The Last Piece of the Puzzle

By Cybra

A/N: A "What if?" scenario based on the fact that these types of fics always have Jeremy finding the factory and then getting the others into it. (And, usually, Odd comes later like in Garage Kids.) So I thought, "Why not turn it around?"

Disclaimer: Hail to the French! Code Lyoko is not mine.

"I'm sorry, Aelita," Yumi Ishiyama sighed. "I'm just not smart enough to do this."

Ulrich Stern and Odd della Robbia leaned over the back of the command chair, looking over the Japanese girl's shoulders. Yumi gazed miserably at the pink-haired computer sprite.

"It's all right, Yumi. You tried your best," Aelita said, a smile on her face. "Perhaps it's best if you shut down the main computer."

The Japanese girl heard the slight hitch of fear in the other girl's voice. Shut down, to the virtual girl, meant death. No way was she going to let Aelita die. True, she, Ulrich, and Odd had not been able to do much from their end, but they had formed a close friendship with Aelita.

She felt the two boys' grip tighten on the command chair. No, they weren't going to give Aelita up without a fight.

"We'll think of something, Aelita," Ulrich assured her.

"Yeah. Don't you worry, Princess," Odd said, giving Aelita a thumbs-up.

Aelita looked confused. "But…"

"We're your friends, Aelita," Yumi told her, smiling. "We're not going to just give up when things get hard."

Aelita blinked then smiled gratefully. "Thank you."

The group of children smiled back, each one secretly asking himself or herself the same question:

"But what are we going to do?"

Ulrich rested his chin on his hand and poked at his food. The table had been blanketed in silence for the past several minutes.

Finally, with a vicious stab at what passed for steak, he told his two friends, "We need help."

"Another person? Isn't that risky?" Yumi asked.

Ulrich nodded. "But we still need the help. Yumi, your computer skills are good but not good enough to get the scanners and everything up and running. Mine definitely aren't." He looked over at Odd who had opened his mouth and raised a finger. "Odd, don't get me started on yours."

"Hmph," Odd sulked.

"We need an expert. Or as close to an expert as possible."

"A teacher?" Yumi asked.

The brunette shook his head. "An adult would want to just shut Lyoko down. We need a kid like us. Someone who's willing to give Aelita's humanity the benefit of the doubt."

Odd took a bite from his "steak" and choked it down. He glanced sideways at a pimply-faced kid wearing glasses. "Herb?"

"Uh uh." This time, it was Yumi who shook her head. "He'll squeal to Sissy if she promised him even a peck on the cheek."

"Then who?"

Ulrich pointed.

Yumi and Odd turned around to see who Ulrich's finger was pointing at.

Odd turned back around, staring incredulously back at Ulrich. "Belpois? The super-nerd?"

Yumi turned back to Ulrich as well, raising an eyebrow. "Interesting pick."

"He's one of the only two guys I know about who could do it," Ulrich said with a shrug.

"He's also got such a sunny personality" was Odd's dry sarcasm.

"Hey, I didn't either before you two started hanging around me," Yumi pointed out. "I wasn't exactly Miss Social."

"Point." Odd glanced back at the blond boy poking listlessly at his food, sitting alone at that back table. "Still, Belpois is weird."

"Weird or not, he's our best chance of freeing Aelita," Ulrich said.

Jeremy Belpois hated Kadic Academy.

While he had managed to avoid most of the bullies, flying as far under the radar as possible, he hadn't met anyone he could call a friend. His father had been wrong in that respect. His mother had told him that things would be all right once he started showing everyone what a good student he was.

What a great plan that was! He might as well have proclaimed he had the Black Plague or leprosy. It would have had the same effect.

At least he had his laptop and computer. He could write programs…

…that had absolutely no meaning, no purpose. Just to stay in practice.

…Wow, his life really did suck, didn't it?

He stopped when he heard footsteps behind him. A whole group of footsteps if his ears weren't lying to him. They stopped when he stopped.

He walked forward a few feet. The footsteps started again.

He stopped again. They stopped again.

He didn't even turn around as he sighed. "If you're going to beat me up, just get it over with."

"We're not here to beat you up."

It took Jeremy a second to recognize the voice. Ah, yes. Ulrich Stern. Star of the soccer team.

A popular kid. Swell.

He turned around to face not just Stern but his friends Odd della Robbia and Yumi Ishiyama. (Jeremy easily recalled them and their reputations. His day just kept getting better and better!) "Well?"

"We…wanted to talk to you," Ishiyama said uncertainly.

"About?"

Frankly, he didn't care. If they were after tutoring, fine. Maybe he could get a little spending money out of the deal…

della Robbia grumbled something about "weirdo super-nerds." Jeremy ignored him and focused on the "leader."

Stern took a deep breath. "Can you keep a secret?"

Jeremy raised an eyebrow.

"So let me see if I've gotten everything." Belpois stood with his back to them, leaning against one of the trees of the wooded area on campus. He held up a finger. "One, there's a hidden computer laboratory beneath that abandoned factory a couple of blocks away from here." Two fingers. "Two, that computer contains a parallel digital world called 'Lyoko' run by a demonic artificial intelligence named 'XANA' that wants to destroy all of humanity." Three fingers. "Three, the only one who can stop it is another artificial intelligence named 'Aelita' who can shut down the towers XANA works through." Four fingers. "Four, the only way to permanently stop XANA is to shut it down, but you can't because…" five fingers "…five, shutting down XANA means killing Aelita, and you want to find a way to bring her here using something called 'the scanners.'"

Odd nodded his head, remembering belatedly that Belpois couldn't see him with his back to them. "That's it in a nutshell."

Belpois started to shake.

Aelita's three human friends looked at each other then stared at the young genius.

"Are you okay?" Yumi asked.

Hissing noises were heard as Belpois continued to shake and he fell to his knees.

It suddenly occurred to Odd what was going on. He covered the short distance between himself and Belpois in no time and grabbed his shoulder. "Are you laughing at us?"

Belpois looked up at him, shaking with obvious repressed laughter. The hissing noises? Air escaping between his teeth. "No…! 'Course not…!"

It seemed the computer genius couldn't take it anymore. He doubled over in a fit of laughter, gasping for breath.

"Why you little…!" Odd snarled.

He knew they shouldn't have gone to this weirdo. The little freak obviously wasn't going to take them seriously. Jeez, they'd have a better chance with Herb!

"Odd, back off!" Ulrich snapped, pulling him off Belpois before he could get a few licks in.

Belpois' laughing stopped after a few minutes. He stood, leaning against the tree and taking a few deep breaths, and turned to face them, a smirk on his lips. "I have to admit it though: You had me going with that 'Can you keep a secret?' line, Stern."

"He was being serious…" Odd growled.

Belpois raised an eyebrow. "Oh please. Nobody has perfected artificial intelligence anywhere near the levels of self-awareness that you all are talking about. The odds of there being not one but two AIs of such intelligence without anyone knowing are so small that I won't even bother to calculate them."

"Listen to me." Yumi grabbed Belpois' shoulders, giving him a start. "It's the truth. All of it. Aelita and XANA are both real."

Belpois blinked for a moment, uncertain, before his blue eyes gained a hard edge. "I don't know who put you three up to this, but I'm not falling for it. You've had your fun, now leave me alone."

He stepped out of her grip and walked away.

Odd pulled against Ulrich's grip. "Let me at that little know-it-all!"

"Forget it, Odd," Yumi sighed. "We blew it."

Odd saw Ulrich frown out of the corner of his eye but was too interested in entertaining thoughts of pulverizing some nerd butt to think too much about it.

Jeremy sat typing away at his computer, working on his self-made antivirus program. While AIs were still mostly in the realm of science fiction, the antivirus program he was working on wasn't. If he could work out the last few glitches, he wouldn't have to worry about updating the thing again. It would act more like an actual immune system, identifying threats based upon how programs normally ran.

A knock on the door interrupted his work.

"Somebody actually wants to talk to me? Huh."

He left his computer desk and opened the door to be met with Stern. He narrowed his eyes, going on the defensive. "Oh, it's you."

"Can I come in for a second? I want to show you something."

Seeing that he wasn't going to get rid of the soccer star any other way, Jeremy stood to one side, allowing Stern inside.

Stern glanced around and whistled. "Single room, huh?"

"I get insomnia." He mentally kicked himself the second it came out of his mouth. He crossed his arms. "So, what is it you wanted to show me?"

"Close the door."

Part of Jeremy screamed "No way!" but the rest of him obeyed. There was a natural…presence…of leadership hanging about the soccer star that told him to do what he said. That and the buzz in the air told him that what he was about to see should not be seen by some random passerby.

Stern leaned over the computer, preparing to click out of Jeremy's hard work.

"Don't do that!" Jeremy yelped.

Stern backed up.

The computer genius leaned forward, saving his progress as a new file. "You nearly deleted two hours' work."

"That was two hours' work!"

"Well, sort of. I've had the base program done for some time, but I've been tweaking for two hours. I'm close to finishing."

The more popular boy blinked—either stunned or impressed, Jeremy wasn't sure—then coughed. "Well, could you try connecting to…" He gave an IP address.

Jeremy raised an eyebrow, sat down, and grumbled, "I thought you were going to ask me to do something hard."

To his surprise, he was met by a rather solid, rather complicated, firewall at the address. He hastily backed out before his system fried itself. "What was that!"

Stern grinned. "Can't get in, can you?"

"I could if I had about, oh, a month or two to pick at it and get the feel of it," Jeremy snapped, unhappy with the assault on his poor computer. "That wasn't nice, Stern."

"Hang on a second." He dialed a number on his cell phone. "Hey. Could you do me a favor? Could give access to the computer at…" He held a hand over the cell's microphone and asked, "What's your computer's IP address?"

"I'm not going to give it to you," Jeremy growled.

"C'mon. No tricks this time."

"I don't trust you." The computer genius glared.

The soccer star sighed and said into the phone, "Hang on a sec." Stern threw him a pleading look. "I swear nothing bad will happen. Honest."

The blond genius scowled but ground out his IP address. Damn his curiosity.

Stern relayed it to the person on the phone before telling him to "try again."

This time, the other system seemed inclined to let him in.

CONNECTING…

After a minute, Jeremy read aloud the message, "'Connection to Lyoko established'? What kind of joke is this?"

Stern and his group really seemed to be pulling out all of the stops. Though where had they found a system with a firewall that mean in order to prank him with? Stern didn't look capable of the computer skills necessary. Ishiyama? Maybe but unlikely. della Robbia? The thought almost sent him into hysterics.

What didn't send him into hysterics was the sound of the two CPUs he had networked together (for extra computing power) suddenly whirring like twin jet engines. Window after window started popping up on his screen.

The "nothing bad will happen, huh?" he had ready died on his lips. This wasn't a virus. His virus program would have been giving him all sorts of red alerts on top of this. No, this was simply his computer connecting to a highly advanced network that was sending too much data for it to handle at a time.

"Tell whoever it is on the other end to stop sending!" Jeremy yelled, working as fast as he could to close windows as they opened. "They're overloading my system!"

Stern called into the phone, "Aelita, stop! You're frying his computer!"

The avalanche of windows stopped.

Sighing with relief, Jeremy closed most of them, scanning each one for something useful, something that revealed where it had come from.

Then a new window opened.

"I'm sorry!" a three-dimensional representation of a pink-haired elf babbled, looking quite distressed. "I thought…it looked like your system could handle the data stream, so…!"

Jeremy yelped and pushed away from his computer desk, pushing too hard too fast and toppling over.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

Jeremy looked up at Stern, open-mouthed, before looking back at the elf.

Stern snickered and waved a hand at the screen. "Jeremy Belpois, meet Aelita."

"I need to see the home system."

Ulrich didn't know why Belpois had made the flat demand, but, then again, Belpois knew more about computers than he did. Perhaps it was a simple "I need to make sure I'm not losing my damn mind" sort of request.

A request that the brunette understood completely. When a supposedly non-existent artificial intelligence nearly blows up your computer by accident and then apologizes profusely to you, you'd want actual proof that where she came from actually exists before you check yourself into a psych ward.

Belpois had been surprised by the sewer entrance in the park and had followed Ulrich on his scooter. (Ulrich had thought ahead and asked if he had anything with wheels since it would be quicker than walking.) Seeing the factory seemed to help soothe the "I'm surrounded by psychos" impulse though Belpois still looked a bit skeptical…and peaked.

Especially going down the rope. Poor guy never did do well in gym.

'If he decides to join up with us, he'll have to get used to it. It's the fastest way down.'

Now Belpois stood beside him in the elevator, hands folded behind his back as if he were ready to begin a lecture.

"So…other than the fact that Lyoko is maintained by XANA, what all do you know about it?"

"Hmm?" Ulrich turned to face Belpois.

"How does the computer run? Where does it get its power from? What—"

Ulrich cut him off with a shake of the head. "We don't really know anything."

"Aelita didn't tell you?"

"Aelita doesn't really know either. All she really knows is Lyoko."

"I see." Belpois stared at the door as the airlock revealed itself and opened.

The soccer star suppressed a smile as the computer genius's eyes went wide with wonder.

Belpois slowly stepped into the room, gazing about at everything and walking over to the command chair, running a hand along one of the armrests.

Now Ulrich grinned. "Well…?"

Belpois sat down in the chair and started typing, eyes flicking between the three screens as if he'd been born to handle this computer. "It's certainly complex. Oh, hello."

Aelita had opened a screen and appeared in front of him, smiling. "Hi. It's nice to see you again so soon."

Ulrich blinked as something flickered across the blond genius's face. 'Was that a smile?'

"It's…er…nice to see you, too, Aelita." He paused, studying one of the screens. "Where are the central processing unit and the scanners?"

"The scanners are a level below you," Aelita responded. "XANA's tower is a level below the scanners."

Belpois blinked. "So XANA's in the same building as us?"

"We think of it as an insurance policy," Ulrich said. "XANA won't dare attack itself."

"Good point." Belpois stood from his seat. "Let's have a look at the scanners."

"You're gonna help us?" Ulrich asked cautiously, not daring to hope.

He didn't answer, just headed towards the elevator.

"Come back soon!" Aelita called, hope shining in her voice.

Ulrich's face looked doubtful as he muttered to Aelita. "Let's hope he does want to come back."

"This place is a mess!"

Yumi banged her head on one of the thick cables, cussing. Rubbing her head, she pulled her head out from where she'd been working on reconnecting a different thick coil of cables…

…to see a rather indignant Jeremy Belpois standing there.

"What's he doing here?" Odd snarled.

"I'll tell you what I'm not doing here: I'm not about to get part of a finger cut off by a nipper. Put that thing down before you hurt yourself!"

Odd blinked, looked down at his right hand to see the tool less than a centimeter away from his left forefinger, and hastily moved it and set it on the ground.

Yumi stared, open-mouthed as Belpois entered the scanner room, shaking his head and muttering to himself. She stood and walked over to Ulrich, Odd beside her. "For the record, what is he doing here? We blew it, remember?"

Ulrich grinned like the cat that got into the cream. "I had him connect to Lyoko."

"You what!"

"Just telling him wasn't going to convince him, so I figured I had to show him, but he wasn't going to just come to the factory. He'd think it was some sort of trick."

Odd smirked. "So you had Aelita let him plug into Lyoko. Smooth one, Ulrich. So he agreed?"

Ulrich's face fell. "Well…I don't know."

Yumi frowned. "What do you mean you don't know?"

"I mean, I don't know. He hasn't said anything about it. He saw upstairs. And the command tower downstairs. This was the last spot. I figured he probably wanted to make an informed opinion."

"Or see what the fastest way to shut this whole thing down is," Odd sulked.

Yumi watched Belpois study the scanner room, going over every inch cautiously. "What'd he do downstairs?"

"Same thing he did here: Circled the place, looking over XANA like it was some kind of new bug."

Belpois stopped his circling and walked up to them, arms crossed.

"Well…?" Ulrich asked.

"I'm not going to sugar coat this." He started ticking problems off on his fingers. With each new problem, Yumi felt the group's spirits fall. "The scanners are showing early signs of metal fatigue. Quite a bit of the wiring has varying levels of corrosion. And your power feeds aren't working to two of these things. But I have good news."

"You say anything about car insurance, Belpois, and I'll hit you," Odd muttered.

Before Yumi could scold him, Belpois stated, "Jeremy."

"What?"

"My name's Jeremy." Before Odd could respond, he said, "As I was saying, I have good news. Everything was pretty well-preserved down here. Any replacement wiring that was stored here might—big might—be okay if it was properly stored. The fatigued metal can be replaced as well with reshaped scraps or by melting down the old metal pieces, reshaping them, and putting them back in place."

"And the power feeds?" Yumi asked.

A careless wave of the hand. "Nothing to it. Though I'd suggest fixing the other problems first. No sense in electrocution by live wiring."

The Japanese girl hugged Ulrich. They had a chance to save Aelita! Now all they had to worry about was the scanner program.

Jeremy headed towards the elevator.

"Hey, Bel—er…Jeremy! Where you goin'?" Odd asked, obviously feeling guilty for snapping earlier.

Jeremy turned around in the elevator. "Back to my room."

"You're leaving?" Yumi asked.

"Only for a little while. I have to get my laptop."

The three in the scanner room glanced at each other before looking at the boy in the elevator.

Clearly knowing their unspoken question, Jeremy explained, "I'd like to have access to the schematics. I'd rather not cut the wrong wire and have to go back and fix it later. Besides…" He pushed the button and placed his hands in his pockets "…I'd like to get a little more…familiar…with Aelita. Since it seems we're going to be working together."

The airlock closed, and Yumi heard the elevator go up the shaft.

She grinned at her friends as the two boys whooped.

The last piece of the puzzle was in place.

They just might have a chance after all.