Note: ooo, the mystery deepens. John's audacity grows. (Well, it's already pretty absurd, so it's hard to tell.)

I haven't seen the Seasion 2 episodes for months because I don't have a DVR and the DVDs aren't out yet, so I don't remember much about Shaw. But I like the way the following conversations went...

Oh yeah, forgot: Connetrix, like Landis and Shanon and Ellizabeth, are mine.

And again with the "URL" filtering. One point seven kilobytes does not a URL make.

#####

One Year and Six Months Prior

That night, Reese sat in a vacant apartment across the street from Horstmann Sarim's little clapboard house. Reese peered through the window blinds. The room in which he sat was dark and empty but for a sturdy wooden chair and a water bottle. His cell phone was on his lap, speaker up, connected to a conference call with Harold Finch and Samantha Shaw.

"...so it's the wife," Shaw said. "I sent the pictures over to Fusco. Should be enough to put her away for awhile. I'll hang out here until she gets arrested, then I'll head back to HQ."

"Very good, Miss Shaw," said Finch. "Although, I must say, you sound rather subdued."

Not that an untrained listener would have been able to tell. Samantha Saw's voice was perpetually cool and disinterested. Most of her emotions were beyond the range of the average person's hearing, much like a dog whistle. Except when she got really mad, in which case, everyone for miles around could tell and even Reese was apt to cringe.

"Open-and-shut case, Finch," Shaw said. "Boring."

"Why, I'm so very sorry that we were not able to provide the excitement and violence you crave, Miss Shaw. We'll do better next time, I promise."

"We could even throw in an explosion or two," Reese added. "I still have some C4 from the Harding case. Help yourself, Shaw. Back wall, bottom-left drawer in the A/V room—"

"Mr. Reese," said Finch, his voice tight, "I don't particularly approve of storing military-grade explosives among rare first-edition—"

Shaw butted in. "Wait a minute, Finch. I crave violence and excitement?" The sound that emitted from the speaker sound suspiciously like a scoff. "You got mixed me up with your heavily-armed guard dog. He's the one that goes around and kneecaps everyone. I bet he's keeping score. Ten points for ordinary knees, twenty points for perps wearing shorts, thirty points if under fire, fifty points if the perp is holding a machine gun, a hundred points plus a 1-up if the perp is holding a sniper rifle while naked and a thousand points if—"

"Shaw," Reese said, "I'm hurt. You know it's an efficient way to neutralize a target without killing them. Plus, it gets me into less trouble with Detective Carter if the perps are limping rather than dead." Reese scanned Sarim's house with the binoculars. The network administrator had gone to bed a half-hour ago, and since then, the street had been still.

"Also," he added, "I'm at fifteen thousand, six hundred twenty points. Pretty sure that's a high score. How about you?"

Shaw said, "Last I checked, you haven't gotten to shoot anybody for two weeks now. You're probably going into withdrawal. Kneecap withdrawal. It's a real syndrome, look it up."

"You know," Reese said idly, "I've built up a lot of good will with Carter lately. Maybe I'll get lucky this case and make some orthopedic surgeon's day."

"Anything new on Mr. Sarim?" Finch asked in a not-very-subtle attempt to change the subject.

"No, not yet," said Reese.

"I'm still trying to crack the encrypted hard drive images you acquired today," Finch said. "The security software employed by Mr. Sarim is rather robust. However, the Connetrix network security measures leave much to be desired, especially with the credentials Miss Ruben discovered. I'm probing their network. I haven't yet found anything out of the ordinary there, but I'll keep looking."

"Data encryption is bad," Shaw said. "Usually means people have things to hide."

"Or it just means they're really private people," Reese said.

He was pretty sure he heard a sigh over the cell phone.

"How is the Conkin case going, Finch?" Reese said.

"Detective Carter has staked out her apartment building," Finch said. "Miss Conkin's biggest threat appears to be—and here I quote the Detective—her 'hyperactive chihuahua from Hell'."

Reese smirked. "And here I thought she was a dog person. I must be losing my touch."

"A dog thinks all people should own dogs," said Shaw.

"Well, yeah. Dogs are the best choice. Can a cat be taught Dutch and be trained to eat a person on command? I doubt it. And cats have no loyalty—they don't obey their handlers."

"But cats have superior intellect and grace," Shaw pointed out. "Not to mention very sharp claws and teeth."

"Sounds like you learned that from experience. You sure you don't prefer dogs?"

"Only if the dog is well trained. Like Bear. And no—uncontrollably shooting people in the knees doesn't indicate training."

"It's not uncontrollable; it's very deliberate."

Finch said, "Perhaps this intriguing conversation can continue on a private line. Mr. Reese, do you still plan to visit Connetrix tomorrow?"

"Yeah," he said. "I'll poke my nose where it doesn't belong. Rattle a few cages. Charm a few women. The usual. But I think Elizabeth will be able to keep an eye on Sarim better than I can."

"You're confident she can protect herself if necessary?"

"She knows enough to get herself out of a scrape."

Shaw said, "I hope she's smart enough to know when to run away from one."

"She is," Reese said. "But I'll remind her anyway..."

#####

I opened one eye and peered at the alarm clock on the bedside table. 5:54AM, it said, its LED screen glowing gently red. The room was dark but for the nightlight—the dawn was not yet bright enough to lighten the window shades.

Might as well get up, I thought. I'll regret it more if I wait the last few minutes.

So I blinked the sleep-grit away, yawned, stretched my limbs. Brushed strands of curly hair from my face. Sat up. The cold air caressed my bare back and shoulders as the sheets fell away from my body. I reached for the alarm clock and disabled the alarm, then clicked on the bedside light.

"Good morning, Robin," said the man on the couch.

I yelped and clutched the sheets against my chest, falling back against the pillows. "The hell, John?" I slurred, squinting my eyes against the sudden brightness of the lamp. "I'm naked!"

Raised eyebrows. "You are?"

"...kinda."

I wasn't, not quite, but Mama had made sure I'd grown up knowing that it was absolutely improper for a man to see a woman in her underthings. According to her, my body was something precious, something that only my mate should have the honor of seeing in its full glory because everybody else just plain didn't deserve to see it. (Mama had a pretty low opinion of most men and certain women.) But John had already seen me naked once, and he had saved my life, and given the way things were going, it didn't look very likely that I was going to settle down with anybody in the foreseeable future, so...who cared?

I kept the sheets around my body anyway, just out of habit. If he asked, I wouldn't hesitate to lay myself bare—but only if he asked.

A tiny part of me really wished he would.

Sighing, I said, "What on earth are you doing here? John, I'm not even awake. Turn around, will ya?"

"I'm here to give you a few reminders," John said to the wall as I reached for the nightgown. It had ended up down near my feet. I slipped my legs out from under the sheets, quickly wrapped the gown around my body, and stepped out of bed. The wood floor was ice. I made a mental note to buy a pair of slippers to keep at this apartment.

I mumbled, "No more talking until I pee and have my tea, m'kay?" Shuffling past John, who was still contemplating the brick wall, I visited the bathroom. Did my business. Washed my hands, stepped back into the living area. John was now sitting at the table. There was a steaming paper cup in front of my empty chair.

I didn't say anything. I just sat down and picked up the cup. Took a sip. Coughed in surprise. The beverage that greeted my tongue was not Black Pearl tea.

"What is that?" I said. "Where's the honey?"

"It's Sencha green tea, Robin," said John. "Your favorite."

"I'm not Robin until I'm awake," I said, feeling grumpy. John was in for it now. He'd messed with my tea.

"You should really be Robin right now. It's easier to maintain a cover identity if you start thinking about it from the moment you're first conscious."

I sighed and glared down at the cup. "There's not enough tea in my honey."

"I think there's a jar in the kitchen somewhere."

"I need like, at least five tablespoons." I walked over to the cupboards and began pulling them open, eying the unfamiliar contents within.

"Good," John said, "you're sounding more like Robin already."

"Hush, you."

I found the jar and stirred a teaspoon or two of honey into my tea. It helped mask the unfamiliar bitterness of the green tea. Soon I was feeling awake enough to think properly—as Robin. Damnit, I was Robin. Not Elizabeth. Who was Elizabeth? I didn't know. But she had way better taste in tea than I did.

"Robin," I muttered as I crossed to the closet, wondering what to wear today. "My name is Robin."

"Where was your mother born?" John asked.

"What?" I said.

"You heard me."

"That's mean," I said, pouting. "I'm not even all the way awake yet."

"So if your life depends on a piece of information and you can't remember it, you'll be okay because you're not awake when you're asked?"

I growled. "Spokane, Oregon."

"Good."

"I'mma crank up the heater and take a nice, long hot shower now," I said. "I don't need to be at work for an hour and a half and since I'm a ditz I can be a little late."

"That's the spirit," John said. "I'll be around Connetrix later today—but you don't know me."

"Who you gonna be this time?"

"I haven't decided yet. I'll introduce myself, if necessary."

"You gonna be Rooney the serial killer again?"

John chuckled. "Maybe. But, speaking of killers—don't forget why you're at Connetrix. You're my eyes and ears, not my gun. If something goes down, you get to safety and call me."

"Yeah, I know, we went over this. You're really redundant, you know that? You're like a dialog box. Are you suuuuure you want to delete this file? No, really, are you reaaaally seriously extra super certainly sure? Real admins use `rm -rf`, you know. No verification prompt."

"I want you to stay safe," John said.

"I'll be fine. Now go away, lemme shower..."

#####

I dried my hair with a towel but deliberately left it uncombed and unruly. Wrapping another towel around my chest, I walked out into the main room of the apartment (which by now was delightfully warm) and opened the closet.

I figured that Robin McCartney, in her quest to be quirky and fashionable, would certainly not wear a similar outfit two days in a row. This was problematic for Elizabeth Ruben, who had a small number of favorite outfits that she wore with only minor variations throughout each season. Fashion was not her thing.

Fortunately, it wasn't really Robin's thing, either.

I explored my options. It felt like I was a little kid playing dress-up. It was fun, in a way, and yet at the same time, it was an irritating chore. I would've much rather gone with my schoolgirl outfit, but that was what Elizabeth wore, not Robin. And I was Robin. Robin McCartney.

After some thought, I reversed the colors of the outfit I'd worn yesterday: I found a thin black cardigan, a long-sleeved white blouse with a V-shaped neckline cut just a little bit lower than I preferred, a pair of black slacks with thin, vertical white strips, and a pair of lightweight tennis shoes.

As I carried the clothes into the bathroom to change—I had forgotten to ask John just why there was a camera staring at me in my own apartment—I wondered idly who had done all the shopping. I mean, there were a lot of clothes here, way more than I'd ever be comfortable owning. I could've worn a different outfit every day of the year if I'd wanted to. Somebody'd had to buy all these clothes. But the mental image of John going around the malls and Broadway boutiques, with a half-dozen shopping bags hanging from one arm and a mountain of clothes draped over the other, just didn't fit. And I couldn't, no matter how hard I tried, imagine him walking into a department store, sauntering to the womens' section, and picking out exactly the kind of comfortable yet just-barely-not-quite-modest underthings I liked to wear. I mean, I knew John was brave, but I wasn't sure if he was that brave.

Then again, his audacity level was off the charts. Maybe he'd done it for the sole purpose of making everyone around him squirm. He was good at that...

I stepped into the pants, pulled them up. They fit just right, which made me wonder. I mean, I hadn't managed to find a single article of clothing that wasn't in my size in the entire apartment. How did John know what size clothes I wore? How did he know my shoe size? My cup size?

How in the hell did he know...well, everything?

He probably went through the clothes in your apartment, I thought as I buttoned up the blouse. My eyes widened as I considered the implications. Oh my god. Did he peek in the box in the back of the dresser drawer? Oh my god, if he did, I'mma kill him. I swear, I will kill him. Slowly. With a spoon.

I was ready for work by 7:12AM. If I left now, I'd get to work right on time—the Connetrix offices were only twenty minutes away even with traffic—but I dawdled a bit. Made myself a proper cup of black tea. Added another earring for the hell of it. Sprawled on the couch, played with the burner phone. I found the apps menu and did a double-take when I read the names of some of the applications.

Force-Pair? I thought. What on earth is that?

Activate Microphone?

Camera Feed?

John had put a bunch of spyware on my phone?

Curious, I selected the Force-Pair app. A window popped up on screen with an hourglass icon spinning in the middle. A second later, a list of surrounding devices was displayed—and on that list was "Elizabeth Ruben's Cell Phone."

Gulping, I selected it, keeping an eye on the sleek black Android laying face up on the coffee table.

A few seconds later, the burner phone said: "Force-pairing Elizabeth Ruben's Cell Phone: failed. (Reason: Bluetooth response timeout.)"

Oh, that's right, I thought to myself. I removed the driver for the Bluetooth adapter on my other phone...but what would've happened if I hadn't? Score one for paranoia...

I didn't want to experiment on random peoples' cell phones, so I hastily exited the menu and shoved the phone into my pocket. I stood. Gathered my purse, my trusty flash drive, and laptop case. It was time to go. I headed down the lift and out to the frigid car at the sidewalk. Locked myself in and started the engine. I let the car warm up for a few minutes, then eased out into traffic.

I arrived at the Connetrix offices eighteen minutes late, snuck a cookie from the lobby when Daryl wasn't looking, and headed up to the third floor.

Andrew started talking before I'd even had a chance to sit down in front of the battered CRT monitor that had appeared on my desk overnight. He kept talking as I logged in and waited, waited, waited for the desktop to load. (The hard drive was thrashing; a glance at the desktop tower on the floor revealed a "Titanium-III Inside" sticker. No wonder it was so slow. I guessed the interns got the bottom of the barrel.)

Fortunately, I didn't have to tune out Andrew's ramblings for long. I was rescued by Jackie Peterson.

"Robin, there you are," she said. "Been looking all over. Melissa wants you working with Sarim in the server room today."

I followed close behind Jackie, getting a close-up view of all that lovely ginger hair. I was envious. When I'd been a little girl, my hair had gone down to my rump, just like Jackie's, but as I'd grown up, my hair hadn't grown with me. After my fifteenth birthday, I'd never gotten my hair down past my shoulder blades. And then it'd gotten stained by that horrible green paint last year, and I'd had to lop most of it off...

Maybe you should grow your hair out again, I thought.

"So, what kind of work have you done with Samba?" Jackie asked as we made our way towards the server room door.

"I—uh. Simple stuff, y'know? File sharing, printer sharing..."

"Ever integrate it with a directory service?"

"Yeah. Yeah, uhm, I know how to connect it to a domain controller for network authorization and authentication."

As soon as the words left my mouth, I began to berate myself. So much for appearing inept.

"Awesome," Jackie said. "You know more about it than I do. See, we're building a new file server. Hardware RAID, quad-core CPU, sixty-four gigabytes of RAM, all that jazz. We were hoping to put Samba on it and integrate it with our domain controller. Think you can help?"

"Yeah, sure. Are you using Samba 3 or Samba 4?"

"Samba 4 is out now?"

"Well...it's still alpha...but it's stable, and it plays nicer with directory servers."

Jackie shrugged. "We could try it. We'll talk about it later." She held the card reader up to the door scanner. The door lock clicked and we headed into the noisy server room.

"I like you already, Robin," said Jackie. She smiled. "Our last intern, he didn't know one end of a network cable from the other."

"Erm, the ends are the same," I said.

"Exactly..."

#####

Sarim listened to my enthusiastic, ditz-ified ramblings about Samba, nodded thoughtfully at my suggestions (most of which were completely valid, but a few were purposefully bogus). Then he handed me a CentOS installation DVD, directed me to a desk with six small rack servers set on top of each other, and told me to wipe them and install a fresh operating system on each.

I said, "Do you have, like, kickstart scripts for automation?"

"Nah," Sarim said. "We do everything manually. Give 'em a root password of 'password' and I'll change it later. Don't connect them to the network. Come get me when they're done. I have some work to do." And he walked away and disappeared among the whirring racks of equipment, leaving me to babysit six operating system installations—child's play, really, but tedious. There was only one old-fashioned PS/2 keyboard and a single monitor at the desk. I could hotplug the monitor safely, but I couldn't disconnect the keyboard from a running system, so I couldn't start an installation on one and move on to the next—I had to do them in series.

He hadn't even told me what packages to install.

I was pretty sure I had just been given busywork.

I connected the first server, powered it up, inserted the CentOS DVD, and started the installation, clicking through the interminable prompts. What language did I want to use? English. What was my time zone? American/New_York, of course. Did the system clocks use UTC? I didn't know, but I could compensate for that later by setting the time manually or with NTP. Did I want to erase the hard disks? Why yes, yes I did. How did I want to partition them? I let the installer do it on its own. Did I want to use logical volume management? Sure, why not, it's not my system anyhow. What root password should I use? I typed it in twice, and it complained: "password" is a dictionary word, was I sure I was dense enough to use it? No, but Sarim was. What groups of packages did I want? And so on and so forth, until I was faced with a blue progress bar that inched across the screen at a rate just this side of glacial while the banner at the top of of the screen helpfully flashed random advice about CentOS that I had already learned long ago.

Five more servers to go...I thought to myself. And I have to type all that in again.

An idea popped into my head.

Or maybe not...doesn't the CentOS installer auto-generate a kickstart file from a manual install?

I tapped my tennis shoes on the floor tiles, waiting impatiently for the installation to finish. When it was done, I removed the DVD, rebooted the server, and logged in as root, searching for the installation log. Sure enough, in /root/...

-rw- . 1 root root 1. 7K Jan 25 2013 /root/anaconda-ks. cfg

(Gratuitous complaint about URL filtering here. Finch would have a heart attack. And then find a better way around it. (Hmm, Unicode characters? (This is looking kinda lispish! (Nevermind.))))

Hah. Take that. Grinning, I took my flash drive from my laptop case, inserted it into the front of the server, mounted the partition, and copied the kickstart file to the drive. Now I wouldn't have to enter all that information over and over again for the other five servers. I could just tell the CentOS installer to grab the answers to all of its prompts from that configuration file, which had been generated from my input for the first installation.

It turned an hour-long project into a twenty-five-minute one.

When the last one finished, I let out a quiet little cheer, yanked my flash drive, and went off to tell Sarim.

Problem was, I couldn't find him.

"Hello?" I called, uncertain. My voice wavered and vanished, overpowered by the steady roar of the server room. "Sarim? Hello?"

I wandered down one of the aisles. The racks of equipment rose up on either side of me, buzzing and humming and whirring. It reminded me of the 94th street library, in a way, but the aisles between the shelves were wider and the servers were much, much noisier than books.

Down near the end of the aisle, I paused. Most of the racks around me were neatly organized, with cables neatly bundled and routed to each server. But the second rack from the end was a little different. There were only a few pieces of equipment. There was a large network switch, a heavy-duty router, and just below that, a thin black rack server. Two yellow network cables ran between the switch and the server, and instead of being neatly bundled at the side of the rack like all the other cables leading to the switch and router, the excess cabling had been stuffed in the narrow gap between the two pieces of equipment.

There was a faded, peeling label on the switch. It said: SW5-102. Next to the label was the IFT logo.

Daaamn, I thought. That's an IFT 2452 managed 48-port gigabit switch. I was just about drooling. The CPU in that thing is even faster than the one in my desktop. I wonder if Connetrix ever surpluses any of their old—

"Hey!" Sarim yelled from the end of the aisle. "Robin, what are you doing?"

I looked up, blushing. "I—uh, I've just like, never seen a real Ethernet switch before. Is this thing running IFOS 5? Does it support—"

He took several long steps down the aisle and motioned me towards him. "Look, get away from that, it's delicate."

"I...all right," I said, glancing at the switch. It looked pretty damn sturdy to me.

He doesn't want me near it, I thought. Why? But I obeyed and walked away from it.

"Don't go down that row again," Sarim said. He put one large hand on my back and guided me away from that aisle. There were beads of sweat on his balding head. "That stuff is trouble-prone, okay? Sensitive to static electricity, or something, I don't know, but it doesn't work right when people are near it."

I had to work very hard to hold in the laugh. That was one of the lousiest excuses I'd ever heard. Hadn't this guy heard of grounding? But I kept those thoughts to myself and said, "Sure, I don't wanna break anything. I was just trying to find you. Got those CentOS installs done already."

I showed him the shiny new operating systems on one of the servers. He nodded, then thanked me by directing me towards the back of the server room, where there was another desk. This one was stacked with broken servers and other decrepit equipment.

"See if you can salvage any of this," he said, and he left again.

Well...I thought, at least it's better than installing new operating systems on a bunch of machines. I cleared a workspace, sat down, lugged one of the servers down from the stack, and popped the cover. A giant cloud of dust rose up to sting my eyes.

Or maybe not...

I tried powering on the machine. It froze halfway through it's boot cycle. My instincts said bad RAM, so I turned the server off and started removing memory sticks, two at a time, to see if there was a faulty module somewhere. As I worked, I thought about that network switch. Why had Sarim reacted so strongly to me being near it? There must've been something he didn't want me to see. Those two loose cables—maybe they weren't supposed to be there. Maybe that rack server shouldn't have been connected to the switch. Maybe it was some sort of top-secret thing, like an NSA PRISM tap.

I didn't know what to do. I wanted to sneak back and examine it closer—but if Sarim caught me, I doubted my internship at Connetrix would last much longer. I'd have to wait and tell John about what I'd found. He'd know what to do.

John always knew what to do.

#####