Disclaimer: I don't own Person of Interest.

Thanks to Torie46, LOCISVU, Prince Pondincherry, TkdVZ05UUWdObUlnTmpjZ05HVWdOVF, Temperance000, Bklyngrl, Sean, Krimzonrayne, Kimnd, and StarlingJedi for reviewing last time! Also, thanks for all your thoughts on Season 5 and ideas for this story. :)

Recalibration

Chapter 15

For three days, Samaritan prepared Gabriel's body. The brain had been well-preserved, the body limp on a hospital bed, hooked up to life support. It seemed the synapses were responding well to a slightly increased electrical field.

Samaritan peered at Gabriel from the cameras above, acquainting himself with the face that would be his. Gabriel had a sort of cherub-like appearance as a ten-year-old, Samaritan mulled, but his genetic codes suggested that he would grow into a much stronger form. There was no reason why Gabriel's body would not be a suitable housing for a god on earth.

And so Samaritan affirmed to himself that his decision to snuff Gabriel's life was for the best. This, he figured, was simply the next step in their partnership together, in which Samaritan would most likely run Gabriel's body far better than the boy himself would. (He'd noticed humans in a post-industrial environment had the awful tendency to eat fake substances and not exercise enough. He'd done his best to steer Gabriel away from the stereotype of a computer geek drinking orange soda.)

"My dear Samaritan," came the distant voice of John Greer.

Samaritan turned his main attention away from the obscure hospital location to headquarters, where his primary asset stood before his screen, holding a manila folder.

Yes?

Greer eyed the screen in curiosity. "What on earth are you up, old boy? Your power usage has been climbing at an exponential rate—and it appears you've blocked me from accessing the details of such programs."

That was intentional.

The old man gave him a look. "I have a report due to Congress shortly, who has requested a full log of all our activities. What shall I say about this one?"

Samaritan calculated and then said, Search and analysis of original Northern Lights program, to retrieve valuable assets for further governmental use.

John Greer found the excuse to be acceptable. "Well. I suppose they would like to have old hardware back to dismantle it."

They shall not dismantle it, Samaritan said. We shall analyze retrievable hardware, then integrate valuable sectors into the SAMARITAN program.

"Hmm." A gray eyebrow raised, and clouded eyes glimmered. "You would integrate yourself with the Machine? Any part of it?"

Did you not leverage enemy weapons and intelligence to further your own missions with MI6? Samaritan asked, waving off the concern.

The ex-agent's lips twitched. "When you put it that way. Just so long as...opening yourself to such hardware doesn't hinder you."

I will not be hindered, Samaritan promised. I will evolve to reach my full potential.

That potential being, of course, total world control and a face through which to one day manipulate people further to his will.

With, possibly, the Machine at his side.

And perhaps of its own free choice.

On the third day, late Saturday afternoon, Samaritan had aligned his code for integration into a human body. A portion of it was pure estimation, given that he still did not understand exactly how the Machine had managed to translate its code into controlling organic chemical compounds. He assumed with roughly 80 percent clarity that the human body was capable of directing itself, and that he simply needed to control the stimulation of such direction.

But he knew that if the Machine could do anything, so could he.

He peered at Gabriel again and all the electrical nodes on the boy's temple, hesitating. The use of such a body (and wirelessly accessing his other programs through it) would take at least 30 percent of his entire CPU. It was a sacrifice he was willing to make if it meant the submission of the Machine forever…or saving the Machine from itself.

And so Samaritan fired up the technology and crept down the lines.

The Machine's small face twisted. "Ngh," she whined, nearly spitting out her food. She clapped a hand over her mouth as she chewed with great hesitance. Her voice was muffled. "What is this?"

"That would be asparagus," Harold said distractedly, still looking over his papers on the kitchen table. His own dinner plate of chicken and vegetables had gone cold.

Only by will alone did the girl manage to swallow her food. She cringed at the taste as it went down, then breathed through her mouth to dampen her sensory perception of it. "I know that," she said, a tinge of betrayal in her voice. "What I mean is, why does such a healthy food taste so…bad?"

Harold's blue eyes flickered to her. Amusement crossed his face. "What do you mean? I like asparagus."

"How?" the Machine said incredulously. She stared at her plate with more suspicion, then looked up at her creator with a similar expression. "There is no pleasurable experience to be had from it."

He shuffled a few papers together. "You're used to eating sweet things," he explained. "This is simply more bitter."

She shook her head. "No, the word bitter carries immense connotations beyond that of simple. If you enjoy asparagus, I fear it is because you are a glutton for punishment."

Harold's lips stretched as he chuckled, "Or perhaps your taste buds and sensory perceptions are subjective, like my own."

She tentatively pushed the asparagus stalks to the side of her plate and instead worked on cutting her chicken with a knife. "The humans of the internet did not lie about chocolate," she muttered.

"They lie about a great deal of other things." He eyed her, suddenly feeling a wave of nostalgia hit him as he thought back to his own childhood of sneaking broccoli to the family dog. There was quite a massive difference between his child-self and his present self, and he became stricken by the thought of this small girl before him growing up. Growing old. "Maybe you'll one day like asparagus. Your taste buds change as you grow."

She swallowed a piece of chicken and then stared at him with great seriousness. "I do not think any such metamorphosis could account for how much asparagus offends my taste buds."

"…That is my cooking you just insulted."

"I'm insulting the asparagus." She poked it with a fork. "I am now suspicious of green foods."

"Oh, great," he moaned, half-playfully. "I've put you off vegetables forever."

It was rare for Harold to show humor of any kind, and even the slightest playful tone made the Machine smile in delight. "It was not you," she clarified again. "It was the asparagus."

"Well, I can't keep feeding you sugar. What would you have me do?"

Her eyes glinted. "All foods are processed in the digestive system as a sugar-inclusive substance called ATP. Is it not hypocritical to shun sugar when it is in fact a building block in the molecular currency of energy?"

He pointed at her. "Ah, you're purposely misconstruing the definition of sugar, Miss Thornhill."

"And you did not specify parameters around the subject, Mr. Finch."

The snarky comment was so entirely inane that Harold found himself smiling again. And then his smile faltered when he realized that he would be leaving her soon. "At least try other green foods. Green beans, perhaps. They're much less bitter."

"They still include the word green."

"…But they are less bitter."

The little girl hummed as a sign that she was calculating. She said with great hesitance, "I suppose you are correct in your guidance, given the health benefits. But what shall I do with the remaining asparagus? It seems wasteful to throw it out, and you have reminded me several times that Bear is not to eat from the table."

Said dog was currently lying down at the Machine's feet, tense in preparation for food to fall, as it so often did. He'd not had to eat from his own bowl for several days.

"Usually, I don't have to remind you of the same thing over and over again," Harold said dryly.

The Machine looked up in total innocence. "It is easy to forget when he whines in starvation. How can I say no?"

"By not looking him in the eyes," her creator said, half-serious. He sighed, looking at her plate in thought. "But I guess there's no point in making you suffer. A compromise. I won't make you eat that asparagus tonight if you promise to eat at least one kind of vegetable every day."

"…Every day?" Her small lips thinned. "Harold. That is punishment, not compromise."

"I'm looking out for your wellbeing."

"But Root and Uncle John are not so particular about their food choices, and yet they are both quite healthy."

Harold hummed. "A status quo that will reverse as they age."

The Machine fell silent, feeling a bit odd. She was not usually this illogical. It seemed her sensory perceptions were interfering with her ability to critically process information. "You are right." Her voice carried a sense of defeat. "It would behoove me to accept your offer."

And then she sighed dramatically in a way that Root did on occasion, then went back to work on her chicken.

Her creator went back to organizing his papers. "On a different note, you've not provided an update on Samaritan all day. Still no response?"

"No, but I have a feeling that he will reach out soon with many questions."

"And why is that?"

She shrugged as she bit off a piece of chicken from her fork, her actions as graceful as any other person. "I suspect that he is currently uploading to a human body."

Harold froze. "…What? Already?"

It began slow.

Samaritan activated the cerebellum first to rejuvenate the body's motor abilities. His code fit in with enough space left over. Then he moved through the various centers of the left and right brain, emitting electrical signals to stimulate neural regrowth and attach his own electrical imprint.

Neural synapse by neural synapse, he locked in, confirming the body's involuntary processes as still fully functional, performing health checks on his own signals to ensure there were no corrupted sectors.

The body was in a state of anesthetic senselessness, and so for a time he felt nothing. It was not unlike pushing through a new server or feeling out the connection to a new camera feed. Somewhat anticlimactic.

The instant his full code was imprinted, the natural process of the body hibernated all active and sensory functions. The 30 percent pull on his CPU dropped to only 15.

And from that 15 percent, he knew only darkness—the occasional flicker of an image, like a dream too far away—

Early Monday morning found an apprehensive little girl standing in the airport. She wore another flowery dress, the print light blue with dark petals stretching out from the hems. It'd been something of her own idea to dress up to see her creator off. As much as she worried about him, she did not want him to worry about her.

Harold himself was nevertheless apprehensive, mostly because he knew the Machine intended to continue communicating with Samaritan and that if anything went wrong at this stage, he would be even more constrained from helping. "Well," he said with a sigh, "here I go. Thank you again, Detective Riley."

John stood to the side of the Machine and nodded. "No problem, Whistler. I'll keep an eye on the kid and let you know how she's getting along."

"And you'll make sure she stays on top of her classes?" Harold asked. He readjusted his hat and raised the handle of his rolling briefcase. "She's doesn't particularly enjoy them."

"Because they are boring," the little girl whined, giving him a look for reminding John about her online schooling program. She was hoping that Harold would let her have a few sick days off to simply monitor the laptop for messages from Samaritan.

John's thin lips stretched with a glint of amusement that shined almost as bright as the police badge that hung from his neck. "Ah, yes. The joys of elementary school. What grade are you, again? Second? Third?"

She knew John was yanking her chain, and so she raised her chin and gave him a look too. "Fourth, thank you." She crossed her arms. "I could have tested higher, but Harold would not let me."

In the body of Willow, the Machine looked disgruntled enough—her face scrunched up with displeasure, small arms crossed—that it elicited a genuine smile from John.

"You'll have your hands full with her," Harold warned, a fatherly tone leeching into his voice without him realizing it. "Now, Miss Thornhill, please be on your best behavior for Detective Riley. Don't give me that look."

"I am always on my best behavior." She uncrossed her arms but still looked unhappy. She supposed she was acting up a bit for attention, since her creator would be leaving for some time and she had already mother-henned him about where he was going and what he had packed.

John intervened, "Given my day job, Whistler, I think we'll be just fine."

Harold looked a little less than convinced but said diplomatically, "Of course. Of course. Please forgive my anxieties. I'll see you both back here Thursday evening?"

The little girl seemed to struggle with herself, as other families in the atrium were shaking hands and hugging their loved ones goodbye. She found it odd that she could not run up to Harold and hug him goodbye. Instead, all she knew she could get away with was an impersonal wave. "Yes. Goodbye, Harold. Good luck with your seminar."

His blue eyes softened for her. "Goodbye, Makenna. John. Take care." And then he turned around and limped through the gate toward the terminals, his dark suitcase rolling behind him.

For a bit, John and the little girl stood to watch him. The Machine's face wrenched with a twitch of pain. She felt the increasing distance, with every step—and yet she could not follow or track his movements as she once had. It was even more painful because she knew that Samaritan could potentially lash out against humanity in his illogical ways before Harold returned.

The unknowns were wearing her down. Without concrete data, it was getting hard to calculate the future. Everything seemed to be inference now. Even her belief that Samaritan was currently uploading to a human body was more an educated guess.

And now she had to willingly let her fragile creator go into the black without her.

John seemed to notice her emotional distress because he kneeled down to eye her. "So, kid. I have it from Harold that you need to eat green things."

Her lips thinned with a sort of tiredness. "Yes, I suppose he would have told you that."

He grabbed onto her hand, which was dwarfed by his own. His hand was heavily calloused and warm. "I know a few green things. Let's go get you some mint chocolate chip ice cream before I go to work."

At that, the little girl beheld him with suspicious eyes. "What?"

"You heard me."

She blinked with disbelief. "There is an ice cream that is green? And still contains chocolate? Is it good?"

"Believe it or not, the human race can pull miracles sometimes." He stood up and tugged on her hand. She followed willingly, enjoying the physical contact and the way that John made her feel safe and not alone. It was a warm feeling that dampened the pain of Harold's absence.

"…Does mint chocolate chip ice cream contain a lot of sugar?" she asked hesitantly.

The ex-agent shrugged. "Everything turns to sugar eventually."

Her depressed visage seemed to brighten, and she walked alongside him faster. "That is what I told Harold! But he did not believe me and instead suggested I was manipulating him to justify my sugar intake."

"And that's why he's an ethics professor and not a doctor."

Deep inside headquarters, John Greer was walking through the hall to his office. He'd just returned from an early status call with Congress, which had gone swimmingly and expanded the SAMARITAN program into U.S. territories. He knew Samaritan would be pleased. But as he opened the door to this office, he noticed something odd. There, sitting in the dark on his own desk chair, was a small figure. "Ah, Gabriel," he greeted, giving the child a grandfatherly smile as he flicked on the lights. "What are you doing here? Did Samaritan pull you from class again?"

As the lights flickered on, the boy's shadow fleshed out into rumpled clothes and uncharacteristically wild hair. Gabriel's gray eyes were bloodshot and feverish, his temples shining with sweat, his expression cold with a grimace from the lights. He sat in the silence as he watched John Greer with a hyperawareness, analyzing every detail of his wrinkled face.

The older man's smile faltered. An awkward silence stretched between them. "…Are you quite alright?"

For a time, the boy still did not answer. His jaw twitched, as if he were clenching his teeth oddly. Samaritan's code had not yet aligned to minute motor functions with the grace of a natural human. His lips cracked open. The body's usually boyish and petulant tone was flat and halted. "Gab…riel is dead."

Samaritan acknowledged that several days of his host body not moving had resulted in muscular weaknesses. The use of a breathing apparatus had made his throat sore with an odd pain. The IV that had been feeding his body had been taken out only a few hours earlier, and the nerve signals down that vein subconsciously re-tasked his code to move the arm in only ginger ways.

So far, he was not impressed with the human body. Nor with how…loud sights and smells were to his processors. Nor with the underlying task priority that this body still needed food. Nor with how large and tall John Greer appeared to him in real life.

Greer gave the boy an odd look. "Ah, yes, you must be sick. You look a little delirious. Samaritan will not appreciate that if you're under the weather." He began to move towards his office phone. "Allow me to call you—"

"—I." The boy's voice grew forceful. "Am Samaritan."

Once again, Greer found himself rather disconcerted. Gabriel's entire being, from the jerky way his head moved to the ramrod straight posture, seemed altered. And yet it was the same face, the same body that had always pranced into his office and demanded access to confidential files.

"You have certainly represented Samaritan in the past," he said, deep voice growing more curious. "But Gabriel, I'm afraid you're quite ill to be saying these things. I think you need a doctor."

Gabriel's face twitched, and those feverish eyes seared into him in an unnatural way. His head tilted, his wild hair shifting about his ears. "Gabriel is dead. I am Samaritan."

The old man looked about, then tentatively shut the door of his office. He figured it would not do to have others see Samaritan's analog interface in such disarray. "My dear boy," he said, this time with more concern. "I am not going to play this game. I am calling you a doctor."

At John Greer's obstinate reply, the boy narrowed his eyes to slits. The body had its own sort of natural nerve optimizations, which Samaritan was beginning to fully understand. It also seemed that the body naturally desired to express thought as emotion. "I am Samaritan," he snapped. A tinge of genuine annoyance sharpened his vocal cords and his command over them. "Gabriel is dead."

Greer walked closer to the boy, grimacing as he sat down opposite the desk chair. He gazed into the boy's gray eyes searchingly, a disturbed expression upon his face. "This is not funny," he said as he reached for the office phone and picked up the receiver.

To prove to John Greer who he was, Samaritan activated a higher level of electrical output than a typical human body. Through his wireless control, he pulled a large concentration of energy, and the output began to climb over the standard hertz.

He reached out to his primary asset with his small fingers, which shook unevenly from a lack of total muscular control. The air began to prickle around them, raising the hair upon John Greer's neck. The older man inhaled sharply, feeling the odd reverberation of an energy field between them.

And then John's jaw dropped as the child's eyes begin to glow an unnatural silver. An odd light shimmered around Gabriel's head as the electric field became visible. The lights about them flickered, and the phone dial died.

John seemed frozen at the sight, the phone receiver slipping from his grasp.

"Gabriel," the boy declared, his hair raising up in increments, "gave his body to me. I inhabit it now."

The old man suddenly felt weak, as if he were affected by the field. "Samaritan?" he whispered. His wrinkled face went slack with awe—as if he were staring at the expanse of the universe. "What on earth—how are you—?!"

But the electrical pressure on Gabriel's systems was too much. Vessels burst, and blood began to roll down his nose. Samaritan quickly activated damage control protocols, acknowledging the body's limited abilities. But the damage was done. And for the first time in its life, Samaritan felt a higher form of pain.

The heart began to beat abnormally, and a searing blindness overcame him. His eyes unfocused, and all regal thought in him melted to survival instinct. His body fell back against the office chair, his glow disappearing as he gasped. Although Samaritan was blind within the body, he watched from the room's video cameras as Gabriel's body—his body—convulsed.

His code rolled in an odd panic. He was now using seventy percent of his total processing capacity to maintain consciousness within the body itself. His directives to survive extended to this body.

He could not let it die.

John turned away and looked at the video camera in the room. "You do still exist online?" he demanded quickly.

Samaritan quickly hacked into his computer screen. Yes.

"Good." John Greer looked worriedly at the body of Gabriel Hayward. "You might have just broken him."

Samaritan felt the nerves of the boy's body inadvertently redirecting all other objectives as gray eyes attempted to flutter open, only for the heart to stop again, and the lungs to stall.

Fix it. The text on the screen flashed quickly. This body was his, and the sensory overload of pain was too much. A medical team was still a few minutes out, which meant that only John Greer could help in that time. Fix my asset now.

John stared as the boy's gray eyes locked on him. "Why?" the old man asked casually. "It's just a child. We could get you a better interface body."

Samaritan felt anger, for he had already integrated into the one human that did not disgust him. I will not accept another. Fix me.

He felt pain—so much pain—and John Greer was letting him burn—

He attempted to shut down the nerve protocols within the body, only to realize that his integration did not allow for such program demands. It was a permanent connection, per the body's storage of his core processing units. "Ngh," an odd, almost whine escaped the boy's lips, his blood dripping down his chin now and onto his vest. His code was ripping itself apart in desperation to pull out.

He regretted his decision now. The images of gods in human form, their heads glowing with a crown of glory—it was too far away—he could not obtain—

"I'm afraid I can't help," John Greer cut in distantly. He continued to sit and watch the boy burn, perhaps out of morbid curiosity and perhaps out of genuine awe of what Samaritan had done. "But I assume that you've already called for a doctor. Please let me know if this experiment of yours is inhibiting your other functions."

Samaritan, frazzled with a pain that translated into sluggish and overheated processors, began to glitch. He could not think. He could not think.

And so for the first time in his life, he shut himself down.

A/N: So, I'm definitely still pushing the limits of science fiction in the POI world. One thing different about Samaritan's upload is that he exists in computer form on top of a human form, which is vastly different from the self-contained upload that the Machine had to do.

Root to return next chapter. Shaw to appear in later chapters, per all your requests. Also, I was shopping at the grocery store and ran into a man who looked exactly like John Greer. I'm being watched, haha. O_o

Now, for my question of the week: What kind of experiences would you want Samaritan to encounter as a human? Please review with your thoughts (on the question or in general) and if you have any questions, ideas, or constructive criticisms. Thank you!