Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  At nine o' clock, when Harry said he had to go, the essay was only half done.

  And when Harry paused, and looked at her on the way out, and said that he thought she was worthy of Slytherin, it made her feel good for a whole minute before she realized what had just been said to her and who had said it.

  When Padma got down to breakfast, that morning, she saw Mandy see her and whisper something to the girl sitting beside her at the Ravenclaw table.

  She saw that girl get up from the bench and walk toward her.

  Last night Padma had been glad that girl roomed in the other dorm; but now that she thought about it, this was worse, now she had to do it in front of everyone.

  But even though Padma was sweating, she knew what she had to do.

  The girl came closer -

  "I'm sorry."

  "What?" said Padma. That was her line.

  "I'm sorry," repeated Hermione Granger. Her voice was loud so that everyone could hear. "I... I didn't ask Harry to do that, and I was angry with him when I found out, and I made him promise not to do it again to anyone, and I'm not talking to him for a week... I'm really, really sorry, Miss Patil."

  Hermione Granger's back was stiff, her face was stiff, you could see the sweat on her face.

  "Um," said Padma. Her own thoughts were pretty much scrambled, now...

  Padma's gaze flicked to the Ravenclaw table, where one boy was watching them with tight eyes and his hands clenched in his lap.

  Earlier:

  "I told you to be nicer!" shrieked Hermione.

  Harry was starting to sweat. He'd never actually heard Hermione scream at him before, and it was quite loud in the empty classroom.

  "I - but - but I was nice!" Harry protested. "I practically redeemed her, Padma was going down the wrong path and I turned her off it! I probably changed her whole life to be happier! Besides, you should've heard the original version of what Professor Quirrell suggested I do -" at which point Harry realized what he was saying and closed his mouth a second too late.

  Hermione clutched at her chestnut curls, a gesture Harry hadn't seen from her before. "What'd he say to do? Kill her?"

  The Defense Professor had suggested that Harry identify all the key influential students inside and outside his year and try to gain control of the entire Hogwarts rumor mill, remarking that this was a generally useful and amusing challenge for any true Slytherin attending Hogwarts.

  "Nothing like that," Harry said quickly, "he just said in a general way that I should get influence over the people spreading rumors, and I decided that the nice version of that would be to just inform Padma directly about the meaning of what she was doing, and the possible consequences of her actions, instead of trying to threaten her or anything like that -"

  "You call that not threatening someone?" Hermione's hands were pulling at her hair now.

  "Um..." Harry said. "I guess she might've felt a little threatened, but Hermione, people will do whatever they think they can get away with, they don't care about how much it hurts other people if it doesn't hurt themselves, if Padma thinks there's no consequences to spreading lies about you then of course she'll just go on doing it -"

  "And you think there's going to be no consequences to what you did?"

  Harry got a sudden sick feeling to his stomach.

  Hermione had the angriest look on her that he'd ever seen. "What do you think the other students think of you now, Harry? Of me? If Harry doesn't like the way you talk about Hermione, you'll get ghosts set on you, is that what you want them to think?"

  Harry opened his mouth and no words came out, he just... hadn't thought about it that way, actually...

  Hermione reached down to grab her books from the table where she'd slammed them. "I'm not talking to you for a week, and I'll tell everyone I'm not talking to you for a week, and I'll tell them why, and maybe that'll undo some of what you just did. And after that week, I'll - I'll decide then what to do, I guess -"

  "Hermione!" Harry's own voice rose to a shriek of desperation. "I was trying to help!"

  The girl turned back and looked at him as she opened the classroom door.

  "Harry," she said, and her voice trembled a little beneath the anger, "Professor Quirrell is sucking you into the darkness, he really is, I mean it, Harry."

  "This... wasn't him, this wasn't what he said to do, this was just me -"

  Hermione's voice was almost a whisper now. "Someday you're going to go out to lunch with him, and it will be your dark side that comes back, or maybe even you won't come back at all."

  "I promise you," Harry said, "that I will come back from lunch."

  He wasn't even thinking as he said it.

  And Hermione just turned around and strode out and slammed the door behind her.

  Way to invoke the laws of dramatic irony, moron, observed Harry's Internal Critic. Now you're going to die this Saturday, your last words will be 'I'm sorry, Hermione', and she'll always regret that the last thing she did was slam the door -

  Oh, shut up.

  When Padma sat down with Hermione for breakfast, and said in a voice loud enough for others to hear that the ghost had just told her things that were important for her to hear, and Harry Potter had been right to do it, there were some people who were less frightened afterward, and some who were frightened more.

  And afterward people did say fewer nasty things about Hermione, at least in the first year, at least in public where Harry Potter might hear about it.

  When Professor Flitwick asked Harry if he was responsible for what had happened to Padma, and Harry said yes, Professor Flitwick told him that he was to serve two days' detention. Even if it had only been a ghost and Padma hadn't been hurt, still, that wasn't acceptable behavior for a Ravenclaw student. Harry nodded and said that he understood why the Professor had to do that, and wouldn't protest; but considering that it did seem to have turned Padma around, did Professor Flitwick really think, off the record, that he'd done the wrong thing? And Professor Flitwick paused, seeming to actually think about it, and then said to Harry, in a solemnly squeaky voice, that he needed to learn how to relate to other students the normal way.

  And Harry couldn't help but think that this was advice that Professor Quirrell would never give him.

  Harry couldn't help but think that if he'd done it Professor Quirrell's way, the normal Slytherin way, a mixture of positive and negative incentives to bring Padma and the other rumor-mongers under his explicit control, then Padma wouldn't have talked about it, and Hermione would have never found out...

  ...in which case Padma wouldn't have been redeemed, she would have stayed on the wrong path, and she herself would have suffered from that eventually. It wasn't as if Harry had lied to Padma in any way, when he was Time-Turned and invisible and using the Ventriloquism Charm.

  Harry still wasn't sure whether he'd done the right thing, or a right thing, and Hermione hadn't relented on not talking to him - though she was talking a lot with Padma. It hurt more than Harry had expected, going back to studying by himself; like his brain had already started to forget its long-honed skill of being alone.

  The days until Saturday's lunch with Professor Quirrell seemed to go by very, very slowly.

  Chapter 51: Title Redacted, Pt 1

  Saturday.

  Harry had run into trouble falling asleep Friday night, which he had anticipated might happen, and so he had decided to take the obvious advance precaution of buying a sleeping potion; and to prevent it from constituting a visible sign that he was nervous, he had decided to buy it off Fred and George a couple of months earlier. (Be prepared, that's the Boy Scout's marching song...)

  Thus Harry was fully rested, and his pouch contained almost everything which he owned and might conceivably need. Harry had, in fact, run into the volume limitation on the pouch; and keeping in mind that he would need to store a large snake, and might need to store who-knew-what-else, he had removed some of the bulkier items, like the car battery. He was up to the point now where he
could Transfigure something the size of a car battery in four minutes flat, so it wasn't much of a loss.

  Harry had kept the emergency flares and the oxyacetylene welding torch and fuel tank, since you couldn't just Transfigure things that were to be burned.

  (Be prepared, as through life you march along...)

  Mary's Place.

  After the waitress had taken their order and bowed to them and left the room, Professor Quirrell had performed only four Charms, and then they'd talked about nothing of any vast consequence, just Professor Quirrell's complex thesis about how the Dark Lord's curse on the Defense position had led to the decline of dueling and how this had changed social customs in magical Britain. Harry listened and nodded and said intelligent things, while he tried to control the pounding of his heart.

  Then the waitress came in again bearing their food, and this time, a minute after the waitress had departed, Professor Quirrell gestured for the door to close and lock, and began to speak twenty-nine security Charms, one of the ones in Mr. Bester's sequence being left out this time, which somewhat puzzled Harry.

  Professor Quirrell finished his Charms -

  - stood up from his chair -

  - blurred into a green snake, banded in blue and white -

  - hissed, "Hungry, boy? Eat your fill sswiftly, we sshall need both sstrength and time."

  Harry's eyes were a bit wide, but he hissed, "I ate well at breakfasst," and then rapidly began forking noodles into his mouth.

  The snake watched him for a moment, with those flat eyes, and then hissed, "Do not wissh to explain here. Prefer to be elssewhere firsst. Need to leave unobsserved, without ssign we have ever departed room."

  "Sso no one can track uss," hissed Harry.

  "Yess. Do you trusst me that much, boy? Think before ansswer. I will have important requesst of you, which requiress trusst; if ssay no regardlesss, then ssay no now."

  Harry dropped his gaze from the snake's flat eyes, and looked back down at his sauce-coated noodles, and ate another bite, then another, while he thought.

  The Defense Professor... was an ambiguous figure, to put it mildly; Harry thought he had unraveled some of his goals, but others remained mysterious.

  But Professor Quirrell had knocked down two hundred girls to stop the ones summoning Harry. Professor Quirrell had deduced that the Dementor was draining Harry through his wand. The Defense Professor had saved Harry's life, twice, in a two-week period.

  Which could mean that the Defense Professor was just saving Harry for later, that there were ulterior motives. Indeed, it was certain that there were ulterior motives. Professor Quirrell wasn't doing this on a whim. But then Professor Quirrell had also seen Harry taught Occlumency, he had taught Harry how to lose... if the Defense Professor wanted to make some use of Harry Potter, it was a use that required a strengthened Harry Potter, not a weakened one. That was what it meant to be used by a friend, that they would want the use to make you stronger instead of weaker.

  And if there was sometimes a cold atmosphere about the Defense Professor, bitterness in his voice or emptiness in his gaze, then Harry was the only one who Professor Quirrell allowed to see it.

  Harry didn't quite know how to describe in words the sense of kinship he felt with Professor Quirrell, except to say that the Defense Professor was the only clear-thinking person Harry had met in the wizarding world. Sooner or later everyone else started playing Quidditch, or not putting protective shells on their time machines, or thinking that Death was their friend. It didn't matter how good their intentions were. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, they demonstrated that something deep inside their brain was confused. Everyone except Professor Quirrell. It was a bond that went beyond anything of debts owed, or even anything of personal liking, that the two of them were alone in the wizarding world. And if the Defense Professor occasionally seemed a little scary or a little Dark, well, that was just the same thing some people said about Harry.

  "I trusst you," hissed Harry.

  And the snake explained the first stage of the plan.

  Harry took a final forkful of noodles, chewed. Beside him, Professor Quirrell, now in human form again, was eating his soup placidly, as though nothing of special interest were occurring.

  Then Harry swallowed, and in the same moment stood up from his chair, already feeling his heart start to hammer hard in his chest. The security precautions they were taking were literally the most stringent possible...

  "Are you ready to test it, Mr. Potter?" Professor Quirrell said calmly.

  It wasn't a test, but Professor Quirrell wouldn't say that, not out loud in human speech, even in this room screened to the limit that Professor Quirrell had secured with further Charms.

  "Yep," Harry said as casually as he could.

  Step one.

  Harry said "Cloak" to his pouch, drew forth the Cloak of Invisibility, and then unstuck the pouch from his belt and threw it toward the other side of the table.

  The Defense Professor stood up from his own seat, drew his wand, bent down, and touched his wand to the pouch, murmuring a quiet incantation. The new enchantments would ensure that Professor Quirrell could enter the pouch on his own in snakeform, and leave it on his own, and hear what went on outside while he was in the pouch.

  Step two.

  As Professor Quirrell stood up from where he'd bent over by the pouch, and put away his wand, his wand happened to point in Harry's direction, and there was a brief crawling sensation on Harry's chest near where the Time-Turner lay, like something creepy had passed very close by without touching him.

  Step three.

  The Defense Professor turned into a snake again, and the sense of doom diminished; the snake crawled to the pouch and into it, the pouch's mouth opening to admit the green shape, and as the mouth closed again behind the tail, the sense of doom diminished further.

  Step four.

  Harry drew his wand, being careful to stand still as he did it, so that the Time-Turner would not move from where Professor Quirrell had anchored the hourglass within the shell in its current orientation. "Wingardium Leviosa," murmured Harry, and the pouch began to float toward him.

  Slowly, slowly, as Professor Quirrell had instructed, the pouch began to float toward Harry, who waited alert for any sign the pouch was opening, in which case Harry was to use the Hover Charm to propel it away from him as fast as possible.

  As the pouch came within a meter of Harry, the sense of doom returned.

  As Harry reattached the pouch to his belt, the sense of doom was stronger than it had ever been, but still not overwhelming; it was tolerable.

  Even with Professor Quirrell's Animagus form lying within the extended space of the pouch resting on Harry's very hip.

  Step five.

  Harry sheathed his wand. His other hand still held the Cloak of Invisibility, and Harry drew that cloak over himself.

  Step six.

  And so in that room shielded from every possible scrying, which Professor Quirrell had personally and further secured, it was not until after Harry was wearing the true Cloak of Invisibility that he reached beneath his shirt and twisted the outer shell of the Time-Turner just once.

  The Time-Turner's inner hourglass stayed anchored and motionless, the setting twisted around it -

  The food vanished from the table, the chairs leaped back into place, the door sprang open.

  Mary's Room was deserted, as it should have been, because Professor Quirrell had earlier contacted Mary's Place under a false name to inquire whether the room would be available at this hour - not to reserve it, not to place a canceled reservation that might be noted, but only to inquire.

  Step seven.

  Staying under the Cloak of Invisibility, Harry left through the open door. He navigated the tiled hallways of Mary's Place to the well-stocked bar that greeted new entrants, tended by the owner, Jake. There were only a few people at the bar, in the morning before proper lunchtime, and Harry had to wait invisibly by the door for several minutes, list
ening to the murmur of conversation and the gurgle of alcohol, before the door opened to admit a huge genial Irishman, and Harry slipped out silently in his wake.

  Step eight.

  Harry walked for a while. He was well away from Mary's Place when he turned off Diagon Alley into a smaller alley, at the end of which lay a shop that was dark, the windows enchanted to blackness.

  Step nine.

  "Sword fish melon friend," Harry spoke the passphrase to the lock, and it clicked open.

  Within the shop was also darkness, the light from the open door briefly illuminating it to show a wide, empty room. The furniture shop which had once operated here had gone bankrupt a few months ago, according to the Defense Professor, and the shop had been repossessed, but not yet resold. The walls were painted a simple white, the wooden floor scratched and unpolished, a single closed door set in the back wall; this had been a showroom, once, but now it showed nothing.

  The door clicked shut behind Harry, and then the darkness was pitch and complete.

  Step ten.

  Harry took out his wand and said "Lumos", lighting the room with white glow; he took his pouch from his belt (the sense of doom growing a little sharper as he grasped it with his fingers) and lightly tossed it to the opposite side of the room (the sense of doom fading almost completely). And then he began to take off the Cloak of Invisibility, even as his voice hissed, "It iss done."

  Step eleven.

  From the pouch poked a green head, followed shortly by a meter-long green body as the snake slithered out. A moment later, the snake blurred into Professor Quirrell.

  Step twelve.

  Harry waited in silence while the Defense Professor recited thirty Charms.

  "All right," Professor Quirrell said calmly, when he had finished. "If anyone is still watching us now, we are in any case doomed, so I will speak plainly and in human form. Parseltongue does not quite suit me, I fear, as I am neither a descendant of Salazar nor a true snake."

  Harry nodded.

  "So, Mr. Potter," said Professor Quirrell. His gaze intent, his pale blue eyes dark and shadowed in the white light coming from Harry's wand. "We are alone and unobserved, and I have an important question to ask you."