L.Y.O.K.O. - "New Order" Analysis

The second season of Code L.Y.O.K.O. brought about many changes in comparison to the first. Jeremy and XANA became much more competitive in nature; a love triangle formed between Ulrich, Yumi, and a new character named William Dunbar; and Aelita became an officially enrolled student at Kadic Academy. Notable changes include:

New Software: Jeremy manages to program three new vehicles for the LYOKO Warriors - the Overboard, Overbike, and Overwing. He also creates a realtime tower activation alert system as an improvement to the alert system we saw in "Big Bug."

New Monsters: XANA responds to the new vehicles by producing a new monster - the Tarantula. This monster can move and attack faster, with more powerful dual cannons. It took just one to wipe out Odd, Yumi and Ulrich (though they figured out countermeasures in repeated combat).

A New Setting: Aelita discovers an abandoned house known as "The Hermitage." Upon entering, she is subject to a series of psychic visions which leads her to believe she may have been to that house before. This would suggest that she may be human after all. The Hermitage is also a stronghold of XANA, who routinely uses it to set traps and hide essential information from the LYOKO Warriors.

The Question: Are virtual worlds such as LYOKO capable of having their own versions of the Military-Industrial Complex?

L.Y.O.K.O. - "False Start" Analysis

"Code: Earth" and "False Start" are the two-part finale of the first season of Code: L.Y.O.K.O. After Aelita is finally materialized on Earth, it's found that she's still linked to the supercomputer through a virus XANA embedded in her. Furthermore, using Jeremy's materialization codes, XANA can transport LYOKO monsters to Earth and cause havoc.

The Question: Has XANA been exploiting Aelita this whole time?

XANA was forced into dormancy until the moment Jeremy activated the supercomputer. Perceiving Aelita as a threat, it attacked her first even before it began calculating ways to interface with the real world. Believing that Jeremy was the only one who knew of the factory, it chose him as the first target. As more people got involved, it targeted them as well.

XANA may not have initially realized that the only reason Jeremy didn't shut the supercomputer back down is because of his attraction to Aelita. Picking up on that, however, it starts to attack Aelita with less intensity, and attack the LYOKO warriors with greater intensity. "Ghost Channel" demonstrated this the most by XANA setting a trap specifically for Jeremy, the only one who could virtualize people into LYOKO. At no point did it send monsters to attack Aelita during the incident (the final swarm of cubes only showed up after the intermediate space was destroyed).

And another thing: once Aelita was materialized, XANA did not immediately destroy the scanners which would have inhibited Aelita from returning to LYOKO (remember, only Aelita can deactivate towers). Apparently, it needs Aelita to remain on LYOKO for some reason. If it needs Aelita on LYOKO, then its "attacks" were never meant to kill her to begin with. So, what was it trying to accomplish?

Thankfully, Season 2 should help us begin to answer that.

L.Y.O.K.O. - "Ghost Channel" Analysis

In "Ghost Channel," a fierce battle erupts between XANA's forces and the LYOKO Warriors. The latter being successful, the tower is deactivated and Jeremy launches a return to the past. However, at the last second, XANA pulls Ulrich, Odd and Yumi into intermediate space, trapping them and making them think they returned to Earth when they clearly hadn't.

The real Jeremy virtualizes himself to enter the intermediate space, and a standoff occurs between him and XANA-Jeremy. By demonstrating that XANA is not infallible, the real Jeremy is able to protect his friends until Aelita can destroy the intermediate space.

The Question: Can an Artificial Intelligence understand and apply motive?

This was our first true glimpse into how XANA's mind worked. XANA understood that Odd, Ulrich and Yumi were the most powerful targets, but that if they were killed, Jeremy would shut down the supercomputer immediately (even if that meant sacrificing Aelita). Instead, it lured Jeremy into intermediate space in an attempt to take out all four simultaneously.

Even with the other three slowly figuring out that the world was somehow altered, XANA only set its sights on Jeremy at first, sending feral copies of Jim, Nicholas and Herve to deal with the "visitor." This fails, and he comes face to face with the real one in the "factory." A verbal standoff ensues where XANA's logic begins to fall completely apart.

L.Y.O.K.O. - "Killer Music" Analysis

The Attack: Odd ends up in a comatose state after listening to an MP3 laced with a unique and destructive subchannel. It is revealed that XANA leaked the corrupted file. With no way to counter, it's a race to deactivate the tower before the killer music goes global.

The Question: How can music be used to control the brain?

The mechanism used in the context of this episode was an auditory signal which told the human brain to slow down the circulatory system. While we do not know if that is possible, we do know that music activates certain neurotransmitters in the brain, leading to physiological effects as chemical levels in the body are altered.

We can make at least two hypotheses as to why the "killer music" served to put people in a coma:

1. The music delivered a frequency which caused excessive neural firing in the brain to bring about extensive damage. The characters subjected to the music appeared to have a severe migraine seconds before falling into a coma, which indicates physical overstimulation of the reticular formation in the brain (particularly the reticular activating system). Once the RF had been successfully overloaded, it would shut down, causing the victim to fall into a sleep-like coma due to inability to respond to external stimuli.
2. The music delivered a frequency which told the brain to produce incorrect amounts of acetylcholine, preventing the heart from contracting normally. The heart and blood vessels continued to slow down, causing the victim to pass out from inadequate oxygen getting to the brain.

Of course, there are many other ideas which would be acceptable conjecture, and we may never fully understand how such incidents are made to happen. Still, it is rather fascinating and when used in a more noble light, music could become the next wonder drug by allowing the body to optimize itself naturally.

L.Y.O.K.O. - "Swarming Attack" Analysis

The Attack (Real World): Prior to this, XANA attempted to use chemicals to control the thought processes of rodents, using a swarm of them to attack Kadic Academy. This time, the AI uses that same chemical on hornets, calculating that the improved maneuverability and ability to create hives everywhere will make them tougher to repel.

The Counterattack: Jeremy, privy to the science of entomology, uses smell and sound to repel the bugs.

The Defense (LYOKO): XANA responds with multiple waves of hornets protecting the activated tower in the forest sector, using defensive flight patterns to stall for time.

The Question: Is there a point at which resource multiplication loses its efficiency?

L.Y.O.K.O. - "Big Bug" Analysis

The Attack (Real World): XANA's newest Tower activation scrambles packet transmissions across the internet, preventing communication from occurring between servers at various infrastructure buildings all over France. The exceptions are the ones specifically controlling the French rail system, which it takes full control of and remotely locks. Manipulating the track configuration, it sends trains 3611 and 9432 onto the same rail. Train 3611 is a convoy containing toxic chemicals.

The Counterattack: Prior to the attack, Jeremy sets up a threat assessment alert system which goes off whenever a Class Six or higher non-natural threat is discovered. Once active, it picks up an independent livestream of the impending incident. Unfortunately, due to a communication breakdown within the group, precious time is wasted getting Ulrich and Yumi to LYOKO.

The Defense (LYOKO): While the two trains have slowed down slightly (the 26 minute window increasing to around 44 minutes), XANA protects the tower with four cube monsters. Odd eventually arrives on LYOKO, but if XANA's last monster (a megatank) can hold out for eight minutes, it's game over for the entire region.

The Question: How do you communicate when communication itself is lost?

XANA's plan was pretty ingenious and actually required no program modification on the trains themselves.It is very likely that any changes in routing were done from the station mainframe and directly copied to the short term memory of each train, all in realtime. It would not matter if the trains were on the same track because with no means of mutual detection (communication being cut off), there would be no need for safety features to deploy. It would all look like a tragic accident.

In reality, there is a similar technique which brings about the same loss of server communication, though instead of misplacing packets, it just sends a bunch of extraneous and wasteful ones until communication is overloaded. I'm talking about a Denial of Service Attack (more info here courtesy of PBS). In fact, a global scale Denial of Service Attack actually occurred in 2013, causing widespread unease as people began to wonder if the miniature protections of our critical infrastructure could really be effective at all in that situation.

Above all else, what is important to consider is that we use the internet to tell devices when to start certain processes; therefore, we must also use the internet to tell those devices when to stop. Starting and stopping at the wrong times can and will trigger significant consequences.

What we need, then, is a secondary communication line which cannot be overloaded with traffic.

L.Y.O.K.O. - "Seeing Is Believing" Analysis

The Attack (Real World): XANA activates a tower and uses it to collect electricity, storing it in a transformer near the Academy. The power level hits 400,000 volts by the afternoon and continues to rise. Its target is a nearby nuclear power plant which, if contacted by the rogue voltage, would overload all security and cooldown systems, triggering a full scale reactor spike and explosion. All attempts to neutralize the circuits manually are blocked.

The Counter-Attack: Yumi and Ulrich vote for alerting the authorities to XANA's nuclear sabotage. Jeremy and Odd vote against, but to break the tie, Aelita votes for. Yumi heads to the surface while Odd and Ulrich enter LYOKO to transport Aelita to the tower.

The Defense (LYOKO): The activated tower is in the desert sector of LYOKO, camouflaged by the terrain (a false lake acting as a veil). The physical tower is also guarded by three crabs, one of which neutralizes Odd immediately. Ulrich must destroy all three crabs before being taken out, or Aelita is doomed, along with all of Europe.

The Question: Just how safe is our critical infrastructure?

Code L.Y.O.K.O. - "XANA Awakens" - Series Overview

Code L.Y.O.K.O. is in a peculiar category as far as animation goes, straddling all sorts of boundaries. It was produced by Moonscoop in France, combined hand-drawn 2D with three-dimensional CGI, and was marketed as a sci-fi drama with slice-of-life and romance elements.

Jeremy Belpois is an 8th grader at Kadic Academy in France. One day, while searching for robot parts in an abandoned factory, he discovered a supercomputer with three scanners and a massive terminal. This terminal allows him to view a three-dimensional rendering of the virtual world known as LYOKO. More interestingly, he meets a young girl living in the virtual world and suffering from some form of amnesia.

Other major characters were are introduced to are the cool and sarcastic Ulrich Stern, the snooty and sarcastic Elizabeth Delmas, the quirky and energetic Odd Della Robbia, the disciplined and mature Yumi Ishiyama, and countless other students and faculty within the walls of the Academy.