John nods and says, "Of course. You do what you need, we understand that. Having a regular job, too, it sometimes makes it easier to hide in plain sight. When we were on the run from Samaritan, just having the cover of Detective John Riley meant I could move through New York without being targeted as the Machine's primary asset."

And while things still hadn't been easy, they had been significantly safer than they might have otherwise been. He knows how lucky they all were that the Machine was able to create those covers for them. Being John Riley hadn't been easy -- it still isn't -- and he has no idea how Root skillfully shifted with such regularity.

"I don't think we're up against anything like that here," he adds suddenly. "No artificial super intelligent computers, not as far as I can tell, and I've looked."