Reboot_

Written by_

AmericanLyokoTeam_

Thanks for a brilliant world to play with:_

Moonscoop_

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their_ respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author_ is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No_ copyright infringement is intended_

***

“He did what now?” Jeremie asked, looking over the rims of his eyeglasses.

“Punched the guy! Twice! Jim had to come over and hold him to get him to stop thrashing the guy.” Odd exclaimed, his face an unreadable mix of expressions.

“Sheesh, there’s reacting to the wrong thing being said and then there’s Ulrich.”

Odd flopped down on the stark cafeteria chair and began liberally helping himself to Jeremie’s food. “The worst part is his dad is supposed to come here tomorrow. If he finds out about this, it’s game over.”

Aelita got out of line with a tray and moved to join them, taking her seat she slapped Odd’s hand away from Jeremie’s tray. “I heard part of that, what happened again?”

“Jolviet, you know, from science class, was running his mouth on a little too much about Ulrich not looking out for his teammates in gym, and knucklehead decided to settle the score with his fists.” Odd attempted to sneak another bite, but rebuked again by Aelita, he left to grab a tray for himself. She nudged Jeremie “Have we seen Yumi today?”

“I saw her going to class earlier, but publicly no.”

Aelita looked saddened “They’re getting worse.”

“Huh? Well, maybe.”

“No, I’m sure, Jeremie. Ulrich fighting over nothing, Yumi’s withdrawing, I’m not sure about Odd, and as for us….”

“It sounds pretty dire when you put it like that.”

She smiled mysteriously “Well, if our little test today works, I may have a plan.”

“Mister Stern, I’m terribly disappointed and angry with you. This isn’t even the first time you’ve been involved in such an incident. I know from the police how concerned you and your friends are since Dunbar’s running away but there is absolutely no excuse for this kind of behavior. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Ulrich tried to avoid eye contact with the headmaster, looking at the supplies on his desk or the books on the new back shelf of the office. He bit his tongue to avoid saying anything to get himself in any more trouble.

“I won’t expel you for this, but neither will I try to convince your father of doing otherwise when he arrives tomorrow. You are suspended from classes until further notice.”

“Yes, sir.” Ulrich replied, finally looking directly into his superior’s face.

Ulrich motioned to the waiting Jim that he was ready to leave for his room, but as they were walking out, principal Delmas called him back briefly. “Stern, as he was one my charges too, I sincerely hope they find Dunbar safe and well.”

Ulrich just turned and closed his eyes, fumbling around the corner or the door.

As they winded their way through the halls, Jim took the opportunity to lecture Ulrich himself. “You know, I can’t be spending my time breaking up trouble like this Stern. I have a responsibility to the other students to be at my peak as a Gym teacher, and I can’t do that when I have to pull out my old training as a Nightclub Bouncer and break up fights the hard way.”

“Sorry Jim, I lost my cool when I shouldn’t have. Nightclub Bouncer, huh?”

“A sordid chapter of my life I’d rather not talk about. Nevertheless, I can’t believe Dunbar alone is responsible for your behavior. I haven’t forgotten that the last time you were pulled in here for fighting it was with him!”

Ulrich stuck his hands in his jean pockets as he was apt to doing, and looked down at the ground as they continued on.

“My father, guess it’s no secret to anybody what I think of him.”

“No it isn’t, but I can sympathize. Why my father was a bear of a man, and- and I’d rather not discuss that either. Just get it sorted Stern, you can’t keep acting like this or headmaster Delmas will expel you one of these times. Well, here we are.”

Ulrich opened the door and walked in, feeling a little calmer.

“Hey Jim, for what it’s worth thanks for stopping me, and for listening.”

“Errr, sure, no problem Stern, it’s my job.” Jim strode off looking oddly pleased with himself.

“I wish they all could have been here for this. It’s not exactly the light of Lyoko, but it will give us something back.”

Aelita crossed her fingers and took Jeremie’s hand as he lifted the switch on the towering dull frame of the supercomputer. As he depressed it again, electricity surged in and primed the system to being generating power from the nuclear battery. The supercomputer began to glow as latent energy flowed through the super conducting gold material that formed most of the body.

The surge of it all created quite a gust and left Jeremie and Aelita looking windblown. Pushing up his glasses, by habit, Jeremie started to think out loud. “Reboot after a complete shutdown. Last time that happened I-”

“Come on, let’s go see if it works” Aelita insisted, snapping him out of it.

The heavy secure doors began to close with their usual slow absolute force, and Jeremie leaned against the back wall.

“You know, if this does work XANA won’t have a way to touch our supercomputer.” He tapped his temple “Advantages to writing your own quantum based software.”

“You really think that will give us an advantage?”

“Until he forges a rival system, it will surely give us some kind of leg up.”

The elevator stopped again and with a hiss of pneumatics, the security doors of the lab began their methodical opening. As if representing the state of affairs on the computer below, the tracked chair still didn’t respond to their presence, and the holo-system displayed a sad empty sphere of white measurement marks.

Jeremie made his way to the console, and tapped a few keys hoping for some response. To his surprise the scan on the right panel was functioning and the center gave readout of the computer’s current processing capacity. Only a single bar filled the meter.

“No way!” he yelped in surprise “We really are geniuses, it worked the first time!”

Aelita hurried over to look over his shoulder. “You act surprised, between my father and the stranger, all the pieces were there already. Even some of the programs.”

“Nothing with computers works the first time, there are always bugs to be worked out.” He sighed. “I’m glad it’s doing this much, but we probably missed something else.”

She frowned, knowing he was probably correct. “Nothing to do then but start to test what functions we can.”

He typed keys, clearing the power capacity meter and bringing up a simple interface “Not a lot, right now. We have real world scanning capacity back since I kept that program, and thanks to Franz Hopper, return trips too.” He flipped back to the capacity meter. “It might as well be a binary computer right now, without all the previous phantom state qbytes lost, we need to run some returns to the past to start rebuilding the power.”

“Start with a short one, let’s be as careful as we can.”

“Right.” Jeremie assured her. He made a familiar command line gesture and hit enter with a smile of determination.

“Return to the past, now.”

“-and for listening.”

“Errr, sure, no problem Stern, it’s my job.” Jim strode off looking oddly pleased with himself.

The elevator doors to the supercomputer chamber opened and Jeremie quickly focused on the objective in front of him. He hardly noticed anything besides the switch until Aelita tapped his shoulder and pointed at the frame of the supercomputer.

“It’s already on?”

“That’s funny, I didn’t even-”

“Let’s go check it out in the lab.”

A short elevator ride later, Jeremie ran to the console with Aelita close behind.

“This is – impossible.” He scratched his head.

“Could it be XANA?” Aelita asked with worry on her voice.

“Doubtful, even if he got it running he would be hard pressed to break my new interface. He doesn’t have access to his own quantum technology yet, and he can’t just break it like binary electronics. That’s funny-”

He brought up the interface on the computer.

“- A simple note. ‘It worked the first time, no errors.’” Quickly flipping to the capacity meter the math began to add up in Jeremie’s brain.

“It was us!”

“Come again?” Aelita asked him, looking bemused.

“We must have turned it on and activated a return trip.”

“Wouldn’t we remember doing that?”

“We would… except the scanner functions were lost with Lyoko! Oh, it’s so obvious! The computer doesn’t have our scanner profiles stored anymore since all the information was lost.”

Aelita gave him a look questioning his leap that it was obvious, but relented “I guess that makes sense. Can we fix it?”

“I’m not about to try and write my own scanning program. It’s dangerous and above my head until we get more info from your father. Since the external scanner is working though, I can block off safe areas, I think.”

“Really? In that case I have a request.”

Odd flopped sat on his bed, his little dog fast on his heals. “So that worked well, huh?”

“Shut up, Odd. I don’t want to talk about it.” Ulrich said, face to the wall.

“offfff course not. I still kinda have to sleep here tonight though, so you might as well not face that wall the whole time.”

Ulrich turned around and jumped off his bed.

“What, you gonna hit me now?” Odd asked.

Ulrich grimaced and clenched his fists “Are you trying to make me?”

Odd stood up and leaned in, with his best serious face “Frankly if that’s what it takes to make you see something’s wrong, I’ll make the sac-”

Ulrich’s mobile buzzed, interrupting the collision of wills. He rolled his eyes and answered. “Yeah? Aelita? No, I don’t feel like it.” He hung up and collapsed back down onto his bed. Odd’s phone rang a second later, much to his amusement. “Hi Aelita. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll get him. Really? Ok, see you there.”

Ulrich rolled his eyes. “I don’t care if it’s the end of the world, I’m not going.”

“Yeah you are, because we’re going to keep time jumping and apparently you won’t remember a thing unless you come with me. It’ll just eat at you that I can come say whatever I want and you’d never remember it.” Odd said with an evil grin.

“That’s stupid Odd? Why wouldn’t I?”

“If you’d listened to Aelita, you’d know things aren’t working like they were. Did you know apparently we’ve already jumped back twice this morning?”

Maybe just out of luck, curiosity briefly won out over anger, and Ulrich sat back up. “Twice, huh? You serious?”

“Makes you appreciate what it must be like for everybody else huh? If you decide to avoid it, you can come to the Hermitage.”

Odd was hardly out the door before Ulrich settled his decision.

“What changed your mind? It couldn’t have been my bad jokes and needling, right?”

“Hah, get over yourself. I just figured if I have to keep a secret I might as well know what the secret is.”

Odd let his declaration stand as they rushed to the nearest door to make their way off campus.

“She didn’t take much convincing” Jeremie shrugged. “She’s not avoiding us on purpose. She’s not doing much of anything on purpose it seems like.”

Yumi was napping on the dilapidated couch behind them, as Jeremie and Aelita sat around a table surface lying on the floor, long since deprived of it’s legs.

Aelita looked saddened glancing in Yumi’s direction “I wish there was anything I could do to help her. I think I figured out what it was, but…”

“She feels responsible for William because she knew him best and thought it was a bad idea to bring him in?”

“That’s perceptive of you” Aelita smiled “Considering sometimes-”

“Hey, I’m not always a dunce around people just, it doesn’t always make sense” Jeremie fiddled with his hands.

“There’s more too though. She was considering accepting something more from him.”

“Huh, I don’t see that.” Jeremie frowned

“Oh yeah, just think of the way she’s been acting around Ulrich. We were all so sure they were going to say something for a time there. Then suddenly they start making snippy remarks about being good friends?”

“Ugh, they can be so complicated. I know it’s just their personalities but they could avoid a lot of it if they would just talk.”

“Anyway, my point being even though she didn’t love him deeply, she was certainly letting him into her life, seeing past his flaws. Maybe she just appreciated the directness with which he made advances. It would be a welcome change.”

Odd opened the door and strode in smiling, a dragging Ulrich in tow.

“Hey gang!” he announced with some volume, rousing Yumi. “So it’s just like a campout huh? Who brought marshmallows?”

Half awake, even Yumi couldn’t help but smile a little at Odd’s lighthearted demeanor.

“Don’t worry, Odd, we brought some food and all.” Jeremie motioned at his bag.

“So anywhere in this building is fine?”

“If we set everything up right, yeah. I think Aelita is more qualified to explain why we set it up this way.”

All eyes were on Aelita, and she held her jaw in hand, striking a very thoughtful pose. She paused for a moment trying to muster what it was she had to say, and took a few paces away from the couch.

“I can’t think of any good way to put it. Ever since XANA destroyed Lyoko, you’ve all been getting worse in your own way. It hurts me to see you all tearing off into your own little worlds. Then I remembered the very first night after, when we had almost lost all hope. I spoke to you about strength and not giving in. That night, here in my father’s house, we all slept easily. I don’t know if anything can fix the way things have become, or your problems, but I do hope I can give you back some of that hope.” She lowered her head and let her eyes to the floor. “It sounded stupid and cheesy didn’t it?”

There was a moment of silence as her words settled on the room like the dust that covered all the old surfaces.

“No, it didn’t” Odd said, suddenly serious. “Hear, hear princess. Thanks for watching out for us.”

Ulrich, who had come to rest against the leg of the couch, gave a salute. “I guess I lost track of what was important a little, didn’t I?”

“Par for the course, good buddy” Odd laughed, as though trying to tempt fate again.

Yumi didn’t speak, but her earnest smile conveyed anything she could have said. Jeremie’s gave a thumbs up to Aelita, and then proceeded to explain the technical side. “The supercomputer is going to execute a series of returns to the past. We lost the scanner profiles, which is why you don’t remember the two that already occurred today, but anybody here or at the factory will be immune. Think of it as a vacation.”

“Now see, this is all the benefits of technology without the downsides of a psychotic AI trying to attack you.” Odd smiled. “I think I’ll be exploring the Attic of this grand old place if anybody needs me.” He waved over his shoulder heading out to the hall.

“I want to watch the sun set a few times.” Aelita announced, tugging Jeremie’s sleeve and leading him out of the room, a smile on her face that nobody could see from behind.

Only Ulrich and Yumi were left, not exactly comfortable in silence, but not awkward either. For a while they simply sat, her on the Couch, Ulrich on the floor leaning against the arm. Finally he turned around, and their eyes met for a brief second before he felt the need to look away foreword again. It might have gone on, but something Odd had said before came into his head and he took a deep breath.

“So.” He paused not sure what to say.

“So.” She answered. “Been having some bad days?”

“Yeah. You too huh?”

“Yeah.”

They sat looking away again for a minute.

Yumi broke the silence “What Aelita had to say made a lot of sense. About looking to hope for the future working out.”

Ulrich didn’t meet her gaze “We owe it to them to keep our wits, don’t we?”

“We owe it to ourselves too, and…” she trailed off.

Odd’s half finished sentence again rang in Ulrich’s head and he reached out took her hand “eachother?”

Yumi blushed “Yes.” Her face was mess of conflict however, and finally she cried out “Ulrich, I can’t, not now.”

He pulled his hand back and reddened up a little at the foolishness of his own actions. “Right, that was dumb, I’m sorry.”

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“But – that doesn’t mean we have to be just friends forever, all right?”

Yumi couldn’t see it, with him facing the other way, but Ulrich was grinning, “I’ll look with hope to the future working out then. Keep yourself together in the meantime, huh?”

“You too.”

Odd burst in waving an official looking envelope, and both of them tried to look as though they were intently interesting in opposite sides of the room.

“Hey, you’ll never guess what I found up there. An old trunk was full of notes and documents. And-” He stopped the survey “Did I miss something?”

“No.” Ulrich said flatly “What’d you find again?”

Odd flatly placed the old sealed sheathe on the table surface. “Apparently Old notes by or about Franz Hopper. I gotta get Jeremie and Aelita, hang on.” Odd turned to run out of the room.

“We’re not going anywhere.” Yumi told him, interrupting his stride just for a moment as he stopped and regarded her with confusion. “Huh.” He continued, quickly out the door and was back moments later practically dragging Jeremie.

“What, you’ll have to go get it again in 30 seconds after the return to the past.”

“At least look at it.”

Jeremie examined the envelope.

“Huh. Project Carthage?”