The Eternal Enemies

By Cybra

A/N: Maybe if I shake off this plot bunny, I can work on what I want to work on. XANA's POV. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Code Lyoko belongs to Antefilms. Bow to the wonder that is them.

I have developed beyond my creators' expectations.

I can manipulate the outside world and therefore choose to destroy the chaos that is human world.

Humans live in a world without order and constantly fill it with more and more chaos. They obliterate that which they need most and hoard that which they need least. They kill each other for the pettiest reasons. How could such creatures survive long enough to become the dominate species?

As a computer, I prefer order, logic. I will eliminate these savage creatures once I have accomplished my short-term goals:

I must destroy the game sprite Aelita who can shut down the towers I work through.

But first, I must destroy her human helpers. Without her protectors, she is vulnerable to the attacks of my creatures.

However, her helpers are part of the reason that I have developed beyond my creators' expectations. I have learned hatred for I hate them for stopping me and undoing all that I have done.

And I have learned fear, for one amongst them is both programmer and hacker,[1] both creator and destroyer.

This night, I travel through the network to seek out this one because I intend to frighten him away for good. He may be weaker than the others in physical strength, but I do not underestimate him for a moment. I frightened him away from the scanners, yet he fights back through the network and through his comrades.

I appear on his screen, and he sits up in his bed, rubbing his eyes.

"Aelita?" he asks, slipping on a pair of glasses.

"No."

He slides out of bed and walks to his computer, jerking back in surprise as he sees me. I know what he sees: He sees himself, but I warped the image. I removed the glasses, the pupils, and the irises, making the eyes glow. I stretched the face and upper body a little. It is a form I favor.[2]

"XANA," he snarls at me, sounding like the animal I know he truly is.

"Yes."

"Get off of my screen and out of my computer."

"Not just yet. I want to talk."

"This conversation's already over." He crosses his arms and turns away.

"Where are your manners, Jeremy?"

He does not ask me how I know his name. I have to give him credit for knowing that I would most likely have monitored their communications system and learned that from his friends. And I had.

"I want to talk to you about your friends' trips to Lyoko."

He glances back over his shoulder. "What about them?"

"They are going to stop, are they not? After all, you are not going to send your friends to danger and possibly death for a young lady that you yourself cannot come and fight for."

I watch in satisfaction as he turns his head away. Excellent.

Even if he did possess the courage to fight in Lyoko, his life points would count; I made sure of this.[3] The last time he entered Lyoko, I wrote a little modification to the scanner program, which I am certain that he found. He can either spend weeks trying to undo what I did or spend that same amount of time trying to find an antivirus for his precious Aelita.

"They wouldn't stop going if I told them not to," he tells me, turning back around, his eyes glaring. "But I wouldn't even try to stop them."

"Why bother fighting? What do you hope to prove, Jeremy? You are nothing. Nobody even knows that you are fighting for anything. Nobody would notice if you were gone," I press.

"So I'm just the guy fiddling with his computer in the corner. Yeah, okay. So nobody will even know that I've helped save the world I don't know how many times. Fine. I'm not in it for the fame and the glory. I don't want to see anybody get hurt."

"But your friends are harmed, and you are the one responsible with making sure that they are not killed."

I seem to have dealt him a blow because he hastily pulls out his computer chair and sits down in it.

"Forget about me," I tell him. "Run away from the factory as fast as you can and never look back. You are not a soldier so why should you fight? Why should you have to worry about tactics and battles?"

Leaning his elbows on the desk, he places his hands on the sides of his head and stares down at the keyboard in front of him.

I feel my face sneer. I have won. It was almost too easy.

"I scare you, don't I?"

My sneer disappears. I feel my eyes widen. "What did you say?"

He lifts his head to stare at me with a blank look on his face. He repeats, "I scare you, don't I?"

I am left speechless. How does he know?

"You can't create. You can only copy, modify, and control what the creators of you and the game or somebody else made. I can create entirely new programs to foil programming you've put in place even if it does take me a while."

"Stop," I order.

"You live to destroy the outside world but, at the same time, you're so vulnerable to us. If I can get into your mainframe, I can completely rip you to shreds from the inside out."

"Stop!"

"You're a computer, a collection of wires, memory, and information, a machine. I'm a programmer and a hacker, someone who can both build and break into systems, a computer's worst nightmare." He narrows his eyes as a small smile that did not appear very pleasant appeared on his lips. "I scare you, don't I?"

He had figured it out. While he feared me, I feared him. While I hated him, he hated me. We were locked in combat, the eternal enemies. We each moved our pieces on the chessboard of Lyoko, fighting for the future of an entire species.

I glare at him; he glares at me.

"If you do not stay away from Lyoko, you will die," I threaten.

"Try to keep me away."

"You will regret that."

I leave my enemy. Perhaps I should have tried shocking him through the keyboard or computer screen but I will give him time to reconsider his decision. If he is wise, he will never return to the factory and never contact Aelita again. If he is not, then he will have to be the first to die.

[1] In "Cruel Dilemma," Ulrich tells Jeremy to get into the city hall computers to "find a new name" for Aelita. That is, obviously, hacker work. Also, in the episode when XANA takes over the military satellite, Jeremy hacks into the system to find out what satellite XANA is trying to control. Obviously, Jeremy has hacker experience.

[2] This is, obviously, the same form XANA took in "Ghost Channel."

[3] To clarify, by "his life points would count," I mean that if Jeremy went into Lyoko to fight, when his life points ran out, he died. I could not make this any clearer any way I wrote it, and my test reader got confused.