paris and he had accepted. When Antea asked how he would get there, he said the train, and that luckily it didn’t start until after noon, so there would be plenty of time to get there. In reality, he took the train to an airport and a helicopter from there to an old factory in Paris, near his aunt, uncle, and mother’s old house. He left at six in the morning and got to Paris at nine, and from then until five PM, he would work on this Project Carthage, the leader of its civilian team.

There were about two dozen or so civilians on the team, all experts in computers or other relevant fields. There were also five military officers and the two government agents. While Franz lead the civilians, the actual leader was Commander W. Schaffer. They all worked on trying to use a network of computers across Europe to disrupt Soviet communications, with different methods as time went on. By the early eighties, the Cold War was just starting to wane, and there was a new American president, Ronald Reagan. However, in 1982, something happened that would change Franz’s life forever. Antea gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, the child they had always wanted. They decided to name the little girl Aelita.

Franz was now juggling Project Carthage and his baby daughter. Luckily, the military officers were the ones truly in charge and were family men, understanding of Franz’s plight. He would work from nine until two, but with a decrease in pay. Franz didn’t necessarily mind, as the salary was still wonderful, the equivalent of $120,000 per year.

Aelita was a very cute girl, with pink hair like her mother’s and stunning emerald green eyes like her father’s. She had been born in July, and her personality seemed to emulate the season she was born in, she was bright and warm. Antea was incredibly happy; she had always wanted a daughter. She was also pleased that Franz was such a dedicated father, loving, caring and even willing to take a pay decrease. Her job was becoming both easier and more complicated, as computers decreased in size and could hold more data, but the use of them became more complicated with different, complex components. She was a very happy woman, and would be so for four years, as would Franz and little Aelita.

However, one rainy night, Antea was driving home from a late night at work. She was on a busy highway and there was a semi-truck next to her. At it seemed, the highway construction budget was low that year, and there was a rather large pothole in the road in front of the semi. The driver, slightly drunk, violently swerved to avoid it and slid on the road. The truck flipped over onto its side- on top of Antea. She felt no pain, it was all over for her in an instant.

Franz was very nervous and pacing in his living room, his wife was three hours late. Aelita was still awake, patiently waiting for mommy to get home to give her a good-night kiss. Franz heard a knocking on the door and opened it. “Antea?” He asked, but instead saw two police officers, who had their heads bowed. “Mr. Hopper, your wife’s care was found on the highway flattened by an overturned semi. We… are very sorry for your loss.” It was at that point that Franz burst into tears. “Mommy?” Aelita asked, but saw only her crying father and solemn police officers. She understood and hugged her father tightly, crying with him.

Franz could no longer bear to live in the home he had shared with his wife for 22 years out of their 28 year marriage. With Aelita, he moved back to the town of Boulogne-Billancourt. He found a job at his old school and built a new house in the forest, calling the house “The Hermitage”. He was now much closer to his job, which was beginning to get very complicated. The Internet was just beginning to be released on the public scene, although Project Carthage had many computers across Europe, even in the Soviet Bloc, that had been exchanging data for years, and even blocking electrical communications by overriding the wires they used, a moderate success. However, this Internet could completely circumvent Project Carthage’s hard work, the entire international project that had cost billions of dollars and had employed hundreds of people across the globe. The military commanders decided to create designs for a massive main node computer for the network that could possibly trace communications all across this Internet, but the plans were abandoned.

Over the next few years, the Cold war began to wane more and more. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and it was all over. Franz, however, was horrified to discover that Project Carthage planned to continue, even though Russia was no longer an enemy. It was that day that Franz decided to end the project once and for all, before Project Carthage was discovered and caused an actual war, now that it was the actual aggressor.

Franz found the old plans for the main processing node and decided to work on them. Below the lab, Franz began to build it, saying that it could further the project. The commanders, now corrupt, were fooled and financed it fully. In three years, he had finished it, the Carthage Main Processing Node, otherwise known simply the Supercomputer. Franz mistakenly programmed it with the electrical overriding system of the other computers, but decides to leave it in, not worried that it could be corrupted.

One summer day, Franz Hopper wakes up. It was the 50th anniversary of D-Day, June 6th, 1994. He went to work, his students restless for the very close last-day-of-school, including his own daughter. He arrives home and plays the piano until his daughter gets home. They have dinner and she went up to her room and Franz went to his laboratory. It was his final testing day for the Carthage Main Processing Node, and while running a scan, discovers that he has inadvertently invented a device, an impossible device, a device that can rewind time itself.

For the next 2,546 days, Franz works, destroying the remnants of Project Carthage by corrupting the aging computers with viruses of his own design, spread on the network from the Main Node, the Supercomputer. However, one aspect remained, the core programming installed in the Supercomputer itself, a manifestation in the memory core. Franz creates Lyoko, a virtual world in the memory core to hopefully override the manifestation, but the virtual codes simply merge, making Carthage part of Lyoko itself. Temporarily giving up, and losing his sanity day by day, Franz redesigns Lyoko to be a paradise for him and his daughter where he and Aelita can be the absolute rulers. Then, in a last ditch effort, he finds an old virus and installs it in the Supercomputer, unaware that it becomes more and more powerful, eventually reaching sentience. XANA was born. All of this, approximately seven years, happened in the actual time span of one day: June 6th, 1994.

On the 2,546th June 6th, after work, Franz hears his daughter confirm his paranoid suspicions. “Daddy, the Men in Black are here.” Knowing that they would all along, Franz says “I know.” They flee to his laboratory and Franz starts up the process to take him and his daughter to Lyoko. “Where are we going?” Aelita asks, confusingly stepping into a scanner. “To a world where you and I can be safe. Forever. See you in a minute, honey.”

“See you in a minute, daddy.”

You know the rest of the story.