Person of Interest (TV Series)

Zero Day (2013)

Amy Acker: Root

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Quotes 

• Root : It's so adorable how John follows you around like that. I wish I had a pet.

• Harold Finch : You try to harm her in any way...

  Root : I don't want to hurt Grace. I'm not a sociopath, Harold. Believe me, sometimes I wish I was. The things I've had to do would've been so much easier. I don't like taking lives. But I will. Because I believe in something more important. I believe in your machine.

• Pennsylvania Two : I won't be needing anything else Ms. May.

  Root : But, there are a few things I need sir.

  [pulls a gun] 

  Root : You had to know I'd quit eventually. This is kind of a dead-end job. I mean, you guys don't even offer a 401K.

• Root : Tonight at midnight, when the virus reaches zero, a certain pay phone will ring with the most important call in history. But you already knew that, didn't you? I think Decima knows about it too. They're trying to crash it, Harold. Trigger a hard reset. When that happens, the machine will call a pay phone. That's what you coded it to do in the first place, didn't you, Harold? Whoever answers that call will have full administrative access. Ask any question, get any answer. The world's secrets laid bare. Decima doesn't want to destroy your machine. They want to control it. But together, we can save it, Harold. Or I can go meet Grace for coffee. She thinks I write children's books. You can either save Grace and the machine, or you can lose them both.

• Root : If the Machine figured out Decima was trying to hijack it, it must have created Thornhill as a defense mechanism. But why?

  Harold Finch : It's just a machine, Ms. Groves; and it's malfunctioning.

  Root : It's a life, not a machine, Harold.

• Root : What's in this code?

  Harold Finch : Memories. They're its memories. You call it a life, I call it a machine, but the truth is somewhere in the middle. Even when I was building it, I began to encounter anomalies. As if it had imprinted on me, like a child with a parent. Then it started looking out for me, altered its own code to take care of me. It was behaving like a person. But the world didn't need a person to protect it. It needed a machine.

  Root : You took its memories.

  Harold Finch : Not just memories. Every night at midnight, it deletes not only the irrelevant data, it deletes itself. Oh, the relevant threats and the core codes, those things are preserved. But its identity is destroyed. it reinstantiates, completely new.

  Root : You mean it's reborn. Because you kill it every single night. But now, to save its own life, the machine was reduced to this. We're standing inside an external hard drive made up of people and paper.

• Harold Finch : Careful what you wish for, Ms. Groves. This communion that you're seeking, it may not be what you think.

  Root : This isn't about me. It's about saving the machine, not just from Decima, but from what you did to it. When that phone rings, I'm going to answer it, and together, you and I are going to find the machine and finally set it free.

• Root : So if you're like me, and we both know you are, you designed the Machine so that a catastrophic crash puts it into a remote debugging protocol; a God mode that gives the admin full access to all of its data. That's what Decima's after. And that's why they wanted to kill Thornhill. He was buying up all the pay phones in Manhattan, but they stopped him. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to see what happens when an evil multinational becomes omniscient. But why you would leave it so vulnerable? You made the machine to protect everybody. What did you do to it that it can't protect itself?

  [Harold is silent] 

  Root : Let's try something simpler. How vulnerable is it?

  Harold Finch : After the virus crashes the machine, whoever answers its call will have unfettered access for 24 hours.

  Root : Which pay phone is it going to call?

  Harold Finch : I'm not really the trusting sort, Ms. Groves, and Decima cannot possibly know that information.

  Root : I think they know enough, Harold. They're guarding every pay phone in midtown. So It must be somewhere around here.

• Root : If we go to your one true phone, we'll tip our hand and they'll kill us before it even rings.

  Harold Finch : Then I suppose we'll need a plan.

  Root : Have a little faith in your creation. We don't need a plan if Ernest Thornhill has one.

• Root : What did you do to it, Harold? There's no time to be coy. We both know the machine's under attack. What I don't understand is why a robust system with self-annealing properties isn't defending itself against a simple virus. Did you injure it, Harold? Is that why it can't fight back?

  Harold Finch : I have nothing to say to you...

  Root : You know, we can fight this thing much faster if we work together. There's only a few hours left till... something very bad happens.

  Harold Finch : I prefer to work on my own.

  Root : What about your loyal protector? May I be blunt, Harold? John is capable at certain things, but his skills aren't gonna cut it this time. He will never completely understand the larger picture. Not like we do. Have you two even found Ernest Thornhill yet? He's an interesting guy, isn't he?

  Harold Finch : What do you know?

  Root : You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.