This chapter takes place in the latter half of season one, between February and April of 2012. It begins directly after the end of the previous chapter.
BEAR WITH ME: If you read this work before, there was another chapter up previously that I have replaced with this one. The one you read before, with Root in Bishop, will go up again, but as Chapter 4. Please excuse the temporary confusion.
The first taxi she flagged down after exiting the quaint little coffee shop was the standard black-and-yellow workhorse that flavored New York's gritty streets with an unmistakable spice of cigarette smoke and stale rain. That driver, a Dominican with a penchant for hip hop, took her as far as Rockefeller Center. She crossed the bustling square and conjured up another ride with a confident wave of her hand. She followed that pattern of zig-zag travel on auto-pilot, her mind occupied with thoughts of her newest playmate.
He was clever, no doubt; most casual hackers could not have found her work in the first place, much less worried at the faint trail until it led them to her honeypot. Clever was fun. But why had he started looking at her work in the—
"Hey, lady, stop here?"
Questioning brown eyes found her own suddenly alert ones in the rearview mirror.
"Here's fine."
'Here' was a slushy, cramped corner on the edge of a hurry-up-and-don't-make-eye-contact sort of neighborhood. 'Here' ended her ersatz commute, just a short walk from the apartment in which she stashed her less mobile possessions.
All records attached to the place linked back to Mary Lorenz, a travel writer who penned short reviews of East Coast hostels and B&Bs for an internet-based travel company. Root ensured with a few simple algorithms that business boomed; it was a shame, really, that their phone line was always busy and their tours always fully booked.
The fairy-tale reviews, spun out at odd hours for her own odd amusement, explained frequent absences and a meager income that covered simple meals, a weak Wi-fi signal, and this run-down apartment in a building that happened to sit directly on top of a transatlantic communications cable. The heavy volume of goings-on transmitted through the cable washed away her more egregious electronic sins and afforded her needed anonymity.
Stepping out of the cab into Mary Lorenz's life transformed her; her shoulders grew rounded, her smile meeker, and she stepped timidly down Mary's block with the cautious surety of a shy woman who nominally belonged there. She kept her head down all the way up through stairwells that buzzed with fluorescent light and down the hall to her door.
She did not even bother to flick on the depressingly dingy lights that punctuated the smoke-stained ceiling. Instead, she found her way by memory and gloomy silhouettes to the kitchen, abandoning her suitcase as she went. Three minutes of humming radiation later, she slurped at hot instant noodles and settled cross-legged on the battered sofa to power up the small array of computer screens that graced her secondhand coffee table.
She often worked from public places, or other locations with no link to her, but new uncertainty prompted by her latest obsession had her circling the city in a never-ending cycle of criss-crossing cab journeys and steaming coffee in disposable cups. The background changed frequently over the course of the next two months, but the foreground was always the same: her fingers tapping out a drumbeat rhythm that marshaled the letters and numbers onto the screen in neat rows as she pursued her burning questions. The same screen lit her face in a true communion, a oneness she had never found anywhere else.
She worked methodically, beginning with the origin of the breach to her system. All points of contact made on this job, from the slightest brush of her electronic self against the smooth steel walls of a guarded database to the physical presence she had embodied in that cramped dorm room, filed through her head like targets for a firing squad. She ignored phone calls, cancelled a job she had already been contracted for, and turned all her time toward answers. Hour piled on hour as she shot possibilities down one by one over the course of a full week, carefully ticking them off against the likelihood that each scruffy, pathetic thread had been the one that lead Harold stumbling blindly to her computer.
His attack was cautious, with a finesse that made it more exploration than foray. His style was distinctive, certainly, but still she found her cursor drifting away from this line of inquiry. Conventional wisdom might have advised the pursuit of the individual, even if she only had a name and a few fragmented files, but an inexorable obsession circled her back around to a larger question: what had alerted Harold to her in the first place? How had he known exactly where to look in the life of an unemployed temp worker in order to pull out a Congressman's assassination plot?
This, then, became the subject of her tireless scrutiny for days. The everyday safeguards on her computers had obviously been compromised, yet each successive search yielded no point of ingress. The violation was not in her own machines, then, but elsewhere. This conclusion, this dangerous omniscience, pushed her back into her borrowed lecture-hall seat-of-the-day. After that, coffee shops and libraries flickered rapidly in and out of focus behind her computer screen, masking her inquiries behind hidden IP addresses.
One dreary March afternoon found her folded up in a poorly-polished wooden chair at yet another library, seated amidst a grab-bag readers, students, and other presumably reputable citizens.
She pushed back in her chair and stretched her arms up, out, down, gracefully rolling her neck until her energy started to flow again. Her fingers tapped a light staccato on the table-stop as she thought. The Congressman hit hung suspended before her mind's eye, a tangle of knots with ends that extended to unknown places, with too many possibilities. It was a tangle of her own creation, though, and therefore she saw it in its clearest form. Someone else, though…
She saw it as a carefully knotted series of connections, artfully tied so as to make it seem impossible for events to be anything but an accident. That was what she excelled at. But then, another might use a different metaphor: a chord. Root as musician, arranger of fingers and pedals and stops, all for the creation of a single, fleeting chorus. In order to predict the chord, then, one would have to watch either the musician or all the tools at once. The first option was not possible, weeks of chasing each byte to its bitter end proved that. The second seemed even more far-fetched, even if it was the simplest explanation.
Root had little respect for Occam's Razor. After all, she had built a shifting maze kingdom on ensuring that the simplest explanation was whatever falsehood she wished it to be. This time, though… this time the simplest answer was more exhilarating than anything she could have conjured herself: someone, or something, with the power to watch everything at once.
She emerged from the echoing electronic well of her thoughts in response to a polite cough originating behind her.
"I'm sorry, dear, I'm going to have to ask you to mute your computer. That dinging noise is distracting our readers."
Root masked irritation with a simper as she turned to face the interloper. It was an older woman with grey-blue hair and the requisite sweater and glasses chain of her ilk.
"No problem," she replied gaily. "I'm sorry to have bothered you." The elderly woman gave her a self-righteous little smile and shuffled off, no doubt to nitpick someone else's behavior. Root's face dropped its smile suddenly, leaving only a hard, blank expression as she turned her attention back to the screen.
Through her strange communion with the digital world, she had learned to parse humans into code and use her electronic half to find their secrets. Much like the commands she marshaled to the screen, nature too coded with loops, with if-else statements, with repetition. If she was to find this new omniscience, she would have to look for the patterns it could see. She spent days plucking these hidden patterns from their surroundings, holding them up, turning them around, studying them, learning them. Using them.
She began with her single data point, the Congressman's assassination, but she built from there, skillfully drawing the barest filaments and estimates out until a spun-sugar pattern grew and solidified on her screen. The mirage of barely-there connections hid a delicate reality; some pattern underlay the whole thing, watching passively over terabytes of data until it found fingers poised in a dozen places to strike a dangerous chord.
It oversaw the entire city and beyond, spilling across neighboring states and farther, though she left the exact determination of borders for a later date.
The beauty and complexity of this shadow pattern stole her usual focus, stilling her black-tipped fingers and derailing her thoughts at each fleeting glimpse of what she sought. Somewhere in the random static of trillions of bytes of data, the lowest humming tune, the barest flowing line, these were all that showed what might truly exist there. There was no source code, though, only traces of some program rather than the program itself. This was not the showy flash of a new hacker, though, or the error-ridden brute force of some new and supposedly sophisticated software. This was beauty and grace and life; this was power.
If the program watched, then it depended on Harold and his annoying friend to act. The first solid result linking back to them came in early April; it was only a fifty-eight percent match to the overall pattern she had developed, and it was months old, but it fit. It was clumsy, perhaps an early effort, a girl thought to be dead brought back to life and caught up in a shady land deal. Unexplained interferences, impossible coincidences—accounting for pattern development over time, the match was closer to eighty-six percent, a close match for a first result.
She skimmed eager eyes over the web of matches that began to crop up as her pattern predictions improved. The information came from a variety of sources: police records, newspaper articles, blog posts, and the like. Many of the incidents appeared unrelated, but they spider-webbed together in back-linking loops of faint connections and habits. In fact, it was similar to the way that she was wont to work, with disjointed events making up a whole result. A damning one, in her case. The difference between Harold and her was their purpose, as well as a certain lack of subtlety that seemed to originate with Harold's partner. Root had certainly never sought the attention called by ramming into cars with semis.
One she uncovered the FBI investigation and Detective Carter's notes, the rest slotted into place. The Man in the Suit acted publicly for Harold, who in turn stood in front of some unknown power.
The power, that omniscience, akin to a god, had to be the source of their information. The tangled net of data in each case unraveled into a giant loop with no loose end for her to tug. Each sequence of events emerged from an infinite past only to be brought to heel by Harold and his friend, and it did not originate with them.
Once she had familiarized herself with his movements and actions, Harold's files were not quite as puzzling as they seemed at first glance. The most heavily protected of them were also the ones that intrigued her most. She cracked her back languidly before opening these as they finished loading from the program cobbling the fragments back together. Though her self-written program had never failed her before, the strings that emerged were far from normal.
It was not simply the beauty of the code that materialized; it was what the code would do. There were test runs and works-in-progress, the saved remnants of an old project. Root's breath was shallow and even the automatic part of her brain forgot to blink in the dry institutional air of yet another Starbucks.
If this worked, if this had been completed, it would explain everything.
She stared for hours at the scrolling numbers, until finally a disgruntled teen worker at her shoulder pulled her out of her soft reverie. She closed her computer reluctantly and wandered out of the coffee shop into dark spring streets. Her thoughts stole the power of sight with distraction, and she ambled by memory back to Mary Lorenz's apartment, consumed with questions about the world's newest god.
She did not sleep at all that night; she sat slumped at her computer, alternately staring at the streetlight through her single grimy window or at her glowing screen.
Once she knew what she was looking for, it was almost laughably easy to locate the huge streams of data flowing out of the NSA and into the ether. The hidden budgets for black-ops programs were a little more difficult, but that was only a matter of time and due diligence. It should not be possible. A half-dozen incomplete government projects, from Trailblazer to Stellar Wind to TIA, proved that. But everything she had found said it existed—an all-powerful program, written by an artist of coding. Trapped and declawed by the same artist, too; that was the only scenario she could imagine to explain why such an omniscient program would watch and wait in near-silence.
Names started to emerge—Denton Weeks, Alicia Corwin; a one-dollar payment for 'The Machine' that gave god a name—but nothing definite enough to go on. Harold would have to be the way in. She sipped at lukewarm black coffee as she scanned her pattern predictions for the interference of Harold and his pet. They all shared some detectable danger, something the Machine could latch onto and predict.
She looked out the window, mind whirring as she switched from research to planning. The poking fingers of dawn grasping at the sills found her unmoved, too occupied with planning her own assassination to sleep.
I'm super-nervous about this, so any and all constructive criticism, suggestions, or thoughts on what you thought worked and what didn't are hugely appreciated!