The room is pitch black. But we can hear faint footsteps coming closer and closer. We also start to hear someone groaning.

Franz: “just waking up Ugh…Where am I?”

Unknown Man: “Dr. Hopper, I’m surprised. You mean you don’t recognize the same place you have been working in for the past 10 years?”

Suddenly a bright spotlight turns on and is pointed directly at Franz. We see him tied up to a chair in a very familiar room. As we pan around to see the other character in the room, we recognize this room as the scanner room. We take a good look at the other person in the room. He is around 6 foot tall, well built, and is wearing an army uniform. His medals indicate he is a general. We obviously don’t recognize him, but Franz does. His name is General Brassard.

Franz: gasps as he sees who he is “But why? Why am I tied up?”

Brassard: “You don’t remember what the original mission of this project was?”

He sits down at a chair across from Franz

Brassard: “Project Carthage was designed to spy on opposing countries without them finding out. XANA was to protect your ‘’Aelita’’ while she retrieved secret data from the other countries. But you had to go and get too attached and jeopardized the whole plan!”

As he said this, Franz had a flashback. He remembered back to the day’s when he was working on project Carthage under the command of General Brassard. When the original designs were being made, the whole group had decided on making it a partnered system. XANA would hold off outside probes while a second AI would retrieve the data that they were after. They designed the whole system to be run from a virtual world so that they would get a more “human” interface to the data.

Towards the end of the construction of this system, they still had not decided on codenames for the retrieval AI and the virtual world. One scientist had come up with the name “Lyoko” for the virtual world. He was put in charge of its design. But they still had not found a name for the AI. After a few minutes of brainstorming, Franz had decided on a name. He decided on “Aelita” after his daughter who had died just a few years before in a terrible attack on France by the nearby country of Germany. This was the same reason that inspired Franz to join the military. With that decision, Franz was put in charge of Aelita’s design.

After a few months of work, Franz had finally finished Aelita’s design. It was a spitting image of his daughter. An old friend of his, whom was assigned to Lyoko’s design, understood completely why he had chosen to design the AI after has daughter.

So that was it. Project Carthage had finally went into effect. For the next 5 years, Project Carthage had done its job and done it well. Anytime a probe attempted to enter Lyoko from the outside, XANA soon had a monster there to destroy it. Meanwhile, Aelita was effortlessly retrieving important plans and designs from opposing countries. France and allies were virtually invincible.

But over the years of working on the project, Franz had soon discovered how much he missed his daughter. He soon began to forget that the Aelita he saw in Lyoko was simply a computer program. But he didn’t care. He had talked to his friends about bringing Aelita out of Lyoko to live with him. He had already worked on a proper materialization program previously to do the job. They all agreed as they had all the information they needed for a finishing attack on Germany so Project Carthage wasn’t needed any more. And General Brassard was no longer involved with the project so it was just Franz, John, and David.

He had just begun plans to materialize Aelita, but had one modification. He would erase any and all memories of her being used for the military’s purposes. He had the materialization program set. It was timed to activate in exactly 1 minute. As it counted down, the 3 made their way down to the scanner room to meet Aelita. The recognizable sounds of the scanner now materializing Aelita could be heard. After a few moments, it stopped. The scanner door opened and soon expelled a large cloud of steam. As the steam cleared, they spotted Aelita huddled in the bottom of the scanner. Filled with joy and with the shift almost over, Franz helped Aelita up and proceeded to take her home to his house at the Hermitage.

Much to Franz’s surprise, Aelita had become as much of a child as any other. She no longer had any memories of Lyoko.

But little did they know was that 3 years down the road, after France had already signed a peace treaty with Germany, their military had found out about France’s previous hacks into their database. Despite the peace treaty, a rogue agent on the inside decided it was payback time. He had programmed a special virus which would attack the source of the system they called XANA.

The plan worked. The virus was inside Lyoko. Under any other circumstances, XANA would have already taken care of this intruder, but his original purpose was to protect Aelita. Since Aelita was no longer in Lyoko, he had nothing to protect. The virus proceeded to make its way around Lyoko at great speed till it found its way to the core: Sector 5. The virus had morphed into a dark bipedal form and proceeded to access the data interface at Sector 5. Within minutes, the interface had displayed “Virus planted” and with that, the Virus’s mission was done. It had disappeared no longer to be seen.

Then Franz had ended his flashback.

Brassard: “When you removed Aelita from Lyoko, XANA dropped his guard due to nothing to protect. Someone from the outside managed to infect it and that is what caused the recent attacks around here.”

Franz: “But. What? How did you know? I thought you were no longer involved with the project?”

Brassard: “That’s what I wanted you to think. Over the years, I noticed how attached you got to Aelita. So I had sorted out a plan with the higher up’s to keep a better eye on you and your colleagues. Under normal circumstances, we would not have objected to you overseeing Aelita’s development, but when we noticed what damaged it caused to XANA, we had to take action against this. This is why you are here.”

Franz: “But I had no idea that XANA would slack off.”

Brassard: “That is your problem. Now to take care of you.”

After a moment, he pulled a walkie talkie type device out of his pocket.

Brassard: speaks into device “Ready.”

On the other end we hear a voice saying “Roger”. Then all of a sudden, all the lights came on in the room and the doors on the scanners proceeded to open. At this time, Brassard pushed Franz, chair and all, into one of the scanner’s. He entered the elevator and proceeded to the control room. Franz sat there dumbfounded as to what was going on. He couldn’t really do anything as he was tied up. We see Brassard back in the control room.

Brassard: “Now how do I work this thing?”

He soon starts tapping keys as he is confused on how to work the computer. Soon enough the virtualization process is started. But due to no profile being made for Franz, the virtualization malfunctioned with Franz never to be seen again. Satisfied with his work, Brassard called his cohort.

Brassard: “All clear.”

His cohort could be heard saying “Roger”. Soon all the lights went out and the super computer went blank...