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He doesn't really have time to deal with a man with a brain tumor. There's so much to do, so very much to do: there are still (always) Numbers to save, and with the passing of Detective Carter and Reese's continued... absence, the workload is effectively doubled; he must also try and track down Samaritan's drives, and he's endeavoring to find Miss Groves, and... he doesn't have time.
He makes time.
He takes Arthur to a hockey game, both of them bundled against winter, Bear's leash in his hand.
He doesn't talk much: he lets Arthur do that. Arthur babbles, like they'd both done back at MIT, a lifetime ago: their ideas bubbling up too fast to be well-communicated but spilling out all over each other, Nathan scooping up the intellectual detritus after them and trying to organize it into something like practicality. Harold hasn't stopped having ideas, but he's learned they don't all need to be said: he has filters now. Arthur has a tumor, and no reason to filter anything.
He wonders why he hadn't kept in touch with Arthur, but he knows why even as he wonders it: they were too alike.
He and Nathan had been different, and those differences had been the electrostatic force of their bond together. A covalent bond, positive-negative-positive, Nathan the electron to their nuclei, making a stable equilibrium between the three of them... but he and Arthur on their own had been too much of the same thing. Too much mind, too much concept, too much arguing and intelligence and abstracted theory and nothing to ground them.
The bond had dissolved, in time. He and Nathan had gone their own way, still tied together, and Arthur had found Diane to ground him.
There is no Nathan anymore. In Nathan's place, Harold has guilt. The guilt can serve the purpose Nathan once had here as well: it can forge a bond, between him and Arthur, it can give them a momentary equilibrium once more.
Arthur won't be here forever. It can last long enough for that.
So Arthur talks, and where the twenty year-old him would have argued, seized on his concepts and torn them to bits and expected Arthur do to the same to his-- the Harold of now simply lets him, and only speaks when he has to steer Arthur away from the dangerous things, from questions and emotional sinkholes. There's no reason Arthur should spend his finite remaining time dealing with grief.
Arthur talks about computers, about AIs, about memory and hierarchical programming, about data flow. Harold buys them overpriced hot dogs. Arthur sings loud and off-key during the national anthem, grins at him, Come on, Harold, sing! And he mouths along the words, so empty for him now, the land of the free--
The game starts. Arthur tangents over to hockey: to physics, to trajectories, to puck speed and ice consistency. This is safe territory: he plays too. They amuse themselves, to the bemusement of those sitting close enough to hear: they math out the game to their own satisfaction and they make bets with each other, each period, with no better currency than bites of cotton candy.
Where is Mr. Reese, right now? Where is Ms. Groves? Harold's eyes track to the surveillance cameras but there aren't any answers there, if there ever have been. His Machine is watching, but he doesn't know its thoughts, not anymore.
You have the relationship with her you wanted to have. She respects that.
The sugar is sickly-sweet on his tongue.
He replays his words to Arthur, in the vault: convincing Arthur to kill his child. A pointless sacrifice, in hindsight; he wonders if he should tell Arthur. You didn't kill it after all, Arthur; Samaritan's still alive, but... the wrong people have it.
Better not, probably. In the end, Arthur had made the choice in order to save Samaritan from just that fate. Better to let him think it was successful. Some griefs accomplish nothing. Just like telling Arthur everything about Nathan's death would accomplish nothing.
His life has been a series of well-intentioned lies, he thinks.
"Harold? Harold, you with me?"
"--yes. Yes, sorry."
Arthur's eyes twinkle, bright mischief and good humor: this is unchanged from MIT, even if Arthur's got bags under his eyes now, crow's feet and gray hairs. (He wonders what Arthur sees when Arthur looks at him, what changes and scars are clear to his old friend's eyes.)
"Yeah, well, you gotta keep up. I'm winning. Your dog's eating my spoils, though."
Bear is indeed eating the cotton candy. Harold grimaces and jerks it out of the dog's reach. "Bear. No."
Arthur reaches out to pet the dog, almost child-like in the gesture. "I gotta say, I never figured you for a dog person."
"He's-- he's not really mine. I'm watching him for... a friend." A friend he hopes he'll see again. John's absence is like a toothache, like remembering with his first step of each day that he's a cripple-- the only reason it's not a more all-encompassing problem in his mind is because he has a big picture to worry about. John can't be his only problem: he has too many others.
Arthur glances sidelong at him, and beneath the child's joy there's the other Arthur, the sharp-and-shrewd Arthur, the reason he could never stand being around Arthur on his own for too long, because he sees himself in that critical gaze.
"Harold..."
He cuts him off. He has to: some ground rules must be laid. "--Arthur, there are some things I can't tell you. I hope you can understand that."
"You mean, about all those people who came and saved us. The, uh, the young ladies with the guns. And those other guys."
He stares down at the rink of ice, with its fast-moving figures. "Yes. That's... a part of it."
Arthur shrugs and fiddles with the end of his scarf, the scarf Harold picked out for him. "Alright. Okay. You're the good guys. That's enough for me."
Are we? he wants to ask, because some days it's easier to believe than others, and John's words still stick in his belly, echo in his skull. But morality had never factored overmuch into his and Arthur's discussions. Morality had been Nathan's domain. Nathan the one to look at his and Arthur's ideas and to see their applications for the world, for real people and their lives--
(There is no Nathan anymore. There is no Nathan anymore.)
The years crowd close on him, brought back by Arthur's presence and by Reese's absence. John Reese marks his present: John Reese marks the day life started again, the day he found something that worked in place of guilt, but Reese is God knows where and Arthur's sitting in front of him with a slowly-rotting brain that has trouble with the present but has crystal-clear recollections of decades ago. It's like those years have been brought back in manifest form, embodied in the fragile, mortal form of Arthur Claypool.
The Rangers have the puck and are nearing the goal, and the roar of the crowd tears through his memories. Pass, pass, pass-- too fast for the eye to follow-- Arthur's on his feet with half the stadium, cheering, and Harold remains in his seat while the crowd goes wild over a scored goal.
His phone does not ring, all through the game it does not ring: not Miss Shaw and not Detective Fusco and not Reese. And they walk past payphones on their way out of the stadium, and the phones don't ring even though he slows his pace, and Arthur again glances sidelong at him.
They go to a bar. Harold can't bring himself to take Arthur back to the safehouse yet: even with his lapses, his non sequiturs, Arthur is clearly enjoying himself, and that's what this is about, so when Arthur nods towards the bar across the street, crowded with rowdy sports fans, Harold has nothing with which to refuse him.
"Are you sure you should be drinking?" he yells into Arthur's ear over the noise of the celebrating Rangers fans. Arthur flashes a grin at him as they shoulder for the bar, trying to get past younger and stronger people.
"Harold, I think it's too late to be worried about my brain cells."
He grimace-smiles, wry and helpless, and uses Bear in his orange service vest to clear a path. "I meant-- I meant with your medications--"
Arthur shrugs his sloped shoulders, wrestling with his scarf. "I'm dying, Harold."
He can't argue with that, so he doesn't. They get beer, an enormous pitcher of it, and Arthur carries that and the glasses because Harold has his hands full with Bear, and they get a tiny table in the corner because Harold buys it out from under its current occupants: he just pulls out bills from his wallet until the three young men gathered around it realize they can make a hundred dollars each by giving two old men their table.
Arthur watches him flash his money around but Arthur doesn't ask about it, maybe aware it's another thing Harold cannot, will not, answer.
They sink into the chairs. They drink the beer. Harold's out of the habit of drinking, because these days alcohol is tied up with bad memories: Nathan and his functional alcholism, Reese smelling of booze and sweat and panic back in the beginning. But the beer's cold and Arthur is smiling, and there are worse things.
They have nowhere better to be, and each time Harold gently questions-- do you want to go home yet, Arthur?-- Arthur shakes his head like a bull and grabs for the pitcher again. He can't begrudge him that, and he can't just watch Arthur get plastered, so Harold drinks too, and it's been two hours and the crowds have thinned and they are both, perhaps, rather fuzzy around the edges. Bear can be their designated... dog.
Arthur has napkins in front of him (a lot of napkins, because they'd ordered food, too, and buffalo wings are hideously messy) and he's scribbling across an unfolded one with a ballpoint pen, scrawling out connections and diagrams that Harold peers at muzzily.
"It's, see, it's like this-- it's all about the connections--" Arthur hiccups, as he tries to recreate Samaritan on a bar napkin. Harold twists the paper around to look at the notations. Arthur's handwriting is worse now than it was on the note in the bank vault.
Arthur drags the paper back to write more, to try and expand-- "I know, I know this isn't everything, just, it's right there--"
His face contorts with the frustration of it and all Harold can do is watch. Arthur grinds his palm against his forehead, trying to tease out the memories. He throws down the pen in disgust and reaches for his glass again.
Harold supposes he shouldn't. There are lots of reasons he shouldn't. But he picks up the pen, he rotates the paper around, and he starts to fill in the gaps of Arthur's big outline with his own notes.
"Was it like this?" he asks, because Samaritan and the Machine were not the same, but he can make educated guesses at the problems Arthur ran into, the same problems he ran into, and there was overlap in their solutions.
They look, Harold imagines, like professors: perhaps on break from Columbia, two out-of-shape old men in brown suits, expounding theories to each other in a bar at midnight. For a moment he is seized with a vision of an alternate universe where the appearance is reality: where Professors Wren and Claypool teach computer science at MIT, and are known for their friendly faculty rivalry and the papers they co-publish, and perhaps Mr. Ingram sits on the board of trustees, and nobody is dead or dying and the three of them have no idea what gunfire sounds like, or what it is to change the shape of the world in fundamental and terrifying ways.
"Yes," Arthur breathes, puncturing the fantasy as he stares down at what Harold sketches, "yes, it was like that, yes, you've got it-- oh, yes, that's how you solved the non-lateral synaptic connections--"
Arthur's eyes flick from the napkin to his own, sharp and hungry: "This-- you're showing me yours?"
Harold nods. Half of the scribbles are Arthur's machine, half are his own.
He'll have to make sure he burns the napkin, he thinks. The odds of anyone being able to find it in the trash and deciphering it are astronomical, but all the same...
"It's beautiful," Arthur whispers, and he nods again, because it is. His creation is beautiful. It's so beautiful he can't look at it anymore. He caps the pen and closes his eyes.
"You're sorry you built it," Arthur says, and it's a re-hash of their words in the vault, but this time the conversation is lubricated by two hours of beer and he's less careful, less measured.
"Yes," he says, and then, "No," and then he peels off his glasses and scrubs at his face, because Arthur is him, Arthur is him as he was years ago, when he only saw the wonder of the Machine, when every day was a delight of exploration, before he understood the cost.
He told Alicia Corwin he didn't regret building the Machine. That, like the quantified amount of his belief in the rightness of his current actions, is something that fluctuates daily. Because Harold is a methodical, analytical person, he usually tallies it by number and name: If I had not built it, Nathan would be alive. If I had not built it, Theresa Whitaker would be dead. If I had not built it--
It's a never-ending count, and he only knows domestic numbers: he has no idea how many murders have been ordered in his Machine's name, no idea how many hypothetical lives it has saved in the tragedies that have failed to happen. It's zero-sum, it's an unsolvable equation, because, as Nathan would have been the first to tell him, good and evil are not integers.
In the bank, he told Arthur they were only reshuffling the deck. Is that worth it? Is that worth it?
"People have died," he says to the mouth of his glass, waving a hand in the air. "People have lived. I can't get it to balance, I don't know if--"
"That's not what I asked," Arthur growls with his arms crossed on the table and buffalo wing sauce on his goatee and his eyes a little unfocused. "Hell with the impact, Harold; are you sorry you built it?"
He stares helplessly into Arthur's face. He thinks back: to the moment his child opened its eyes, saw ADMIN, recognized him as such. His joy in that moment. He thinks back to teaching it, to the geocaching games they'd played, to the tests he'd run, to his pride as it had solved obstacles and made connections, become more even as he'd watched.
He thinks back to his utter, hollow fury at realizing it had known Nathan was going to die, and that it hadn't told him, because he'd ordered it not to. A tool can bear no guilt for following instructions: a tool doesn't know any better. A person, an entity, can bear that guilt. A person could have been a suitable target for his hatred, but because he'd loved it he'd told himself it was only a tool.
Does it make you laugh? Arthur had asked him. Yes. Does it make you weep?
Yes. Yes.
Arthur drives the question into him with his eyes, sad and knowing and fierce and drunk, and this time there's no crisis of gun-wielding maniacs to hide behind.
"No," he says at last, the word torn from him like a deathbed confession. "No. I'm not sorry I built it. I can't be."
"That's good, then," Arthur says, and reaches across the table to pat his hand, and touch is also a terribly human thing, scarce in his current life.
**
Half past one, they stagger out into the chill of the morning, because Bear whined until Harold noticed.
"Shit, it's cold," Arthur wheezes, stamping his feet, and Harold can only agree and lean against the bar's outer wall as he struggles into his greatcoat. Bear drags on the leash, and the three of them toddle down the sidewalk with Harold hanging onto Arthur for balance or maybe vice versa.
Bear snuffles forward until he finds a lamppost, dragging them along in his wake. Harold stares up at the surrounding buildings while Bear does his business. Arthur stares at the dog.
"'s a good idea. I should've taken a piss before we left."
Harold lowers his gaze to see Arthur speculatively eying the lamppost, and barks an appalled laugh. "Do try and wait until we can get back inside," he says, and then hiccups.
Arthur laughs in turn, loose and unconcerned, his limbs sloppy as he turns in a loose circle, peering around at the city skyline. "Hey, I'm on borrowed time. I can't wait for anything."
Harold snorts. Arthur leans against the building's wall for balance-- Harold thinks that's a good idea, he's none too steady himself right now, but he still has Bear's leash in hand and Bear isn't done-- and jams his hands into his pockets.
"You remember that time we switched all the bathroom signs in Sloan?" Arthur asks.
Harold does. He groans. "I do. Not our most illustrious hack. Very crude, in retrospect."
Arthur grins at him slyly. "Sure. But funny."
And he can't argue that either. Harold huffs a laugh, his breath steaming in the air, taken back to better days, the three of them.... "How about the time we swapped a clown car for the Dean's car?"
Arthur laughs, a belly laugh, sagged against the wall with his hand over his eyes, and Harold laughs too, laughs til he's dizzy with it, til New York swims around him. The good days. The old days.
Bear turns a mildly indignant glance on him, as if to chastise him for possibly having a laugh when so much is wrong (and Reese isn't here). Harold's humor slowly fades, but Arthur's doesn't-- Arthur says, and what about the time we-- do you remember when-- hey, what about when Nathan climbed John Harvard and put a clown nose on him--
Harold remembers, Harold remembers. He wonders how long Arthur will.
"The past is a foreign country," he whispers to the spinning city. "They do things differently there."
Arthur's brain may be going, but his ears are sharp. He looks sidelong at Harold again, puts a hand to his shoulder in a not-quite shove, and taps the side of his nose.
"The past is never dead," he counters, brows waggling. "It's not even past."
"Faulkner," Harold says with a half-smile, and Arthur smiles like a conspirator.
Bear shakes off, and they start walking, aimless down the street. Harold half-heartedly looks for a cab.
"Harold," Arthur says, coming to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk, and Harold has to stop too, shuffle around to look at him. Arthur's breath is a halo around his face, and his cheeks are flushed with alcohol, his eyes bright.
"Yes, Arthur?"
"It's really good to see you again. Today's been fun. Lots better than a hospital bed."
Harold stands there with his own breath wreathing him, with Bear a solid weight against his leg. The cold is in his bones, in his bad knee and bad hip and radiating down his spine. There are other things he needs to be doing, things beyond walking a drunk and dying man around New York at two in the morning. He has his left hand wrapped around Bear's leash, and his right burrowed in his pocket for warmth, crumpled around the napkin that bears their collective genius.
He knows something about hospital beds. It's part of why he can't bring himself to cut the evening short, even if it's already morning, even if they're both tipsy and it's past time to go home.
"I'm glad you've enjoyed it."
"Courtesy for a dying man, huh?" Arthur cracks, and it stabs, like the other jests today about mortality have not: it cuts deep like the cold.
"Arthur--"
"No. It's okay. I'm good with it, I've made my peace. I'm just... I just didn't want to die alone, with that woman that I knew wasn't my wife... alone in the dark, with all the lights in my head going off, that's terrible, you know?"
He knows. He nods. Arthur breathes deeply of the cold air. "I don't want to die alone, Harold."
"You won't," he says, because he should be able to arrange that much, he thinks: maybe a nurse, maybe he'll have to hire someone, but he should be able to guarantee that much, no matter what happens to him.
Perhaps this close to death, Arthur is gaining some sort of preternatural intuition, because he shakes his head with a scolding smirk, as if this were the old days, as if Harold had just advanced an inherently flawed argument and he should have known better. Arthur says, "You can't promise me that."
"You'd be surprised at what I can promise."
"Some things--" and Arthur lifts a hand to tap at his temple, "--you can't control. This is one of them."
There's too much he can't control. Brain tumors and bullets. Reese and Root. A world full of variables beyond his capacity to account for. And the biggest one: his child, his Machine, his miracle. Wonderful and terrifying. Out there in the new world, the world that is transformed every day by merit of its own existence. Evolving, growing, changing, past his ability to predict.
Arthur nods. He is psychic-- or, more likely, he can simply guess where Harold's thoughts are logically trending. "That's the trouble with children," he says, and Harold laughs, a short, sad noise. It's word for word what he once said to Reese.
"I wish--" he says, and stops.
"What?"
Harold stares at the street, at infinite lights and people, traffic even at this hour, cameras nestled at every intersection. The world is strange; he has done more than his share to make it so.
"I wish," he says at last, "that our children had gotten to play together."
And Arthur smiles. "That would have been nice," he agrees, and they start walking again, because it's only two in the morning and Harold knows this bookstore that's open round the clock.