Deletion

Deletion, also called Eternal Virtualization, occurs when any entity such as an avatar, monster or vehicle comes into contact with the Digital Sea. The DNA and coding of any human that falls into the Digital Sea is then dropped by the qubits of the Supercomputer, spreading the DNA and coding for the entity's virtual shell across the network into many millions of parts, effectively killing them.

It is one of the things most feared by the Lyoko Warriors. Many close calls have been had, with Yumi being the first one who has ever fell into it in Cruel Dilemma. She was saved by Jeremie's one-shot devirtualization program which relocated, recompiled, and reconstructed Yumi's data, at the cost of Jeremie having to remake the program from scratch due to the it having been accidentally modified by Odd dropping candy on Jeremie's keyboard, making it unknowable what was used to correct the program.

Overview[]

When something falls into the Digital Sea, a glowing column of light emanates from the part of the Digital Sea which the object fell into. Falling into the Digital Sea would result in the deletion of the subject. The only exceptions to this effect are the Skidbladnir, X.A.N.A. William, Franz Hopper, and any type of monster designed specifically to live in the Digital Sea, such as Kongres, Sharks and Kalamar. Falling into the celestial dome in the exterior of Sector Five would have the same effects as falling into the Digital Sea.

Being devirtualized while the scanners are offline also causes deletion, as the security protocol that regulates forced devirtualization will not be overridden by any command. It will attempt to discharge the quantum memory in use holding the matter and brain activity of the person but upon realizing a scanner is disconnected, it will auto-dump the quibits being used to hold the massive amount of data ensuring deletion. However, there has been shown to be one way to free someone from deletion: the person's DNA sequence must be located inside a Tower or in Sector Five, but before devirtualizing the person again, the scanners must be online. If the scanners are destroyed, the only way to bring them back to the real world is to launch a return to the past.

In Distant Memory, Aelita was thrown into the Digital Sea, and the white column of light was seen, meaning that she was deleted. However, Franz Hopper brought her back onto the surface sctor, which concludes that Franz Hopper is able to reconstruct an avatar after they have fallen into the Digital Sea.

Deletion can also occur to non-living objects, such as data or surfaces of sectors or even the virtual worlds themselves, by the means of anyone at the Factory Interface or X.A.N.A. voluntarily deleting the object in question. Deletion can also be involuntary, such as the destruction of a replika, in which the destruction of the supercomputer hosting it means that the replika cannot exist because there is nothing to contain the data.

X.A.N.A. used his own code to delete sectors of Lyoko in Season 3. In some episodes, when the supercomputer is damaged or inactive, parts of or the entire sector of Lyoko would disappear, such as in Common Interest where Ulrich and Odd nearly fell into the Digital Sea because the nuclear battery powering the supercomputer was dying and the Ice Sector was erasing itself, and in False Lead where the X.A.N.A. possessed man in black was trying to fry the circuits of supercomputer, which caused parts of the Ice Sector or the pathways in the Mountain Sector to disappear randomly, same with the vehicles.

Things that are projected using towers, such as specters, will disappear if the tower generating them is deactivated. However, if the specter manages to be virtualized on Lyoko before the tower generating it is deactivated, it will be able to sustain itself as the tower is only needed to generate them outside of the Supercomputer.