Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry was currently sitting cross-legged on a cushion, chilly premorning breezes stirring over his exposed hands and face. He’d ordered the house-elves to bring up the hand-glittered throne from his previous office as General Chaos… and then he’d told the elves to put it back, once it had occurred to Harry to start worrying about where his taste in decorations had come from and whether Voldemort had once possessed a similar throne. Which, itself, wasn’t a knockdown argument—it wasn’t like sitting on a glittery throne to survey the lands below Hogwarts was unethical in any way Harry’s moral philosophy could make out—but Harry had decided that he needed to take time and think it through. Meanwhile, simple cushions would do well enough.

In the room below, connected to the rooftop by a simple wooden ladder, was Harry’s new office inside Hogwarts. A wide room, surrounded by full-wall windows on four sides for sunlight; currently bare of furnishings but for four chairs and a desk. Harry had told Headmistress McGonagall what he was looking for, and Headmistress McGonagall had put on the Sorting Hat and then told Harry the series of twists and turns that would take him where he wanted to be. High enough in Hogwarts that the castle shouldn’t have been that tall, high enough in Hogwarts that nobody looking from the outside would see a piece of castle corresponding to where Harry now sat. It seemed like an elementary precaution against snipers that there was no reason not to take.

Though, on the flip side, Harry had no idea where he currently was in any real sense. If his office couldn’t be seen from the lands below, then how was Harry seeing the lands, how were photons making it from the landscape to him? On the western side of the horizon, stars still glittered, clear in the pre-dawn air. Were those photons the actual photons that had been emitted by huge plasma furnaces in the unimaginable distance? Or did Harry now sit within some dreaming vision of the Hogwarts castle? Or was it all, without any further explanation, ‘just magic’? He needed to get electricity to work better around magic so he could experiment with shining lasers downward and upward.

And yes, Harry had his own office on Hogwarts now. He didn’t have any official title yet, but the Boy-Who-Lived was now a true fixture of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the soon-to-be-home of the Philosopher’s Stone and the world’s only wizarding institution of genuinely higher education. It wasn’t fully secured, but Professor Vector had put up some preliminary Charms and Runes to screen the office and its rooftop against eavesdropping.

Harry sat on his cushion, near the edge of his office’s roof, and gazed down upon trees and lakes and flowering grass. Far below, carriages sat motionlessly, not yet harnessed to skeletal horses. Small boats littered the shore, prepared to ferry younger students across the lake when the time came. The Hogwarts Express had arrived overnight, and now the train cars and the huge old-fashioned engine awaited on the other side of the southern lake. All was ready to take the students home after the Leave-Taking Feast in the morning.

Harry stared across the lake, at the great old-fashioned locomotive he wouldn’t be riding home this time. Again. There was a strange sadness and worry to that thought, like Harry was already starting to miss out on the bonding experiences with the other students his age —if you could say that at all, when a significant part of Harry had been born in 1926. It had felt to Harry, last night in the Ravenclaw common room, like the gap between him and the other students had, yes, widened even further. Though that might only have been from the questions Padma Patil and

Anthony Goldstein had excitedly asked each other about the Girl-WhoRevived, the rapid-fire speculations shooting through the air from Ravenclaw to Ravenclaw. Harry had known the answers, he’d known all the answers, and he hadn’t been able to say them.

There was a part of Harry that was tempted to go on the Hogwarts Express and then come back to Hogwarts by Floo. But when Harry imagined finding five other students for his compartment, and then spending the next eight hours keeping secrets from Neville or Padma or Dean or Tracey or Lavender… it didn’t seem like an attractive prospect. Harry felt like he ought to do it for reasons of Socializing with the Other Children, but he did not want to do it. He could meet with everyone again at the start of the next school year, when there would be other topics of which he could speak more freely.

Harry stared south across the lake, at the huge old locomotive, and thought about the rest of his life.

About the Future.

The prophecy Dumbledore’s letter had mentioned about him tearing apart the stars in heaven… well, that sounded optimistic. That part had an obvious interpretation to anyone who’d grown up with the right sort of upbringing. It described a future where humanity had won, more or less. It wasn’t what Harry usually thought about when he gazed at the stars, but from a truly adult perspective, the stars were enormous heaps of valuable raw materials that had unfortunately caught fire and needed to be scattered and put out. If you were tapping the huge hydrogen-helium reservoirs for raw materials, that meant your species had successfully grown up.

Unless the prophecy had been referring to something else entirely.

Dumbledore might have been misinterpreting some seer’s words… but his message to Harry had been phrased as if there’d been a prophecy about Harry personally tearing apart stars, in the foreseeable future. Which seemed potentially more worrisome, though by no means certain to be true, or a bad thing if it was true…

Harry vented a sigh. He’d begun to understand, in the long hours before sleep had taken him last night, just what Dumbledore’s last message implied.

Looking back on the events of the 1991-1992 Hogwarts school year was nothing short of bone-freezingly terrifying, now that Harry understood what he was seeing.

It wasn’t just that Harry had kept the frequent company of his good friend Lord Voldemort. It wasn’t even mostly that.

It was the vision of a narrow line of Time that Albus Dumbledore had steered through fate’s narrow keyhole, a hair-thin strand of possibility threaded through a needle’s eye.

The prophecies had instructed Dumbledore to have Tom Riddle’s intelligence copied onto the brain of a wizarding infant who would then grow up learning Muggle science. What did it say about the likely shape of the Future, if that was the first or best strategy the seers could find that didn’t lead to catastrophe?

Harry could look back now on the Unbreakable Vow that he’d made, and guess that if not for that Vow, disaster might have already been set in motion yesterday when Harry had wanted to tear down the International Statute of Secrecy. Which in turn strongly suggested that the many prophecies Dumbledore had read and whose instructions he’d followed, had somehow ensured that Harry and Voldemort would collide in exactly the right way to cause Voldemort to force Harry to make that Unbreakable Vow. That the Unbreakable Vow had been part of Time’s narrow keyhole, one of the improbable preconditions for allowing the Earth’s peoples to survive.

A Vow whose sole purpose was to protect everyone from Harry’s current stupidity .

It was like watching a videotape of an almost-traffic-accident that had happened to you, where you remembered another car missing you by centimeters, and the video showing that somebody had also thrown a pebble in exactly the right way to cause an enormous lorry to miss that nearcollision, and if they hadn’t thrown that pebble then you and all your family in the automobile and your entire planet would have been hit by the lorry, which, in the metaphor, represented your own sheer obliviousness.