An hour or so later (despite the fact that Ash was reading the map Nurse Joy had provided and Misty had needed to drag Brock away from Officer Jenny when passing the police station) the trainers were coming up to the home of Professor Sinclare, who lived on the outskirts of Dioton. The structure was very large and fancy, three stories high and at least twice as wide, so it was obvious that Sinclare had a lot of money. There were large brick walls surrounding the property, and a huge opening in front that had large steel gates, but the paint on the brick walls was badly cracking, and what foliage could be seen past the iron bars of the gates was completely out of control. Clearly, though Sinclare wanted an expensive house, he didn't take very good care of it.

         "Looks like we're here." Ash spoke up after comparing the mansion to the sketch on the map. "Let's go!" He put the paper away in his pocket, and began to hurry to the house in the distance, with Pikachu still firmly clamped upon his head.

         Misty couldn't help but smirk. "Wow. Nurse Joy must be really good at making maps easy to read if Ash could find his way here on the first try."

         "Yeah." Brock smiled, and followed Ash to the structure ahead.

        There was no call button on either side of the iron gate like what some rich people had, so the trainers would have had no way to ask permission to come in. Not that it mattered- Ash didn't think to look for one and went straight for the gate. Sinclare had forgotten to add a lock to the gate at all, so Ash was able to open them and run right through to the house, which as it turned out was also unlocked.

         This act was, of course, quite rash, and Misty and Brock knew it. Both gasped, gave out calls for Ash to wait, and followed as fast as they could. By the time Ash did slow down and the others caught up, all three were already well within the house.

         "Huh? What is it?" Ash asked as the others caught their breath. "Why'd you tell me to stop?"

         Upon breathing in enough, Misty glared at the younger trainer. "You idiot! We can't just be barging in here without permission!"

        "But how are we supposed to ask him if he's in here and we're out there?" Ash asked, scratching his head.

         Misty blinked. She hadn't noticed anything similar to a call button or doorbell outside, though she'd not had much time to look for one. She frowned.

        Darn you, Ash! Why does your stupidity have to actually make sense for a change?

         Ash stood there looking at her, smirking. Misty had been mocking him so much since they'd started travelling together, and he couldn't help but return the favor. "What's the matter? How would you suggest we ask, hm?"

         Misty glared at him harder than before, but only for a second, and then her expression changed drastically. She suddenly looked as if she'd seen a ghost.

         "Huh? What's up?" Ash asked, dropping the mocking tone upon noticing the change.

         "B-b-b-behind y-y-you... .. ."

         Ash looked at Misty for a moment, frowning and then looked to see the same sort of expression as hers on Brock's face. But it was Pikachu shifting around on his back and suddenly letting out a nervous "P-pikaaaa...." that finally convinced Ash to turn around at what everyone was looking at.

         He came face to face with... a giant face! Floating in midair was a gigantic disembodied floating head, looking like Professor Sinclare's aside from being easily large enough to swallow any of the three trainers. And from its expression, it did not look happy.

         "INTRUDERS!!" It shouted, and then bared an array of razor sharp teeth. The head then zoomed straight at Ash, opening its mouth wide to swallow him whole.

         Ash screamed, and tried to back away, but tripped over his own feet and fell over backwards. He thought for sure that he was doomed, as would be anyone's initial reaction upon seeing a giant head come at them, but Pikachu responded quickly by jumping off the back of his head onto his face. Though the trainer was completely blinded, Pikachu got the perfect angle and fired a Thundershock directly into the giant floating head's eye. The Sinclare head screamed, and then exploded in a mass of flying triangular shards.

         Misty cried out and stepped out of the way to try avoiding the shards, but Brock got hit by several of them... or thought he had. They had flown at him like they were going to impale him, but he felt absolutely nothing.

         Once the shards could no longer be seen, Misty let out a sigh of relief. "Th... thank goodness that's over... what WAS that?"

         A maniacal laughter disrupted her calm, however. The triangles reappeared, coming back together to form the gigantic Sinclare head once more, and inducing screams of rekindled terror from Ash, Misty, and Pikachu.

         Floating heads, shattering into triangles, and passing through me harmlessly...

         Brock finally thought to look down, and it became blatantly obvious. "Look! Under the head! That thing's just a hologram!"

         "Bwa?" The hologram ceased its laughter as the trainers saw the wheeled device underneath it. Sinclare's holo-head followed their gaze, and then looked squarely at Brock. "You figured it out already? Humph!"

         "Yeah." Brock nodded. He could see now how obvious the differences in this head and a real one were- the surface wasn't smooth, but was instead formed of squares and triangles. "It was scary enough at first, but now it looks like something right out of a Starvee game." He was almost sure it was the final boss this head resembled, but unlike his little sister Cindy he'd never taken much time to play video games.

         Sinclare head snorted. "Comparing my work to some cheap toy maker's programming!" Then it stopped for a moment, and hovered back and forth looking over each of the three trainers. "Hmm... but you three all look like clever kids.

        Come, come this way!"

        As the head, propelled by the wheels in its holo-generator's base, led the trainers down the hallways, they noticed for the first time how old-fashioned the areas near the front door were. Hardwood floors, simple dark peach-colored walls, and the only lighting was some small electric lights, mounted on the walls and shaped to resemble electric candles. Past one door, however, the scenery changed went 180 degrees and several centuries the other way. Everything was made of bluish grey metals. The walls looked like they'd been welded together and some were full of air vents and access hatches. Numerous tubes and pieces of pipe hung from the ceiling. Overall, it resembled how an 80s cartoon would portray a planet populated entirely by robots, and Ash, Misty, and Pikachu kept looking back and forth, uncertain whether the creepy science fiction motif was worse than the creepy old mansion motif or not.

        Finally, the hallway ended, and in its place was a large room with a floor in the same sort of metal as before apart from now being a reddish grey. The lighting was pretty much nonexistent, though, so the only thing visible aside from the floor was a shine off of something glassy some distance from the door.

         The holographic Sinclare head motioned to a gap in the glassy shine. "Come! I've got something I need to speak with all of you about!"

         The trainers looked at each other with a moment of hesitation, but did as the head said. This was indeed a serious situation, so it only made sense that Sinclare was having the head lead them to where he really was.

         But as soon as they were all past the opening in the glass, they heard a mechanized noise similar to a louder version of a car's side window shutting. For the first time, the ceiling lights revealed their presence by flipping on, and revealed also the nature of the situation that Ash, Misty, Brock, and Pikachu were now in- they were surrounded by a cylinder of glass, and a quick glimpse confirmed that they were completely so now that the entrance door was shut.

         "Hey!" Ash exclaimed. "What's going on here?"

         "You tricked us into this prison!" Misty glared at the holographic head. "You...."

         "Imprison? Don't be daft!" The head smiled proudly. "You should be honored, you're the first people to stand in my digitizer, at least that I've invited!"

         "Digiwhatnow?" Ash raised an eyebrow. He looked curiously at the circular shape of the glass, and muttered to himself, "What is this, a big fish tank?"

         "It's my greatest invention," the head continued without paying attention to Ash, "and a great benefit to mankind! Mechanically, think of it like a larger version of the Pokéball teleporter, but functionally, it's so much more even I can't fathom it all yet!"

         Ash blinked, and snapped out of his stupor upon hearing that about teleporters. "Ah! That's right! So what's this got to do with what went on at the Pokémon Center?"

        "Everything! Well, almost. Meet the counterpart of the other part!"

        An electrical crackling sound reverberated about the glass tube, and as all heads turned towards the source they saw a bright energy field not too dissimilar from the glow of a Pokémon being released. As the crackling and the light died down, the spot was filled with what appeared to be another hologram. This one was just as polygonal as the first hologram, but the resemblance ended there. The body didn't look entirely solid, but it still looked more solid than the holographic Sinclare head. The shape was like that of a duck Pokémon, aside from the inherent blockiness, but was pink with blue feet, beak, tail, and underbelly.

         "Pory!" it cried out. Unfortunately, Misty was the closest to the creature as it solidified, and her already-jittery nerves meant the creature's introduction resulted in an unpleasant scream in the face.

         "Wh-what is that thing?" Misty asked nervously, taking a step away from the creature, which looked at her in a manner suggesting it felt hurt by her reaction.

         "Meet Porygon! The world's first computer program based Pokémon, version 1.0 Beta!"

         "Computer program? You can make Pokémon out of those?" Ash asked.

         Misty tried shaking off her nervousness and returned to her usual fiery self. "What are you saying? You can break the laws of physics to make Pokémon? You couldn't even fix that computer at the Pokémon Center!"

         The Sinclare head frowned. "Young miss, do you know whom you're speaking to? I, the great technological scientist Kabili Sinclare, can fix anything!"

         "Then why did you run away like that?" Ash asked with a sudden angry tone. "Why didn't you fix it there?"

         "If YOU were asked to fix a car in a man's garage instead of your own workshop when 90% of the tools you needed were in the workshop, what would YOU do?" the head replied bluntly. "A scientist without his tools is a paralyzed genius whose intellect goes to waste!

         And as for that about 'breaking the laws of physics', that's exactly how to fix the problem- that's how it all started, after all-

        ...and the tools for it are all right here!"

         The Sinclare head slowly dismantled itself into a mass of peach and teal triangles, which spun around for a moment, turning black and white before reassembling into the form of a giant computer monitor.

         "While I was asleep this morning, another group of people stopped by and came in."

         The screen lit up with security camera photos of a two familiar human figures and an equally familiar feline one. One of the humans was a man with blue hair reaching down to his chin, clad in a white suit and black gloves covering his entire body. The other was a woman whose red hair went down at least as far as her knees, clad in a white jacket in miniskirt and black gloves reaching almost to her shoulders and equally black thigh-high boots. Both humans' jackets bore a crimson R across the front.

        "Team Rocket!" the trainer trio shouted in unison.

         "Oh, is that who they are?" Sinclare asked. "Well, if you know them, maybe you can talk them into coming back out of the computer and giving Alpha back!"

         "What?" Brock asked, most surprised by the part about pulling people out of computers.

         "These three came inside, and talked my first Porygon, version 0.9 Alpha, into teaching them to operate my digitizer!" The image changed, showing the Rockets entering the house (which was unlocked then too) and talking to a Porygon similar to the one currently in the digitizer, apart from having a lightly colored square on its forehead. "Alpha isn't a complete version, though, and can't tell one human from another- he thought the redhead was me!" The trio pressed a few switches on a nearby control panel, stepped into the digitizer, and disappeared in a flash of blue lightning.

         "So you knew they were in before you went to the Pokémon Center, and that's what you ran away over." Misty frowned. "That still doesn't explain why you didn't fix it sooner."

         Then the digital screen showing the image reshaped itself into Sinclare's head again. "Don't be rude! I'm getting to that part! Science is all about learning things you didn't know before! To be quick, Cyberspace isn't really 'in' the computer, but is a micro-universe formed by gem-matrix circuits. I knew that what happens in a computer affects what happens in Cyberspace, but those three intruders did prove that it can go the other way too! Somehow, presumably by using Porygon Alpha, they put in a lot of Halt Transfer commands that have the Pokéballs stopping mid-transfer, and are stealing them from that spot."

         The Sinclare hologram frowned severely, and his tone became grim. "The problem is, I can't insert a Vaccine program. That would solve the problem, yes, and delete the Halt Transfer commands... but that program seeks out ANY foreign code! It would mistake Team Rocket for viruses and delete them too, and that would be murder!"

         The trainers stood there for a few moments, silent as that set in. Then Brock spoke up.

         "So you came back here to try to find some way to get them out unharmed, right?"

         The hologram nodded. "Indeed. And I found one, too!" He suddenly grinned widely. "You guys!"

         Cries of "Bwa!?" and "Pi?!?" resulted, and Ash followed up with "W-what do you mean!?"

         "If someone experienced in computers, namely me, stays here to operate the machine, I can send all of you inside to retrieve Team Rocket and Porygon Alpha, and remove the halt commands!"

         "Inside the computer!?" Brock shouted. "Hold it, so far the only thing you've ever taken out of a computer is the Porygons and Pokéballs! You haven't tried returning human beings from Cyberspace- what if it doesn't work?"

         Misty gulped, suddenly catching Brock's meaning. She didn't know the scientific details of it, but she knew humans weren't as compatible with dematerializing as Pokémon were. In the early years of Pokeball technology, efforts to put a human in a Pokeball paralyzed each volunteer test subject. Fortunately, that paralysis was temporary, but with a similar yet unknown frontier waiting to be crossed now... .. . "W...w-we might come out paralyzed... or we might not come out alive!"

         Sinclare laughed. "Don't be silly! Why do you think I made the digitizer that big? To transport an Onix? I could just use a Pokeball for that!" He shook his head. "You'll come out fine! And even if you don't, you'll go down in scientific history as famous pioneers of unknown realms! A no-lose situation!"

         All three trainers looked at the holographic Sinclare head like it had Doduo heads sticking out of its invisible nostrils. "Um, as much as I hate losing..." Ash started, "that doesn't make me feel any better..."

         Unfortunately, Ash spoke too softly for the holo-generator's microphone to pick up through the glass and Sinclare didn't hear him- either that or the professor simply wasn't paying attention. In either case, the clacking sound in the hologram's speakers indicated that the professor was typing away at a control panel.

         "Here goes... digitize!"

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