Set in the first half of season two- Root becomes Ms. May and gets as much information as she can while working for the Office of Special Counsel.


Ms. May was borne of a burst of manic energy in the month she was named for, shortly after Root returned from Bishop. Once she established the name and credentials, there were a few ways to make Ms. May stand out. Root hung attractive qualities from her resume like ornaments, sparkling and shiny enough to catch the eye of even the most lax supervisor.

Security clearances were surprisingly easy to acquire; though the process itself was highly protected, the internal list detailing those who had undergone the process and their supporting documents was less secure. In what Root critiqued as the main flaw of the NSA's internal system construction, the firewalls were set up to prevent information getting out, but much fewer guards were posted to halt the addition of new files. With a few days' work, Ms. May's social security number was listed as belonging to a woman with top secret clearance, and a history as a personal assistant at the Office of Naval Intelligence.

There had been a moment of hesitation at her computer, a question that had simmered away on the back burner as she made her way across the country and back. All the way, Root had been bothered by one thing: the timing of John Reese's arrival at the train station. He had not found them on the long road between New York and Relton, nor had he surprised her at the house. Instead, he had detoured through Bishop of all places, and Root could imagine why. That circuitous path, written through years and dozens of identity changes, could only be traced by the Machine.

Yet once Harold had been retrieved, there was nothing. No shadow scratching at the back of her neck, signaling that someone followed behind; no subtle ping to warn her of an intruder on her digital stronghold. Repeated checks of the security cameras that enclosed Harold's orbit between his apartment and his library yielded the same message-the Machine, once satisfied that Harold was safe, had not given anyone further information about how to find Root.

The thought brought a slow smile to Root's face as she sat alone in an unfurnished apartment outside Washington.

God likes me.


Especially in the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, few mundane meetings were scheduled for the late afternoon. Higher-clearance meetings might be held at any time of day or night, but those were beyond the purview of everyday office workers. By four o'clock on a Friday, meetings had already been scheduled and materials pre-assembled; most of the secretaries could not help glancing at the clock every few minutes, counting down the seconds until they were allowed to leave.

At five, the first swift wave was already rounding desks, sweeping up their coats, purses, and wallets and trickling out of the building onto the neat, sunset-lit streets. They dispersed into Chinatown and Logan's Circle, past the Mall and the Smithsonian, settling like delicate moths attracted to light on trendy yet inexpensive gourmet eateries or pubs.

The shadows within the building grew faster than those outside. Though the sun would not have set until nearly nine, the halls of Justice were dim by six. By six-thirty, the halls held only silence; everyone who remained was ensconced in their private offices, unlikely to emerge for hours, and even then, only one at a time. It was in this silence that Root emerged from the women's restroom and walked swiftly down the hall.

Her heels echoed lightly on the parquet floor. If asked, she could always say that she had forgotten her wallet at her desk, but no one emerged from behind heavy oak doors to question her. When she reached the plain brass plaque that marked the man known as Special Counsel's office, she slowed and reached into her purse for her lockpicks.

The office was not particularly secure; nearly nothing kept on hard copies was confidential, and those files could be locked away within a more secure file cabinet. Root tapped through the alarm and entered with ease, shutting the heavy outer door silently behind her. Then she turned her now-rapt attention to the computer atop Special Counsel's desk.

He had a name, of course, but Root actually preferred Special Counsel. It was how he was referred to in any file she had been able to find pertaining to the Machine, and it gave a ludicrous air of bureaucratic approval to the highly illegal development of a super-computer to watch the country. As one of only eight people to know about the existence of the Machine in the beginning, he had apparently appreciated the anonymity of a title. Root could understand that.

M Street was lit only by pools of light from deceptively antique-looking lamps by the time Root emerged from the building. She drudged her way through the subway and bus systems, taking nearly an hour to make it from the Farragut North Station back to Ms. May's small apartment in Falls Church. While she leaned tiredly against the back of the hard plastic seat, she rested a hand on the carefully snapped close of her purse. Her fingers twitched to reach inside for her laptop and the memory drive she had filled with information, but instead she tapped long nails on the leather to the beat of an increasingly frantic inner drive.

She climbed the faux-marble steps of her apartment building, which joined many DC residences in pretending to be much more aged and distinguished than it had any claim to. The door opened before Ms. May, and promptly closed on Root.

She did not even remove the heels that made her feet ache before she slipped the memory drive from its inner pocket of her purse and plugged it into the monitor asleep on her desk. The machine awoke quickly, like a puppy greeting its owner, and in a moment the file directory lay open before her more inviting than any array of Christmas presents.

She hesitated over which to open first. Chronologically, the files began in 2001, but those would not yield the current location of the Machine. They might, however, hold some idiosyncrasy of the Machine's operating system that would provide her a point of ingress. A weak point.

She arranged the files and tapped a few keys to open the earliest. Chronological order would work as well as any other.

Hours later, she pushed back from her desk and rubbed absently at eyes that still stared at the screen. The white light washing over her skin made her euphoria appear alien, other. She had absorbed every crumb of information in the files she had read so far: memos from Nathan Ingram to Alicia Corwin, an order transferring command of a branch of the Intelligence Support Activity to an office or body simply called Control, records of every individual ever identified by the Machine as a threat, and more. It even contained a copy of the original contract for the Machine, signed in February 2002. Apparently, God was worth one U.S. dollar, give or take the rate of inflation.


Root fell easily into a mindless routine of alternating between Ms. May and her own nighttime activities. Leaving New York had cut short lines of communication and ways of reaching her that had persisted through nearly ten years of professional criminality. She had worked in Washington before, but few knew her there, and she sought no new connections. The quiet gifted her a focus keener than any she had before achieved for any mere job. This was more than business now.

While Ms. May monitored the government-run end of the Machine's affairs, Root used her nights to follow the other side of its activities. Now that Root knew more about Harold and John's existence, and their modus operandi in general, it was simple to track them across New York. Even from Washington, she could follow their daring feats of police evasion through surveillance cameras, online monitoring, and reading between the lines of police reports.

Detective Carter's reports were particularly humorous. Though the hunt for the Man in the Suit had died down, still she was referenced every time his name came up as someone who knew the case. And every time, she found new ways to say that she knew nothing. It was rich, considering that she worked quite closely with John and Harold. Combined with Detective Fusco's sarcastic reports that carefully concealed his partner's extracurricular activities along with his own, Carter's files became Root's favorite form of light entertainment while she played Ms. May.

One day, when she tracked John through miles of New York canyons, she noticed a figure following behind him. She managed to find a shot in which he was looking close enough to the shop's camera to be workable. The grainy grey face bothered her. Someone else knew about John and Harold.

She searched for that face in every public database she could find, but nothing came of it. Patiently, she whittled down the possibilities; he could be with law enforcement, but then he would have arrested John long ago. When she caught him trailing Harold one day, although not for long given the limping man's propensity for shaking tails, she firmly set aside the idea of him as someone on the lighter side of the law and focused on the shadowy edges.

Though trawling for information on a government computer might have brought a lesser being perilously close to detection, for Root it simply meant an immediate on-ramp to a superhighway of government files. On her first day, she had inserted a segment of code into the program that monitored her activity. This shut down all alerts it would have sent, but allowed the passage of any mundane activities done in the course of Ms. May's everday duties. Early one morning, she uploaded a photo of the blurry face to a conglomerate of government databases. By the time she left for the evening, the search had ended without results.

That in itself was telling. He had to be government then, or he would have shown up on security footage, in a police file, on the NSA's radar, something in the grand scope of her computer's eye. And yet, nothing. That smacked of concealment, and made sense for anyone following Harold and John.


All through the summer, Root wore through office days and dim nights with a tireless, zombie-like patience. She constantly updated her search parameters to reflect each new piece of information, slowly building a picture of the Machine and its rules.

And yet each night, a growing sense of disappointment closed in on her after her screen went black. The certainty that the Machine had some plan for her waned then, in the dark between the light from her screen and the morning sun. She had deconstructed spam emails and retraced hang-up phone calls, but found nothing.

Once, late at night after weeks of nothing, Root shook out restless legs and walked out into Washington's best attempt at a cool summer night, humid and polluted with dim, dirty light. Her shadow spidered through streetlamps as she walked rapidly down the sidewalk, counting the cracks passing uniformly under her feet.

She made her way to the small main street of the neighborhood, filled with shops and a tiny grocery. Security cameras on the stores here were real and recording, unlike any that she might have found elsewhere. She stood with her back to the nearest street lamp and tipped her head back until she could see the small red light of a security camera.

"Are you there?" she asked softly.

Nothing happened. She had not really expected anything. Her voice was tiny, among so many others; the Machine had no reason to speak to her. Once she found it, she'd have proved herself. She would have shown that she, along with Harold, deserved to know the Machine.

Root turned and kept walking. She stepped into the grocery and bought a half-gallon of milk, as a precaution. Ms. May should not have been out walking after dark. Root, on the other hand, welcomed the shadows.


Most mornings in Special Counsel's office stuttered by unremarkably, interrupted only by semi-interesting visitors in dark suits for meetings with the man himself. Ms. May occupied the seat outside the door with the air of a jovial yet professional castle wall. She held the keys; no one passed without her inspection and approval.

That included files, luckily. Root delighted inside as she deftly vetted envelopes and files to be sent in, ensuring that it was exactly what Special Counsel wanted to read. And that was how she learned about Sameen Shaw.

First there was a quarterly report, seemingly unimportant, partially hidden beneath a few dozen inter-departmental memos. Ah, bureaucracy. This report, however, was stamped with a less familiar title; whether it was meant to be a person or an office, Root was not sure.

Office of Control.

Root opened it curiously, after ensuring that her hallway was relatively empty. Inside lay an unredacted version of reports that Root had seen, briefly, in an earlier form, on Harold's computer. She used a hand-held mini-camera, unattached to any network and therefore difficult for her current employers to access short of arresting her, to scan the documents quickly before putting them back. One name, however, did stand out, and stood as a tempting symbol of her gains that called her attention all day.

Agent S. Shaw.

Root typed on auto-pilot all morning, too caught up in thoughts of the files waiting for her to really pay attention. It was mostly mail merges and simple scheduling, nothing that came close to requiring her full attention. Her lip curled at the email notification heralding the continuation of a particularly mind-dulling exchange with the White House Counsel's personal assistant. It regarded a meeting between the two offices that was more form than functional, at least on the part of Special Counsel, and yet the assistant's fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between 'Tuesday' and 'Thursday' was making the matter the most time-consuming part of Ms. May's morning. She had just typed out a somewhat less-than-polite salutation when a soft rap sounded on her desk. She looked up and blinked, startled.

The man standing in front of her was the same as the one she had attempted to trace, the one following Harold and John Reese. His features, formerly blurred and grainy on surveillance video, were still soft and nondescript in life. He shifted on his feet silently, and Root was reminded that he had made it all the way down the hall to her desk without being detected. This put another mark down in the 'government spook' column tallying up what he might be.

After mere seconds spent sizing him up, Root slipped into Ms. May.

"Can I help you?" she asked perkily.

"I'm here to see Special Counsel." After meeting her eyes briefly, the greying man spent the rest of his short sentence scanning the hallway. He had been trained to find escape routes, security cameras and their blindspots, and cover in any location; given his age and apparent rank, he had most likely passed on that training to teams of his own. In any permutation of his background, he was a man to be reckoned with.

Root took the moment afforded by his scan to check Ms. May's desk calendar.

"I'm sorry," she demurred, "I don't have anything on his schedule. May I have a name?"

Hard eyes studied her.

"Hersh. He'll want to see me." He gestured at the files neatly stacked on the corner of her desk. "I sent those ahead."

"I'll just check," Root bubbled. She pressed the intercom button on her hopelessly outdated phone console. "Sir, I have a Mr. Hersh here to see you."

There was a brief pause, followed by a cough. "Send him in."

Root smiled politely and stood, brushing imagined wrinkles out of her pencil skirt.

"If you'll follow me, Mr. Hersh."


In the subway and then on the bus the whole way home, Root's mind whirred with the knowledge she had gleaned from Special Counsel's meeting with Hersh. He was caught up tracking John, and by extension Harold, but he had also mentioned some names and operations that she had not yet come across. Michael Cole was apparently a threat to the mysterious Program that Hersh represented, and Root had mentally noted this down for further investigation.

By the time Ms. May trudged wearily up the front steps of her comfortable Georgian-style apartment building, Root was humming with excitement. She forewent lights and the removal of back-breaking heels for the glow of her computer. In the fading cold light of Washington's early spring, she connected the mini-camera to her computer and uploaded the high-resolution photos she had taken.

Root drank in the words gluttonously. The language was vague, but the details were there for the savvy reader; Project Northern Lights had yielded several dozen viable targets in the previous quarter. Although it began with a summary, the file frequently referenced more detailed case files.

There was one particular target discussed in a bit more detail. There had been a near miss at a convention center in Mexico City, but a team of agents including S. Shaw had infiltrated the event and taken down the terrorists before they could detonate their suicide vests. Agent Shaw was mentioned more than once as having been particularly key to the operation.

Root pushed back from the table and considered how this information fit into the framework of the Machine and Machine-adjacent entities she had been building up over months. There were very few people who knew of the Machine; Weeks had been one, Special Counsel was another, and this Control had to know as well, for there was no mention of information sources in the report, even though that office had a near-perfect success rate.

Then there were the people who worked for them, who most certainly knew nothing of the real power they served. These were the ones Root dismissed; they could not lead her to her ultimate goal. They, however, did interact with those who did know, and thus might provide a means of finding and intercepting others such as Control, which might be useful.

All this Root tucked away in her mind, half-formed plans lying down with her to sleep away the end of fall.


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