Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (189 page)

“Harry,” croaked Professor Quirrell. “Harry. Are you there?”

It was the first time Professor Quirrell had ever called him by his first name.

“I’m here,” Harry said. Without any conscious thought, his feet were moving forward.

“Please,” said Professor Quirrell. “Please, I haven’t… much time. Please take me… to the mirror… help me… get the Stone.”

“The
Philosopher’s
Stone?” Harry said. He glanced around at the scattered bodies, but he couldn’t see Draco anymore, the revealment had worn off. “You think Mr. Nott was
right?
I don’t think Dumbledore would -”

“Not - Dumbledore,” gasped Professor Quirrell. “Because - Sprout -”

“I understand,” Harry said. If Dumbledore had been the one behind it all, he wouldn’t have needed to mind-control a Professor in order to use Memory Charms.

“Mirror… ancient relic… could hide anything… Stone could be there… many others want Stone… one sent Sprout…”

Harry repeated rapidly, “The mirror down there is an ancient relic that can be used to hide things, and it would be one possible place to hide the Philosopher’s Stone. If the Philosopher’s Stone is inside the mirror then any number of people might want to get it. One of them is controlling Sprout and that would explain what their goal really is… only… that doesn’t explain why Sprout’s controller would go after Hermione?”

“Harry, please,” Professor Quirrell said. His breathing was yet more labored now, his voice came with excruciating slowness. “It’s the one thing… that can save my life… and I find, now… I don’t want to die… please, help me…”

And somehow that tore it.

Somehow that was a little too much.

The sense of detachment that had come over Harry when Professor Sprout had arrived, the broken suspension of disbelief, was returning; his Inner Critic weighing up everything as though it were a set-piece. Timing, probability, so many people showing up at the same door, the Defense Professor’s desperation… this whole situation didn’t feel real. But he might be able to
solve it
if he just took time to think things through in advance, instead of running off at adventure’s first call. All the accumulated experience from the last year had finally crystallized into something like a touch of battle hardening. An instinct born of past disaster was telling Harry that if he just rushed on ahead, he would end up afterward in a sad conversation, realizing that he’d been stupid.
Again.

“Let me think,” Harry said. “Let me think for a minute before we go.” He turned away from the Defense Professor, looking at the unconscious bodies draped in various shapes over the floor. There’d been so many puzzle pieces already, this last year, maybe everything would just fall into place with one more piece…

“Harry…” the Defense Professor said in a faltering voice. “Harry, I’m dying…”

One more minute can’t make the difference he’s had the WHOLE YEAR to be sick it’s IMPROBABLE that his life versus death would be precisely timed to rest on this last minute no matter what happened to Hermione -

“I
know!
” Harry said. “I’ll think
quickly!
”

Harry stared at the bodies and tried to think. There was no time for doubts, for caveats, no brakes or second-guessing just take the first thoughts and
run with them -

In the back of Harry’s mind, fragments of abstract thought flitted past, heuristics of problem-solving that there was no time to rehearse in words. In wordless flashes they shot past, to set up the object-level problem.

-
what do I notice I am confused by -

- the first place to look for a problem is whatever aspect of the situation seems most improbable -

- simple explanations are more probable, eliminate separate improbabilities that must be postulated -

Professor Snape had already been here then Professor Quirrell had arrived then Harry had arrived (via Time-Turner) then the adventuring party had arrived and Draco had been revealed (part of the party) then Professor Sprout had shown up.

Too many people had shown up
synchronously
and that was too much coincidence, it was
improbable
that so many different parties would show up at the same location within a five-minute window, there
had
to be hidden entanglements.

Label Sprout’s controller as the mastermind who had ordered Hermione Memory-Charmed. The mastermind had sent Sprout.

Professor Snape had said that the Headmaster had sent him to guard the door after there’d been some sort of
disturbance
, if the mastermind had caused that as a distraction then that explained Severus’s presence as well.

Harry wasn’t sure any more that Draco had been controlled by the mastermind, that hypothesis had come to him in the spur of the moment, Draco might have just been trying to drop not-Susan so he could get into the corridor unhindered-

No that was the wrong way to think, turn it around, try to
explain
the timed presence of Draco and his adventuring party, no time for self-questioning,
run with the hypothesis,
therefore suppose Sprout’s mastermind had sent Draco or triggered his coming.

That was three arrivals explained.

Harry had shown up because his note to himself had told him to do so. That could be attributed to time travel.

That left the Defense Professor who’d said he was following Snape, only that didn’t
really
seem like an adequate reason for Professor Quirrell to show up it didn’t really make Harry feel less confused and so maybe the mastermind had also controlled the timing of Professor Quirrell’s presence somehow and even arranged for Harry himself to enter the time loop.

Harry’s mind hit a stumbling-block, he couldn’t see how to extend that reasoning further.

There was no time to stare blankly at stumbling-blocks.

Without any pause or braking Harry’s mind attacked the problem from a new angle.

Professor Quirrell had deduced a controlled Hogwarts Professor from the need for some Professor to Memory-Charm Hermione which meant that Professor Sprout’s controller had framed and then murdered Hermione which meant Professor Sprout’s controller had detailed information about Hogwarts life and maybe a personal interest in the Boy-Who-Lived and his friends.

Harry’s mind finally threw up the relevant memory, Dumbledore saying that Lord Voldemort’s strongest road to life was hidden here inside Hogwarts
run with the hypothesis
so that resurrection tool was the Philosopher’s Stone hidden inside the mirror
why had Dumbledore put the mirror into a corridor first-years could get through no ignore this question it’s not important right now
and Professor Quirrell had said the Philosopher’s Stone possessed great healing power so that part also fit.

But if it was the Philosopher’s Stone that was hidden in the mirror to keep it away from the Dark Lord, that meant the mirror also contained the one thing in the world that could save the Defense Professor’s life -

Harry’s mind tried to hesitate, to flinch away, feeling a sudden apprehension as to where this was going.

But there was no time allowed for hesitation.

-and that was also far too much coincidence just too much improbability if your mind didn’t write it off as an amazing plot twist like you were inside a story.

Could the putative Dark Lord also be manipulating Professor Quirrell so that Professor Quirrell would discover his supposed salvation at the right time so that Harry and Professor Quirrell would go get the resurrection tool from the mirror that might not even actually be the Philosopher’s Stone and then the Dark Lord’s avatar or some other servant would show up and seize it from them that would explain
all
the synchronies and negate every coincidence.

Or Professor Quirrell had known from the beginning that the one thing that could save his life was hidden inside this mirror and that was why he had agreed to teach Defense at Hogwarts and now he was finally trying to get it but then why wait until he was this sick to even try and why had Sprout shown up at the same time as Professor Quirrell -

Harry’s mind faltered harder.

His inner eye was looking in a direction it was afraid to look.

The note I sent myself said to help the watcher of stars. I wouldn’t send myself a note saying that, if I hadn’t already worked out in the future that it was the right thing to do - maybe the note is just telling me to get on with it -

A small note of confusion was promoted to conscious attention.

The coded message on the parchment… one or two lines hadn’t quite sounded right, hadn’t sounded like the code Harry would expect himself to use…

“Harry,” whispered the dying voice of Professor Quirrell from behind him. “Harry, please.”

“I’m almost done thinking,” Harry’s voice said aloud, and Harry realized as he spoke the words that they were true.

Turn it around.

Look at it from the Enemy’s perspective, from where the Enemy does their own intelligent planning, somewhere out of your sight.

There are Aurors in Hogwarts, and your target Harry Potter is now fully on guard. Harry Potter will call in Aurors at the first sign of trouble, or send a Patronus to Albus Dumbledore. Considering that as a puzzle, one creative solution is to -

- forge a supposedly Time-Turned message to Harry Potter from himself, telling Harry Potter
not
to call for help, telling him to be at the place and time you want him to be. You get the target himself to bypass all the protections he set up. You even bypass his protection of skepticism with the overriding authority of his own future self’s judgment.

It isn’t even difficult. You can Memory-Charm some random student into remembering Harry Potter handing over an envelope to be given back to himself later.

You can Memory-Charm that student because you are a Hogwarts Professor.

You don’t go to the extra effort to steal a pencil and Muggle paper from Harry Potter’s pouch. Instead you forge Harry Potter’s handwriting on wizard parchment. You can forge Harry Potter’s handwriting because you have seen it on Ministry-mandated exams you have graded.

You call Draco Malfoy ‘the constellation’ because you know Harry Potter is interested in astronomy and you are a wizard and you have taken Astronomy and memorised the names of all the constellations. But it’s not the natural code that Harry Potter would use to describe Draco Malfoy to himself, that would have been ‘the apprentice’.

You call Professor Quirrell ‘the watcher of stars’, and tell Harry Potter to help him.

You know that life-eater is how you say ‘Dementor’ in Parseltongue and you expect Harry Potter to think of the Aurors as being in league with them.

You encode 6:49 as ‘six, and seven in a square’ because you have been reading a Muggle physics book that Harry Potter gave you.

Who are you, then?

Harry noticed his breathing had sped up, and with a burst of heartrate, Harry slowed his breath down again, Professor Quirrell was
watching him
.

What if hypothetically speaking Professor Quirrell was the mastermind and had faked Harry’s message then that explained all five parties showing up the whole synchronous coordination of the comedy and then Professor Sprout was just controlled to give Professor Quirrell deniability let him blame someone else for the False Memory Charm after the dust settled but

But why would Professor Quirrell risk the fragile alliance Harry had with Draco via the attempted murder-frame

(that Professor Quirrell had ‘detected’ and ‘stopped’ allegedly via a tracer put on Draco)

Why would Professor Quirrell kill Hermione

(if his first attempt to remove her hadn’t worked)

If Professor Quirrell was the bad guy then he might have lied about everything to do with horcruxes and maybe it wasn’t coincidence at all that the only thing that could save his life was the avenue that could resurrect the Dark Lord what if the Dark Lord had arranged that too somehow

(one day David Monroe had mysteriously disappeared, presumed dead at the Dark Lord’s hands)

An awful intuition had come over Harry, something separate from all the reasoning he’d done so far, an intuition that Harry couldn’t put into words; except that he and the Defense Professor were very much alike in certain ways, and faking a Time-Turned message was just the sort of creative method that Harry himself might have tried to bypass all of a target’s protections -

And that was when Harry finally realized what should have been obvious from the very, very beginning.

Professor Quirrell was smart.

Professor Quirrell was smart in the same way as Harry.

Professor Quirrell was smart in exactly the same way as Harry’s mysterious dark side.

If you had to guess when the Boy-Who-Lived had acquired his mysterious dark side, the obvious guess was the night of October 31st, 1981.

And
And
And Professor Quirrell had known a password that Bellatrix Black had thought identified the Dark Lord and his presence gave the Boy-Who-Lived a sense of doom and his magic interacted destructively with Harry’s and his favorite spell was Avada Kedavra and and and -

The realization blasted through Harry like a vast dam breaking, releasing out all its water, bursting through his mind in an irresistible flood that swept everything away.

There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.

If different observations seem to point in incompatible directions, it means the true hypothesis is one you haven’t thought of yet.

And in those cases, when you finally think of the correct hypothesis, everything aligns behind it, beyond denial or horror, tearing away every doubt and every emotion that might stand in its path.

- and then ‘David Monroe’ and ‘Lord Voldemort’ had just been one person playing both sides of the Wizarding War and that was why the Monroe family had been killed before they could meet ‘David Monroe’ just like Moody had suspected -

Reality settled down into a single known state, one coherent state-of-affairs that compactly generated the observation set.