Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  So Harry tried it again, and that time it felt true. But another twist at the doorknob showed it hadn't worked. No surprise there.

  Time to bring out the big guns. Harry drew a deep breath. This spell was one of the most powerful he'd learned so far.

  "Alohomora!"

  Harry staggered a little after saying it.

  And the classroom door still didn't open.

  That shocked Harry. Harry hadn't been planning to go anywhere near Dumbledore's forbidden corridor, of course. But a spell to open magical locks had seemed like a useful sort of spell anyway, and so Harry had learned it. Was Dumbledore's forbidden corridor meant to lure people so stupid that they didn't notice the security was worse than what Draco Malfoy could put on it?

  Fear was creeping back into Harry's system. The placard in the medical kit had said the Numbcloth could only safely be used for up to thirty minutes. After that it would come off automatically, and not be reusable for 24 hours. Right now it was 6:51pm. He'd put on the Numbcloth about five minutes ago.

  So Harry took a step back, and considered the door. It was a solid panel of dark oaken wood, interrupted only by the brass metal doorknob.

  Harry didn't know any explosive or cutting or smashing spells, and Transfiguring explosive would have violated the rule against Transfiguring things to be burned. Acid was a liquid and would have made fumes...

  But that was no obstacle to a creative thinker.

  Harry laid his wand against one of the door's brass hinges, and concentrated on the form of cotton as a pure abstraction apart from any material cotton, and also on the pure material apart from the pattern that made it a brass hinge, and brought the two concepts together, imposing shape on substance. An hour of Transfiguration practice every day for a month had gotten Harry to the point where he could Transfigure a subject of five cubic centimeters in just under a minute.

  After two minutes the hinge hadn't changed at all.

  Whoever had designed Draco's locking spell, they'd thought of that, too. Or the door was part of Hogwarts and the castle was immune.

  A glance showed the walls to be solid stone. So was the floor. So was the ceiling. You couldn't separately Transfigure a part of something that was a solid whole; Harry would have needed to try Transfiguring the whole wall, which would have taken hours or maybe days of continuous effort, if he could have done it at all, and if the wall wasn't contiguous with the rest of the whole castle...

  Harry's Time-Turner wouldn't open until 9pm. After that he could go back to 6pm, before the door was locked.

  How long would the torture spell last?

  Harry swallowed hard. Tears were coming into his eyes again.

  His brilliantly creative mind had just offered the ingenious suggestion that Harry could cut his hand off using the hacksaw in the toolset stored in his pouch, which would hurt, obviously, but might hurt a lot less than Draco's pain spell, since the nerves would be gone; and he had tourniquets in the healer's kit.

  And that was obviously a hideously stupid idea that Harry would regret the rest of his entire life.

  But Harry didn't know if he could hold out for two hours under torture.

  He wanted out of this classroom, he wanted out of this classroom now, he didn't want to wait in here screaming for two hours until he could use the Time-Turner, he needed to get out and find someone to get the torture spell off his hand...

  Think! Harry screamed at his brain. Think! Think!

  The Slytherin dorm was mostly empty. People were at dinner. For some reason Draco himself wasn't feeling very hungry.

  Draco closed the door to his private room, locked it, Charmed it shut, Quieted it, sat down on his bed, and started to cry.

  It wasn't fair.

  It wasn't fair.

  It was the first time Draco had ever really lost before, Father had warned him that losing for real would hurt the first time it happened, but he'd lost so much, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair for him to lose everything the very first time he lost.

  Somewhere in the dungeons, a boy Draco had actually liked was screaming in pain. Draco had never hurt anyone he'd liked before. Punishing people who deserved it was supposed to be fun, but this just felt sick inside. Father hadn't warned him about that, and Draco wondered if it was a hard lesson everyone had to learn when they grew up, or if Draco was just weak.

  Draco wished it were Pansy screaming. That would have felt better.

  And the worst part was knowing that it might have been a mistake to hurt Harry Potter.

  Who else was there for Draco now? Dumbledore? After what he'd done? Draco would sooner have been burned alive.

  Draco would have to go back to Harry Potter because there was nowhere else for him to go. And if Harry Potter said he didn't want him, then Draco would be nothing, just a pathetic little boy who could never be a Death Eater, never join Dumbledore's faction, never learn science.

  The trap had been perfectly set, perfectly executed. Father had warned Draco over and over that what you sacrificed to Dark rituals couldn't be regained. But Father hadn't known that the accursed Muggles had invented rituals that didn't need wands, rituals you could be tricked into doing without knowing it, and that was only one of the terrible secrets which scientists knew and which Harry Potter had brought with him.

  Draco started crying harder, then.

  He didn't want this, he didn't want this but there was no turning back. It was too late. He was already a scientist.

  Draco knew he should go back and free Harry Potter and apologize. It would have been the smart thing to do.

  Instead Draco stayed in his bed and sobbed.

  He'd already hurt Harry Potter. It might be the only time Draco ever got to hurt him, and he would have to hold to that one memory for the rest of his life.

  Let him keep screaming.

  Harry dropped the remnants of his hacksaw to the ground. The brass hinges had proved impervious, not even scratched, and Harry was beginning to suspect that even the desperation act of trying to Transfigure acid or explosives would have failed to open this door. On the plus side, the attempt had destroyed the hacksaw.

  His watch said it was 7:02pm, with less than fifteen minutes left, and Harry tried to remember if there were any other sharp things in his pouch that needed destroying, and felt another fit of tears welling up. If only, when his Time-Turner opened, he could go back and prevent -

  And that was when Harry realized he was being silly.

  It wasn't the first time he'd been locked in a room.

  Professor McGonagall had already told him the correct way to do this.

  ...she'd also told him not to use the Time-Turner for this sort of thing.

  Would Professor McGonagall realize that this occasion really did warrant a special exception? Or just take away the Time-Turner entirely?

  Harry gathered up all his things, all the evidence, into his pouch. A Scourgify took care of the vomit on the floor, though not the sweat that had soaked his robes. He left the overturned desks overturned, it wasn't important enough to be worth doing with one hand.

  When he was done, Harry glanced down at his watch. 7:04pm.

  And then Harry waited. Seconds passed, feeling like years.

  At 7:07pm, the door opened.

  Professor Flitwick's puff-bearded face looked rather concerned. "Are you all right, Harry?" said the squeaky voice of Ravenclaw's Head of House. "I got a note saying you'd been locked in here -"

  Chapter 24: Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis

  J. K. Rowling coils and strikes, unseen; Orca circles, hard and lean.

  Act 3:

  Draco waited in a small windowed alcove he'd found near the Great Hall, stomach churning.

  There would be a price, and it would not be small. Draco had known that as soon as he'd woken up and realized that he didn't dare enter the Great Hall for breakfast because he might see Harry Potter there and Draco didn't know what would happen after that.

  Footsteps approached.

  "Her
e ya go," said Vincent's voice. "Now da boss ain't in a good mood today, so ya'd better watch your step."

  Draco was going to skin that idiot alive and send back the flayed body with a request for a more intelligent servant, like a dead gerbil.

  One set of footsteps went off, and the other set of footsteps came closer.

  The churning in Draco's stomach got worse.

  Harry Potter came into sight. His face was carefully neutral, but his blue-trimmed robes looked oddly askew, as if they hadn't been put on quite right -

  "Your hand," Draco said without thinking about it at all.

  Harry raised his left arm, as though to look at it himself.

  The hand dangled limply from it, like something dead.

  "Madam Pomfrey said it's not permanent," Harry said quietly. "She said it should mostly recover by the time classes start tomorrow."

  For a single instant the news came as a relief.

  And then Draco realized.

  "You went to Madam Pomfrey," whispered Draco.

  "Of course I did," said Harry Potter, as though stating the obvious. "My hand wasn't working."

  It was slowly dawning on Draco what an absolute fool he'd been, far worse than the older Slytherins he'd chewed out.

  He'd just taken for granted that no one would go to the authorities when a Malfoy did something to them. That no one would want Lucius Malfoy's eye on them, ever.

  But Harry Potter wasn't a frightened little Hufflepuff trying to stay out of the game. He was already playing it, and Father's eye was already on him.

  "What else did Madam Pomfrey say?" said Draco, his heart in his throat.

  "Professor Flitwick said that the spell cast on my hand had been a Dark torture hex and extremely serious business, and that refusing to say who did it was absolutely unacceptable."

  There was a long pause.

  "And then?" Draco said in a shaking voice.

  Harry Potter smiled slightly. "I apologized deeply, which made Professor Flitwick look very stern, and then I told Professor Flitwick that the whole thing was, indeed, extremely serious, secret, delicate business, and that I'd already informed the Headmaster about the project."

  Draco gasped. "No! Flitwick isn't going to just accept that! He'll check with Dumbledore!"

  "Indeed," said Harry Potter. "I was promptly hauled off to the Headmaster's office."

  Draco was trembling now. If Dumbledore brought Harry Potter before the Wizengamot, willingly or otherwise, and had the Boy-Who-Lived testify under Veritaserum that Draco had tortured him... too many people loved Harry Potter, Father could lose that vote...

  Father might be able to convince Dumbledore not to do that, but it would cost. Cost terribly. The game had rules now, you couldn't just threaten someone at random any more. But Draco had walked into Dumbledore's hands of his own free will. And Draco was a very valuable hostage.

  Though since Draco couldn't be a Death Eater now, he wasn't as valuable as Father thought.

  The thought tore at his heart like a Cutting Charm.

  "Then what?" whispered Draco.

  "Dumbledore deduced immediately that it was you. He knew we'd been associating."

  The worst possible scenario. If Dumbledore hadn't guessed who did it, he might not have risked using Legilimency just to find out... but if Dumbledore knew...

  "And?" Draco forced out the word.

  "We had a little chat."

  "And?"

  Harry Potter grinned. "And I explained that it would be in his best interest not to do anything."

  Draco's mind ran into a brick wall and splattered. He just stared at Harry Potter with his mouth hanging slack like a fool.

  It took that long for Draco to remember.

  Harry knew Dumbledore's mysterious secret, the one Snape used as his hold.

  Draco could just see it now. Dumbledore looking all stern, concealing his eagerness as he explained to Harry what a terribly serious matter this was.

  And Harry politely telling Dumbledore to keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him.

  Father had warned Draco against people like this, people who could ruin you and still be so likable that it was hard to hate them properly.

  "After which," Harry said, "the Headmaster told Professor Flitwick that this was, indeed, a secret and delicate matter of which he had already been informed, and that he did not think pressing it at this time would help me or anyone. Professor Flitwick started to say something about the Headmaster's usual plotting going much too far, and I had to interrupt at that point and explain that it had been my own idea and not anything the Headmaster forced me into, so Professor Flitwick spun around and started lecturing me, and the Headmaster interrupted him and said that as the Boy-Who-Lived I was doomed to have weird and dangerous adventures so I was safer if I got into them on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen by accident, and that was when Professor Flitwick threw up his little hands and started shrieking in a high-pitched voice at both of us about how he didn't care what we were cooking up together, but this wasn't ever to happen again for as long as I was in Ravenclaw House or he would have me thrown out and I could go to Gryffindor which was where all this Dumbledoring belonged -"

  Harry was making it very hard for Draco to hate him.

  "Anyway," Harry said, "I didn't want to be thrown out of Ravenclaw, so I promised Professor Flitwick that nothing like this would happen again, and if it did, I would just tell him who did it."

  Harry's eyes should have been cold. They weren't. The voice should have made it a deadly threat. It wasn't.

  And Draco saw the question that should have been obvious, and it killed the mood in an instant.

  "Why... didn't you?"

  Harry walked over to the window, into the small beam of sunlight shining into the alcove, and turned his head outward, toward the green grounds of Hogwarts. The brightness shone on him, on his robes, on his face.

  "Why didn't I?" Harry said. His voice caught. "I guess because I just couldn't get angry at you. I knew I'd hurt you first. I won't even call it fair, because what I did to you was worse than what you did to me."

  It was like running into another brick wall. Harry could have been speaking archaic Greek for all Draco understood him then.

  Draco's mind scrabbled for patterns and came up flat blank. The statement was a concession that hadn't been in Harry's best interests. It wasn't even what Harry should say to make Draco a more loyal servant, now that Harry held power over him. For that Harry should be emphasizing how kindly he'd been, not how much he'd hurt Draco.

  "Even so," Harry said, and now his voice was lower, almost a whisper, "please don't do that again, Draco. It hurt, and I'm not sure I could forgive you a second time. I'm not sure I'd be able to want to."

  Draco just didn't get it.

  Was Harry trying to be friends with him?

  There was no way Harry Potter could be dumb enough to believe that was still possible after what he'd done.

  You could be someone's friend and ally, like Draco had tried to do with Harry, or you could destroy their life and leave them no other options. Not both.

  But then Draco didn't understand what else Harry could be trying.

  And a strange thought came to Draco then, something Harry had kept talking about yesterday.

  And the thought was: Test it.

  You're awakened as a scientist now, Harry had said, and even if you never learn to use your power, you'll always, be looking, for ways, to test, your beliefs... Those ominous words, spoken in gasps of agony, had kept running through Draco's mind.

  If Harry was pretending to be the repentant friend who had accidentally hurt someone...

  "You planned what you did to me!" Draco said, managing to put a note of accusation in his voice. "You didn't do it because you got angry, you did it because you wanted to!"

  Fool, Harry Potter would say, of course I planned it, and now you're mine -

  Harry turned back toward Draco. "What happened yesterday wasn't the plan,
" Harry said, his voice seeming stuck in his throat. "The plan was that I would teach you why you were always better off knowing the truth, and then we would try together to discover the truth about blood, and whatever the answer was we would accept it. Yesterday I... rushed things."

  "Always better off knowing the truth," Draco said coldly. "Like you did me a favor."

  Harry nodded, blowing Draco's mind completely, and said, "What if Lucius comes up with the same idea I did, that the problem is stronger wizards having fewer children? He might start a program to pay the strongest purebloods to have more children. In fact, if blood purism were right, that's just what Lucius should be doing - addressing the problem on his side, where he can make things happen right away. Right now, Draco, you're the only friend Lucius has who would try to stop him from wasting the effort, because you're the only one who knows the real truth and can predict the real results."

  The thought came to Draco that Harry Potter had been raised in a place so strange that he was now effectively a magical creature rather than a wizard. Draco simply couldn't guess what Harry would say or do next.

  "Why?" Draco said. Putting pain and betrayal into his voice wasn't hard at all. "Why did you do this to me? What was your plan?"

  "Well," Harry said, "you're Lucius's heir, and believe it or not, Dumbledore thinks I belong to him. So we could grow up and fight their battles with each other. Or we could do something else."

  Slowly, Draco's mind wrapped around this. "You want to provoke a fight to the finish between them, then seize power after they're both exhausted." Draco felt cold dread in his chest. He would have to try and stop that no matter the cost to himself -

  But Harry shook his head. "Stars above, no!"

  "No...?"

  "You wouldn't go along with that and neither would I," said Harry. "This is our world, we don't want to break it. But imagine, say, Lucius thought the Conspiracy was your tool and you were on his side, Dumbledore thought the Conspiracy was my tool and I was on his side, Lucius thought that you'd turned me and Dumbledore believed the Conspiracy was mine, Dumbledore thought that I'd turned you and Lucius believed the Conspiracy was yours, and so they both helped us out but only in ways that the other one wouldn't notice."