Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (18 page)

Harry’s thoughts flashed back to possibly the worst moment of his life to date, those long seconds of blood-freezing horror beneath the Hat, when he thought he’d already failed. He’d wished then to fall back just a few minutes in time and change something, anything before it was too late…

And then it had turned out to not be too late after all.

Wish granted.

You couldn’t change history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the
first
time around.

This whole business with seeking Slytherin’s secrets… seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, ‘And
that
was where it all started going wrong.’

And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice…

Wish granted. Now what?

Harry slowly smiled.

It was a rather
counterintuitive
thought… but…

But he
could,
there was no rule saying he couldn’t, he
could
just pretend he’d never heard that little whisper. Let the universe go on in exactly the same way it would have if that one critical moment had never occurred. Twenty years later, that was what he would desperately wish had happened twenty years ago, and twenty years before twenty years later happened to be right now. Altering the distant past was easy, you just had to think of it at the right time.

Or… this was even
more
counterintuitive… he could even inform, oh, say,
Professor McGonagall,
instead of Draco
or
Hermione. And she could get a few good people together and get that little extra spell taken off the Hat.

Why, yes. That sounded like a
remarkably
good idea once Harry had actually
thought
of it.

So very obvious in retrospect, and yet somehow, Option 3c and Option 3d just hadn’t occurred to him.

Harry awarded himself +1 point on his anti-Dark-Lord-Harry program.

It had been an awfully cruel prank the Hat had played on him, but you couldn’t argue with the results on consequentialist grounds. It certainly did give him a better idea of the victim’s perspective, though.

To-do 4: Apologise to Neville Longbottom.

Okay, he was on a roll here, now he just had to keep it up.
In every day, in every way, I’m getting Lighter and Lighter…

People around Harry had also mostly stopped eating at this point, and the dessert serving dishes began to vanish, and the used plates.

When all the plates were gone, Dumbledore once again stood up from his seat.

Harry couldn’t help but feel the urge to drink another Comed-Tea.

You’ve GOT to be kidding,
Harry thought at that piece of himself.

But the experiment didn’t count if it wasn’t replicated, did it? And the damage was already done, wasn’t it? Didn’t he want to see what would happen
this
time? Wasn’t he
curious?
What if he got a different result?

Hey, I bet you’re the same part of my brain that pushed through the prank on Neville Longbottom.

Er, maybe?

And is it not
overwhelmingly
obvious that if I do this I shall regret it one second after it is too late?

Um…

Yeah. So, NO.

“Ahem,” said Dumbledore from the podium, stroking his long silver beard. “Just a few more words now that we are all fed and watered. I have a few start-of-term notices to give you.”

“First years should note that the forest on the grounds is forbidden to all pupils. That is why it is called the Forbidden Forest. If it were permitted it would be called the Permitted Forest.”

Straightforward.
Note to self: Forbidden Forest is forbidden.

“I have also been asked by Mr. Filch, the caretaker, to remind you all that no magic should be used between classes in the corridors. Alas, we all know that what
should be
, and what
is
, are two different things. Thank you for keeping this in mind.”

Er…

“Quidditch trials will be held in the second week of the term. Anyone interested in playing for their house teams should contact Madam Hooch. Anyone interested in reformulating the entire game of Quidditch should contact Harry Potter.”

Harry inhaled his own saliva and went into a coughing fit just as all eyes turned towards him. How the
hell!
He hadn’t met Dumbledore’s eyes at any point… he didn’t
think.
He certainly hadn’t been thinking about Quidditch at the time! He hadn’t talked to anyone but Ron Weasley and he didn’t
think
Ron would have told anyone else… or had Ron run off to a professor to complain?
How
on
Earth…

“Additionally, I must tell you that this year, the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a very painful death. It is guarded by an elaborate series of dangerous and potentially lethal traps, and you cannot possibly get past all of them, especially if you are only in your first year.”

Harry was numb at this point.

“And finally, I extend my greatest thanks to Quirinus Quirrell for heroically agreeing to undertake the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor at Hogwarts.” Dumbledore’s gaze moved searchingly across the students. “I hope all students will extend Professor Quirrell that utmost courtesy and
tolerance
which is due his extraordinary service to you and this school, and that you
will not pester us
with any
niggling complaints
about him, unless
you
want to try doing his job.”

What was
that
about?

“I now yield the floor to our new faculty member Professor Quirrell, who would like to say a few words.”

The young, thin, nervous man who Harry had first met in the Leaky Cauldron slowly made his way up to the podium, glancing fearfully around in all directions. Harry caught a glimpse of the back of his head, and it looked like Professor Quirrell might already be going bald, despite his seeming youth.

“Wonder what’s wrong with
him,
” whispered the older-looking student sitting next to Harry. Similar hushed comments were being exchanged elsewhere along the table.

Professor Quirrell made his way up to the podium and stood there, blinking. “Ah…” he said. “Ah…” Then his courage seemed to fail him utterly, and he stood there in silence, occasionally twitching.

“Oh, great,” whispered the older student, “looks like another
long
year in Defence class -”

“Salutations, my young apprentices,” Professor Quirrell said in a dry, confident tone. “We all know that Hogwarts tends to suffer a certain
misfortune
in its selections for this position, and no doubt many of you are already wondering what doom shall befall me this year. I assure you, that doom is not to be my incompetence.” He smiled thinly. “Believe it or not, I have long wished to someday try my hand as the Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts here at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The first to teach this class was Salazar Slytherin himself, and as late as the fourteenth century it was traditional for the greatest fighting wizards of every persuasion to try their hands at teaching here. Past Professors of Defence have included not just the legendary wandering hero Harold Shea but also the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga, yes, I see some of you are still shuddering at the sound of her name even though she’s been dead for six hundred years. That must have been an interesting time to attend Hogwarts, don’t you think?”

Harry was swallowing hard, trying to suppress the sudden surge of emotion that had overcome him when Professor Quirrell had begun speaking. The precise tones reminded him very much of a lecturer at Oxford, and it was starting to hit home that Harry wasn’t going to see his home or his Mum or his Dad until Christmas.

“You are accustomed to the Defence position being filled by incompetents, scoundrels, and the unlucky. To anyone with a sense of history, it bears another reputation entirely. Not everyone who teaches here has been the best, but the best have all taught at Hogwarts. In such august company, and after so much time anticipating this day, I would be ashamed to set myself any standard lower than perfection. And so I do intend that every one of you will always remember this year as the
best
Defence class that you have ever had. What you learn this year will forever serve as your firm foundation in the arts of Defence, no matter who your teachers before and after.”

Professor Quirrell’s expression grew serious. “We have a
great
deal of lost ground to make up and not much time to cover it. Therefore I intend to depart from Hogwarts teaching conventions in a number of respects, as well as introducing some optional after-school activities.” He paused. “If that is not sufficient, perhaps I can find new ways to motivate you. You are my long-awaited students, and you
will
do your
very
best in my long-awaited Defence class. I would add some sort of dreadful threat, like ‘Otherwise you will suffer horribly’, but that would be so cliched, don’t you think? I pride myself on being more imaginative than that. Thank you.”

Then the vigour and confidence seemed to drain away from Professor Quirrell. His mouth gaped open as if he had suddenly found himself facing an unexpected audience, and he turned with a convulsive jerk and shuffled back to his seat, hunched over as if he was about to collapse in on himself and implode.

“He seems a little odd,” whispered Harry.

“Meh,” said the older-looking student. “You ain’t seen nothin’.”

Dumbledore resumed the podium.

“And now,” said Dumbledore, “before we go to bed, let us sing the school song! Everyone pick their favourite tune and favourite words, and off we go!”

Elen sila J. K. Rowling omentielvo.

EDIT: Don’t panic. I solemnly swear that there is a logical, foreshadowed, canon-compliant explanation for everything which happens in this chapter. It’s a puzzle, you’re supposed to try to solve it, and if not, just read the next chapter.

“That’s one of the most obvious riddles I’ve ever heard.”

As soon as Harry opened his eyes in the Ravenclaw first-year boys’ dormitory, on the morning of his first full day at Hogwarts, he knew something was wrong.

It was quiet.

Too
quiet.

Oh, right… There was a Quietus Charm on his bed’s headboard, controlled by a small slider bar, which was the only reason it was ever possible for anyone to go to sleep in Ravenclaw.

Harry sat up and looked around, expecting to see others rising for the day -

The dorm, empty.

The beds, rumpled and unmade.

The sun, coming in at a rather high angle.

His Quieter turned all the way up to maximum.

And his mechanical alarm clock was still running, but the alarm was turned off.

He’d been allowed to sleep until 9:52 AM, apparently. Despite his best efforts to synchronize his 26-hour sleep cycle to his arrival at Hogwarts, he hadn’t gotten to sleep last night until around 1AM. He’d been planning to wake up at 7:00AM with the other students, he could stand being a little sleep-deprived his first day so long as he got some sort of magical fix before tomorrow. But now he’d missed breakfast. And his very first class at Hogwarts, in Herbology, had started one hour and twenty-two minutes ago.

The anger was slowly, slowly wakening in him. Oh, what a nice little prank. Turn off his alarm. Turn up the Quieter. And let Mr. Bigshot Harry Potter miss his first class, and be blamed for being a heavy sleeper.

When Harry found out who’d done this…

No, this could only have been done with the cooperation of all twelve other boys in the Ravenclaw dorm. All of them would have seen his sleeping form. All of them had let him sleep through breakfast.

The anger drained away, replaced by confusion and a horribly wounded feeling. They’d
liked
him. He’d thought. Last night, he’d thought they liked him.
Why…

As Harry stepped out of the bed, he saw a piece of paper facing out from his headboard.

The paper said,

My fellow Ravenclaws,

It’s been an extra long day. Please let me sleep in and don’t worry about my missing breakfast. I haven’t forgotten about my first class.

Yours,
Harry Potter.

And Harry stood there, frozen, ice water beginning to trickle through his veins.

The paper was in his own handwriting, in his own mechanical pencil.

And he didn’t remember writing it.

And… Harry squinted at the piece of paper. And unless he was imagining it, the words “I haven’t forgotten” were written in a different style, as if he was trying to tell himself something…?

Had he
known
he was going to be Obliviated? Had he stayed up late, committed some sort of crime or covert activity, and then… but he didn’t
know
the Obliviate spell… had someone else… what…

A thought occurred to Harry. If he
had
known he was going to be Obliviated…

Still in his pyjamas, Harry ran around his bed to his trunk, pressed his thumb against the lock, pulled out his pouch, stuck in his hand and said “Note to myself.”

And another piece of paper popped into his hand.

Harry took it out, staring at it. It too was in his own handwriting.

The note said:

Dear Me,

Please play the game. You can only play the game once in a lifetime. This is an irreplaceable opportunity.

Recognition code 927, I am a potato.

Yours,
You.

Harry nodded slowly. “Recognition code 927, I am a potato” was indeed the message he had worked out in advance - some years earlier, while watching TV - that only he would know. If he had to identify a duplicate of himself as being really
him,
or something. Just in case. Be Prepared.

Harry couldn’t
trust
the message, there might be other spells involved. But it ruled out any simple prank. He had definitely written this and he definitely didn’t remember writing it.

Staring at the paper, Harry became aware of ink showing through from the other side.

He flipped it over.

The reverse side read:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE GAME:

you do not know the rules of the game
you do not know the stakes of the game
you do not know the objective of the game
you do not know who controls the game
you do not know how to end the game

You start with 100 points.
Begin.

Harry stared at the “instructions”. This side wasn’t handwritten; the writing was perfectly regular, hence artificial. It looked as if it had been inscribed by a Quotes Quill, such as the one he’d bought to take dictation.

He had
absolutely no clue
what was going on.

Well… step one was to get dressed and eat. Maybe reverse the order of that. His stomach felt rather empty.

He’d missed breakfast, of course, but he was Prepared for that eventuality, having visualised it in advance. Harry put his hand into his pouch and said “Snack bars”, expecting to get the box of cereal bars he’d bought before departing for Hogwarts.

What popped up did not feel like a box of cereal bars.

When Harry brought his hand into his field of vision he saw two tiny candy bars - not nearly enough for a meal - attached to a note, and the note was inscribed in the same writing as the game instructions.

The note said:

ATTEMPT FAILED: -1 POINT
CURRENT POINTS: 99
PHYSICAL STATE: STILL HUNGRY
MENTAL STATE: CONFUSED

“Gleehhhhh” Harry’s mouth said without any sort of conscious intervention or decision on his part.

He stood there for around a minute.

One minute later, it
still
didn’t make any sense and he
still
had absolutely no idea what was going on and his brain hadn’t even
begun
to grasp at any
hypotheses
like his mental hands were encased in rubber balls and couldn’t pick anything up.

His stomach, which had its own priorities, suggested a possible experimental probe.

“Ah…” Harry said to the empty room. “I don’t suppose I could spend a point and get my box of cereal bars back?”

There was only silence.

Harry put his hand into the pouch and said “Box of cereal bars.”

A box that felt like the right shape popped up into his hand… but it was too light, and it was open, and it was empty, and the note attached to it said:

POINTS SPENT: 1
CURRENT POINTS: 98
YOU HAVE GAINED: A BOX OF CEREAL BARS

“I’d like to spend one point and get the
actual cereal bars
back,” said Harry.

Again, silence.

Harry put his hand into the pouch and said “cereal bars”.

Nothing came up.

Harry shrugged despairingly and went over to the cabinet he’d been given near his bed, to get his wizard’s robes for the day.

On the floor of the cabinet, under his robes, were the cereal bars, and a note:

POINTS SPENT: 1
CURRENT POINTS: 97
YOU HAVE GAINED: 6 CEREAL BARS
YOU ARE STILL WEARING: PYJAMAS
DO NOT EAT WHILE YOU ARE WEARING YOUR PYJAMAS
YOU WILL GET A PYJAMA PENALTY

And now I know that whoever controls the game is insane.

“My guess is that the game is controlled by Dumbledore,” Harry said out loud. Maybe
this
time he could set a new land speed record for being quick on the uptake.

Silence.

But Harry was starting to pick up the pattern; the note would be in the next place he looked. So Harry looked under his bed.

HA! HA HA HA HA HA!
HA HA HA HA HA HA!
HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
DUMBLEDORE DOES NOT CONTROL THE GAME
BAD GUESS
VERY BAD GUESS
-20 POINTS
AND YOU ARE STILL WEARING PYJAMAS
IT IS YOUR FOURTH MOVE
AND YOU ARE STILL WEARING PYJAMAS
PYJAMA PENALTY: -2 POINTS
CURRENT POINTS: 75

Welp, that was a puzzler, all right. It was only his first day at school and once you ruled out Dumbledore, he didn’t know the name of anyone else here who was this crazy.

His body more or less on autopilot, Harry gathered up a set of robes and underwear, pulled out the cavern level of his trunk (he was a very private sort of person and someone might walk into the dorm), got dressed, and then went back upstairs to put away his pyjamas.

Harry paused before pulling out the cabinet drawer that held his pyjamas. If the pattern here held true…

“How can I earn more points?” Harry said out loud.

Then he pulled out the drawer.

OPPORTUNITIES TO DO GOOD ARE EVERYWHERE
BUT DARKNESS IS WHERE THE LIGHT NEEDS TO BE
COST OF QUESTION: 1 POINT
CURRENT POINTS: 74
NICE UNDERWEAR
DID YOUR MOTHER PICK THEM OUT?

Harry crushed the note in his hand, face flaming scarlet. Draco’s curse came back to him.
Son of a mudblood -

At this point he knew better than to say it out loud. He would probably get a Profanity Penalty.

Harry girded himself with his mokeskin pouch and wand. He peeled off the wrapper of one his cereal bars and threw it into the room’s rubbish bin, where it landed atop a mostly-uneaten Chocolate Frog, a crumpled envelope and some green and red wrapping paper. He put the other cereal bars into his mokeskin pouch.

He looked around in a final, desperate, and ultimately futile search for clues.

And then Harry left the dorm, eating as he went, in search of the Slytherin dungeons. At least that was what he
thought
the line was about.

Trying to navigate the halls of Hogwarts was like… probably
not
quite as bad as wandering around inside an Escher painting, that was the sort of thing you said for rhetorical effect rather than for its being true.

A short time later, Harry was thinking that in fact an Escher painting would have both pluses and minuses compared to Hogwarts. Minuses: No consistent gravitational orientation. Pluses: At least the stairs wouldn’t move around
WHILE YOU WERE STILL ON THEM.

Harry had originally climbed four flights of stairs to get to his dorm. After clambering down no fewer than twelve flights of stairs without getting anywhere near the dungeons, Harry had concluded that (1) an Escher painting would be a
cakewalk
by comparison, (2) he was somehow
higher
in the castle than when he’d started, and (3) he was so
thoroughly
lost that he wouldn’t have been surprised to look out of the next window and see two moons in the sky.

Backup plan A had been to stop and ask for directions, but there seemed to be an extreme lack of people wandering around, as if the beggars were all attending class the way they were supposed to or something.

Backup plan B…

“I’m lost,” Harry said out loud. “Can, um, the spirit of the Hogwarts castle help me or something?”

“I don’t think this castle has a spirit,” observed a wizened old lady in one of the paintings on the walls. “Life, perhaps, but not spirit.”

There was a brief pause.

“Are you -” Harry said, and then shut his mouth. On second thought, no he was NOT going to ask the painting whether it was fully conscious in the sense of being aware of its own awareness.

“I’m Harry Potter,” said his mouth, more or less on autopilot. Also more or less automatically, Harry stuck out a hand towards the painting.

The woman in the painting looked down at Harry’s hand and raised her eyebrows.

Slowly, the hand dropped back to Harry’s side.

“Sorry,” Harry said, “I’m sort of new here.”

“So I perceive, young raven. Where are you trying to go?”

Harry hesitated. “I’m not really sure,” he said.

“Then perhaps you are already there.”

“Well, wherever I
am
trying to go, I don’t think
this
is it…” Harry shut his mouth, aware of just how much he was sounding like an idiot. “Let me start over. I’m playing this game only I don’t know what the rules are -” That didn’t really work either, did it. “Okay, third try. I’m looking for opportunities to do good so I can score points, and all I have is this cryptic hint about how darkness is where the light needs to be, so I was trying to go down but I seem to keep going up instead…”

The old lady in the painting was looking at him rather sceptically.

Harry sighed. “My life tends to get a bit peculiar.”

“Would it be fair to say that you don’t know where you’re going or why you’re trying to get there?”

“
Entirely
fair.”

The old lady nodded. “I’m not sure that being lost is your most important problem, young man.”

“True, but unlike the more important problems, it’s a problem I can understand how to solve and
wow
is this conversation turning into a metaphor for human existence, I didn’t even realise that was happening until just now.”

The lady eyed Harry appraisingly. “You
are
a fine young raven, aren’t you? For a moment I was starting to wonder. Well then, as a general rule, if you keep on turning left, you’re bound to keep going down.”

That sounded strangely familiar but Harry couldn’t recall where he’d heard it before. “Um… you seem like a very intelligent person. Or a picture of a very intelligent person… anyway, have you heard of a mysterious game where you can only play once, and they won’t tell you the rules?”

“Life,” said the lady at once. “That’s one of the most obvious riddles I’ve ever heard.”

Harry blinked. “No,” he said slowly. “I mean I got an actual note and everything saying that I had to play the game but I wouldn’t be told the rules, and someone is leaving me little slips of paper telling me how many points I’ve lost for violating the rules, like a minus two point penalty for wearing pyjamas. Do you know anyone here at Hogwarts who’s crazy enough and powerful enough to do something like that? Besides Dumbledore, I mean?”