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comment_fic's any, any, All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. ~Aristotle Post 1x23: "Firewall". Root+Finch, Root+Reese. Title refers, of course, to the Genesis account of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Chance: She could set the trap for Finch or that pitbull in a black suit he had on a leash, but it would be chance that would lead either of them into the careful hidden trap. Gaining Reese's trust would be easier, since the man seemed diverted by damsels in distress more easily. The hard part would be tricking the Machine into thinking she was in harm. Reese was the link in the chain that she could stress, in order to gain access to the Machine and its secrets.
Nature: It is in our nature to be curious, to seek an understanding of what is around us. That, to her, included programming: she'd been the first in her class to crack the coding in her family's computer, when she was a kid. Since then, she'd come to a point where she had run out of things she could take apart. And like a Frankenstein of computer programming, she had to come to an understanding of whatever it was that the government was hiding from its own people...
Compulsion: It was easy to compel Finch to go with her. His fear of guns kept him pliable. He'd tell her anything if she kept a firearm in his face.
Except how the Machine was coded. To get at that, she had to waste a few rounds and some of his blood shooting past less valuable parts of his person, letting the bullets get close enough to graze his skin.
Habit: Even someone as paranoid as these two were creatures of habit. Reese had certain sorts of hotels he chose to stay in, though he never stayed in any one place for more than a few days at a time. Finch had a restaurant that he frequented. It was these little things that made it easier to draw a circle about the one she had her eye on.
Reason: Transparency. That was an all too rare commodity these days, and if the government was going to maintain a machine intelligence as powerful as the one they were hiding, they needed to come clean about it. That was where she came in: to let the citizens of the U.S. of A. know that there was something smarter than any human, and the government had it trained to watch each and every one of them.
And because she hated not knowing how someone had created a true non-biological intelligence.
Passion: Information was her passion; where her classmates had wasted their time with pointless relationships or pursuing careers that left them feeling drained and dissatisfied, she was following her dream. She was following that white elephant that had bedeviled computer programmers and robotics designers for decades and had haunted man since the Greek myth of Talos and the legends of the golem. Only now, man had created a golem to watch over him; she had to make sure it didn't end up turning on its masters...
Desire: She'd always had a thing for smart men. Not necessarily handsome ones: too many like that knew they were attractive and went little deeper than that. She might be considered a golddigger of sorts, though in her case, it wasn't Finch's billions that she desired, it was the wealth of his knowledge, the intellect that had produced such a remarkable thing as the Machine. And she was determined to find, but any means possible, to extract that information: psychological, chemical, even sensual if it came to that...
comment_fic's any, any, All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. ~Aristotle Post 1x23: "Firewall". Root+Finch, Root+Reese. Title refers, of course, to the Genesis account of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.Chance: She could set the trap for Finch or that pitbull in a black suit he had on a leash, but it would be chance that would lead either of them into the careful hidden trap. Gaining Reese's trust would be easier, since the man seemed diverted by damsels in distress more easily. The hard part would be tricking the Machine into thinking she was in harm. Reese was the link in the chain that she could stress, in order to gain access to the Machine and its secrets.
Nature: It is in our nature to be curious, to seek an understanding of what is around us. That, to her, included programming: she'd been the first in her class to crack the coding in her family's computer, when she was a kid. Since then, she'd come to a point where she had run out of things she could take apart. And like a Frankenstein of computer programming, she had to come to an understanding of whatever it was that the government was hiding from its own people...
Compulsion: It was easy to compel Finch to go with her. His fear of guns kept him pliable. He'd tell her anything if she kept a firearm in his face.
Except how the Machine was coded. To get at that, she had to waste a few rounds and some of his blood shooting past less valuable parts of his person, letting the bullets get close enough to graze his skin.
Habit: Even someone as paranoid as these two were creatures of habit. Reese had certain sorts of hotels he chose to stay in, though he never stayed in any one place for more than a few days at a time. Finch had a restaurant that he frequented. It was these little things that made it easier to draw a circle about the one she had her eye on.
Reason: Transparency. That was an all too rare commodity these days, and if the government was going to maintain a machine intelligence as powerful as the one they were hiding, they needed to come clean about it. That was where she came in: to let the citizens of the U.S. of A. know that there was something smarter than any human, and the government had it trained to watch each and every one of them.
And because she hated not knowing how someone had created a true non-biological intelligence.
Passion: Information was her passion; where her classmates had wasted their time with pointless relationships or pursuing careers that left them feeling drained and dissatisfied, she was following her dream. She was following that white elephant that had bedeviled computer programmers and robotics designers for decades and had haunted man since the Greek myth of Talos and the legends of the golem. Only now, man had created a golem to watch over him; she had to make sure it didn't end up turning on its masters...
Desire: She'd always had a thing for smart men. Not necessarily handsome ones: too many like that knew they were attractive and went little deeper than that. She might be considered a golddigger of sorts, though in her case, it wasn't Finch's billions that she desired, it was the wealth of his knowledge, the intellect that had produced such a remarkable thing as the Machine. And she was determined to find, but any means possible, to extract that information: psychological, chemical, even sensual if it came to that...
