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Shaw had plans for her night off - they involved a bottle of eighteen year-old scotch and a porterhouse so rare that a well-trained veterinarian could have revived it.
"You busy, sweetie?" Root's voice curled in her ear.
"You pick your moments, you know that," Shaw replied.
"I have an off the books mission for you, if you're interested?"
Off the books these days meant: don't tell Lionel.
*
Root had once held a gun under her own jaw and said that she couldn't live without Shaw; Shaw could live without Root, though, she'd been doing it for more than a year now.
Reese and Finch hadn't made it either, and the best thing Shaw could say about that was at least it hadn't been at her hand. Fusco had made it, and he and Shaw still worked the irrelevant numbers.
They didn't work out of the subway; even if it hadn't been a structurally unsound death trap, seven thousand simulations of trying to throw Samaritan off the scent had left Shaw with an aversion to the place.
They had an office now. An office building, actually.
Harold had left his money - the money he'd made from being a founding partner of IFT, the money that had been out of reach while he was living as Professor Whistler - to whichever of my friends survive me; Shaw and Fusco were the only survivors on a very short list of names. The Machine threw twenty years of Root's ill-gotten gains into the pot too. The result was fuck you money.
Shaw and Fusco had stood staring at the long list of zeroes.
"We could retire," said Lionel. "We could retire and buy an island."
"Separate islands," Shaw had replied.
"Goes without saying."
Instead they bought a building, had a payphone installed in the lobby, and started working the irrelevant numbers.
*
"You're hot, Sam."
"Excuse me?"
The Machine's off the books mission had involved a tech start-up, Shaw setting fire to it, kicking out the glass of a second storey window, and jumping into a dumpster.
Root's voice in Shaw's ear was deliberately bland. "Your temperature is elevated, Sameen."
"I just jumped out of a burning building," said Shaw hauling herself out of the dumpster and ducking away from the sound of sirens.
Ever since Root had given the Machine the ability to defend herself, rival ASIs were smothered in their cradles, which was fine with Shaw.
"Are you going to want anything else from me, or can I get back to my night off?"
"If I do I know where to find you." Shaw snorted at that. "Have a good night, sweetie."
*
Shaw had never told Fusco the details of what had happened when she was Samaritan's prisoner, just that it had been bad. And she definitely wasn't about to tell him that he'd become her touchstone to reality.
Lionel had never once been in any of Samaritan's simulations, and Root never, ever died in them. But Root was dead and Lionel was here, ergo this was real.
*
Greer had tried to convince her that this was just another hallucination.
"She's not dead, Ms. Shaw," he'd said with Shaw's gun pointed at him.
Shaw had heard the explosion in her earpiece; she could hear Fusco choking and coughing, could hear Reese's shuffling and ragged breathing like a grievously wounded man dragging himself along the ground, couldn't hear Finch at all.
"End this, my dear. End it and the simulation will reset and you'll see Ms. Groves again." Shaw's gun hand wavered. "You do remember how to end it, don't you?"
Slowly, numbly Shaw raised her gun to her temple. Fusco, Reese, and the heavy silence where Finch should have been cut abruptly from Shaw's earpiece to be replaced with the Machine's stilted electronic tones. "He's. Lying." the Machine said, each word stolen from a recorded conversation. "I'm. Sorry. I. Loved. Her. Too."
"I never--" Shaw lowered her gun, just a bit.
"She's. With. Me." the Machine's artificial voice softened, mellowed -- "She's. Safe" -- and became Root's singsong tones. "I'm safe, sweetie."
"My dear Sameen..." Greer began; Shaw shot him through the heart.
"It's too late for Harold and John," said Root's voice in Shaw's ear, "but we can still save Lionel if you move quickly."
*
Shaw arrived at their office to find Fusco on the payphone in the lobby.
"Helpful as ever, Fruit Loops," he grumbled, hanging up. He brandished his notepad at Shaw. "Another number. You know what, next time you can speak to Her All Seeing Eye-ness. You're her favourite, maybe you can talk her into giving us full names and addresses."
"What's the problem, Lionel," Shaw drawled, following him up the stairs. "I thought you used to be a detective."
Fusco harrumphed. He had been pushed into retirement after one too many suspicious shootouts, culminating in an explosion in an abandoned subway station from which two unidentified bodies had been recovered.
Shaw spent way too much of her time listening to him complain about his pension, even though she knew that he gave the lot to NYPD charities; Shaw had given a chunk of Root's money to various animal shelters around the state.
The floor they used as their base of operations was empty apart from two desks facing each other, the whiteboard where information about whatever number they were working was pinned, and a bank of monitors.
The rest of the building was empty too, even though Lionel sometimes sighed over what they could have been making in rent. They used the rest of the building to stash numbers who had to be kept off the streets for a while; Shaw slept here sometimes when she couldn't face going home; two floors up Shaw had stored more munitions than Lionel really needed to know about.
Shaw draped her jacket over the back of her chair as Lionel peered through his glasses and tapped at his laptop. "Unless Her Ladyship is feeling expansive today--" they both looked up at the monitors, which remained stubbornly blank "--we're going to need someone at the NYPD to unseal these records."
"If only we knew someone who used to be a detective," Shaw said blankly.
"You can go this time, I think Silva's sick of the sight of me." Shaw snorted and Lionel huffed.
Dani Silva was their regular contact within the NYPD; she'd been promoted to the homicide taskforce on Fusco's recommendation before he'd been shoved out the door.
"C'mon," Lionel coaxed. "I think she has a crush on you, and it ain't like your All Seeing Other Half is exactly in a position to be jealous."
Shaw could feel her expression turn to stone.
*
It wasn't as though Shaw lived like a nun. She had needs, and when they got to her she picked up some guy to satisfy them, and it was always a guy now.
At one point there had been a succession of leggy brunettes, but it had been hard to concentrate on the matter at hand with Root's gleeful cackle in her ear.
*
Shaw's off-off-the-books missions involved hunting down former Samaritan operatives.
The Machine didn't exactly help her with those missions, but the targets she chose never came up as irrelevant numbers.
Shaw packed up her sniper rifle; her latest hit had made it almost too easy, she'd used Samaritan's money to buy an apartment with floor length windows.
"Did I ever get the one who killed her?" she asked.
Root's voice was soft in her ear. "Would that make you feel better, Sameen?"
*
"You make a nice change from Fusco," Dani Silva said, handing Shaw a photocopied file across the table in a diner not too close to the precinct.
Shaw flipped straight to their number's known associates, and careful not to sound fond, said,"Ebola would be a nice change from Lionel."
Silva grinned. "Hey, I'm working until ten tonight, but I could grab a drink afterwards?"
Shaw picked up a pickle from the side of her burger and shoved it all into her mouth. Lionel had said that Silva had a crush on her, but Shaw had never been any good at reading these things; God only knew how long Cole had harboured feelings for her, and she'd only known with Root because the woman had practically had I would tattooed on her forehead.
Shaw swallowed the pickle. "I don't do relationships."
Silva leaned forward. "We could always skip the drink and go straight to, you know," she arched an eyebrow. "Or we could even skip that and go right to you telling me what you and Fusco are actually up to."
When Shaw didn't say anything Silva stood with a shrug. "You've got my number if you change your mind, about any of it. In the meantime, enjoy your list of criminal associates."
Shaw was walking back to the office, file in hand, when Root's voice piped up in her ear: "You should have taken her up on it, Sam, I know your type. Detective Silva's hot, and she's a badass." Shaw grunted, and Root's voice turned deceptively flat and bland. "I think you would make an excellent recruiter of potential asset Dani Silva, Sameen."
*
"Honey, if you're not too busy," Root's voice cooed in Shaw's ear, "Lionel's got himself into a bit of a pickle."
'A bit of a pickle' turned out to be Fusco being backed into a kill-box by three of the Armenian mobsters their latest number had gotten entangled with. He was still grumbling about it when Shaw had finished shoving a bag of Finch's money at the skinny teenager they'd just saved and telling him that she and Fusco wouldn't be around to save him if this happened again.
"A pickle, she called it! I could have died back there! Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between Root and the Machine; they're both trying to get me killed."
"No," Shaw lied coldly. "It isn't."
*
For all that Lionel's reaction to hearing the Machine speak with Root's voice had been to say, "That's some next level superpower shit, Coco-Puffs," he'd always been better at differentiating between the two than Shaw.
"You're not her, are you?" Shaw had asked one night. She'd been falling asleep with Root's voice babbling in her ear about metaphysics and Schrodinger, and how until it ended this life both was and wasn't a simulation, but that was no reason for Shaw to rush to the finish line.
"I'm her and she's me, Sameen."
"Well, that's a comforting thing to say to a person with reality issues," Shaw drawled sleepily.
*
Shaw knew something that Lionel didn't: she knew that the Machine had let a number die to keep Shaw safe.
"Primary mission objective complete." Root's voice had been flat and dull; her machine voice.
Once upon a time Shaw would have argued that she didn't need the Machine to protect her, that Finch hadn't built it to prioritize any one person. But Shaw was a pragmatist, and she couldn't save anyone if she was dead; she flinched now in a way that she never had before Samaritan, too.
The Machine was not Root.
Root was dead and Lionel was here, and those were the twin pillars on which Shaw's reality was built.
But the Machine wasn't just the Machine anymore either.
Sometimes Shaw thought that the Machine had stolen Root's voice in a fit of bizarre ASI grief. And as angry as she got at the Machine then, she wasn't in any position to judge; she hadn't hung up on the damn system for a year just because it spoke to her in the voice of her dead... person. If Shaw were the sort of person who worried about phone bills or poor coping methods, she'd be concerned about both.
Sometimes the voice in her ear sounded so exactly like Root that Shaw thought the woman must have somehow actually managed to upload her mind into the Machine. It shouldn't have been possible, but neither should VR simulations so real that they were indistinguishable from reality, or mind controlling brain chips. They were living in a science fiction universe now; Shaw's dad would have loved it.
*
"You got any plans for tonight?" Lionel asked as they were finishing up for the day.
"If this is your way of telling me to get a drink with Detective Silva, Lionel..." Shaw warned.
"Nah, what would she want with a grouch like you anyway?" Lionel said, gruffly fond. "But my kid has a hockey game if you feel like it?"
Shaw glared daggers at him.
"C'mon," he said, snatching up Shaw's jacket and holding it out for her to slide her arms into. "What else are you going to do, sit at home playing pinochle with your robot girlfriend?"
Not so long ago Shaw would have rather stabbed herself in the thigh with a syringe full of germ warfare toxins than spend an evening at a hockey game with Fusco, and she wouldn't have hesitated to tell him so.
Now she snatched her jacket out of his grasp and pulled it on. "Let's go."
Shaw didn't actually find Fusco's son all that annoying; he'd always remembered the time she saved him from a dirty cop who'd been sent to kill him, and treated her with the sort of silent, respectful awe that a girl could get used to.
"Hey," he said coming up to his father and Shaw after the game with his hockey stick over his shoulder and his skates in hand.
"How's my man?" Shaw asked.
"Fine," Lee grinned. "I had to take him to the vet's last week for his vaccinations, and they said he's fine."
Lee Fusco had adopted Bear in his retirement. There had been a while there where Shaw was in no fit state to look after him; she hadn't been sure if Bear was a real dog or not, and daily she'd wondered if blowing out her own brains wasn't the only way to be sure.
And later Lionel had said that at least one of them deserved a quiet retirement.
*
The Machine thought that Shaw should get a cochlear implant, like Root's.
Shaw kneecapped the rent-a-thug she was fighting.
"It's bad enough having you in my ear never mind inside my head."
"What?" said the thug, clutching desperately at his shattered knee.
"I'm not talking to you," said Shaw.
In her ear Root's voice said, "Well, I always did like being inside you, Sam."
It was a terrible line, and Shaw couldn't help the bark of laughter that accompanied her rolling eyes.
She thought about patterns; about her and Root as a never-ending symphony in the noise.
*
Fusco had tried to change the Machine's voice once.
They'd held a wake for everyone they'd lost in the ruined subway. Lionel didn't drink, so after a certain point it had just been him stubbornly refusing to leave Shaw to choke on her own vomit.
Root's voice had crackled out of a broken speaker - something about Shaw's blood alcohol level - and Lionel had scrambled to his feet to look for a working computer. "There's got to be some way to turn that off. It's like changing the voice on your sat nav, right?"
"Leave it," Shaw had ordered him, pointing a bottle of whiskey at him like a shotgun. "It helps."
*
This former Samaritan operative was an unimpressive specimen; too sharp features and a scruffy, sandy coloured beard. Shaw had dropped him with two to the centre mass.
"That's him," Root's voice was soft in her ear.
Shaw reached up to the unblemished skin behind her ear and pressed down hard. The world stayed exactly as it was, down to the corpse at Shaw's feet.
"She wasn't alone. I was with her. I still am."
Shaw turned on her heel and walked away.
*
Shaw broke into Lionel's apartment. She had a key -- "For emergencies, and so I can stop buying new locks, don't make it weird" -- but broke in anyway, and helped herself to a cup of terrible cop coffee in his kitchen.
When Lionel ambled in wearing pajamas he didn't seem at all surprised to find Shaw already there. He poured his own cup of coffee, sat down, and said, "If you're here to visit the dog, Lee's taken him to my ex's for a few days."
"You were right, Lionel," Shaw said into her coffee. "Sometimes I can't tell the difference between Root and the Machine. And the worst part is that I don't think she knows herself."
"So this would be a bad time for a robot girlfriend joke?"
The corner of Shaw's mouth twitched. "I've been working missions for her without you."
"I know," said Lionel. "I was a detective for a long time, remember? All those break-ins and fires at companies working on artificial intelligence, it wasn't hard to figure out. Artificial super intelligences are like apex-predators, right? More than one in the same place and they fight to the death."
Shaw expected to hear Root's laughter in her ear at Lionel comparing the Machine to something from the Discovery Channel, until she remembered that she'd taken her earpiece out earlier and shoved it into her pocket.
"I wish you would have told me, because I'm all for stopping the next supercomputer apocalypse, but I'm glad you've told me now."
There were probably other things Shaw should tell him; like that she'd been executing former Samaritan operatives, but was pretty sure she was done now. But Shaw wasn't self-destructive enough to drive away the only person who she was totally sure was real.
Lionel looked like he was thinking of making some sort of comforting gesture like touching her hand, thankfully for both of them he thought better of it.
"You want some breakfast, Sameen?" he asked instead.
"You can cook?"
"Nah. But I got a kid; you can have cereal and chocolate milk."
"Isn't your kid, like, sixteen?"
"You want some or not?"
Shaw touched the earpiece in her pocket, but didn't put it back in. "Yeah. Okay."