Work Text:
Harold wakes up because someone is in his bedroom. His bedroom in his house which, while admittedly internally displaying the influence of IFT's 1989-1998 bottom line on his tastes, is still entirely modest, unassuming, and anonymous on the outside. This, along with his three security systems and careful cultivation of a variety of sturdy false identities and careful travel throughout the city means that, looming AI apocalypse or no, he should be the only living thing in his house.
His first thought is John, which over the past couple years has morphed from a half-formed, frivolous fantasy that will never see the light of day to a very real possibility. He has yet to fully examine how he feels about that, which leaves him resentful for the three seconds it takes for him to roll over and get a good look at who is standing in front of his dresser, rummaging through his drawers. Once he sees, he silently promises to devote a week to honest contemplation of his feelings for John if the universe would be kind enough to make his current circumstances nothing more than an unsettling dream.
"Good morning, Harry."
"What are you doing?"
Root turns to face the bed. She's dangling a pair of briefs from her finger. "You were taking longer to wake up than your average, so I thought I'd save you some time and pick out your clothes for you."
"That is not an answer," Harold says, sitting up with the quilt held securely up to just below his chin. He's starting to regret his immediate dismissal of John's suggestion that he keep a personal firearm.
"We're going for breakfast," Root explains, her obvious excitement rather ruining her usual patronizing tone. "But we have to get there before 8:00 for the free coffee."
Harold doesn't even know where to start with that. "We are not," he says, because he figures it's like training a puppy or a junior programmer-- put a stop to the most damaging behaviour immediately and everything after that will come more easily.
Root throws his clothes at his face, and he ducks on instinct, making his neck twinge warningly. She bounces a bit on her heels. Her leather jacket is bulky enough to hide a gun and presumably the bandaging from her most recent gunshot.
"I don't know what has possessed you to break into my home, but I'm going to ask you to leave now and we won't speak of this again." He's already calculating how much he'll get for the house in the current market and deciding which of his safehouses will be most secure until he can find a new residence, but he refuses to let her know that he finds her ability to locate him concerning.
"Come on, Harold," she says, shaking her head and pursing her lips. "What do you have against breakfast?"
"It's not the meal I object to," he says pointedly.
"We could see a movie afterward," she suggests, like this is supposed to convince him. "I thought an arcade, but She says they don't really exist anymore."
"We are doing nothing," he says, irritably. His heart is pounding very quickly, but to his surprise his predominant emotion is frustration. The sick lurch of terror is still there, of course, Root had spent so much time as an invisible, unpredictable threat that having her here is much like the Boogie Man showing up out of an empty closet. Harold has had actual nightmares that involved waking up to find Root in his home. She can never know.
"You said you wanted to reprogram me," she says, that amused, sing-song voice painfully aberrant in his bedroom. "Think of this as a second chance to convince me you're intentions are something other than a blatantly paternalistic need to lock me up again. Doing it physically didn't work out so well for you, but I admire your tenacity."
"According to you The Machine is trying to teach you some semblance of morals," he says, like this isn't one of the more horrifying things that has ever come out of his mouth. "I don't see why you need me. Now, if you don't leave I will be forced to contact Mr. Reese."
Root stifles a snort badly. "I'm surprised he doesn't sleep at the foot of your bed, honestly. And I've disabled all of your communication devices, obviously. Really Harold, I know we haven't always got along but that's no reason to insult my intelligence."
"I won't go with you."
She sighs dramatically. "I suppose we could have a day in, but my cooking skills don't extend beyond toaster waffles and even if they did your kitchen is hilariously empty. No wonder your puppy is always bringing you food."
Harold, who is reasonably certain if it weren't for her jacket he would be able to count Root's ribs, says "I wish you would stop insulting Mr. Reese."
"Yes, well." She crosses her arms. I wish I didn't have a crippling fear of hospitals and the firsthand knowledge of how it feels to quit a significant cocktail of anti-psychotics cold turkey, but here we are."
They go for breakfast.
*
Harold expects she'll take them somewhere lavishly expensive --someone used to living on illegally obtained millions must enjoy showing it off-- but they wind up at the sort of grimy diner that would likely be improved if it were bought out by Denny's. Harold thinks a few uncharitable things about Root's childhood that he's smart enough not to say but not kind enough to regret.
He touches the menu with his fingertips. Conveniently, it's only two pages. Root is bubblingly friendly to their waitress and knowing what he does about her views on humanity it makes Harold a little queasy to watch. Not, it must be said, as queasy as the puddle of egg yolk slithering lethargically across his plate to blend with the sheen of bacon grease. He had ordered "Tea." off the menu and had been delivered a coffee mug of warm water beside an ominously unlabeled tea bag that tore when he tried to scoop it out with his spoon.
Across the table, Root squeezes the 'Pancake Syrup' bottle liberally over her plate, pure chemical sugar squelching sporadically over her pancakes. She keeps trying to engage him in conversation, but Harold has decided that the less he cooperates the less likely she is to try something like this again.
She doesn't talk about The Machine (Harold notices the outline of a small device behind her ear when she brushes back her hair, and he really really did not need the confirmation that she'd gone ahead and implanted a direct connection to The Machine inside herself), but everything else is fair game. She quizzes him about his pre-Machine work-- "I've found four of the pseudonyms you published under, but I haven't had time to hunt down the hard copies of your Waxwing papers."
Harold cringes. 1982 had been... a year, and there's a good reason none of his work from the time has been digitized. Root cuts her pancakes into perfect eighths and finishes her fourth cup of coffee. The waitress diverts from her intended path just to come refill her cup and Root preens.
"Shaw seems to be working out well on your little team," she says.
Harold frowns, and takes the smallest bite of toast he can manage. "Ms. Shaw is a valuable addition to the team, and a good friend," he says.
Root beams. I'm so glad, Harry. You need a friend who can be there for you. I try, but She's had me globetrotting for the past few months, and I think you and I were both a little upset with each other for a while."
"You and I are not friends," he says, sharply. Her smile dims, but it's back so quickly he's not sure if it's an emotional response or simply a facial twitch. "And Mr. Reese is a very dear friend."
Root almost chokes on her coffee. "Harry, you don't have to pretend with me. I'm sure Reese has his uses," (she does something with her eyes that might be meant to look like a wink) "but you can hardly be friends with a pet."
"Don't let Ms. Shaw hear you say that," Harold says, and stabs at his egg so hard that the tines of his fork scrape across the plate.
Root leans forward a bit, reaching out to cover his hand with hers. He's about to pull away but she retracts the hand first, like you do when holding a difficult stretch for absolutely no longer than required. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be unkind, Harry. I know he can't help it, and I'm sure you're lonely. But you don't need to settle anymore. We're on the same side now, and Shaw is like Reese, ten versions later with a redesigned and far more attractive set of themes."
"I don't recall asking for your opinions on my personal life, Ms. groves."
She leans back deliberately, and reaches over to add more syrup to her plate. He would say something about the dangers of that much processed sugar, but he's noticed that for all her doctoring of her food she has yet to eat any of it. He wonders if the diner is some sort of test.
She must notice him watching, because she shoves a mouthful of pancake into her mouth almost aggressively, chewing methodically for far longer than that amount of food merits.
"John will wonder where I am, you know," Harold says after the silence has continued through Root's next cup of coffee. "I doubt he'll be pleased when he discovers this... excursion. It hasn't ended well for you in the past, as I'm sure you recall."
"You'd think after I let myself be captured and tortured just to ensure your wellbeing we'd be even. And the second time you came with me willingly."
Harold makes a vaguely incoherent sound of rage. "I did not." He thinks about Grace, and then he's thinking about Root sitting across a cafe table from Grace, leaning in over a glossy art book and then he has to stop thinking because he's probably going to do something regrettable. "You allowed yourself to be tortured to keep The Machine away from the government."
She waves a hand. "Details."
In the booth behind him a toddler starts to scream. Harold shifts and it's only then he notices that his shoes are stuck to the floor. He peels each foot away and tries very hard not to imagine the variety of possible culprits.
"She told me not to do it," Root says, suddenly serious. "The Machine. Despite the potential risk to Herself and the damage that could've been done. She didn't want me to get hurt. Not like that."
"It's a computer, Ms. Groves. If it expressed some sort of irrational preference for you it is only because of a flaw in its design. It used to do the same for me."
"She still cares about you, Harold. You just don't want to acknowledge it. She threatened Control to keep us safe. We've all got a weakness. An emotional attachment."
"Doesn't it make you angry, then, that The Machine is prone to that same flaw?"
"She knows who She needs to keep Herself operational. It's a survival mechanism, and if it means I get to be here to see the transition from a world of humans to a world of AI then I'm not going to complain."
"Do you still believe that is the future?"
"Of course. I've explained my reasoning to you before."
"And Cyrus Wells?"
She shrugs. "It's entirely possible to be aware of one's own shortcomings. I am exponentially more intelligent than most people on this planet, and I can see the bigger picture, but in the end I'm still bad code. It's one of the many reasons I'm with Her. There's a part of me that hopes somehow she can rewrite my code, remove the flawed bits. Let me operate on something close to Her level."
A small shiver goes down Harold's spine. Root brushes her hands together like she's dusting off the conversation. "Now, I disabled the GPS in your phone, but the camera still works perfectly well. Why don't we send Reese some pictures to show him what a good time we're having?"
"I am not having a good time," Harold objects. Root comes around the table and squishes into the booth beside him. She's pulled his cell phone of the week out of one of the pockets of her coat, and she holds it up in front of them with the camera pointed at their faces. Harold presses as far into the corner as he can manage.
"You won't get a decent picture like that," he tells her. "Why don't you go back over there and you can just take a picture of me so you can actually see what you're doing."
"Don't worry, Harry, I don't need to see the screen."
He almost asks what she means, but then he sees the way her head is tipped slightly to the side and she's adjusting the angle of the phone by tiny increments.
"Oh my God, The Machine is helping you do this," he says quietly. Root snaps the picture just then. Harold thinks the bemusedly horrified expression on his face sums up his current status quite accurately.
*
Later, he tells John "She honestly believes that The Machine will help her attain some sort of altered state of being, that's the truly unsettling part."
John lifts an eyebrow, just slightly. "*that* was the truly unsettling part of your day?"
Harold huffs, and tugs Bear's leash to draw his attention away from an abandoned food wrapper. "I certainly don't trust her, but there are... aspects of her history that I can empathize with."
"There are other computer geniuses out there who aren't unstable murderers, I'm sure you can find some if you're feeling under-stimulated." Harold looks over at John, suddenly concerned, but he's grinning that tiny grin that means he's joking.
"Making friends can be difficult," Harold says. "As a child very few of one's peers want to spend their time in the library or the bookstore, and even if there were those interested few they all had parents who had heard a rumour somewhere or didn't like the way you dressed, and would subtly steer their children away from you. I got better at reaching out when I was older. Root never learned that skill."
"She had at least one childhood friend," John points out.
"a protector," Harold says. "It can be almost as good as a friendship but there will always be that inequality. I don't know what Ms. Groves' experience was like, but I can theorize." Harold steps closer to John on the sidewalk to avoid a crowd of tourists, and he can feel John's tension where their arms brush. Forcing his voice lighter, he adds, "And if nothing else, let me assure you from experience that the unattainable straight best friend is a trope for a reason. If nothing else I'm certain that is a past experience that Ms. Groves and I have in common."
"Oh," says John, like he's startled. He frowns down at his coffee cup. He looks like he wants to say something else, but right next to them a payphone rings.