I've finally gotten back to this fic! Basically, it'll be a Root-centric story that fills in what we don't get to see/know in the show. Right now, I'm intending it to be canon-compliant, so any deviations are unintentional unless otherwise noted. If you read the first chapter I posted back in December, I think it's now going to be Ch. 4, so it may be confusing for a couple weeks until I get Chs. 2 and 3 up. Please bear with me!
This chapter encompasses the events of "Root Cause" (1.13). I've tried to give enough information from the episode so that it's clear what Root is doing, but all the references will probably make more sense if you've seen the episode. Enjoy!
The woman with many names and an ever-changing face strode up to the plain dorm building, wheeling her smart black suitcase behind her. She wove smoothly between students rushing to shuffle their patchwork duffle bags into waiting caravans before the parking meters ran out, desperate to fall into familiar beds and let the semester's knowledge disappear under Christmas snowdrifts. She caught the door before it closed behind another teenager running mad to escape the so-called hallowed halls.
A woman with a suitcase, even one in her thirties, did not attract much attention from the frantic students. One, however, did notice that the woman, though beautiful, seemed to be alone, withdrawn and inscrutable within her deep hood. Had she looked closer, she would have seen that the woman's sweatshirt was indeed of that university, but still had creases from the campus bookstore shelves; that she was not, in fact, attached or connected in any way to any of the retreating students; and that she avoided the steady gaze of the security cameras with the ease of someone who has planned to do exactly that. The student, however, noted only that the woman was a small anomaly in the painfully plain corridor before succumbing to the siren whisper of a home, two hours' drive in her future, in which she could sleep without alarm clocks. She was certainly long gone by the time the hooded woman exited the elevator on the fifth floor, located an empty room, and swiftly picked the lock before finally stepping inside and freeing her head and long, brown hair from the confines of the sweatshirt.
She smirked to herself. That was all the audience she ever needed.
Hours chased themselves down to tired nubs and returned to the room as puddling shadows casting themselves across the industrial carpet. They drifted past the woman working steadily at the wooden desk and fell into the grime-swiped cracks between the cramped room's institutional furnishings.
She had pushed the whimsical clutter of a teenage girl's attempt at stylish study methods to the floor. That leveled the space into a smooth plane, full of opportunity, upon which she could place the tools of her craft.
She had honed her talents until the intricate whorls and hauntingly beautiful veins of a beating system flowed from her hands in smooth strings of numbers and letters, a cat's-cradle of information spun between her fingertips. Over years, the spinning patterns grew in complexity, though they never outpaced her controlling touch. She had grown her playground into an empire over the years, but as its ruler, she and she alone played there.
The beating tattoo of her black-tipped fingers striking the keyboard formed the soundtrack to her work. With flicks of her fingers she spun a spiraling trail of hints and tiny lies down into the life of one bumbling being. A gun license here, a series of encrypted emails there, a search history to do a black-ops recruit proud scattered throughout. She was particularly pleased with the trojan program she had designed to be delivered by email. Nearly any fool could write a trojan, but it took an artist to create an elegant program. The best part was that the mark had installed the program himself when he replied to the email.
All these had been set up over the last months, of course, or dated in such a way as to seem so. These things took time, and she was a master of the long game.
The shadows had long since circled the room and settled in for the night when her phone buzzed.
"Hello?" she answered sweetly.
"Is it ready?" a nervous voice rasped.
The honey in her voice did nothing to dull the edge it slashed through the air.
"It's been ready. We've discussed this before, you know," she reminded the Congressman's campaign manager with the air of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a particularly stubborn child.
"I just want to be sure," was the disgruntled reply. "I pay you enough for that, don't I?"
"You pay me enough to have me take care of your problems," she answered in a bored tone. "But you don't pay me enough to keep cleaning up when you create new ones. Like this call, for example."
The businessman turned frantic. "You said this was a secure line to call," he accused shakily.
"It is," she sighed. "But that just means that no one can find out who you called. They'll still know you called an untraceable number, if they check."
"Fix it!" The order was a dying shudder of bravado and fraying nerves. Some people were just not built for this game.
She rolled her eyes and tapped her long fingers carelessly on the desk in a slow rhythm.
"Oh, I will," she drawled. "Once."
Then she hung up. The phone had not even stopped transcribing glinting circles on the desk when the plastic tap of the keys once again slipped around the room.
She dozed periodically, both on the bed and in the strict desk chair; she ate irregularly whenever hunger overtook her malaise. She monitored the development of her strategy as a general from base, watching the far-off flashes that signal gun-fire. Soft pings interrupted her other projects, alerting her to the finding of the planted emails, the discovery of the gun permit, and everything else she had planned so meticulously. She could have placed a time-estimate on every alert, but betting against herself was pointlessly boring in the face of her certainty.
And then, a ping she did not expect. A louder one, an alarm set long ago against a dim possibility.
She studied the screen for a moment before once again grinning. It seemed that there was a pretender to the throne of her kingdom. Of course, entering her empire of mirrors meant that one had to see the mirages coming.
The shadow system absorbed the intruder's search and pulled it into a dark hole to chase ghosts. Meanwhile, the hacker directed her attention to the information arriving on her screen in scrolling strings of code. Though it streamed by with the volume and force of an enormous river, she picked out several strings she had never seen before, and she had seen it all. Moreover, it carried within it an artistry and elegance that twined close to her own. It hardly matched the agitated voice she heard exclaiming, "they're listening to us right now, destroy your phone!" But then, she was so rarely what people expected either. It was really an advantage.
Even as her program unceremoniously kicked the errant thief out on his ear, she had become absorbed in the graceful and gripping numbers gleaned from the attacker's computer. Her lips curled into the irrepressible beam of a child absorbed in a new toy. This was far from boring.
Another call from the Congressman's campaign manager, now that her perfectly balanced strategy had been skewed by unpredictable variables. More threats, more pointed this time, and he backed off. Still, his call itched at the back of her throat.
The issues he raised, though, were far from annoying; they were welcome. She sat up straight with renewed energy, typed with a force and purpose that had drifted away from her fingers in the last few years. She had forgotten that it was more fun to play with an equal, but now she remembered.
Her relocation was inconvenient, but not more than slightly irksome. It was not as if she had ever unpacked more than her equipment, nor left traces that would be of any help. She disappeared as she had come, a tall, faceless figure wheeling a suitcase down an empty hallway. And if the security video from those days were mysteriously and precisely corrupted, it was only a usual precaution.
The whole strategy was thrown off, but she swiftly constructed a new one. She tested it and its components for weaknesses, but found none. The objective had changed, of course; where before, she had been aiming to complete the job, now she was trying for closure on her part in it. The rest of the team she had arranged would have to fend for themselves, but then, it was their job to become the same color as the shadows. The client, on the other hand, was less… adaptable. He would have to be abandoned.
She tied the strings of that last job with neat flourishes of code and tactics from a quiet coffee shop in Queens; she was particularly proud of the suicide note. It was not easy to get these things right remotely, but she had chosen her disposable team as carefully as she chose any of her other tools. With a final tap, the last elements fell into place, leaving behind a smooth, impenetrable facade walling up all proof that she had ever been involved.
And then, as a reward, she opened a new window and sent the opening gambit for her newest game.
Opening IRC Chat IP Port 96 on … user 'anonymous'
HELLO
FBI PAID ME A VISIT. GOOD THING I TRAVEL LIGHT...
She typed with the same easy precision that characterized all her operations. The force, though, the power she held in her fingers, had been renewed by this intriguing adversary.
WHO ARE YOU?
A very direct adversary, then. No finesse, no slow approach. She could still work with that.
MY NAME? I'VE HAD A FEW. YOU CAN CALL ME ROOT.
That was the proud appellation connected by whispers and conjecture to dozens of jobs she had completed, some with blood spilled and others mere money operations. All neat, though, airtight and perfect, like ships in glass bottles built of her wondrous manipulations.
DID YOU KILL MATHESON?
Her lips quirked at the question. It was imprecise, and therefore deserved an indirect answer.
MATHESON WAS A CASUALTY OF HIS OWN WEAKNESS.
An involuntary muscle contraction flared her nostrils. Matheson had been a particularly dense example of the average human being. Sometimes, when dispatching other obstructions to the smooth flow of her projects, it had crossed her mind that another woman, a lesser woman, might have felt remorse for the action. In Matheson's case, not even this sneering commentary on human weakness crossed her mind. Not even a lesser woman would have hesitated to kill him.
WHY DID YOU CONTACT ME?
A slightly more interesting question. In common parlance, her new toy was taking the bait. Now to set the hook.
First, flattery.
I WANTED TO ACKNOWLEDGE A WORTHY OPPONENT.
Then, a challenge.
AND SAY I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME…
Finally, dominance.
… HAROLD.
[CONNECTION TERMINATED]
Well, there's chapter 1! This is the longest and most complex fic I've ever undertaken, so I need feedback more than ever. Please drop me a review with likes/dislikes/questions/etc., I would love to hear from you!