Wolf in the Fold

By Cybra

A/N:  Evil plot bunny!  Get off my leg!  :::shakes leg furiously:::  Er, you readers enjoy the story.  Maybe then it'll let go.  :::continues to shake leg:::

Disclaimer:  Some wealthy people in France own Code Lyoko, and I hope they hurry up with season two.

If he stared at the antivirus program for one more second, Jeremy swore that there would be reports on the news the next morning about how a quiet computer genius suddenly went on a murderous rampage around a local boarding school.

"I have to go, Aelita," he told the pink-haired girl apologetically.

She smiled at him.  "You get some rest, Jeremy.  Good night!"

The window she saw the real world through closed.  He saved his work and closed the antivirus's window.

Closing his eyes, he could still see line after line of that computer code.  He moaned to himself and rose from his seat, using his fingers to lift up his glasses and rub his eyes.

Sleep?  No, he currently was so tired that he was actually restless.  Too many long nights—even before Lyoko—had instilled a night owl mentality into him.  He worked better at night.  A few catnaps here and there, and he was almost always fine.  No wonder his sister[1] called him an insomniac.

Maybe he should at least try to sleep.  No, that was out.  When he had tried that the last time he was like this, he had nearly driven himself crazy.  Considering that he was the one who operated the super computer[2] that allowed Ulrich, Odd, and Yumi to travel to Lyoko and made sure things went well while they were there, it would not do if he ended up in the madhouse.

The computer behind him beckoned.  Yet its siren call did not hold the promise of sweet Aelita and the chance to free her from XANA.  No, it was not the quest to free the princess that attempted to summon Jeremy.

It was a different call entirely: something older, something Jeremy had managed to bury under the tons of work required for Lyoko and Aelita.  It was the reason he had had so many late nights before he had found Lyoko.  It was the very reason he had found Lyoko in the first place.

'No, no, no!' he shouted in his mind, trying to block out the old temptation.

Was this what a reformed drug addict felt when in the presence of the drug he had once partaken of?  Was this what a former alcoholic felt when presented with a glass of wine?

His fingers itched with memory.  They had never forgotten the patterns in which they had moved in order to work their magic.  Some part of his mind, long buried, had already begun to work out the details of how he would work through each obstacle that might be presented to him.  His blood began to race with the remembered thrill of the possibility of being caught and the consequences of what would happen if he was caught, adrenaline already starting to enter his bloodstream.

"No," he hissed. "Not anymore.  Not anymore."

He clenched his trembling hands into fists and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to banish the screens that traitorous part of his mind was conjuring.  If he could have, he would have placed roots into the ground just to keep himself from turning around and walking to his computer: his greatest tool and now his greatest enemy.

'It's wrong.  It's illegal,' his conscience told him, trying to strengthen his resolve.  Yet it seemed as if his conscience was weak on this point, like it was only a halfhearted attempt.  You knew you had fallen far if your version of Jiminy Cricket had already given itself up to your addictions.

He slumped.  He was too keyed up to go to sleep now.  Reading a book would only be delaying the inevitable.  Besides, he probably would not even be reading it.

Jeremy had lost.

'You weak, spineless loser,' he berated himself as he turned around and sat down at his computer.

Opening a program that he had made himself, he masked his location twice.  The outer mask made him invisible to other computers.  The second mask was a sort of "just in case" mechanism.  If the outer mask was torn off, he seemed to be in hundreds of locations all around the world.  And while the other person tried to track him down, he would slip into the world of Quake which would dutifully report that he had been playing for hours.

All of it ridiculously simple to a professional hacker.

Jeremy slipped into the mainstream of the Internet, aimless at first, seeking a target.  Perhaps he would check up on Bill Gates and Microsoft.  Then, to be fair, he would have take a peek at Macintosh; hacking entirely different systems was always fun.  Unlike the more notorious hackers, he just liked hacking systems to look around and see what was going on, not stealing information.

It had all started as a game from pure boredom, a simple test to see if he could do it.  When he had managed to do it without getting caught (by pure luck), he had read more and more on computer systems and programming.  This had led to more hacking jobs just for the fun of it.  This led to a more reading, and more hacking, and more reading, and more hacking.  He ran out of books before systems but had picked up on patterns in code so he really did not need the books by that time.

It was not as if he could simply instant message one of his hacker friends for tips.  Hackers had a code of silence not built of respect (well, some of it was respect in some cases) but on self-preservation.  Revealing one hacker more often than not pointed the finger at yourself.  If you knew another hacker and were a hacker yourself, you kept your mouth tightly shut and, as an added precaution, did not talk to that other hacker.  While that other hacker might not go directly to the police, he or she might get it into his or her head to point a digital finger at you if you crossed the line.

By the end of the first year, the whole sport of hacking for Jeremy had become a full-fledged addiction.  The adrenaline high of knowing that he could be caught and thrown in jail was better than any sort of manufactured drug.  Being able to slip through even Microsoft's firewalls gave him a rush that could not possibly be matched.  Back then he had had no real friends to speak of, so he had nothing really to lose except the respect of his parents and sister.  While he felt bad, Jeremy simply could not stop himself.

Going across the Atlantic Ocean[3] had not really helped matters.  He had not made any friends upon entering Kadic Junior High,[4] so he did a little local hacking to get the "feel" of French systems.  Low and behold, there was a complex system running at the abandoned factory that he just had to take a look at in person.  He ran into the other three while he was sneaking out thanks to an old map of the area he had managed to hack from the system (he had claimed he had been trying to find secret passageways he had heard about or something like that), took them to the factory with him, and the rest was history.

After finishing his self-appointed task of hacking both Microsoft and Macintosh, Jeremy signed off and placed his glasses on the desk.  He walked over to his bed and lied down, stopping only to kick off his shoes, not even bothering to change.

Tears that would have blurred his vision and cost him potentially fatal mistakes slid down his cheeks as he closed his eyes.  He had been so weak to give in yet again after he had held out for so long.

One thing was for certain: Yumi, Odd, Ulrich, and Aelita could never know.  Ulrich once stated that hackers were a potential threat to Lyoko since they could possibly destroy Lyoko if XANA turned them to his side, the brunette completely unknowing that there was a wolf in their fold.  Jeremy had been thinking about telling them since that was how he had learned so much about computers but then had promptly decided to keep his mouth shut.

If he was lucky, they would never speak to him again.

If he was unlucky…

Well, then it would be time to start running.  Flo always said he looked bad in orange.