Person of Interest2011

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.