Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Harry could picture the Earth, now, in the midst of the starfield, the blue-white orb.

  ...and I won't let them!

  "Expecto Patronum!"

  The words came out a little halting, and when the human shape burst back into existence it was dim at first, moonlight instead of sunlight, white instead of silver.

  But it strengthened, slowly, as Harry breathed in deliberate rhythm, recovering. Letting the light drive back the darkness from his mind. Remembering the things that he had almost forgotten, and channeling them back into the Patronus Charm.

  Even when the light blazed full and silver once more, illuminating the corridor more brightly than the gas lamps, banishing fully the cold, Harry's limbs still shook. That had been too close.

  Harry took a deep breath. All right. It was time to reconsider the situation now that his thoughts were no longer being artificially darkened by Dementors.

  Harry reviewed the situation.

  ...still looked pretty hopeless, actually.

  It wasn't the crushing despair of before, but Harry still felt wobbly, to put it mildly. He didn't dare go dark and it was his dark side that had the ability to take this level of problem in stride. It was his dark side that would have laughed scornfully at the very concept of giving up just because he'd lost Professor Quirrell and was marooned in the depths of Azkaban and had been seen by a police officer. The ordinary Harry was not able to take that sort of thing in stride.

  But there wasn't any option except to keep moving forward anyway. You couldn't get any more pointless than giving up before you'd actually lost.

  Harry looked around.

  Dim gas lights lit a corridor of grey metal, whose sides and floor and ceiling were slashed in places, gouged and melted, telling anyone who cared to look that there had been battle here.

  Professor Quirrell could have repaired it easily enough, if he'd...

  The sense of betrayal struck Harry with full force, then.

  Why... why did he... why...

  Because he's evil, said Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, quietly and sadly. We told you so.

  No! thought Harry desperately. No, it doesn't make sense, we were going to commit the perfect crime, the Auror could have been Obliviated, the corridor repaired, it wasn't too late but it would have BEEN too late if he'd died!

  But Professor Quirrell was never really planning to commit the perfect crime, said the grim voice of Slytherin. He wanted the crime to be noticed. He wanted everyone to know that someone had killed an Auror and broken Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban. He would have prepared some kind of evidence, some proof he could reveal of your involvement, to use as blackmail against you; and you would have been bound to him forever.

  Harry's Patronus almost went out, then.

  No... Harry thought.

  Yes, said the other three parts of him sadly.

  No. It still doesn't make sense. Professor Quirrell had to know I would turn against him the instant I saw him kill an Auror. That I might very well go ahead and confess to Dumbledore, hoping to plead the true fact that I was tricked. And... in terms of blackmail, does his killing an Auror against my will, really add all that much to breaking Bellatrix out of Azkaban with my willing help? It would have been more cunning to keep the evidence of my involvement with the basic crime, but still pretend to be my ally for as long as he could, saving the blackmail to use only if it became necessary...

  Rationalization, said Slytherin. So why did Professor Quirrell do it, then?

  And Harry thought with a tinge of desperation - knowing, even as he thought it, that he was motivated in part by a desire to reject reality, and that wasn't how the technique was meant to be wielded - I notice that I am confused.

  There was internal silence. None of the parts of himself seemed to have anything to add to that.

  And Harry continued to take stock of the moderately hopeless-looking situation.

  Did Harry need to re-evaluate the probability that Bellatrix was evil?

  ...not in any mission-relevant sense. It was a given that Bellatrix was currently evil. Whether she was an innocent who'd been made that way by torture and Legilimency and unspeakable rituals, or whether she'd chosen it of her own will, didn't have much bearing on the current situation. The key fact was that while Bellatrix thought Harry was the Dark Lord, she would obey him.

  That was one resource, then. But Bellatrix was starved and nine-tenths dead...

  'Oh, I feel a little better now, how strange...'

  Bellatrix had said that, in her shattered voice, after Harry's Patronus had blazed out of control.

  Harry thought, and he couldn't have quite said why he thought this, it might have just been his own mind making things up, but... it seemed likely that what the Dementors had taken from you long ago was lost forever. But what the Dementors had taken from you recently, the True Patronus Charm might give back. Like the difference between emptying a cup, and the unused cup fading away. Bellatrix, then, might have got back what she'd lost in just the last week or so. Not any happy memories, those would have been eaten years ago. But whatever strength and magic had been drained from her in just the last week, she might have regained. Like the equivalent of getting a week of rest, a week to build up her magic again...

  Harry looked at Professor Quirrell's snake form.

  ...maybe enough for an Innervate.

  If awakening Professor Quirrell was, in fact, a smart thing to do.

  Some of the despair came back to Harry, then. He couldn't trust Professor Quirrell, couldn't trust that reviving him would be wise, not after what had just happened.

  Steady, Harry thought to himself, and looked at the crumpled form of the Auror.

  Bellatrix might also be able to manage a Memory Charm.

  That could be step one, anyway. It wasn't exactly getting everyone safely out of Azkaban, and the Aurors would know afterward that something strange had happened, they might suspect Bellatrix's body and perform an autopsy. But it was a step.

  ...and would it be all that hard to get out of Azkaban? If they could get to the top of Azkaban quickly enough, before the Auror was supposed to report back in, before anyone noticed him missing, then they could just fly out through the hole Professor Quirrell had made, and get far enough away from Azkaban to activate the portkey Harry already had in his possession. (Both Professor Quirrell and Harry had portkeys, and both were powerful enough to transport two humans, plus or minus a snake. As with their doubly-concealed departure from Mary's Room, Professor Quirrell had put enough safety margin in his plans to impress even Harry.)

  Bellatrix could carry Professor Quirrell's snake form, which Harry dared not touch or levitate.

  Harry turned and strode quickly toward where Bellatrix was waiting on the stairs. He could feel his spirits reviving a little. It was starting to look like a good plan, and there was no time to waste in going about it.

  What to do with Professor Quirrell, or for that matter Bellatrix, after the portkey took them to where they were supposed to hand Bellatrix over to the psychiatric healer... well, Harry could work that out along the way. Harry would probably have to bamboozle the healer into doing something - which was going to take one hell of a bamboozling, and Harry wasn't even sure what he wanted done - but he and Bellatrix had to get moving now.

  The main problem Harry saw, as he quickly ran the whole process forward in his imagination, would come when they reached the roof. Professor Quirrell had been supposed to sneak around invisibly and Confund the monitors that would notice visitors in the aerial surroundings of Azkaban, causing them to see a repeating loop of scenery for a few minutes. Professor Quirrell had said that he couldn't Disillusion Harry's Patronus; and if they switched off the Patronus, the Dementors would notice Bellatrix was missing, and alert the Aurors...

  Harry's train of thought stumbled.

  There were times when 'Aw, crap' just didn't seem to cover it.

  Li's hands were sure despite the adrenaline, as he unlocked the bars on the Vanishing Cab
inet that linked Azkaban to a well-guarded room in the interior of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. (A one-way Vanishing Cabinet, of course. The wards permitted a few fast ways into Azkaban, all of them highly restricted, and no fast ways out.)

  Li stepped well back, pointed his wand at the Cabinet, spoke the incantation "Harmonia Nectere Passus", and not a second later -

  The door of the Cabinet burst open with a bang, and into the room strode a heavy-set, square-jawed witch with greyed hair cropped close around her head. She wore no rank signs as she wore no jewelry or other ornamentation, it was only an ordinary Auror's robes that she deemed fit to grace herself: Director Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and said to be the only witch in the DMLE who could take Mad-Eye Moody in a fair fight (not that either of those two were the sort to fight fairly). Li had heard rumors that Amelia could Apparate within the bounds of the DMLE, and this was the sort of thing that gave rise to rumors like that, he'd called in the alarm not fifty seconds ago.

  "Get into the air, now!" Amelia barked over her shoulder at the female Auror trio following behind her with police broomsticks, they must have all been crushed in there, waiting for Li to activate the Cabinet. "I want more aerial coverage on this place! And make sure you keep up your anti-Disillusionment Charms!" Then her head turned toward him. "Report, Auror Li! Do we know how they got in yet?"

  Another Auror trio holding broomsticks materialized in the Vanishing Cabinet and strode out after them even as Li began talking.

  They were followed by a trio of Hit Wizards in full battle gear.

  Then another trio of Hit Wizards.

  Then another broomstick team.

  The emaciated form that was Bellatrix Black was resting motionless on the stairs when Harry got there, eyes closed, and when Harry asked in a cold, high whisper whether she was awake, he got no response.

  A brief twitch of panic was countered by the thought that Professor Quirrell had knocked her out to prevent her from hearing the Dark Lord's cringing servant suddenly turn into a hardened criminal and then an expert battlemage. Which was good, because she wouldn't have heard Harry's voice saying 'Expecto Patronum'.

  Harry drew back the hood of the Cloak, pointed his wand at Bellatrix, and whispered as gently as he could, "Innervate."

  From the way Bellatrix's body jerked a little, Harry didn't think he'd managed to get it quite gentle enough.

  The sunken dark eyes opened.

  "Bella dear," Harry said in his cold, high voice, "I am afraid we've run into a bit of a problem. Have you recovered enough to do small magics?"

  There was a pause, and then Bellatrix's pale head nodded.

  "Very good," Harry said dryly. "I won't ask you to walk unaided, Bella dear, but I am afraid you must walk." He pointed his wand at her. "Wingardium Leviosa."

  Harry kept the flow of force down to something he could sustain for a while, and it was still probably lifting two-thirds of her current body weight. She was... thin.

  Slowly, as though for the first time in years, Bellatrix Black pushed herself to her feet.

  Amelia strode into the duty room, Auror Li and his silver badger following behind her. She'd spun her Time-Turner the moment she'd heard the alarm, and then spent a tense hour preparing her forces for entry. You couldn't loop time within Azkaban itself, Azkaban's future couldn't interact with its past, so she hadn't been able to arrive before the DMLE had gotten the message, but she should have arrived in time...

  Her eyes went straight to the corpse, uncloaked and looking very dead, floating beyond the viewing window.

  "Where is Bellatrix Black?" Amelia demanded, showing no fear before the creature of fear.

  Even her own blood froze for an instant, as the corpse parted its lips, and gurgled, "Do not know."

  Harry watched, now fully invisible once more, as Bellatrix slowly leaned down, took Professor Quirrell's wand (which Harry dared not touch), and slowly straightened again.

  Then Bellatrix pointed the wand at the snake, and said, her voice precise though it was still a whisper, "Innervate."

  The snake did not stir.

  "Shall I try again, my Lord?" she whispered.

  "No," Harry said. He swallowed the sick feeling. Harry had decided to say the hell with it and try to revive Professor Quirrell after he'd realized that the Dementors had probably alerted the Aurors by now. His high, cold voice went on, unperturbed, "Do you think you are able to perform a Memory Charm, dear Bella?"

  Bellatrix paused, and then said, hesitantly, "I think so, my Lord."

  "Eliminate that Auror's last half-hour of memory," Harry commanded. He'd thought a bit about whether he wanted to provide any justification for that, what he would say if Bellatrix asked why they weren't just killing him, in which case Harry would explain that they were pretending to be a different power group and then tell her to shut up -

  But Bellatrix simply pointed her wand at the Auror, stood silently for a time, and finally whispered, "Obliviate."

  She swayed, then, but did not fall.

  "Very good, my dear Bella," Harry said, and chuckled thinly. "And I will ask you to carry that snake."

  Again, the woman said nothing, demanded no explanations, didn't ask why Harry or the apparently-invisible Patronus caster couldn't do it. She only staggered to where the long snake lay, slowly bent over, picked it up, draped it over her shoulder.

  (A tiny little part of Harry observed that it was very relaxing to have a minion that would just follow orders so unquestioningly, and even got as far as thinking that he could totally get used to having a minion like Bellatrix, before that mind-fraction was screamed into silence by his mortally offended remainder.)

  "Follow," the boy commanded his minion, and began to walk.

  It was starting to get crowded in the duty room, almost too crowded to breathe, though there was still space around Amelia herself; if needing to breathe meant that you had to crowd Director Bones, it was better not to breathe.

  Amelia looked at where Ora was fiddling with Auror McCusker's mirror. "Specialist Weinbach," she barked, causing the young witch to start. "Any response from One-Hand's mirror?"

  "None," Ora said nervously, "it's... I mean it has to be jammed, not dead, carefully jammed because it didn't set off the alarms, but the line is so blank the mirror might as well be broken..."

  Amelia didn't let her expression change, though the part of her that was already mourning One-Hand got a little sadder and a lot more angry. Seven months, he'd had seven months left until his retirement after a full century of service. She remembered him as an eager young Auror, so very long ago, and his whole career he'd served the DMLE with perfect loyalty, at least when it came to anything really important...

  Someone would burn for this.

  The Dementor still hovered outside the window, casting its useless shadow of dread over their operations; all the creature could do was gurgle its lack of knowledge or fail to reply at all, when asked questions like 'Did Bellatrix Black escape?' and 'Why can't you find her?' and 'How is she being hidden?' Amelia was starting to worry that the criminals were already gone, when -

  "We found a hole in the roof over C spiral!" someone shouted from the doorway. "Still open, ward circumventions still active!"

  Amelia's lips peeled back in a smile like a wolf opening its jaws to eat.

  Bellatrix Black was still in Azkaban.

  And in Azkaban, Bellatrix Black would remain forever.

  She took a stride toward the window, ignoring the Dementor now, and looked up at the sky above, to check with her own eyes the patrolling broomsticks. She couldn't see the whole sky from here, but she saw ten brooms go past on a patrol pattern and that already ought to be enough to catch anyone, though she fully meant to put every broom she could in the air. Her Aurors were equipped with the fastest racing broom currently on the market, the Nimbus 2000; no unsuccessful chases for her people.

  Amelia turned back from the window, and frowned. The room was getting ridic
ulously crowded, and two thirds of these people didn't need to be here, they just wanted to be close to the center of the action. If there was one thing Amelia couldn't tolerate, it was people who did what they wanted instead of what was needed.

  "All right, you lot!" Amelia bellowed at them. "Stop hanging around here and start securing the top level of each spiral! That's right," she said to the looks of surprise, "all three! They could tunnel through a floor or a ceiling to go between them, in case you hadn't worked that out! We're going down level by level until we catch them! I'll take C spiral, Scrimgeour, you're on B..." She paused, then, remembering that Mad-Eye had retired last year, who could she... "Shacklebolt, you're on the A spiral, take with the strongest other fighters! Check every set of cells you pass, look under blankets, do the full set of detection Charms in every corridor! Nobody leaves Azkaban until the criminals are caught, nobody! And..." People looked at Amelia in surprise as her voice trailed off.

  The criminals had invented some way to prevent the Dementors from finding Bellatrix Black.

  That ought to have been impossible.

  It chilled her blood, contemplating that. It was like...

  Amelia took a deep breath, and spoke once more, in a voice of steel command. "And when you catch them, make bloody sure they're the real criminals and not our own people forced to take Polyjuice. Anyone behaves oddly, check them for the Imperius Curse. Keep each other in sight at all times. Don't assume an Auror uniform is friendly if you don't recognize the face." She turned to the communications specialist. "Tell the broomsticks. If one of the brooms peels off for no reason, half of them are to hunt it down while the rest keep patrolling. And change the harmonics on everything changeable, they may have stolen our keys." Then back to the rest of the room. "No Auror is above suspicion unless they have no family left to threaten."

  She saw it, the cold looks that came over the older faces, saw some of the younger Aurors flinch, and knew that they understood.

  But she said it out loud, just to be sure.