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John is having problems again. Nothing like before, of course; Harold would never let it get that bad, not as long as it was in his power, but John just wasn’t built to maintain a steady routine of the kind of stresses their work involves, and he’s gotten tenser and sadder than usual lately. Harold knows that if left alone long enough, it will result in exactly the kind of downward spiral that had happened the last time. Fortunately, Harold also knows exactly what he needs to do to fix things.
He should. He wrote the protocols himself.
John comes in to the library as usual, and Harold allows himself a half-smile at the bag of fresh muffins he brings with him. It’s astounding, really, the level of empathy that he displays. The CIA had no idea the treasure that they’d wasted.
“Mr. Reese, could you assist me for a moment?” he asks, and of course John agrees. When he’s leaning over to reach the server rack Harold asked for help with, Harold says “the serpent has fled from the nest, Mr. Reese,” and John tumbles face-down onto the table; Bear starts barking in alarm, and Harold has to soothe him and shut him in the other room. What comes next will be delicate work, after all.
“There, now,” Harold murmurs, running a hand over John’s back, warm through his shirt. He is so beautifully made; It’s an indulgence, to let himself touch, but there’s nobody there to see. “Things will be all right, John. I promise.”
He moves a row of books from one of the shelves and unlocks the hidden safe that they were hiding, taking out the laptop (never networked, purpose-built and only ever used for this) and the interface cable. The original protocols had called for a wipe-and-restore after each mission, but Harold had never liked the idea; if you wanted drones you should use drones, if you wanted to build yourself artificial operatives you should permit them to learn and grow the same as the organic ones. All the constructed memories in the world couldn’t take the place of experiential learning.
He runs his fingers through the thick, soft hair at the base of John’s skull, searching for the hidden catch. It feels like a scar, but Harold knows how to unlock it, the precise twist of fingers impossible to do by mistake, and the tiny port rises from its hiding place. Harold smiles, and plugs the cable in.
John’s body twitches with the connection, and Harold pets him absently, already scanning the indicators on the maintenance console; just as he thought, there are lots of reds and yellows on the dashboard, but nothing severe enough to require direct edits.
Harold starts running the first maintenance routine, which compresses and archives traumatic memories. John won’t forget these experiences, but any negative emotions he connects with them will feel dulled and distant, as though they happened long ago. It’s a shame organic people can’t do the same; it’s a much more efficient process than therapy. While the routine runs, he checks the relationship matrices. The area devoted to Harold himself is larger than ever, sprawlingly connected to nearly every other memory node and taking up a large percentage of John’s nightly integration subroutines. Harold should really compress the node, but John is so high-functioning he can tolerate a few inefficiencies, and Harold finds a wild and tangled beauty in the web of John’s code. Anyway, he suspects that the wipe-and-restore protocols had been largely responsible for what happened to Kara, leaving her unprepared to cope without someone regularly trimming and tidying her mind when she finally broke free, leaving her vulnerable. Kara had been designed for loyalty and emotionless obedience to the mission; he’d traded much of that to give John more resilience and empathy. He’d succeeded beyond even his most ambitious goals, and John had soon developed a deep and steadfast loyal streak of his own, his self-preservation routines peppered with connections to his other primary nodes to the point that danger to Harold or Carter or Fusco or Bear triggered more intense responses than threats to himself.
It’s a pity, Harold often thinks, that he can’t connect to organic people like this, can’t hack into their firmware and determine their motivations and loyalties, look at the web of their lives and emotions sparkling like a net of stars. It would certainly make their jobs easier.
The maintenance routine finishes with a chime, and Harold scans the report with a smile. All the warning indicators are gone; John should feel much better when he wakes up. He turns on the low-level functions on John’s body, but not his consciousness, yet.
“Maintenance Protocol Seven, Mr. Reese,” he says, and the body activates with a tremor under his calming hand. “Not to worry, we’re almost finished. Stand up, if you please, and then move slowly to the armchair in the corner.” The body obeys, stiff and somewhat unnerving without its gentle and lively inhabitant. (He’d heard distressing rumors about the goings-on in the body development lab, but he prefers not to dwell on the possibilities.) Harold follows, staying close enough not to risk disconnecting the cable.
“Very good,” he says. “Now sit, please, slowly, and lean back. Arrange yourself comfortably. Maintenance Protocol Eight, Mr. Reese. When you awake you will remember helping me move the servers and then sitting down comfortably in this chair, where you drifted off for a pleasant and refreshing nap. Maintenance Protocol Eight ends.” He closes the console and removes the cable; by the time John wakes, eight minutes later, the laptop and cable have been re-stowed and Harold is ensconced at his desk with every appearance of having been there for hours.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Reese,” Harold says, eyeing him for signs of confusion or disfunction. “Did you have a pleasant nap?”
John blinks, and then smiles, sunny and uncomplicated the way he very rarely is. “Actually, yeah,” he says. “Sorry to conk out on you like that, but I feel great.”
“You should allow yourself more downtime,” Harold says.
John smirks. “Is this the ‘even computers need to defrag sometimes’ talk, Finch?”
“Indeed, Mr. Reese,” Harold says. He loves when John is sarcastic; the data webs it makes are so intricate and lovely. “And you are so much more than any mere machine.”