[ It's extremely kind of her, in that way Shaw is where the tone doesn't match the content at all. Harold, being someone who now thinks of a computer as a full being with personhood and a grasp on caring, who had grown to love the Machine slowly, day by day, impossibly, doesn't find it difficult to look past her tone. ]

I don't regret that I made the Machine, [ he says somberly. That's not a trivial statement; it's something he'd wrestled with so hard and so long, and only the Machine herself reassuring him that the people he knew, the people he loved, are all better off for it ... that's what had eventually compelled him to make peace with his decision and his years of effort to make it. Harold would like to think knowing it was the only force powerful enough to stop Samaritan's inevitable rise would be enough to extinguish his regret, but that only leaves a hollow, echoing acceptance behind. Knowing John, Shaw, Root, Fusco -- knowing they were all better off -- that left a warmth in the hollowness, an ember he can nurture. ]

And I won't insult you by suggesting you didn't know the possible consequences when you decided to sacrifice yourself for us. [ That's what it was, and this new Harold is blunter, sharpened to a point in some places that had been soft and rounded before. ]

I'm not looking for you to comfort me, Sameen. Others keep paying the price for my mistakes -- I could have done more to stop Samaritan all along, and I didn't. What I did at the end was possible from the beginning. Because I didn't, you were captured, Root died... [ In a brittle tone: ] John died.

I won't make that mistake again. I'm saying that I'm sorry because you deserve as much from me as you give.