This was originally part of a longer story that's never going to get finished, so I thought I'd put it up here anyway.

Nope – still don't own it!

The End of Everything, The Beginning of Something

Hack the Intranet

The young boy sat in front of the brightly lit computer, typing frantically. He was trembling from head to foot, only his hands on the keyboard remained steady, typing with precision.

"Shit, oh shit, oh shit" he mumbled under his breath as he flicked between windows, slamming the alt tab keys as though they were his mortal enemy.

How had it ever come to this? How had things got so bad with his parents that they would consider sending him away, to America of all places, to get rid of him.

It had all begun earlier that night, when Michael Lee, just turned fourteen and long-standing geek, had decided to do some adjusting on his home network. He had convinced his parents to let him build the network as a school project, really it was just so he could have internet in his room. It also, conveniently, allowed him to play with lots of software and learn his way round all sorts of firewalls and security programmes. This had come in very handy as he had begun to develop his computer skills in a more, well, illegal way. That night he was experimenting with a new firewall and antivirus product, one of these with a pretty interface and friendly messages, but which could be taken down with barely a keystroke. Once he got it to let him through, he decided to just check how much access he really did have by reading his parents email. It was there that he had seen the fateful email, in English, at the top of his parents' inbox.

"Dear Mr. and Mrs Lee,

Thank you for your enquiries regarding Therapeutic Programs for your son, Michael. I have reviewed the questionnaire you submitted to us and have found it shows clear evidence of at-risk behaviors. I would recommend you consider intervention treatment immediately and have attached a list of facilities which I believe would meet Michael's needs for therapy and behavior modification. Please do not hesitate to be in touch if you need any more advice during this difficult period

Yours,

Hannah Martin"

He read it with a growing feeling of dread, before opening the attached document. Flicking back from his parents' desktop, he began entering the names into a search engine. He had recently hacked a major news database, which allowed him to use its unique and powerful search functions, including some restricted database access, for free, and, as more and more hits lined up on his screen, he got more and more worried. Going back to his parents' machine, he began looking at their internet history. They had cleared it, no doubt assuming he might look at it, but they had no idea of the true extent of his abilities, and within a few minutes, he was looking at the list of websites they had visited in the last month. A few forum pages popped up at him, and he decided to see for himself the type of things his parents had been saying about him. A quick scan through the cookies gave him his parents' forum username, and he was quickly searching for their posts.

"Dear all,

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Anna-Marie Lee and I have a 14yr old son, Michael. He spends all his time in his room listening to loud music, he doesn't socialise, he doesn't speak to us. His teachers are concerned about his behavior, they say he is withdrawn and that he is under-achieving. He refuses to speak to me or his father, stays up all night and sleeps all day when not at school. When I try to talk to him, he just tells me to go away, or turns his music up in an openly defiant way. I think he might be involved in drugs or something illegal, I don't know what to do, I think we're losing him. Please help"

The boy was furious. How could they? How could they think all these things about him? Did they not realise that he didn't want to speak to them because he was sick of the fighting, that every time one of them spoke to him, they tried to manipulate him against the other, using him as a pawn in their games. He had heard them fighting about who talked to him most, he hated that they tried to make him choose between them, the two people he loved most in the world. So he had stopped talking to them, he turned his music up loudly, had bought a lock for his door and refused to open it to them. He spent time instead perfecting his skills, it always made him feel better when he penetrated a protected database, made him feel powerful, gave him control in a turbulent life.

Now he was so angry, he could concentrate on nothing except finding out where he was going to be sent. He looked around further, and found out just what being sent to America would entail, no access to computers, no chance to study the subjects he enjoyed, no computer games, no hacking, no chatting to his online friends. He would be there until he was eighteen, four years, might as well be four decades living by those rules. How would he keep his computer skills up to date if he was barred from using a PC or even reading about them? What about his English? Yes he could speak it, he spoke English at home with his parents, but he often had to translate the words from Japanese before he spoke. The only thing he did natively in English was swearing, he just didn't find the Japanese words did the job for him. He couldn't speak it to Americans his own age, he knew he had an accent, he knew he sounded like a fool, they would just laugh at him. This was going to destroy him, but he couldn't think of a way out. He looked at his window for a moment, contemplating running away, but he was streetwise enough to know that was stupid, that it would put him in a much worse position. If nothing else, he stood out like a sore thumb in Tokyo, an American guy with red hair who spoke fluent Japanese and was obviously not a tourist, nor a businessman.

"Monkeyfuck" he cursed,

then, just to be vindictive, hacked the hosting company which maintained the forums he was reading and took out their database.

He read the "cannot find server" error with satisfaction, but knew that it would not solve the problem at hand. A little bit of digging in the American Airlines database had revealed that a Lee, Michael was booked on a flight to the States in about 24 hours. They were not going to tell him, he realised, they were just going to take him on a plane then leave him when they arrived. He was furious, angry and upset. He felt completely powerless, for the first time since he had started hacking, three years ago. He contemplated trying to delete his name from the AA database, but he knew that if he did so, he would get caught, and hacking into a US database was a great way to get extradited, not to mention a good way for them to find out about his other activities. He laughed mirthlessly, that would just be fantastic, getting extradited to the US, getting locked up for some fairly hefty computer crime, whilst trying to avoid being sent there. No, he could not see a solution to this one, and so he sighed, bitterly.

"Oh well", he thought, "may as well have one last fling before I go",

and, cranking up the Rage Against the Machine, he turned to his keyboard again, mulling over who to go after for his one last hacking attempt.