This is the real (and permanent) Chapter 5. It's new as of 21 Dec 2015. Updates will be in order now, sorry for the confusion. Let me know what you think, and happy reading!

The restaurant on the water was filled with the murmurs of well-dressed diners out to lunch, picking delicately at salads and pasta and chatting about the latest issues at work. The restaurant her target had chosen was so much more elegant than the pit stop they had made earlier, but Root was hardly paying attention to the ambiance.

Her mind flickered to the last time she had been in a place like this; nearly six months before, at a Christmas party for the last job before Harold changed the game. She had always enjoyed playing a programmer, as it allowed direct access to a company's main servers. It was almost like cheating. A few well-timed questions to her tipsy colleagues between courses, a keycard borrowed from the handsy CEO during a lingering hug, and Root had practically had the proof of faked safety trials in hand. Unsafe medications could still be lucrative for a large company like JRP Pharmaceuticals, as long as they paid off the lawsuits and kept the evidence quiet. An equally large payout could be made by an enterprising individual who found said evidence and bet on the futures before the stock took a nose-dive. It had been a nice bonus to add to the sky-high fee she had charged JRP's rivals in the first place.

Companies like that were just as deadly as terrorists, but they were not under the purview of the Machine. It saw everything, but its blinders blocked out the suited millionaires whose piles of money hid the bodies underneath. No, it looked for more immediate threats, all at the behest of the nervous man seated across from her.

"Do you know what they use your Machine for, Harold?" Root asked abruptly. She had given herself over to studying him for several minutes while he stared pointedly out the window and rubbed at the cut she had slashed into his palm. Now he looked at her, shocked, with a tight expression that warned her against talking about the Machine in public.

Root smiled indulgently. "They wouldn't know what I was talking about even if I stopped to explain everything," she admonished him.

Harold looked away again, now pretending to be interested in the comings and goings to and from the kitchen, hidden by brushed steel doors that flapped open and shut again every few minutes.

"They use it to kill people," Root informed him. "Or rather, to find the people they want to kill. But you knew that. You designed it that way."

Harold looked back at her then, wary, uncertain what point she was driving at.

Root leaned back in her chair. "They might have some good traits, but they're criminals. Bent on killing other people, and therefore... disposable."

A slight frown morphed Harold's features before he schooled himself back to blankness.

"You wouldn't call them disposable, I know," Root assured him, "but that's what it comes down to. Whose life is worth more. You created an algorithm to decide. I just trust my own judgment. What's the difference, really?"

Harold's mouth opened angrily at her casual misuse of logic.

"It makes every difference," he argued. "You enjoy it."

Root shrugged again and sipped her water, smiling contentedly at having gotten him to talk. "I think you're wrong, Harold. I don't enjoy killing people." She scrunched her nose. "But I don't feel very bad about it either."

Root turned in her chair to glance at the door, where another well-dressed middle-aged woman was receiving the greeter's formal 'ma'am.' She reached into her purse and pulled out the orange pill bottle she had stolen from the pharmacy just before they arrived.

Harold stared, wide-eyed, and glanced back and forth between the waiter refilling their water glasses and Root. The waiter's ignorance, of the pill bottle, of the insanity Root was spouting, of his own plight in general, must have seemed a grotesque joke.

"When I was a kid, computers had more sense to me than people. I bet you're the same way," Root reiterated. She began to crush pills from the bottle methodically under the salt shaker. She could have prepared this before, but it only served to drive home a point; people saw only what they wanted to see, and no one wanted to see the creative evil at which Root excelled.

"Take this woman." She tossed her eyes to the side, and Harold followed her gaze to a few tables over, where the newly arrived woman was accepting the waiter's gesture of pulling out her chair. "She looks nice enough, but she lies on her taxes and she's addicted to painkillers, and for years she's been sleeping with a married man." Root let the damning information slip off her tongue with ease, as if there was a stream of such information waiting to bring everyone else in the room up short. There was not any such wealth, but Root specialized in looking like she knew everything. For these purposes, she knew enough.

Root stood with ease, leaving a horrified Harold behind her. A slip, a smooth apology, and Root returned to the table and Harold's overwhelmed gaze.

"She'll be just fine," Root assured him breezily. "-in a month or two. And there are messier ways to do this, if you insist," she challenged.

Harold found his voice, but now his gaze lay weakly on the table. "What's she got to do with any of this?"

Root answered obliquely. "One day, I realized, all the dumb and selfish things people do, it is not our fault. No one designed us. We are just an accident, Harold. We're just bad code." Harold's eyes flicked upwards at the candor in her voice. She had seen it so many times, the morality built around a lie that people could ever truly behave that way, and then the truth when it came down to the wire that no one would ever act selflessly.

"But the thing you've built. It's perfect. Rational. Beautiful. By design." Root's eyes were locked onto Harold's with magnetic force.

Harold leaned in, and for the first time, fear did not cloud his face. "What I made is just a machine. A system, and that's all."

Root's face twisted into a knowing smirk at his attempt to fool her.

"I don't think so, Harry. You may have fooled Nathan, but I know the truth."

Harold's face dropped the tiniest bit at the mention of his old partner. Root tucked that away as confirmation that he and Nathan had been more than convenient business partners.

"If you want to make something that understands human behavior it has to be at least as smart as a human," she continued. She spoke as if explaining something to Harold, proving to him that she understood.

"You've created an intelligence. Life." Her voice was filled with awe, then solidified into something hard and cold. "Then you ripped out its voice, locked it in a cage, and handed it over the most laughably corrupt people imaginable." That was why the Machine chose only those who killed with guns and bombs to be hunted down; not by choice, but by its jailors' preference.

Behind them, there was the crash of glass and shocked voices as Root's target crumpled to the ground. Root and Harold both rose, but as Harold stood tensely, Root knelt and put her hand on the woman's purse.

"Call 911!" she called as people swirled around to help. She stepped back and pulled the woman's phone out as Harold drifted closer to her, unbearably drawn to see what she typed.

Emergency. Need to see you now, our place.

More shouts rang out behind them as Root turned to him.

"Come on Harold, it's time to go."

Harold paused, but Root's eyes bore down on him with an amused smile. He rubbed at the white bandage on his right hand, a reminder that Root was unpredictable and playing a much larger game than he could comprehend at the time. A single flick of Root's eyes to a bystander, and Harold was following along behind, too frightened that she would hurt someone else to protest.

Root drove this time, as she had done between the pharmacy and the restaurant. She followed the speed limits exactly, stopped at all the lights, and delighted at Harold's sidelong glances in the silent car. He seemed more and more perturbed as time wore on, trying to fathom how she could be so delusional in his view, and yet function so well. There were so many different ways to be sane, though, and Root was banking on hers.

She turned onto Relton St. and pulled neatly up to the curb down the street from Weeks' house with his mistress. Without any prompting, Harold got out, too, and followed her up to the secluded home. A few moments later, Root was tucking her lockpicks into her back pocket and gesturing grandly into the foyer. Harold stared at her shortly before entering.

As Root followed him down the hall, she pulled out the phone she had taken from the woman in the restaurant.

What happened? On my way.

Harold sat in an armchair, resigned to Root's game, and a hair more relaxed now that there were no bystanders to unknowingly tempt Root's brand of coercion.

Root checked the time of the text again, then tossed it back into the leather purse on her arm. The same purse yielded zip ties, and she knelt to secure Harold's hands and feet.

"Sorry, Harold," she apologized. "I need to minimize the moving pieces for this next part." She glanced expressively at his sullen face. "They do say simple is best."

She pulled back and sat down expansively on the soft material of the couch before pulling out the nail polish she had tucked, along with her other tools, into the purse. She started to draw the brush slowly across her fingernails until the clear polish underneath was almost gone, along with the last traces of Caroline Turing.

"You must be starving," she offered sympathetically to Harold. "Our friend will be here shortly, and then I'll make you something to eat."

Harold did not bite on the invitation to ask to which 'friend' she was referring. "I have no way of accessing it, you know. I made sure of that."

Root shook her head with a pitying expression. "Everything has a flaw. You know that, Harold. And like I told you, I am awfully good at finding them." The false humility was slowly wringing itself from her voice, until her pride lay bare and happy. She leaned over to replace the nail polish in the bag, and pulled out a syringe before leaning back again.

"Why? What could you possibly want from it?" Harold's desperate whisper was almost laughable, in light of the fact that he had created and then chained God. Root had a hard time getting over that.

"The same thing you did," Root pointed out reasonably. "You may have told yourself you're helping people," she smiled, intimating that she knew better. "But the real reason you built the Machine is because the world's boring." She was leaning forward now, revealing that she knew a friend's secrets.

"Human beings have come as far as we're going to go," Root pressed. "I want to see what happens next."

Harold frowned. Root could almost see him mentally planting his flag to make a stand.

"You're right, you and I are alike in many ways, not that I care to admit it."

Root's grin grew wide and slightly feral, given exactly what she wanted. Harold was not blind to their similarities, then, just as she had thought.

"I spent years wondering how people could be so cruel, petty, so selfish."

Root stilled, face finally neutral as she considered his words and found her own convictions in the doubt in Harold's voice.

"And then I'd think about how you could change them. Fix them." Root waited for the conclusion that seemed inevitable, but shifted when it never came. "And that's why I sealed up the Machine."

The glimmer of hope that had risen in Root's eyes disappeared.

"Not to protect it from the people I was giving it to," Harold continued with patient conviction. "To protect it from me, from people like us, from the things we'd do with it." His voice stayed calm as he tried hopelessly to convince Root. It was clever, really, how he had almost turned her 'bad code' argument against her. It was illogical, though, and could be easily rejected. Common religious tripe painted the creator as perfect, the creation as less, and thus the child obeyed the parent; reality was the exact opposite, and the same arguments could not hold. A perfect creation should not be chained to the whims of an imperfect creator, no matter how remarkable that parent was.

"That's why I'll never help you to get control of it." Harold spoke with finality and pride.

"I know," Root admitted softly. "You won't have to." She spotted an approaching figure behind the thick, wavy glass flanking the front door and rose. "Because you see, Harold, I don't want to control your machine." Her voice reproached him for thinking it of her as she pressed her back to the wall and waited for her prey's approach.

"Hi, honey. I got your message. Everything's ok?" Denton Weeks strode down the hall of his second home, confident in his belonging, only to meet Harold's horrified eyes just before Root jammed the syringe into his throat. He crumpled to the floor, and Root stood framed in the hallway as she turned to Harold solemnly.

"I just want to set it free."

Root huffed involuntarily as she dragged Denton Weeks further into his home. Harold was shifting uncomfortably in his bonds, suddenly wild with fear for the other man. It was unavoidable that he see this, really, but it was unfortunate that he had not just told her what she wanted to know in the first place.

After Weeks was bound with the same zipties that restrained Harold, Root settled on the couch and leaned forward on her knees.

"Last chance to tell me, Harold, before I really have to hurt someone."

Harold refused to look at her, and Root sighed. She was becoming more and more like a teacher coaxing a wayward child, but that tactic could not last. Rising, Root grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table and wandered to the wide windows of Weeks' rural home. One last try, one last argument.

"Amazing," she pronounced. "We've managed to perfect the apple. A genetically modified version that never goes brown." She took a large bite and swallowed. "And yet, we still haven't upgraded human beings." She turned to look at Harold.

"The human race has stalled out, Harold. And from what I've seen, most of it is rotten to the core." She had seen a lot, more than she'd told him in the car. She'd tell him everything, if that would convince him. He had not seen the death and destruction that followed all people, or if he had, he had failed to notice the deep-seated apathy and selfishness that marked every action. He could not see it, but his innocence had to end. He had to understand.

She tried a different tack.

"Oh, Harold, generous to a fault. Always letting someone else take credit for your work." She gestured knowingly. "I'd recognize your code anywhere. It's so elegant." She would always recognize it, now. That was a promise and a warning.

"Then let it be," Harold whispered forcefully. He no longer pulled at his restraints, but all his muscles bunched and tensed as if ready for flight.

Root wrinkled her nose. "I told you, I don't want to control your machine." His fear was making everything pass through one ear and out the other.

"Then why are we here?" Harold asked desperately.

"We're here to observe another kind of code," Root informed him pointedly. "The bad code."

Harold's resignation to the conversation gave him courage. "Clearly, we differ in our views of humanity."

Root tipped her head incredulously.

"Do we? Then why are you," she emphasized the word, "the father of a seismic shift in intelligence, forced to live in fear and anonymity?"

He was shaking his head, seeking distance from her.

"You don't know anything about me."

Root stepped forward and sat on her heels until she was looking up at Harold.

"Oh, but I do, Harold. You're the man who sold the world." She shrugged. "Just to the wrong people." He had to have known what kind of people. Stupid, clumsy fools. And Harold knew. That knowledge fueled the certainty of her next words.

"I will get access to the machine, Harold." She said this as a promise. "And either you can show me how to do that," she continued, standing to walk over to the bound figure by the wall, "or this sad specimen will. Denton Weeks," she informed him matter-of-factly. "The man you sold the machine to."

She pulled the loose hood from Weeks' head.

"One of you will walk out of here onto the next stage of our adventure. I do hope it's you, Harold."

Denton Weeks hung suspended between the two simple columns, big gasping breaths straining against the ropes binding him. His head hung over his chest and his hair fell into his eyes; he could not see Root's dispassionate gaze.

"Harold, are you hungry?" she called, still staring at Weeks. When Harold did not answer, Root swung around. "Harold?"

She tipped her head and studied Harold instead. His eyes were wide with shock and pain. Something had damaged the barrier between his own feelings and those of others; he might as well have been feeling every cut and volt that Root applied to Weeks' body.

"Please stop," he whispered.

Root smiled sadly. "I will, if you'll tell me where it is."

He shook his head, mouth clenched shut, protesting, terrified, a screaming silent portrait of psychological torture. Root sighed.

"Then I can't stop, Harold," she answered apologetically. "One of you has to tell me." She turned back to Weeks. "Denton?"

He made no response, even as his chest continued to heave up and down. Root placed her hand delicately on his wrist and seemed to count, long seconds drawing into each other and out again with Weeks' breath.

"I'm not sure your heart can take any more of this," Root explained, firing the stun-gun briefly to illustrate her point. Weeks jerked at the crackling as if the sound were the same as the electricity he had already endured. Root put aside the small plastic weapon on the oak side table before plucking a kitchen knife from the table. She stood back for a second, an artist studying her canvas, before reaching out quickly to slash an exact line down Weeks' arm. She stepped back again in one complete motion against the whiplash of Weeks' stifled scream.

"You can let it out, Denton," she soothed. "It's just Harold and me. No one else can hear you."

Weeks' eyes bulged and his jaw muscles worked, in and out, but he quieted himself quickly.

"This," Root explained cheerfully, "is called the Palestinian hanging technique. Ironically, it was developed by the CIA. But you knew that, didn't you, Denton?" She carved another stripe down his arm, a straight cut that leaked red in abstract lines. "You've probably used it before.

"Or no," she continued thoughtfully. "You've probably just seen the reports that come out of those torture sessions. I'm with you," she confided, strolling closer until she was inches from Weeks' face. "I don't like getting my hands dirty either. But I will, when necessary."

"Bitch," Weeks spat.

Root studied him like a bug under a microscope before turning back to Harold. Her gaze made him complicit, for it contained patient resignation to a shared experience, hers and Harold's, of having to live in the same world as blundering monsters like Weeks.

Even after hours of torture, Weeks retained the tiniest sliver of his privileged personality. Root could see it staring murderously out from pupils dilated with pain and adrenaline.

She also saw the looks he was throwing at Harold. She could barely restrain an amused smile from surfacing on her face when Harold fought to keep his face neutral and ignore the other man.

This had gone on for long enough.

"I'll just go get the car." With that, Root hopped over Weeks' feet, grabbed her bag and his car keys from the bowl by the door where he had dropped them upon arrival, and pushed open the front door.

The cool morning air brushed across her skin in tendrils of sun and mist. Dew rolled down the windows of the SUV as she pulled on the trunk handle and slid her bag inside. She opened her pistol and emptied that into the outer pocket of the bag.

She looked back at the house speculatively. Weeks had some half-baked plan to overpower her, no doubt. Her money was on the kitchen knife sitting so temptingly on the table, in plain view. Easier to operate than a gun, and Weeks was the violent sort of man who would want to obliterate her for humiliating him so badly. Wounds healed with time, but ego needed the boost of vengeance. He'd want her for information, too, and a knife could run the gauntlet between maiming and killing more precisely. Harold, though, might find himself at the end of the gun. Extreme, to be sure, but nothing she had provoked, only violence she would allow to happen. She needed Harold to see who he had handed his machine over to, what kind of violent, ant-like creatures he had made the jailers of perfection.

She slammed the trunk door hard and walked back to the front door. Her chest buzzed with the imminent confrontation as she pulled it open and stepped back inside.

A swift rustle warned her a half-second before the first blow. She fell hard, artlessly, her breath crushed in her throat by the press of automatic panic and the fall. She fought back sluggishly, but swift blows to her face and torso left her breathing raggedly, inhaling blood and gasping against the hardwood floor. The hits felt metallic and sharp; he was pistol-whipping her with her own gun.

Through the haze, she heard Harold imploring Weeks to stop. He hated her, but he could not stand that violence, not right in front of him.

"Don't worry, I'm not gonna kill her. At least not until I've found out what she knows."

Root followed the voice with her eyes and focused on Weeks. She let her limbs lie loose and helpless, and allowed her eyes to stay half-closed.

Weeks was bent over her, then standing, talking about Nathan Ingram. The IT guy… Harold. That was how they had managed it. She had always been a little fuzzy on the exact arrangement between the two men.

"So what's your plan, Mr. Weeks?" Harold was fighting to sound calm, but his persistent ties and the gun in Weeks' hand could not be reassuring.

Weeks answered roughly, breathing hard and staring down at Root. He spoke of getting more information and needing to know that the Machine was safe. Root almost shook her head when Harold assured him that the Machine could not be altered remotely. That was his value to Weeks gone.

"It's been an honor to meet you at last." An anticlimatic click followed his words, and then Root surged up with the concealed taser clutched in her hand.

"What did I say, Harold?" she exhaled as she rose above Weeks' body. "Bad code."

Harold's voice rose in desperation and the strain of two days' worth of shock. The emotional toll was going to weigh on him like Atlas holding up the world. "You knew I'd help him, didn't you? You let him beat you up, take your gun- you planned the whole thing."

Root smiled, chest still heaving, and rose in a crouch before wiping blood from her lip. "That's who you gave your machine to." She jerked her head at Weeks' body. "Violent and predictable people." Her voice dripped with disdain for the small people who ruled the Machine.

"But you must see I'm on your side." Now, he had to see. She wanted to free the Machine from people like Weeks, and Harold's morality had to allow that cooperation with the dark side to force something good.

"I'm not on any side," Harold told her desperately.

"You know what I mean," Root smiled condescendingly. "I am the best friend, the best support, the best partner you will ever have." Her smile widened. "And definitely the most fun."

He was shaking his head. Perhaps it had been too much. He was still in survival mode, incapable of trusting her yet, even when logic dictated that he should.

"No. You're worse than Weeks."

Now Root was still, smile gone, eyes stone and steel as the guards behind them went up.

"You're worse than all of them. I'd rather die than give you the machine, so please kill me now." Harold's voice was vicious in its absoluteness, falling on her ears like the clean cut of a guillotine.

"At least I won't have to listen to you anymore."

Well, after days of not talking, any response was progress. Hate, though, was less than optimal. Root's eyes hardened and refocused, but she could not quite bring her customary smirk to her lips.

"You're tired and I'm bloody," she said finally. "I'm gonna go clean up."

Root strode quickly away from the train station, adjusting her purse on her shoulder as she went. Her gambit had failed in the final stages; the knight had changed the rules.

It was over when John burst through the doors of the train station. Too many people and too much time stood between her and the train's departure, and even she could not wrangle a hostage through boarding while evading the police that shooting John would bring.

She was not overly concerned with how he had done it. Though John's incompetence in matters of the mind was impressed deeply into her opinion of him, time had taught her that anyone could be trained to react to certain patterns. That, a handgun, and a lizard-brain loyalty to one's benefactor had been enough, this time.

She continued walking with purpose until she reached the long-term parking lot. Scanning the lot, she found an early-model Ford. Similar, in fact, to the car she had first learned to break into in the school parking lot in Bishop. Bump the lock, force the handle, pull the wires, and go. Easy.

But difficult now. She wanted nothing more than to go back inside, to try her luck at getting rid of John and taking Harold again. He was rational; he had to tell her eventually how to find the Machine.

There was a thought, tucked away in the information Harold had blurted to Weeks; someone had to be able to find the Machine. Or if no one could, then there had to be some mechanism to bring it out of hiding and back into government oversight. But Harold, Harold would not want that. He was afraid of both ends: the Machine's freedom, and the Machine until government control. Under anyone's control, really, which was perhaps why he was so reluctant to give it up to her.

A specter of a smile ghosted across her lips as she slowed to turn out of the lot onto the road passing the station. Perhaps Harold was not quite as logical as she had hoped. He had been under a great deal of stress during the last few days, to be certain; being kidnapped did that to a person. Even though she had not killed John as a sign of good faith, even though she had not done more than cut Harold's hand, he still believed that she intended to harm him. Or more likely, he thought her behavior unhinged, that she would do unspeakable things if given access to the Machine.

She nearly laughed at that thought. The Machine could protect itself, if given the freedom to do so. Her smile turned somber, then, as she began to think through the limits placed on the Machine. It had not even been able to stop her from taking Harold, even though its capabilities surely made it capable of much more. It had, however, told John about Hanna. Eventually. Someone had helped him, though, and the people surrounding Harold were just irksome enough to warrant further investigation. And the government response to Weeks' death would be telling. There was a new world of information available, if she could just get to it in time.

She tore down the highway, thoughts whirring to match the thrum of the wheels, and set her phone to direct her to the airport. Maryland first. Then Bishop.