Molly Nelson
The Machine could only give numbers to her operatives. Admin had wanted it this way, and perhaps it was for the best. It meant some lives could not be saved, assuredly, but it also meant the assets and primary assets weren't only tools obeying orders. They had to witness someone's life, in order to decide what to do to help them.
Info only got so far to describe a person. Some of the people saved by the Machine's operatives might not have seemed worth it, had she given more than a number.
Sometimes, it also meant her assets were too late. The Machine mourned, then. But she still understood why Harold Finch had made her so. Human lives were meant to be handled by human hands. Human hearts.
Primary Asset n°1 and Admin had not been able to save Richard Nelson. The moment Vincent Cochran had ordered the murder, with the virus hindering the Machine's functions, had been too close to the actual time of the doctor's poisoning. It had been too late, for John Reese to intervene.
But the operative hadn't stopped there for all that. He had helped Richard Nelson to get revenge, and in that, surely, he had prevented other crimes of the same kind. Vincent Cochran was dead, true, and the Machine didn't condone murder; yet John Reese had probably made the right choice. A choice she wasn't programmed to make.
Richard Nelson had died, nonetheless, and no one had been saved.
But Molly Nelson, the doctor's daughter, had heard from the police what had happened to her father. She had been told the reason why her father had looked like it was the last time they'd talk, back then. And she had remembered the man who had been with her father at the time.
The police had said there had been someone, helping her father against Vincent Cochran. They hadn't known who. They'd have arrested him if they had.
Molly Nelson would probably have thanked the stranger, had she known who he was. She might not have had the best of relationships with her father, but she knew he hadn't deserved that. Cochran, on the other hand, had deserved his slow, painful last day on earth, poisoned with polonium. Killed as he had ordered her father to be killed. Richard Nelson hadn't been perfect, but his daughter thought he had more rights to live than a man who didn't see the value of human life.
Had she known who the stranger was, she'd have thanked him.
That is why the Machine reached out to her, even if she hadn't been saved by John Reese, three days after Primary Asset n°1's demise.
Molly Nelson immediately remembered the face of the man in the obituary.
It was to late to thank him.
It wasn't too late to honor his memory.
