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Root hesitated for a moment before removing the gas mask from her face. She was pretty sure that the air hadn’t cleared completely of the neurotoxin she’d pumped through the ventilation system yet, but then again, it’s not like it was going to matter in a couple minutes either way. Plus, the plastic screen of the mask obstructed her vision somewhat, and she really needed to see for what she was about to do.
She stepped over yet another body before finally finding the one she’d been looking for. With the plan she had, she didn’t need the actual codes (the program she was about to plug in would generate them quickly enough), but she still needed the RFID tag that was currently located in this general’s left wrist. With a few cuts from a scalpel, some dousing of alcohol, and a quick injection, Root stood up and returned back through the hall to do the door that had previously been locked to her. She scanned her wrist, and presented her contact-covered eye for retinal scanning. Having passed both tests, she keyed in the passcode she’d witnessed on the security feeds she’d hijacked earlier in the month, and entered the United States War Room.
For a while she’d debated where she’d launch the first missiles from. Of course, once the code was sent to the guiding satellites, it would spread to every automated weapon in the world, initiating immediate, unstoppable launch, and it probably would have been easier to gain access to an upload point in some country like Russia or Pakistan. But something stubborn in Root had insisted that the end must start here. After all, it was this stupid country’s naive ambition and determination that had cost her everything.
It hit her then, like a stab to the chest, the memories jumping in her mind as easily as if it had been yesterday. Driving through the streets of New York with Harold, John, and their current number, at twice the legal speed limit, four Decima vehicles on their tail. John yelling at Harold and the number to stay down as he leaned out the window to return fire. The bump and the lurch of a tire being shot out. The wild veering of the car that Root tried desperately to maintain control of. The inevitable flip. The gut-wrenching roll. Coming to with a fractured shoulder and a bleeding forehead. Pulling the boys out of the car. Shoving Harold and the number out of harm’s way. The shootout. The warning, sent too late to her implant, telling her to cover John.
The sound of the bullet being fired. The red mist suddenly spewing from John’s heart as he crashed to the ground. The explosion of their car, providing brief cover for an escape, reflected in his unseeing eyes.
She remembered the look on Harold’s face as she’d pushed him and the number away from the wreckage. He was in utter shock. He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream like she’d done when they’d lost Shaw at the stock exchange. But his whole body had trembled. And when they finally got the number to safety and returned to the subway station, just the two of them now, Root saw something hard in his eyes, something dangerous.
It took him over a year to find another access point to slip a Trojan Horse into Samaritan, but eventually he did it. Professor Whistler became good friends with a brilliant programmer/psychologist by the name of Jordan Banks who was doing his best to write a program that would analyze a person and predict their decisions based not only on their mental state, but also their underlying psychological motivations. Samaritan had wanted that code. And two days after it was integrated into its system, Professor Whistler was killed in a tragic car crash.
Root had been in Hong Kong at the time, working a relevant number, and when she got back she found a note from Harold apologizing and explaining that he knew she was strong enough to carry on without him and, as she’d said, some people had to be sacrificed if they were ever going to stop Samaritan. He also asked her to look out for Grace. Root looked into it and found that Grace had been in the other car that day. According to the doctors’ reports, she’d died instantly.
Root wondered if Samaritan had coordinated that on purpose.
Also in Harold’s letter were instructions telling her where she could find the code he’d leached from Samaritan. From that moment on, Root was running.
She may have been still protected by Samaritan’s blind spot, but Root had learned the hard way that that protection didn’t extend to the AI’s agents. Samaritan knew she had some of its code, and was relentless in assigning any and every asset under its control to tracking her down. If it hadn’t been for the many interventions of the Machine, Root would have been killed long ago.
But the Machine had looked out for her, despite their past arguments. It was just the two of them now, and they fell back into their old pattern so quickly it hurt. The Machine would coordinate where Root went next and direct her to whatever she was supposed to do, and Root would follow blindly, trusting her god to know what to do.
Only once did a Samaritan agent sneak up on her.
And the smug look on that familiar face had been more than enough to bring back the heartbreak that Root had thought she’d buried over a year ago. She’d been so caught off guard that it had taken her a moment to register the gun Shaw was pointing at her chest. It was only thanks to her reflexive obedience to the Machine’s instructions that she had moved fast enough to avoid the bullet ripping through her heart.
After that encounter, though, Root’s heart didn’t feel undamaged.
Shaw was truly Schrödinger's cat, both alive and dead. She was still breathing, but she was no longer Root’s Shaw. The Machine had known what Decima was doing to Shaw, and knew there would be no way to save her from it, or reverse the process. So she'd kept this information from Root, not wanting to destroy the one thing that She knew would be most important to Her analogue interface during this time.
Hope.
But as Shaw hunted Root around the globe, Root felt that hope shatter. The few more times Shaw managed to corner her, Root would try to talk to her, to somehow bring back the woman she had loved so dearly and who, despite all the odds, she knew had loved her. But every time Root spoke, Shaw’s eyes flashed with a foreign hatred, her words gained a deadly bite to them, and her gun would inevitably fire.
There was no way to avoid it. Root had known what must be done even before the Machine told her as gently as She could. That didn’t stop Root from locking herself in the bathroom and crying all night when the Machine told her the plan.
It worked, of course. If there was one thing that could be counted on, it was Shaw’s magnetic attraction to danger. When Root showed up on the feeds of traffic cameras capturing an apparent shootout between gang members and a dealer that was double-crossing them, Shaw was there in under five minutes.
But by then the violence had stopped. The members of the gang and the dealer’s security team were all unconscious on the asphalt, and there was no sign of Root. Until a needle slid into Shaw’s neck.
Root had been adamant. She would not shoot Shaw. After what had happened at the stock exchange... she knew she wouldn’t have been able to hold it together if she witness one more bullet pierce that small frame. So the Machine had led her to a supply of a neurotoxin (the same one Root had planned to use on Elizabeth over two years ago) and promised Shaw a painless death.
Root couldn’t stop the tears coming to her eyes and she pushed the plunger down. Immediately, Shaw whipped around, her hand coming to Root’s throat and Root couldn’t help but laugh weakly at the sick way history had decided to repeat itself. But then the effects of the poison began to set in, and Shaw’s knees had gone weak, her hand falling from Root’s neck as Root gently supported her to the ground.
As she lay there dying, something flickered in her eyes. Something familiar. “R-Root?” She’d gasped weakly.
“Shhh,” Root hushed her gently, brushing a stray strand of hair from Shaw’s eyes, not even trying to hold back tears. “Everything’s going to be alright, Sweetie.”
“I...They-” Shaw continued, struggling between haggard breaths. Root knew she only had seconds left. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Sameen,” Root murmured gently. “It’s not your fault.”
Those were the last words Sameen Shaw ever heard.
Root watched her last breath, watched the lids close over those eyes for the last time. She kissed Shaw’s forehead, whispering, “People like us don’t get Maybe Somedays. But I still wish we could have tried.”
She would never be sure how long she stayed there, crying over Shaw’s corpse. Eventually the Machine had prompted her to get up. They still had work to do.
Root went through those next months in a daze, following whatever orders the Machine gave her. But more and more, as she ducked to hide her face from a nearby security camera, or leaned against the balcony of whatever apartment she was squatting in that day, she found a single questions ringing in the back of her mind.
“Why are we doing this?”
Though she could no longer provide herself with a justifiable answer to this questions, whenever she voiced it aloud the Machine was ready to remind her. They had so many conversations about it. It was as though the past few years had never happened, and Root was still in that mental hospital, listening to the Machine patiently explain to her why humanity was worth saving. And as long as She said it, Root believed Her.
Eventually the Machine came to the conclusion that the only way to fully utilize Samaritan’s code was for Root to bring it directly to Her. She finally told Root where She’d hidden Herself so long ago.
The day Root met her god was the day she lost everything.
She never figured out how Samaritan’s agents had tracked her. Maybe she’d made a mistake. Maybe she hadn’t kept a low enough profile. Maybe it was dumb chance and one of them had spotted her as she made her way to the bus station that would take her to the middle of nowhere, where the Machine had arranged her transportation. Maybe this was all part of the plan.
Root had been in the underground bunker for hours, waiting as the Machine analyzed the data and code and processed all possible methods of action. Finally she heard the voice in her ear telling her that there was no useful way to implement the code.
Harold’s sacrifice had been for nothing.
At that moment, the doors to the bunker had been blown open, and a small army had swarmed in. Less than a second later, one of the containment pipes had burst, flooding the whole area with steam. Root had no doubt that this was somehow the Machine’s doing, and prepared herself to die fighting. But the voice in her ear that she could never say no to ordered her to run. The steam provided enough cover for Root to make it out through the back exit, and it wasn’t until she heard the deep rumble and felt the ground lurch between her feet that she realized she was not the target of this attack. She waited, fiddling with her implant, praying for a sign, a word, even a beep, something to tell her that She was still listening. But there was only silence.
The Machine had been her life, her purpose, her reason for living for so long. Now even She was gone.
And Root was alone.
Alone with no friends, no loved ones, no god, and one goal.
Revenge.
Samaritan had taken everything from Root, and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to do the same.
It took her a while to identify Samaritan’s weak point. After all, what could she do that would damage an all powerful machine? With humans it was easy, the ache Root felt in her chest every morning when she woke up was proof enough of that. The weakness of humans was that they cared, they prioritized, they sought to protect. The more Root dwelled on that fact, the angrier she got.
It was that prioritization, that thought that some people were more important than others and therefore deserved to be protected that had led to the creation of the Machine. And when the Machine had chosen to save more than who She had been told, Samaritan had been brought online in order to ensure certain humans remained alive.
This whole mess was the fault of humans and their lack of logic.
Everything led back to bad code.
And with Samaritan on the loose, that code would only get worse.
It was that thought that led to her plan. To her building a program that would duplicate and implement some of the most dangerous codes and keys in existence. To sneak into the most secure buildings in the country. She’d probably killed a few thousand people, poisoning this building at this time of night, but she didn’t care. The entire world would soon follow.
Root paused as she plugged her thumbdrive into the jack and uploaded her code. She wondered if she should feel guilty. After all, she was dooming humanity in order to spite a computer program. But Samaritan was just a computer program. For all its omniscience and awareness and processing power, its plans had to be implemented physically somehow. A god was nothing without its worshippers, knowing or unknowing. And Root was going to destroy the congregation.
She supposed that she could justify herself using morals. She could claim that she was saving humanity from the inevitable slavery Samaritan would inflict upon all of them. She was setting them all free while taking away the AI’s source of power. But if she was honest to herself (and why would she lie? There was no one left for her to be better for) she knew that--as she set her code to run, and bypassed the system preparations, setting all nuclear warheads to launch in ten--the grim smirk on her face was fueled not by some sort of saviour complex, but by the thought of Samaritan left, aware but powerless, watching the world destroy itself, watching the aftermath, watching nothing but death, until the power ran out and it too died.
Leaning against the wall, Root watched the screens showing satellite coverage of the world as, one by one, every automated missile on the planet fired on random targets. As more and more direct hits registered around the world, Root felt herself sliding down until she was sitting on the ground. Her mind was getting a bit fuzzy, the effects of the toxin still lingering in the air, no doubt.
It was probably better this way, she told herself. Better to be weakened by the poison before a missile struck. Though she could see on the screens that there was one headed right towards her. She wondered if she'd be unconscious before it hit. She wondered if it'd be better to fall asleep and never wake up or to feel the burn of the missiles impact for just an instant before it ended.
Her eyes fluttered for a moment and when she opened them she saw a familiar figure looking down at her.
Root knew she was hallucinating. She knew there was no way Shaw could be here. It was just her subconscious projecting the person who would bring her the most comfort in her last moments. Still, that knowledge did nothing to damper the emotions that jumped up inside her at the sight of the woman she loved, nor did it stop the flirtatious grin that spread across her features.
"Hey Sweetie," she said as her eyes fluttered again. "Long time no see." She heard the roar of the incoming missile and closed her eyes, waiting for the end. "I'll see you soon."