Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (4 page)

“Wow,” said Draco Malfoy, sounding slightly impressed. The boy gave a sort of wistful sigh. “Your flattery was great, or I thought so, anyway - you’d do well in Slytherin House, too. Usually it’s only my father who gets that sort of grovelling. I’m
hoping
the other Slytherins will suck up to me now I’m at Hogwarts… I guess this is a good sign, then.”

Harry coughed. “Actually, sorry, I’ve got no idea who you are really.”

“
Oh come on!
” the boy said with fierce disappointment. “Why’d you go and do that, then?” Draco’s eyes widened with sudden suspicion. “And how do you
not
know about the Malfoys? And what are those
clothes
you’re wearing? Are your parents
Muggles?
”

“Two of my parents are dead,” Harry said. His heart twinged. When he put it that way - “My other two parents are Muggles, and they’re the ones that raised me.”

“
What?
” said Draco. “Who
are
you?”

“Harry Potter, pleased to meet you.”

“
Harry Potter?
” gasped Draco. ”
The
Harry -” and the boy cut off abruptly.

There was a brief silence.

Then, with bright enthusiasm, “Harry Potter?
The
Harry Potter? Gosh, I’ve always wanted to meet you!”

Draco’s attendant emitted a sound like she was strangling but kept on with her work, lifting Draco’s arms to carefully remove the chequered robe.

“Shut up,” Harry suggested.

“Can I have your autograph? No, wait, I want a picture with you first!”

“Shut
up
shut
up
shut
up.
”

“I’m just so
delighted
to meet you!”

“Burst into flames and die.”

“But you’re Harry Potter, the glorious saviour of the wizarding world! Everyone’s hero, Harry Potter! I’ve always wanted to be just like you when I grow up so I can -”

Draco cut off the words in mid-sentence, his face freezing in absolute horror.

Tall, white-haired, coldly elegant in black robes of the finest quality. One hand gripping a silver-handled cane which took on the character of a deadly weapon just by being in that hand. His eyes regarded the room with the dispassionate quality of an executioner, a man to whom killing was not painful, or even deliciously forbidden, but just a routine activity like breathing.

That was the man who had, just that moment, strolled in through the open door.

“Draco,” said the man, low and very angry, “
what
are you
saying?
”

In one split second of sympathetic panic, Harry formulated a rescue plan.

“Lucius Malfoy!” gasped Harry Potter. “
The
Lucius Malfoy?”

One of Malkin’s assistants had to turn away and face the wall.

Coolly murderous eyes regarded him. “Harry Potter.”

“I am so, so honoured to meet you!”

The dark eyes widened, shocked surprise replacing deadly threat.

“Your son has been telling me
all
about you,” Harry gushed on, hardly even knowing what was coming out of his mouth but just talking as fast as possible. “But of course I knew about you all before then, everyone knows about you, the great Lucius Malfoy! The most honoured laureate of all the House of Slytherin, I’ve been thinking about trying to get into Slytherin House myself just because I heard you were in it as a child -”

“
What are you saying, Mr. Potter?
” came a near-scream from outside the shop, and Professor McGonagall burst in a second later.

There was such pure horror on her face that Harry’s mouth opened automatically, and then blocked on nothing-to-say.

“Professor McGonagall!” cried Draco. “Is it really you? I’ve heard so much about you from my father, I’ve been thinking of trying to get Sorted into Gryffindor so I can -”

“
What?
” bellowed Lucius Malfoy and Professor McGonagall in perfect unison, standing side-by-side. Their heads swivelled to look at each other in duplicate motions, and then the two recoiled from one another as though performing a synchronised dance.

There was a sudden flurry of action as Lucius seized Draco and dragged him out of the shop.

And then there was silence.

In Professor McGonagall’s left hand lay a small drinking-glass, tilted over to one side in the forgotten rush, now slowly dripping drops of alcohol into the tiny puddle of red wine that had appeared on the floor.

Professor McGonagall strode forward into the shop until she was opposite Madam Malkin.

“Madam Malkin,” said Professor McGonagall, her voice calm. “What has been happening here?”

Madam Malkin looked back silently for four seconds, and then cracked up. She fell against the wall, wheezing out laughter, and that set off both of her assistants, one of whom fell to her hands and knees on the floor, giggling hysterically.

Professor McGonagall slowly turned to look at Harry, her expression chilly. “I leave you alone for six minutes. Six minutes, Mr. Potter, by the very clock.”

“I was only joking around,” Harry protested, as the sounds of hysterical laughter went on nearby.

“
Draco Malfoy said in front of his father that he wanted to be sorted into Gryffindor!
Joking around
isn’t enough
to
do
that!” Professor McGonagall paused, visibly taking breaths. “What part of ‘get fitted for robes’ sounded to you like
please cast a Confundus Charm on the entire universe!
”

“He was in a situational context where those actions made internal sense -”

“No. Don’t explain. I don’t want to know what happened in here, ever. Whatever dark power inhabits you, it is
contagious,
and I don’t want to end up like poor Draco Malfoy, poor Madam Malkin and her two poor assistants.”

Harry sighed. It was clear that Professor McGonagall wasn’t in a mood to listen to reasonable explanations. He looked at Madam Malkin, who was still wheezing against the wall, and Malkin’s two assistants, who had now
both
fallen to their knees, and finally down at his own tape-measure-draped body.

“I’m not quite done being fitted for clothes,” Harry said kindly. “Why don’t you go back and have another drink?”

Blah blah disclaimer blah blah Rowling blah blah ownership.

A/N: The “Aftermath” section of this chapter is part of the story,
not
omake.

You think your day was surreal? Try mine.

Some
children would have waited until
after
their first trip to Diagon Alley.

“Bag of element 79,” Harry said, and withdrew his hand, empty, from the mokeskin pouch.

Most children would have at least waited to get their
wands
first.

“Bag of
okane,
” said Harry. The heavy bag of gold popped up into his hand.

Harry withdrew the bag, then plunged it again into the mokeskin pouch. He took out his hand, put it back in, and said, “Bag of tokens of economic exchange.” That time his hand came out empty.

“Give me back the bag that I just put in.” Out came the bag of gold once more.

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres had gotten his hands on at least one magical item. Why wait?

“Professor McGonagall,” Harry said to the bemused witch strolling beside him, “can you give me two words, one word for gold, and one word for something else that isn’t money, in a language that I wouldn’t know? But don’t tell me which is which.”

“
Ahava
and
zahav,
” said Professor McGonagall. “That’s Hebrew, and the other word means love.”

“Thank you, Professor. Bag of
ahava.
” Empty.

“Bag of
zahav.
” And it popped up into his hand.

“Zahav is gold?” Harry questioned, and Professor McGonagall nodded.

Harry thought over his collected experimental data. It was only the most crude and preliminary sort of effort, but it was enough to support at least one conclusion:

“
Aaaaaaarrrgh this doesn’t make any sense!
”

The witch beside him lifted a lofty eyebrow. “Problems, Mr. Potter?”

“I just falsified every single hypothesis I had! How can it know that ‘bag of 115 Galleons’ is okay but not ‘bag of 90 plus 25 Galleons’? It can
count
but it can’t
add?
It can understand nouns, but not some noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn’t speak Japanese and
I
don’t speak any Hebrew, so it’s not using
their
knowledge, and it’s not using
my
knowledge -” Harry waved a hand helplessly. “The rules seem
sorta
consistent but they don’t
mean
anything! I’m not even going to ask how a
pouch
ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding when the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can’t get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work,” Harry gasped for breath, “but
what
is going
on?
”

“Magic,” said Professor McGonagall.

“That’s just a
word!
Even after you tell me that, I can’t make any new predictions! It’s exactly like saying ‘phlogiston’ or ‘elan vital’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘complexity’!”

The black-robed witch laughed aloud. “But it
is
magic, Mr. Potter.”

Harry slumped over a little. “With respect, Professor McGonagall, I’m not quite sure you understand what I’m trying to do here.”

“With respect, Mr. Potter, I’m quite sure I don’t. Unless - this is just a guess, mind - you’re trying to take over the world?”

“No! I mean yes - well,
no!
”

“I think I should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.”

Harry glumly considered the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. It had been the first conference ever on the topic, the one that had coined the phrase “Artificial Intelligence”. They had identified key problems such as making computers understand language, learn, and improve themselves. They had suggested, in perfect seriousness, that significant advances on these problems might be made by ten scientists working together for two months.

No. Chin up. You’re just
starting
on the problem of unravelling all the secrets of magic. You don’t actually
know
whether it’s going to be too difficult to do in two months.

“And you
really
haven’t heard of other wizards asking these sorts of questions or doing this sort of scientific experimenting?” Harry asked again. It just seemed so
obvious
to him.

Then again, it’d taken more than two hundred years
after
the invention of the scientific method before any Muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a
human four-year-old
could or couldn’t understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could’ve been discovered in the eighteenth century, in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the twentieth. So you couldn’t really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the Retrieval Charm.

Professor McGonagall pursed her lips, then shrugged. “I’m still not sure what you mean by ‘scientific experimenting’, Mr. Potter. As I said, I’ve seen Muggleborn students try to get Muggle science to work inside Hogwarts, and people invent new Charms and Potions every year.”

Harry shook his head. “Technology isn’t the same thing as science at all. And trying lots of different ways to do something isn’t the same as experimenting to figure out the rules.” There were plenty of people who’d tried to invent flying machines by trying out lots of things-with-wings, but only the Wright Brothers had built a wind tunnel to measure lift… “Um, how many Muggle-raised children
do
you get at Hogwarts every year?”

“Perhaps ten or so?”

Harry missed a step and almost tripped over his own feet. “
Ten?
”

The Muggle world had a population of six billion and counting. If you were one in a million, there were seven of you in London and a thousand more in China. It was inevitable that the Muggle population would produce
some
eleven-year-olds who could do calculus - Harry knew he wasn’t the only one. He’d met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he’d been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally
all day
practising maths problems and who’d
never
read a science-fiction book and who would burn out
completely
before
puberty
and
never
amount to
anything
in their future lives because they’d just practised
known
techniques instead of learning to think
creatively
. (Harry was something of a sore loser.)

But… in the wizarding world…

Ten Muggle-raised children per year, who’d all ended their Muggle educations at the age of eleven? And Professor McGonagall might be biased, but she had claimed that Hogwarts was the largest and most eminent wizarding school in the world… and it only educated up to the age of seventeen.

Professor McGonagall undoubtedly knew every last detail of how you went about turning into a cat. But she seemed to have literally never
heard
of the scientific method. To her it was just Muggle magic. And she didn’t even seem
curious
about what secrets might be hiding behind the natural language understanding of the Retrieval Charm.

That left two possibilities, really.

Possibility one: Magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable, that even though wizards and witches had tried their best to understand, they’d made little or no progress and eventually given up; and Harry would do no better.

Or
…

Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound, rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagon Alley.

Possibility two: He’d be taking over the world.

Eventually. Perhaps not right away.

That sort of thing
did
sometimes take longer than two months. Muggle science hadn’t gone to the moon in the first week after Galileo.

But Harry still couldn’t stop the huge smile that was stretching his cheeks so wide they were starting to hurt.

Harry had always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how far ahead they’d been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because those other geniuses hadn’t gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They’d never found an important problem.

You’re mine now,
Harry thought at the walls of Diagon Alley, and all the shops and items, and all the shopkeepers and customers; and all the lands and people of wizarding Britain, and all the wider wizarding world; and the entire greater universe of which Muggle scientists understood so much less than they believed.
I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science.

Lightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies.

“What are you smiling about?” inquired Professor McGonagall, warily and wearily.

“I’m wondering if there’s a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution,” explained Harry. He was carefully memorising the exact words of his ominous resolution so that future history books would get it right.

“I have the distinct feeling that I ought to be doing something about this,” sighed Professor McGonagall.

“Ignore it, it’ll go away. Ooh, shiny!” Harry put his thoughts of world conquest temporarily on hold and skipped over to a shop with an open display, and Professor McGonagall followed.

Harry had now bought his potions ingredients and cauldron, and, oh, a few more things. Items that seemed like good things to carry in Harry’s Bag of Holding (aka Moke Super Pouch QX31 with Undetectable Extension Charm, Retrieval Charm, and Widening Lip). Smart, sensible purchases.

Harry genuinely didn’t understand why Professor McGonagall was looking so
suspicious
.

Right now, Harry was in a shop expensive enough to display in the twisting main street of Diagon Alley. The shop had an open front with merchandise laid out on slanted wooden rows, guarded only by slight grey glows and a young-looking salesgirl in a much-shortened version of witch’s robes that exposed her knees and elbows.

Harry was examining the wizarding equivalent of a first-aid kit, the Emergency Healing Pack Plus. There were two self-tightening tourniquets. A syringe of what looked like liquid fire, which was supposed to drastically slow circulation in a treated area while maintaining oxygenation of the blood for up to three minutes, if you needed to prevent a poison from spreading through the body. White cloth that could be wrapped over a part of the body to temporarily numb pain. Plus any number of other items that Harry totally failed to comprehend, like the “Dementor Exposure Treatment”, which looked and smelled like ordinary chocolate. Or the “Bafflesnaffle Counter”, which looked like a small quivering egg and carried a placard showing how to jam it up someone’s nostril.

“A definite buy at five Galleons, wouldn’t you agree?” Harry said to Professor McGonagall, and the teenage salesgirl hovering nearby nodded eagerly.

Harry had expected the Professor to make some sort of approving remark about his prudence and preparedness.

What he was getting instead could only be described as the Evil Eye.

“And just
why
,” Professor McGonagall said with heavy scepticism, “do you expect to
need
a healer’s kit, young man?” (After the unfortunate incident at the Potions shop, Professor McGonagall was trying to avoid saying “Mr. Potter” while anyone else was nearby.)

Harry’s mouth opened and closed. “I don’t
expect
to need it! It’s just in case!”

“Just in case of
what?
”

Harry’s eyes widened. “You think I’m
planning
to do something dangerous and
that’s
why I want a medical kit?”

A look of grim suspicion and ironic disbelief was the answer.

“Great Scott!” said Harry. (This was an expression he’d learned from the mad scientist Doc Brown in
Back to the Future
.) “Were you also thinking that when I bought the Feather-Falling Potion, the Gillyweed, and the bottle of Food and Water Pills?”

“Yes.”

Harry shook his head in amazement. “Just what sort of plan do you think I have
going
, here?”

“I don’t know,” Professor McGonagall said darkly, “but it ends either in you delivering a ton of silver to Gringotts, or in world domination.”

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”

This hilarious joke failed to reassure the witch giving him the Look of Doom.

“Wow,” Harry said, as he realised that she was serious. “You really think that. You really think I’m planning to do something dangerous.”

“Yes.”

“Like that’s the
only
reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don’t take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but
what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with
?”

“Gryffindors,” spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful enthusiasm and high spirits.

“Deputy Headmistress Professor Minerva McGonagall,” Harry said, putting his hands sternly on his hips. “I am not going to be in Gryffindor -”

At this point the Deputy Headmistress interjected something about how if he
was
she would figure out how to kill a hat, which odd remark Harry let pass without comment, though the salesgirl seemed to be having a sudden coughing fit.

“- I am going to be in Ravenclaw. And if you really think that I’m planning to do something dangerous, then, honestly, you don’t understand me
at all.
I don’t
like
danger, it is
scary.
I am being
prudent
. I am being
cautious
. I am preparing for
unforeseen contingencies
. Like my parents used to sing to me:
Be prepared! That’s the Boy Scout’s marching song! Be prepared! As through life you march along! Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared - be prepared!
”