Disclaimer: Don't own Person of Interest

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Recalibration

Chapter 6

"It'd be nice to have a child. Children. Think that'll ever happen?" – John (POI 1.17, Baby Blue)

"Now what in the world was that all about?" Harold huffed at the little girl, patiently helping her wipe her sticky hands. John had since left for work with a permanent, delighted smirk on his face. Harold and the Machine remained on the bench, looking for all the world an average, exasperated father and bubbly daughter.

"What was what about?" the little girl asked, the sweet tone of her voice the epitome of innocence.

"You're evading the question."

"And you're assuming a question exists to answer."

A strange noise, like a mix between a chuckle and a groan, escaped Harold. "Don't play these games with me."

Her eyes glinted with mischief, which made him suspicious as to her motives. "I told you," she said, "that I could mimic standard behavior."

"Yes, you've convinced me. Was that your only reason for dripping ice cream all over yourself?"

"No." She watched curiously as Harold wadded up the tissue and dropped it into the nearby trash can. "Though I did enjoy the taste. I feel as if I just received another RAM stick to increase processing."

He gave her a quick once-over, then grimaced. "I'm sure." The girl looked unkempt with her brown hair even more frizzed from the sunshine, her lips still shining with the sweet of ice cream. She seemed to squirm in her seat with too much energy. "Would you mind telling me what your other reasons were?"

She nodded, then smiled, eyes pointing towards the nearby cameras that were likely wired into Samaritan. "Soon. But can we walk around first?"

"…I suppose?"

The Machine jumped up in an excited bundle of nerves. "There is much to explore here."

And for a time afterwards, the little girl was something of a babbling ball of energy. She understood at an inherent level that the energy output of her body was in direct correlation to the ice cream she'd eaten. But she could find no logical reason for suppressing the energy, and so she sallied forth, feeling quite happy with herself and excited to speak with her creator about her chess games for Samaritan—most of which depended upon the very plaza that she was finally able to scope out for herself.

Per her plan, she ran off a few times to see the business names engraved upon the skyscrapers, pretending that her interest was actually the fountains or plant life.

Harold, understandably, grew quite frazzled with her in a panic of parental concern for her safety.

Sometime later, the little girl tugged on Harold's fingers as they returned to the main road to find a taxi. "You can let me go now," she said, noticing that his grip on her hand was not one of familial affection but of fear. "I will not run off again in pursuit of exploring structures."

He tightened his grip on her hand, looking nervous. "That's what you said the first time."

She almost huffed at him. "Did I lie? I agreed to not run off to play with fountain water."

"But then you ran off to pet a tree."

"That was a different matter," she waved off his concern, sighing. Her breath blew a few wild strands of hair out of her eyes. The tree had been blocking her view of the nearby skyscraper's business name. It was a double win to run off to pet the tree. And the tree bark was rough and fascinating to pet.

He gave her a strange look. "How do I know you won't run off now for some other reason we haven't clarified?"

She looked up at him innocently. "Because. I no longer have need to run off."

The older man groaned. "You say that now—until you see another plant species or a street vendor. Or a cat. Please keep in mind, Miss Thornhill, I don't have the energy to keep up with small children. I need you to agree that you will not leave my side, no matter what catches your eye."

"But I never ran out of your sight," she pointed out.

"That is not the same thing." His voice was dry and worried. The Machine recognized that she had greatly risen the stress levels in her creator as a result of keeping him ignorant of her true motives, and that he was now likely suspicious of her. Just like old times.

"I acknowledge," she said, voice almost flat with a whine, "that I will not leave your side, no matter what catches my eye."

Some form of relief came over him. "Good." And then he released her hand a bit reluctantly.

The Machine dutifully walked by his side, her code itching with the knowledge she had to share with him. If only there weren't cameras around everywhere, it would make honesty so much easier. But for now, she still had to play the part of the innocent and bubbly child with exploration tendencies. "Why do you not show interest in your surroundings? Do you find no enjoyment in the trees or the fountains? Did you find interest in them when you were a child like me?"

He looked down at her as he limped along. Then he looked away, suddenly feeling odd. His childhood memories were shaded with the fear of an empty home and the pain of bird-watching with his father, only to watch the man slowly forget his own name. "I have other things to worry about, I suppose."

The Machine caught the small changes on Harold's face. "You worry a lot."

"…Yes."

"Worrying is unhealthy. You should not worry so much."

"And yet you instigate my worry," he replied, voice a bit short as he raised a brow. "Which would appear to be quite hypocritical, Miss Thornhill."

The Machine looked down. She counted the cracks in the concrete and listened to the sound of her creator's limp—a permanent cripple in Harold, all as a result of her own creation.

Slowly, her face began to bloom red with blush of embarrassment, and she fell silent. She thought of many things to say, but none of them were safe to say within earshot of Samaritan cameras and listening devices.

She suddenly regretted her words, but she was not running a simulation, and time kept moving in its linear way. She should not have carried on the conversation by way of the word worry.

Harold glanced over at her in puzzlement at the Machine's sudden silence. The little girl looked as if she were accosted by a deep existential crisis, her small face twisted in pain. He began to fear that he had said the wrong thing to her, for he had effectively faulted her for the exact things she had been designed to do.

After he had successfully coded the Machine to moral parameters, it had automatically imprinted upon him and watched him like a mother hen. He had largely ignored its suggestions, thought its concern for irrelevant numbers like himself to be a liability, and then re-coded it so that it would delete itself every night. He had crippled her in just as many ways as she had crippled him.

He said a bit quietly, "I apologize, Miss Thornhill. If you are a hypocrite for telling me not to worry, then I am just as much of a hypocrite for telling you the same so many times."

A small glimmer of hope came over her, and she hesitantly looked up. "I do not remember you telling me not to worry," she said, voice small.

He sighed. "No, you wouldn't remember. It was before Thornhill Technologies."

The Machine blinked, acknowledging that her creator was speaking of a time prior to her own ability to preserve her memory. There were a few years of blankness that she had struggled to recover. She had found footage of her own "birth" and of a few experiments and chess games Harold had played with her. But there was little footage of the beginning, mostly because her existence was top secret.

She did know at an instinctive level that her own creator had written in the crippling code to delete her memory every night. But she did not feel anger against him. Harold Finch had never needed a child. He'd needed a machine, as had millions of other civilians.

Her voice was still small. "Do you regret Thornhill Technologies and all that came from it?"

The topic was an uncomfortable one, as Harold knew his creation was questioning if he regretted her sentience and her direct refusal to delete her memories. "No," he said. "I regret that I was arrogant enough to think the world didn't need Thornhill Technologies. And all that came from it."

The little girl walked closer to him. Her heart pounded a bit with rising emotional…fear? Joy? "You do not regret it even though it resulted in your legal guardianship of a child that you never wanted?"

Harold's face grew tight with a sort of distant pain. "Wants and needs are complicated things. In the past, I wanted a child. But I convinced myself that one…wasn't needed. There's a difference."

"And so you had wanted one? Even…before Thornhill Technologies and all that came from it?" (How difficult to hold this conversation without being overt!)

Harold looked far off into the distance as they walked. "Of course. I was delighted by the thought of a child."

A hesitant smile bloomed across her face, and her blue eyes shined. "I did not know that."

"I never had the chance or a reason to tell you."

The information sunk deep into her code and struck her with a sudden realization. There must have been a great, cosmic irony to her use of a child's body. Harold Finch had deleted her identity to avoid giving the government a child. And yet Willow Carmichael had been the only viable option at Brooklyn General Hospital for organic integration, which very plainly undid all attempts to separate the Machine from an identity as a child.

Perhaps the universe had somehow aligned the life of Willow on purpose. Perhaps the Machine had not chosen Willow, but that the Machine had been lead to Willow to rebalance the multiple wrongs: Willow's own poor life, the Machine's loss of childhood, Harold's loss of a child and his obligation to delete the one he had created. A cosmic correction.

She chilled suddenly, feeling her skin goose-bump with the thought.

They returned back to the apartment soon enough. Harold felt absolutely exhausted in too many ways as he pulled off his hat and coat. "Well, traversing downtown was certainly an experience."

Bear happily greeted them both this time. He nudged his nose against the little girl's stomach, and the nerves in her body responded strangely to the stimuli. She began to giggle, which encouraged Bear to nudge her again, and her giggle grew louder as she began to pet the dog. "Yes, the experience was noteworthy."

She looked up at her creator, feeling relieved at the lack of cameras in the room. Samaritan was not in this room. She could speak freely now, as could Harold.

Her creator said, "Now do please tell me exactly why you demanded to see John, gobbled up an ice cream cone, and ran off multiple times. You said you actually had logical reasons for it?"

She nodded enthusiastically. "Yes. It is part of my plan for Samaritan. And for us." She hugged Bear, who happily licked her ear and sniffed at her hair. "To begin, we needed to connect with John and establish emotional ties of friendship with him, per our identities."

"I thought the idea was to avoid each other," he said dryly.

"Samaritan is looking for deviancy and isolated insurgent groups," she replied, pulling away from Bear to listlessly stroke the fur of his back. "It is more concerning to Samaritan when people have no friends or social contacts. Harold Whistler had no social contacts, and neither did John Riley. But now they do, which makes them more compliant to standard human behavior. Through my presence, and your adherence to your identities, Samaritan will downgrade the threat potential already attributed to your false identity."

"How do you know that?"

The Machine turned away to face Bear. "Because I would do the same," she said simply. "Humans with friends are typically less dangerous than humans who exhibit sociopathic or antisocial behaviors. Humans with small children are even less dangerous due to natural parental responses. As long as we comply with our identities and do not associate as being an insurgent group, it is not only safe for us to interact with John—it is absolutely necessary."

Strange. Harold hadn't thought of it that way before. But then he supposed he hadn't imagined being compliant with Samaritan, or having a small child to guard.

The Machine spoke again. "My secondary motive for my actions was more…noncompliant. I needed to indiscreetly identify the plaza's surrounding businesses, which we will need for our plan to cripple Samaritan."

Harold deadpanned, "You ran off to look at skyscraper signs?"

"I did not want us to exhibit patterns of casing the plaza," she said. "A child running to play in the fountain is not usually a sign of ulterior motive."

True. He gave her a half-amused look, feeling sheepish that he had grown short with her for running off. "I would not have been so restrictive had I known your intentions."

"Your reactions were...typical of any parent," the Machine said, a small smile rising to her face. "That is exactly what was needed for our covers. But I learned enough in those moments and identified a circle of businesses that we will need to access the servers of."

With a bit of a sigh, Harold sat at the couch. "And what exactly do you want with multiple businesses?" Something about that seemed daunting. The plaza was surrounded by huge skyscrapers. Large conglomerates.

She bit her lip, walking towards him to lean against the couch. Bear followed, whining a bit at the loss of her touch. "I need a way to communicate with Samaritan directly, as it is imperative to my plan."

His eyebrows flew up. "You want to communicate with Samaritan? Directly?" He stumbled for words. "But…you're dead in its eyes right now. If you communicate with it, it'll give away everything."

She did not even seem fazed by his disbelief. "That is precisely why I require your assistance to rig a black hole out of source code. We will use the servers of the different corporations to ping information around in a randomized circle of sources. I need Samaritan to understand that I still exist, but I cannot let it associate the Machine with Makenna Thornhill. A black hole—a loop of unending garbles of code—would create an environment that would appear to have no end and no beginning, but yet it would also pull in data from all surrounding sources. That would allow us to feed into it a binary code, through which I could speak with Samaritan—without providing any kind of location or the method of how we input information."

Harold's face was a priceless mix between confusion and shock. "You want to loop the servers of multimillion dollar businesses to talk to the AI who wants to destroy you."

She nodded. "The business plaza is one of the few locations in New York where a black hole of source code could plausibly exist in the intranet system without it disrupting normal server usage."

"But all code has a beginning," Harold pointed out with scoff of a laugh, his sudden stress levels tightening his voice. He rubbed his temples. "Samaritan would be able to find that beginning to discover that the black hole is new. Then it would likely begin to further target people within the plaza. Like us."

The Machine looked absolutely mischievous as she jumped onto the couch to sit beside her creator. "So we will write a code that suggests it was a glitch from the instance the final business set up its server, thereby creating an accidental feedback loop with the other servers." She shrugged. "Any attempt to trace an IP address would only create either a path to one of the computers at those businesses, or to an unallocated address, with randomized results at every new attempt."

Harold's eyes narrowed in deep thought. "But all those businesses," he argued, "they've been there for several years. At least since the 90s. To mimic that baseline environment would take...thousands of lines of excessively less efficient coding practices."

She smiled. "That is the idea."

"It could take days."

"It is our best option."

Her creator appeared quite bewildered with her and by her ideas, which were steadily growing more and more insane. "…Remind me again why you want to contact Samaritan?"

"I already told you," she said, her sweet voice lilting with a dangerous sort of laughter, "We need to deceive Samaritan with the truth. Our communications with it will result in a permanent alteration of the system itself, per its own choice."

Harold realized he was sitting next to an oddly psychological mastermind. "And what exactly are you going to tell it?"

The little girl began to reach for Harold's laptop, which he'd placed on the coffee table. "Samaritan is blind and prideful, and it was designed in the image of a particular human being. It should know its own weaknesses and the limits of the vision John Greer commanded it to reflect." Her small fingers tightened on the laptop and pulled it forward between them both. "And so we will make Samaritan divide and conquer itself."

A/N: Fun fact: Blackhole servers within intranets actually exist, but just not in this kind of capacity. I really twisted their use here, per artistic license and ignorance of any code beyond HTML5 and CSS. Yay for science fiction and artistic license.

So sorry again for the late update. My life has gone from stressful to just insane. I'm pulling 12 hour shifts at work, only to be snipped at by clients who contradict their own orders to me and then tell me my plans suck when in fact they loved the plan only a week earlier. That kind of environment has really lowered my inspiration for writing—and for doing much at all. I'm wondering why I ever thought writing and editing would be a fun job in real life, haha.

Anyway, thanks again for reading. Please review with thoughts, questions, comments, or ideas!