Against The Machine

Seconds later Irene was hurling down the dark, seemingly endless series of stairs once more. It was the opposite of how it had been when she'd made this desperate trip minutes before; this time her physical responsiveness was dulled and lagging behind the sprint of her mind, and so she almost stumbled forward several times, though she always caught the bannister just in time with the hand not holding the gun.

Her footfalls were hard and jarring against the metal stairs, and each step sent shockwaves up through her body, but the thuds were almost in sync with her pounding heart and her harsh, staccato exhales as she made her way ever downward.

She'd thought it had taken ages to reach the ground floor before, but that had been nothing compared with the eternity it felt like now that she knew that her baby waited for her there.

…As most certainly did the fight of, and perhaps also for, her life.

She was ready, even eager, to face whatever awaited her at the bottom, and she cursed the never-ending interval of flights of stairs and nondescripts metal doors.

Then finally, with a cry she immediately stifled, she reached the ground floor exit, and even though she was desperate to confront whatever was on the other side of the door, she took one final moment to compose herself, slow her breathing, and clench and unclench each hand several times to control their trembling.

When she had been downstairs before, she had assessed the expansive reception area with a quick sweep of her eyes, and anything that didn't have the potential to yield the prize she sought had been dismissed in a millisecond.

But now she remembered the long corridor that had stretched out from the opposite corner of the lobby, on the western side of the building. In the blink of an eye she had seen then written off the banks of lifts on the right of the hall, as well as the series of Modern murals that spanned the left-hand wall facing them.

The images themselves were a blur in her mind, but that was all right, because so were the indistinct shapes she'd seen behind Nero. The pattern she'd seen in the background of the camera feed on James's tablet now had context. Her child was here in this lobby.

Were the murals what Sherlock had seen as well? Had he been aware of the fact that this building contained these installations, and he had recognised them when he'd looked at the tablet? She didn't know why he would have stored such a bit of arcana in his head, but he must have. It was the things that would likely not bear fruit for his work, like astronomy or politics according to an old blog entry John had written, that he deleted or only had the scantest awareness; almost everything else had the potential to serve as a clue and was therefore noted and archived in the vast palace of his mind.

Irene narrowed her gaze, and took in the expansive space new eyes. The lobby that had seemed so barren and forgettable save for what she could mine from it now struck her as being full of hidden menace. The silence wasn't neutral to her ears anymore but foreboding, like the held breath of a concealed assailant. That could literally be the case, and not for the first time that day she was grateful for the rubber-soled trainers she still wore from her time in custody, instead of the heels she usually favoured. She had to employ every bit of grace and stealth in her arsenal now.

She made her way across the dusty floor, inspecting it for disturbances that might give her any foresight into what she would face in moments, but the grey film was even and untouched here. She raised her head and peered through the murky light to focus on her destination, and every sense was on such high alert that it felt as if her entire body were vibrating.

As she made her way towards the corridor she began to see that the murals were actually comprised of ceramic panels, and each of them depicted what had been cutting-edge telecommunication technology of the early '60s. Their colours and shapes were distinct, which is why even though she hadn't initially been able to discern the individual designs, and could barely make out the one in the background of Nero's feed, she had been able to make the correlation.

With the hand not gripping the gun Irene pulled the tablet from the joggers' deep left pocket and looked at the screen again. It was still active and Nero was still there on the screen, and looking as afraid and forlorn as he had when she'd first seen him. Something in her chest squeezed painfully as she took in his red and pale face; he looked like he had cried himself out to the point of exhaustion, but was too distressed to actually sleep. She tore her eyes from her child and strained to see the background, and confirmed what she had already realised: the blurry shapes behind him did corresponded with the style of the murals stretching out to her right for the length of the building.

There wasn't anyone in sight of the camera, but Irene was under no illusion that it would be as easy as simply finding Nero and taking him away from all of this – even if it deceptively seemed that way. There would be one final show-down before she could have her son.

The rage that had pounded through her before began to heat her blood again as she prepared to face whoever it was that would stand as the last barrier between her and Nero, and she thought '3' was a nice rounded number for lives taken in ransom for her child's suffering.

She reached the entrance to the long corridor and flattened herself against the wall just on the other side of it, then slid her face out by a fraction to scope the area for any visible sensors, cameras, or sentries.

She didn't see anything, and she also couldn't see Nero, but the corridor was arranged gallery-style, and although she could make out the murals stretching down the flat wall on the left, from her angle she could not see into the series of four lift alcoves that branched off to the right.

She glanced down again to inspect the mural behind Nero and thought she could discern stylised aerials in it. Bold black lines cut at angles bisecting black curlicues, over a fragmented mosaic of muddy blues, brown, greys, and greens. She glanced up and spotted the mural at once, and it sent her heart-rate skyrocketing. It was the last mural in the hall, which meant that her son was there too, just out of sight.

Her desire to sprint to Nero warred against her knowledge that she must be cautious; it was her strategic and impetuous natures at war. The fact that she was acting on behalf of her child instead of herself meant that restraint won.

She slipped the tablet back into her pocket and crept around the entryway into the first alcove, expecting at any moment to be ambushed.

She wasn't, but she didn't let down her guard in the slightest, and all of her muscles were tensed to spring to action at a heartbeat's notice.

She glanced around and saw that the lift in this first bank served Floors 1 - 5, which suggested that last alcove, where Nero was being held, corresponded with the top floor. She and Sherlock had bypassed the ground floor on their ride from the basement to the highest level, meaning that they had passed right by Nero, and had been oblivious.

That added to her wrath, but she let it fuel her purpose rather than derail her. She set her jaw and steeled herself to make her next move, and after another quick glance around the corner she made a swift and smooth motion into the next alcove. When she reached it she let out a low breath of relief, but didn't pause before she repeated the action and then slipped into the third out of four spaces when she saw that it, too, was empty.

Now that both her son and the final threat lay just on the other side of this thin, mildew-stained wall, she allowed herself a moment to prepare for what came next. She was experiencing a paradoxical mixture of giddy anticipation and powerful, almost paralysing fear - each of which represented the two possible outcomes that would put a final end to this extended nightmare.

She also felt both dizzy and more lucid than she ever had before, and so she focused on the tangible. The gun was cool and heavy in her grasp, but her palm was slick against the handle, so she clenched her hand around it, then clamped her other one beneath, steadying fingers trembling from the adrenaline coursing through her.

At the same time she worked to regulate her breath and then held it to ensure that whoever might be standing guard on the other side of the wall wouldn't hear her. Since they had been out of sight in the feed and there hadn't been any physical clues to interpret, she had no idea what sort of person or people she'd be facing.

As she took this final pause, she spared a moment to appreciate how her thought of "Save Sherlock; save Nero" had actually borne its fruit. Instead of Sherlock regaining consciousness and telling her where to find their son, her sentiment for him and her bid to help save his life had given her the means to have the breakthrough herself.

Nonetheless, Sherlock's absence was palpable. She found herself longing for him to be here with her and for the two of them end this together, for so many reasons beside the tactical advantage it would afford. That thought made her realise how much loving someone else had changed her, since her younger self would have relished the opportunity to win single-handedly. But what it had not changed was that she was still The Woman, and no matter her personal feelings her instincts and abilities remained as potent as ever. She was still the woman who had ultimately beaten Sherlock Holmes on her terms, and no person on the other side of this wall could hold a patch on him. She could do this on her own – she just would rather have Sherlock by her side…

And so bracing herself, she slid her face an inch from the edge of the dividing wall to gauge what waited for her with one eye.

What she saw nearly caused her to drop both the gun and the tablet, as everything in both her body and mind went slack with horror.

The feed on the tablet hadn't been deceptive; Nero really was alone.

Of course he was, and she ought to have anticipated this, but it surpassed even the worst of her imaginings.

There was no guard, because this Moriarty had never relied on people except to perpetuate his charade of being Jim, and even then they had all been expendable.

There was no guard because as much as this Moriarty paid lip service to true power being derived from controlling people, his strength hadn't been in controlling them through direct manipulation the way that Jim had; he'd achieved power through his mastery of technology and engineering.

And so instead of a fallible, human guard standing in between Irene and Nero, her baby was inside a clear glass chamber of approximately three by three metres, which was set in the middle of the space. Connected to the chamber were cables, wires, and display monitors that she could not process in her current state.

It was Irene versus the machine.

For one hysterical moment Irene thought that as much as Sherlock would've considered that phrase an apt metaphor for when the two of them had first met, at least at the time, he had never been that. Not in general, but especially not with her.

Besides, she had felt in-control since before he'd even rung her doorbell, and she hadn't lost any semblance of it until it became clear how dangerously sincere her feelings for him were.

But now… this… she felt entirely out of her depth for perhaps only the second time in her life, and the notion that she might fail Nero after coming this far was almost too much to bear. As frustrating as it had been when she'd been unable to tell where Nero's was through the tablet's feed, it was nothing to the impotence she felt now. After all of her efforts they were no better off than when she had watched through the tablet feed; he was still separated from her by a panel of impenetrable glass, and he was just as unreachable.

Her legs, which had already been weakened by their earlier sprint up twenty storeys, threatened gave out now, but she managed to remain upright by throwing out an arm and bracing herself against the wall.

In her mind she heard Sherlock make an exasperated sound, then tell her in his most imperious tone, The machine didn't spring into existence from nothingness – someone made it. Read the man – the way I read you in a similar situation.

Obvious, she snarled back at him, at herself. She had taught Sherlock the the value of being able to read people better than any he had ever taught himself. The problem was that she didn't know this James Moriarty, not really. Back then she, for better or for worse, had allowed Sherlock to see a glimpse of her.

She moved closer to the glass and saw that it was as thick as her wrist; a bullet wouldn't even crack it; she'd had have to find another way in.

Breathing in low, tight gasps, she skimmed her gaze over the rest of the chamber and saw that there were only two points of entry. One was a steel mesh-encased vent with a circumference the length of her hand, which passed into the chamber from a short grate-covered protrusion outside, where it connected to a pump-like mechanism, which was in turn attached to the electronic equipment inside. She figured its purpose was to provide ventilation and oxygen in an otherwise sealed chamber, and she dismissed it as a means to get inside.

The other was a glass door with a metal handle.

She reached towards the door automatically, but a moment before wrapping her hand around the knob she jerked it back, coming out of her trance-like state as she recalled who had built this. She might not know much about the man, but it was likely that sensors in the handle would trigger something or set off an alarm, and she must avoid setting anything like that into motion.

I can wait… she thought, partially in an attempt to convince herself, and partially resolute.

One thing she had learned from all of this was that Sherlock was right about the benefits of 'outsourcing' in certain ways, and not bearing something all on one's own. It was an extension of what she'd shown him about sentiment potentially being an advantage, but it was something she had never considered given her intentionally solitary lifestyle. Nonetheless, they had gambled everything on a plan that had depended on both these things being true, and Mary had delivered; they were both still alive. So perhaps Mycroft Holmes's associate Andrea, with all her expertise on electrical engineering and computers, could do the same for Nero. It would be torture to passively wait on help again, but the alternative of setting off some deadly sequence of events was far worse.

The movement of reaching for the handle must have registered with Nero, because her baby roused from his numbed state and caught sight of her. The breath lodged in her throat as his small brows rose in surprise, and he started to smile that smile that both soothed her fear and exacerbated it, but then it faltered and his face crumpled. He drew in a deep breath, and then the sound of his crying was muffled but audible through the glass, and it went into Irene's chest like a dagger. Nero had been through an unimaginable ordeal, and he had never been apart from his mother for so long in his short life, so that seeing her must have unleashed a torrent of overwhelmed feelings and exhaustion that he was too young to understand. He shakily made his way out of the makeshift cot set on the floor, and crawled towards her, his movements sluggish since his energy was being spent crying.

When he reached the barrier he braced himself against it and got unsteadily to his feet, first leaning against the glass and then slapping at it with both palms, his crying intensifying at not being able to reach her. He pinched at it with his little fingers and tried to climb up against it, lifting one chubby knee and the other, but when each knee just slid down he collapsed onto his bottom, letting out shrieks of frustration. Every few moments he would swing out a small arm to smack his hand against the glass with a shriek of emphasis, his eyes clenched and his cheeks red and wet with tears. Every time his hand hit the barrier again, it sent him into a new, harder crying jag.

Irene had a difficult time holding herself together as she murmured at him through a clenched throat that she was there now, that he was all right, that he was such a good boy, and she was so proud of him.

Without thinking she made a move she had made hundreds or thousands of times before since becoming a mother – she bent down to him. She pressed her hands to where he was sitting on the other side of the glass, hating the feel of the cold, intractable barrier instead of his soft, warm hands.

Suddenly an alarm began to sound in quick, measured beeps, and Irene let out a hoarse sound of her own and wheeled away from the glass with her hands held aloft, but the beeps continued. The door she had anticipated being rigged with sensors – but the exterior of the glass as well?

Then a different noise started, and over her own ragged breaths she could hear another breathing sound, like giant bellows opening and closing.

For the space of a single second she felt nothing but bemusement, because it was such an unexpected and organic noise in a room full of glass, metal, and digital equipment, but then the truth of what was happening hit her, and a scream of raw horror and anguish ripped from her throat.

The pump that she had thought was there to supply oxygen was now actually drawing air out of the glass cube.

Tears burned her eyes as she raised the gun to take aim and empty its cartridge at the vent, the pump, the glass door's locking mechanism, a new image on the interior monitor of a scuba-tank icon – already past any green levels and dipping into yellow. But although she was a good shot even with shaking hands, the bullets were unable to stop or even impede the pump's work. The metal casing around the vent and pump and the strength of the reinforced glass made them impervious, just as she had suspected. Brute force would not save her child, would not stop him from suffocating to death right before her eyes, just as his father had been, many storeys above.

Even though Nero was the one trapped in the chamber Irene felt like a caged, feral animal, and as she paced around the perimeter of the glass, her new dominating thought was that she'd granted James far too kind a death. If she had known what she would find this… her child trapped inside this sadistic machinery… he would not have died for a very, very long time, and his suffering would have been enormous. Violent fantasies filled her mind, but they were a distracting indulgence, and she shook her head to clear it, and refocus.

Could she shut down the power at its source? – no, this was operating on an independent generator, which along with everything else that powered and operated this machine was inside the glass room with her child.

If only Nero were older, she could talk him through disabling the generator from the inside. But while her boy was smart, he wasn't even a year old yet, so that wasn't an option. Besides, Irene was sure that if Nero were more than just a toddler, James would've enclosed the generator inside a locked case, so either way that track of thinking was irrelevant and a waste of precious time. If she wanted Nero to have the chance grow into that older child, she needed to come up with something else.

She had never been so acutely aware of the passing of seconds. In a more general way she had been aware of the concept of time as her 'six months' ticked by, but seconds were infinitely smaller measurements, and the pending consequences infinitely more unthinkable than even her own death.

This time it was her child's frantic crying that drew her out of her mind, and she took a moment to try to calm Nero so that he would stop taking in such gasping lungfuls of air, to preserve what oxygen he had. But he wasn't listening to her; he had been pushed too far, well beyond breaking point, and along with the incessant beeping his cries added to the clamouring din in her head.

She had been pushed beyond that point as well, but being selfless for Nero didn't just mean in action or through sacrifice. It also meant denying herself any thought or feeling that wasn't in service of saving her child. She had always been capable of repressing her own emotional impulses for the sake of some greater plan – with absolute success apart from one exception – but never had she been so compromised. Even counting that dreadful night in Mycroft Holmes's house just over two years before, never had her own emotions so threatened to annihilate her as they did now.

She looked into the face of the child she had conceived and carried to term against all odds, the physical proof of an unprecedented connection, who was yet also so much greater than the sum of his parts. She saw past the tears and feverish skin of her baby to the mouth and eyes he'd inherited Sherlock, the set, stubborn chin he'd inherited from her, and the locks that would continue to darken as he grew up, and at last something clicked.

The haze of panic cleared, and with a new sense of vivid clarity her mind revved into top speed. She closed her eyes lightly as she sensed thoughts like filaments unspool to every corner of her consciousness, where they would curl around anything relevant and draw it back for closer consideration.

The first thing she seized upon was all the ways she had accessed locked spaces before. From the simple latch on Sherlock's kitchen window, to a safe-room which had been connected to an electric piano that unlocked the room when you played Three Blind Mice on it, to a computer system that only granted access when you arranged the pieces of the screensaver's chessboard in a certain way. She dismissed there being a cypher here; although this James clearly liked codes, he had struck her as being too pragmatic for that kind of game.

But there was still something of value in this line of thought… what was it…

Ah.

She opened her eyes, and breath quickened, but this time it was in excitement rather than fear.

That last one had been effortless; the person had been a grandmaster who'd invented a move and named it after herself, and so Irene had simply set up the move and the computer had booted to life. Irene always found the narcissistic ones the easiest to beat, including Sherlock – until her sentiment had gotten the best of her…

At the thought of Sherlock, Unlock the man… echoed in her head again, and she resumed her pacing.

Had James Moriarty been a narcissist? It certainly appeared so from that speech he had given, but it wasn't enough to identify that aspect of his character alone. She had to pinpoint in what way it manifested.

When they had been preparing for all of this, Sherlock had told her that Jim accused Sherlock of always wanting everything to be so clever, and that that would be his downfall, but Irene mustn't make the mistake of thinking James would approach this in that same way. It was impossible to know nature versus nurture had manifested in the twins, and she couldn't make the mistake of thinking that because they were so alike in some crucial ways they were essentially the same person. The very different ways in which they'd respectively found power proved that they weren't.

She let out another growl of frustration at her inability to break down the psyche of the most dangerous adversary of her life, regardless of how little time she'd had to interact with him. She was on the verge of something, her skin tingled with the certainty of it, but what was it?

James had had the mind of an engineer, and his wealth, status in Silicon Valley, and construction of this nightmare machine certainly told her that he had been a global elite in his field. All of this spoke to a brain of infinite complexity and cleverness, and yet… in its design and murderous work, this machine wasn't needlessly complex; its design was efficient, neat, and effective. Simple.

Irene froze mid-step, and her heart began to pound as every hair on her body rose and a chill went through her.

Intricate, complex machinery, and yet governed by simplicity. That was a description of the death trap itself, but for some reason it resonated with her as if it were a revelation.

Why…?!

She gasped like a drowning victim sputtering back to life, as the answer came to her. Yes, there were ways in which the brothers were utterly different, but there again were the ways in which they were as alike as clones, and appreciating a simple, elegant solution was potentially one of them.

Intricate, complex machinery, and yet governed by simplicity.

Maybe… Oh god, maybe.

Her ears began to ring as she fished her hand into her pocket. She yanked out James Moriarty's tablet.

Its screen was dark and when she jabbed at the home button only a prompt to 'press home' appeared; she had let too much time pass without interaction, and the device had locked.

Irene didn't even hesitate in her next move.

As she flung herself back up the endless stairs, thoughts both intrusive and inane cycled round and round in her head. What if the authorities were already there? What if Moriarty had been taken away? She knew that she had only been downstairs for moments and that she was being irrational, but vicious fear pervaded every part of her.

When she dragged herself up the final flight of stairs for the second time in half an hour she was close to vomiting both from the stress and the physical hardship of climbing so many flights again more swiftly than she would've thought possible, and the muscles in her legs were shaking in violent spasms. She wouldn't have been capable of it under normally circumstances, but the determination of her mind had overcome the limitations of her matter.

Once again Mary looked up at her with wide eyes and started to say something, but when she saw Irene's face she stopped.

"What is it, what's happened?"

Irene ignored her, as well as Sherlock's still-unconscious form, to scan the room for James's body.

When she spotted the corpse she made her way unsteadily to it and collapsed, panting, then caught up James's finger in her grasp and pressed it once more to his tablet's home button.

Nothing happened. She pulled it back and then applied it again but the lock-screen didn't even display, and she almost screamed again before it occurred to her that James's skin felt cold to her touch. The last of his living warmth had already faded from his extremities.

Without hesitation Irene stuck the finger into her mouth and sucked hard, drawing any blood she could to the surface, and warming it as much as she could.

"Jesus," she heard Mary say to her right, but she continued to ignore her.

As nausea and dizziness so intense threatened to black out her vision, she pressed James's index finger once more to the tablet's button, and to her unutterable relief the screen brightened to life again.

There was Nero, still in hysterics – even moreso, since Irene had vanished again – and there was the oxygen monitor, now glowing an ominous red. An icon showing the same information flashed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and seeing it gave Irene a powerful bolt of hope.

She swept her eyes over the screen and saw a shallow circle graphic on the left-hand side. Her heart pounding so hard that she could feel her pulse in her fingertips where they pressed against the screen, she dragged the circle to the right, and a new panel slid out. A control panel.

This time she did let out an involuntary exhale that almost sounded like a sob, and as Mary looked on, looking stricken and anxious, she swept her eyes over the display with a new, desperate hope.

The interface was incredibly simple and user-friendly, just as she'd expected. Text prompts were laid out on one side, with corresponding switches to their immediate right. On the far right were check boxes under the icon of a power button. All the switches were green, indicating 'engaged,' and all of the boxes were checked.

LTE Hotspot Engaged

Locking mechanism Engaged

Panel sensor Engaged

Zirox VAK Engaged

What was it she'd read in the transcripts of Jim's trial – that Sherlock had claimed it had taken him three minutes to understand Moriarty? Well it was a different Moriarty, but introduce Irene to the proper stimulus and it had taken her even less time…

She held her breath as she moved to disengage everything except for the data link, all the while dreading that a pop-up would display at any moment with a prompt for an administrator's password, but the indicators slid along with the movement of her finger.

As she watched with the tension of a violin string poised to snap, the graphic of the oxygen reserve went grey, and in the feed she saw the glass door swing open by pneumatic release.

She had done it; she had saved her son.

Suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the iPad to the floor, and her eyes glazed as her mind frantically looked for flaws in the belief that this was finally over, and she had achieved what she'd been working towards for the entirely of her son's life. Before she let down her guard and collapsed in relief, she had to be absolutely certain that there wasn't yet another threat lurking, as there had always been before.

But no: both Jim and James Moriarty were dead, as was their network, her son was no longer trapped in an airless prison, and she had seen for herself that there had been no one else here with them.

Irene let out a long, shaky sigh, and with her eyes still unfocussed she crawled over to Sherlock and gently pushed her fingers into his sweat-drench locks, then pressed her lips against his clammy hairline. She rested her forehead against his, and found her voice enough to whisper hoarsely against his cheek that Nero was safe now; their son would be all right.

If Nero weren't waiting for her down in the vacant lobby of this condemned building Irene would've finally broken down then. Instead she pressed her lips to Sherlock's forehead in one last kiss and rose to her feet, with Mary's quick hand steadying her when she nearly collapsed to her knees again.

She barely remembered this third and final flight down from the tower except for flashes of leaning heavily on a handrail in near-darkness, but when she came upon Nero again her world exploded back into full colour. Viewing things through a screen hadn't made it real enough for her, but seeing him now finally drove it home that he was safe, for the first time in his life.

Her son had found his way out of the chamber and was now standing on shaking legs in the open corridor, and despite the gloom, to Irene his tiny but sturdy silhouette stood out brilliantly against the light of the open space around him.

A final insidious mental image pressed into her brain of a hulking figure darkening that bright space and then snatching Nero out of it, and with the very last shred of physical energy in her utterly depleted reserve she let out a choked sound, dropped the tablet to the floor, and ran full-pelt towards her child.

When he saw her coming he let out a hoarse, exhausted cry of his own and raised his hands towards her, then took several wobbling steps forward, but dropped to his knees so that he could crawl as fast as his limbs could move him. He didn't get very far before he was overcome by more tears, and he just waited for her to reach him, his fists pressed into his eyes and his mouth propped open in a now-silent wail.

Irene got to her child in less than three seconds and collapsed in front of him, grabbing him up into her arms.

She clutched at Nero with a hunger and neediness that she had never known, and feeling the compact heft of his weight, the rapid beating of his heart, and the wetness of his tears as he pressed his face into her shoulder and wound his fists into her hair was the only balm that could possibly soothe the ravaging horror of what she had experienced in the past minutes, and the hardship of the past year of her life.

Again she found herself repeating over and over again that Nero was all right, that she was there and he was safe, but this time she let the words devolve into nonsensical murmurs, and then she found herself finally letting go and sobbing right alongside her child. She had never abandoned control like this, not even with Sherlock, but it was like the bleeding of poison from a wound, and in recovering from all of this it felt just as vital as the cleanse of literal toxins from Sherlock's blood would be.

In a distant corner of consciousness she grew aware of sirens approaching and then slowing to a stop somewhere nearby. If she could find the strength to break from this moment with her child in the next minutes, perhaps the two of them could ride with Sherlock to hospital. If not, she and Nero would be waiting for him when he regained consciousness.

This had changed her, and it would stay with her for the rest of her life, but it was over.