Chapter 7: Freeing the Mind

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The lanky teen with jet black hair and a pale, malnourished look to his face banged his fist on the console in front of him. "Damn it!" he cursed in anger.

"Watch it, kid!" the young woman next to him growled. "If you damage that console we'll have to put in for repairs for a few weeks."

"Sorry, Tonks," the teen replied, his fists clenched. "It's just, you know, we were so close. And what good is being free if I can't help the few friends I had?"

"Yeah, I know, Eon," she sighed, her previous anger melting away. "I know. I liked him, too."

The pair sat before a console and a multi-paneled viewscreen. The larger portion of the screen, set in the center, displayed a constantly shifting terrain flowing above, below, and around them. It appeared that they were flying through an underground tunnel and sewer system built and abandoned long ago. Several smaller screens showed the same scene, but in infrared and ultraviolet spectrums as well as an echo-pulse digital mapping. A series of smaller panels set between the larger screens and the console showed a black background with multi-colored code streaming down vertically, forming strange patterns.

A beeping sound from the console in front of her surprised Tonks. "The hell?" she asked after checking the incoming signal.

"Language, Tonks," a tired, but cultured voice came from behind them.

"Whatever, Remus," the girl snorted. "Look, Eon, I'm getting a message. From you."

"What?" the young man asked in surprise. "How's that possible?"

Tonks pulled a flat board out from the console and began writing on it. When she was done, she waited for the response and then gasped. "It's Harry Potter."

"The diary! Give me the board. He knows my handwriting," Eon said, grabbing the writing implement. "It might not be too late to save him."

"But I thought that Agent erased his memory," Tonks mused. "Unless they're using this to test him, to see where his loyalties are."

"Damn it, he used my name. How bad is that?" the dark haired teen asked the girl next to him.

"John or Eon?"

"John."

"Not a problem, then. Just make sure he doesn't write any word they might have flagged."

After several more moments of furious writing on the board, John smiled. "He's still got the non-detection cloak. And the cell you gave me that I never used. We're in business. Turn this ship around."

Tonks pursed her lips. "Give me the board. If we're going to do this we have to make sure it will work. Otherwise we're just risking us and him."

After several more quick messages, the girl nodded his head. "Alright, it's a go." She turned back to look at the man behind her dressed in a simple gray shirt and dirty black pants. "Remus? It's your call."

The man sighed, then nodded his head. "Get everyone up. We're going to need the whole crew."

"Now let's hope Harry doesn't blow it," Tonks muttered.

The ship was a flurry of activity. The remaining crewmembers were woken from their sleep shifts and they hurried to take up positions. On their re-entry to the broadcast zone there was a bit of excitement as a sentinel patrol passed dangerously by their position. Fortunately, careful piloting and the ship's stealth allowed the threat to pass and the mission to continue. One peep from a single sentinel and they would had to have aborted.

As soon as they were clear, Tonks found that Harry had replied. "Good, the little ickle didn't mess everything up."

A grumpy voice from one of the gunnery positions snorted. "Who's to say he didn't, and the buggers are just using him as bait for us?"

"Think positive, Alastor," Eon chuckled.

Alastor didn't laugh. "Think constant vigilance, kid. If you want to live."

"The hell?" Tonks suddenly said in surprise.

"Language, Tonks," Remus reprimanded her, only to be ignored.

"Harry says he got the map to work for him. How'd he do that?" She continued writing back to the boy through the diary they had programmed to serve as a communications device while pondering the feat. She had programmed the map herself. There was no way for it to activate for anyone except John Anderson. Nothing but John's unique brainwave pattern would trigger the item to activate. Regardless, the instructions were relayed and Harry was on his way. As soon as he left the school grounds there would be no turning back for him.

"Okay, we're at broadcast depth and our position is secure. This is as close as we can get to his block without risking detection," Remus announced.

Tonks checked their position. "Geez, kind of far isn't it?"

Remus shrugged. "Higher security in this area. This was always going to be a risky operation even before it got complicated." He left it at that, though there was more to it.

All those not at critical systems huddled around the monitors. They watched as the code snippet representing the non-detection program Harry wore as a cloak made its way out of the restricted code section of Hogwarts to the boundary between the code lines. They could seen the codes snippet but it would be invisible to the machines. Tonks gave him instructions on how to pass through the boundary undetected. Then they watched as he quickly zipped a couple hundred kilometers on his broom towards London.

"Geez, look at him go. He's reading like a bloody airplane," Remus said with a grin. "Surprising that actually works outside the special coding zone."

"Alright everyone, let's get ready to jack in," Remus said with a clap of his hands. "Tonks and I will meet with Harry and get him ready for extraction. Alastor, you're on pilot duty. Eon, think you can handle operating? Lucius will be on standby."

Eon nodded, a serious look on his face.

Then Tonks cursed loudly. "Oh, damn it!" Remus didn't even tell the girl to mind her language. They all turned to look at the screen. There, right in front of them in plain sight was the code for Harry Potter. He had somehow lost the non-detection program. And an Agent was staring right at him. Then somehow, miraculously, the Agent was disabled. But as soon as that happened, things got worse. Much, much worse.

"No," Eon said in denial.

"No, no!" Tonks echoed, pressing her face on the screen, her eyes an expression of horror.

Dozens of Agents had appeared in the code, all surrounding Harry. And there was something else. Something in the code that seemed different. Worse.

"They're going to use the kill code on Harry!"

Whatever that thing in the code was, it did it. It activated Harry's kill code.

And then all the screens in the hovercraft just went blank.

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"What the hell?" Tonks's voice carried over the confusion while the control center of the ship was eerily dark.

A second later, the main screen lit up once again. Visual, infrared, ultraviolet, and echo-mode all returned to normal. But the code screens were still blank.

"We need to get out of here," a voice said from the back, sitting by a weapons control.

"Shut it, Lucius," Tonks snapped. "We can't abandon Harry like that."

"You talk about him as if he were already unplugged, girl," the man snapped back. "Until he is no longer one of them, he is not one of us. I say we save us while there's still a chance of that."

Before Tonks could retort, Remus intervened. "It's not a question of us or them, Lucius. And we can't risk all of our lives just for one target, even if it is possibly a Potential. No matter how we may feel about him," Remus looked pointedly at Tonks. "But as Sirius would point out if he were commanding the ship right now, the mission parameters must make any reward worth the risk." Remus gestured towards the blank code monitors. "We need to know what this means. We investigate further for that reason. If the opportunity arises to retrieve the target without jeopardizing the goal of finding out what caused this black out, we take it. But we won't risk ourselves needlessly. Got it?"

The argument was settled. Remus didn't have the same charismatic type of leadership that Sirius had, but he had an air of gravity and quiet strength so that when he spoke, people listened, whether they agreed or not. He was in command now, and that was how things were going to be.

"Take us forward, Tonks. Cautiously."

The ship eased forward, moving out of the security of the hiding spot that would make it relatively safe from machine sensors. Carefully, the hovercraft left the warrens of underground tunnels to emerge to a view of a series of black towers rising in the air like apartment buildings clustered together. If they were scary, evil apartment buildings made of black, twisted demonic metal. Magnifying the screen to a hundred times normal, the crew could make out the thousands upon thousands of distinct pods that comprised each tower. Each pod held a human. Humans wired together into a massive network. All kinds of tubes and wires connected into the still forms of the people who were lying in biothermal goo.

Eon leaned forward to look at the smaller monitors and noticed something disturbing. "Why aren't there any machines in the air?"

The screen magnification changed to give a better perspective of the entire scene. He was right. There wasn't a single machine flying anywhere around any of the towers. There should have been hundreds of them.

On an impulse, Tonks rapidly increased the hovercraft's velocity, shooting forward as fast as she could.

"What are you doing? Are you insane?" Lucius's voice loudly complained.

"Look," she said, targeting the ship's external cameras to pan around the bottom of the Earth's surface. Below them was a group of sentinels, hunter-killer machines sent to find and kill any humans that ventured too near this place, and they were all lying on the ground in a rough V-shape where they had apparently all crashed simultaneously. As they approached the towers, even more machines were seen littering the ground.

"It's like they were all hit by a massive EMP. But what could have caused something like this? It would take a dozen hovercraft firing off their EMPs concurrently to create a wave this expansive," Alastor asked quizzically.

"We should check out the towers. We have to see how this affected all of the imprisoned minds."

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For several seconds, all Harry knew was the blinding white light. Then from the whiteness he began to discern a form. Only after a several confused moments, he realized that the form was himself. Harry looked around, finding himself seemingly floating directionless in nothing. It was only when he thought of his feet as "down" and his head as "up" that things suddenly settled and there was a "floor" of whiteness beneath him. Without any goal in mind, other than exploration, Harry began walking. But walking lead to nowhere. Everywhere was the same as here, which was a place Harry began to wonder existed at all. He tried to communicate.

"Hello?"

No answer.

"Am I dead? Is this heaven?" he wondered. "Or maybe hell?"

No answer.

Without anything else to interact with, Harry sat down on the "surface" and started pondering his own form. As Harry looked and examined his skin something unexpected happened. He was able to look deeper. What he saw made him catch his breath, which was the exact moment that he realized that all of this time, he hadn't actually been breathing. What had startled him was the fact that when he looked deeper into himself he hadn't seen tissue or blood or anything else a person who suddenly found themselves with X-Ray vision would have expected. He found code. Symbols wrapped in symbols, tied together as groups of symbols.

That was when it struck him. He wasn't real. He didn't actually exist.

And then the "floor" which actually had never been a floor, which when he realized it, had only been a reference point which the imaginary him had invented in reference to his non-existent feet, and that non-floor gave way. Harry was falling away, deeper and further into what he did not know nor could he comprehend. He tried to scream but it came out as a distorted gurgle of sound that fragmented and splintered into a digital echo.

And then Harry found himself thinking again. Aware again. He felt pain and soreness everywhere. It was painful, but the boy managed to open his eyes. What Harry saw was frightening. His entire face was covered by some kind of mask. When he pulled it away enough so that his eyes were not covered, he felt some kind of warm goop on him. And then he felt something sharp at the back of his head. He struggled to reach back and felt a sharp metal spike cut his hands. The spike was halfway extended and Harry struggled to move his lethargic body away from it, all the while trying to get to his feet.

Getting to his feet was difficult for many reasons. First off, his body didn't want to work. His limbs merely flopped around. Second, there was a plastic-like covering over the pink goo he was in, the goo that was really the only thing supporting his weight. His arms really didn't have the strength to break through that covering. Third, there was a series of wires and cords connected to his shoulders, back and head that further restricted his movement. It was this third reason that most alarmed Harry. He felt horrified by this, violated. It was like a really bad nightmare, only this nightmare felt more real than his waking life. Terribly much more real.

And then a bright light shone down on him and he had to shield his sensitive eyes from the burning feeling. Harry felt a presence near him. Physically near him in such a way that now it seemed nothing ever had been. And then he felt the various cords and rods around him being severed and most disturbingly, a long tube being pulled out of his mouth that was so long that he gagged twice as it was being brought up. He heard a voice, a voice that sounded oddly familiar, but he couldn't make out what it was saying. The voice sounded concerned, but he could tell it was trying to be… reassuring. And then something was lifting him up. The shock of it all was just too much, and Harry, mercifully, lost consciousness.

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Harry slowly returned to consciousness once more. It wasn't the first time that had happened over the past… he didn't know how long… but it was the first time he did so that he didn't immediately feel drowsy and fall back asleep. He remembered voices talking around him and to him sometimes during that period. And he remembered waking up to the feeling of sharp stings of electricity and the muscles on his body contracting before a warm, calm feeling suddenly overcame him and he was back asleep again. Now, though, that warm calm feeling that always proceeded a trip back to the sweet oblivion of sleep wasn't coming and he felt that he could finally think clearly. He wasn't sure if this was good or bad.

"Harry."

Harry sat up. His sides hurt from the motion, but despite this, he felt stronger than he had while lying in that strange tub of goo. That tub of goo that had felt so terribly, terribly real.

"Harry, how are you feeling?"

"Pretty awful, thanks," Harry tried to say with a cheeky tone, but his voice was hoarse and it came off rather pathetic rather than smart-mouthed. "What's wrong with my voice?"

"You've never used your real voice before, Harry. Your eyes will sting and your whole body will ache for a few days," the voice was saying. He recognized it. It wasn't exactly the same, but it sounded like Tonks.

She looked different. Her face was a bit plainer, but still pretty. With a blush he realized one major difference was that her chest size was about a cup size smaller than he remembered from their previous encounters. But it was her hair that was the most telling. Her hair was plain, unadorned brown. It didn't shift colors.

"Where am I?"

"Good question. You are on my ship, the Lupin, and currently we are about a day away from our base. But, unfortunately, that really doesn't tell you very much. The really important questions will have to wait until you are physically ready to handle the answers."

Harry knew this person. Without thinking he tried to surge to his feet to kill him, strangle him. Sirius Black. The mass murderer. He had to die!

Fortunately, though, Harry Potter was far from being in a state where he could actually cause any harm to anyone. Even if he had been able to actually wrap his hands around Sirius's neck he wouldn't have had the strength to squeeze the life out of him. As it was, Tonks merely pushed him back on his bed with one arm.

"Heh, we're really going to have to undo that 'kill Sirius Black on sight' brainwashing they have on him," she laughed. "Or maybe we should keep it? It would sure make for fun, wondering when he'll snap and try and kill you again."

Harry froze, mortified. "I… I'm sorry. I don't know why I…"

"Relax. We know you've been programmed to kill me. Half the population of London has, and I'm pretty sure everyone at that school of yours was as well," Sirius said with a grin. "I'm just that popular. Apparently, old Albus Dumbledore thinks he hasn't a chance with the ladies as long as I'm around."

"I tried to kill him with a butter knife just a few weeks ago," another familiar voice said.

"John!" Harry enthused, sitting up further. "I wasn't dreaming it! You really are alive!"

"Call me Eon, Harry. 'John Anderson' is just a fictional character in fantasy story."

Harry looked at the three of them with a million questions on his mind. The first one that made it out of his mouth was about something he was confused about. He turned to Sirius. "But… I thought I did kill you. I hit you with the Killing Curse. What really happened?"

"Ah, good question," Sirius said with a chuckle. "You did try to kill me, and your 'killing curse' did 'kill' the version of me that you saw. But the real me, the one you see now, all it did to me was put me into a coma." At Harry's stunned and guilty look, Sirius gave a wry smile. "Oh, I forgive you. But we are definitely going to have you deprogrammed before you get strong enough to try and kill me with dull silverware like your friend over there."

"So…"

"Not yet, Harry," John… or Eon, rather, answered. "You need to build up your strength first. It's really important that you're healthy before we show you too much. I know you want to know everything, and you don't want to wait, but trust me."

"Then, what now?"

"Sleep some more, Harry. This time without sedatives. When you wake up we'll feed you some real food, let your body get used to the digestive process. And we'll start some simple exercises to build your body back up," Tonks answered.

It didn't really make sense to Harry. He'd never really been all that physically fit before, but how had his body gotten so terribly out of shape like this? Where had he been before J—Eon and Tonks had found him? What the bloody hell was going on?

But he did feel tired. Sleep came again, and this time he could tell the difference between sleeping and waking.

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"Do you feel up to getting some answers now, Harry?" came Tonks's kind voice.

Nodding, Harry put the weights he was working out with away. They were not very heavy weights, just a few kilograms each, but the process of exercise invigorated him. It had been just three days since they had arrived at NewSalem, but Harry already felt much healthier. He had been blindfolded when leaving the ship, for security reasons they had said, but he was promised that once everything had been explained to him he would be free. Here he had been restricted to special quarters and always accompanied by either Tonks or Eon when going to eat or to exercise.

Tonks led him to a room where Sirius, Eon, and several others were all standing together. "First," Sirius said speaking up, "let's introduce you to the rest of the crew that took part in the first phase of freeing you." One by one, Sirius indicated the people in the room. "Of course you already know Tonks and Eon. Tonks is the ship navigator and a mission specialist. You may also recognize Remus, my second in command and the ship's primary operator," the man dressed in plain gray clothes raised his hands. "The one with the patch over his eye and the metal leg is Alastor, our tactical officer." Alastor stomped the cane he was carrying on the floor with a loud thump. "Our resident pretty boy with the long white hair is Lucius. He is our second shift operator and a programmer." The man shot Sirius a disgruntled look but then gave Harry curt nod, though there was a look of disdain on his face when he did so. "And finally, Shaq, gunner, programmer, and chief security officer." The rather tall man gave a salute.

"Now that that's out of the way, I guess there's no better way to do this than to show you," Sirius said. "If you want to understand what's going on, really comprehend it, then sit down on that chair there."

Harry looked to where Sirius was pointing. There was a chair with a very, large mechanical device on it and a large needle right behind it that looked very scary. Harry felt behind his head to feel a metal circle at the base of his neck. It was strange feeling that there. It didn't feel like part of him. He was frightened of the idea of some metal needle being put into the back of his head.

"Um, is it alright if you just… you know… tell me?" Harry asked.

Lucius snorted.

"We could tell you, Harry, but you wouldn't really believe it. Not how it really counts," Tonks said. "I can tell you that your whole life has been a dream. Or a nightmare. Depending on how you want to look at it. But unless we show you how what I'm saying is not just possible but is the truth, your rational mind will reject what I'm saying. You might say you believe us, but on your most basic level you will never really believe it, and that will hold you back. You will never be completely free. So it's best if you endure this. Then, if you don't want to do it again, you never have to."

Tonks was speaking to him earnestly and calmly, and Harry felt her reassurance. Feeling like he had been a coward, Harry hopped up on the chair. "Okay. Let's do this then."

Harry felt something sliding into the back of his head. He anticipated pain, and so at first he felt something excruciating, but then it was gone and there was only whiteness. A moment later, and he once again saw himself. For just a second he was alone. Then, a familiar form appeared in front of him.

Tonks was as he remembered her from Hogsmeade. Her face was brighter. Her… cleavage… was larger. And her hair was changing from one color to another.

"Okay, first things first, we're going to remove the behavior program. You're going to feel something messing in your head. Don't worry, though, it's to get rid of something nasty."

No sooner was she done speaking than he felt an odd sensation, like a wobble in his senses. Then it was gone. He felt… right. Like something that shouldn't have been there, something he wasn't aware of, was now gone. He was himself.

"Better?"

"Yes, actually. So… what is this place?"

"We call it the Construct. It's a virtual mindscape that allows our minds to interact with the computer. Right now your mind is in a receive-only state, which means that you cannot give commands to the construct program. Which is why everything around us appears black. Or white, depending on how you visualize a void."

"Then why do I see bright orange?"

"You see orange?" Tonks said in disbelief.

"No, it's white; I was just messing with you."

Tonks's hair turned a bright pink, then flashed to an angry red, but her lips were turned upwards in a bright smile. "So, you think you're quite the joker do you?" Then her expression turned serious. "I'm glad you still have your sense of humor, Harry, but this is really no joke. Take a look."

Beneath the whiteness suddenly appeared a city. London. The ground quickly rose up to meet them, and Harry was suddenly afraid to move.

"We're inside a computer program, Harry. Just like the program you've been living in all the years of your life. Everything you know, everything you believe to be real, has been a series of input to your brain."

Harry staggered under the revelation. Seeing his senses being fooled right before his eyes, he had no way to deny her words. Tonks walked up to a car, touched it, and it dissolved into a series of pixilated dots that then flew away into the air.

"How can this be possible? It isn't real. It can't be true," Harry tried to deny verbally, but his heart wasn't in his words.

"Real?" Tonks challenged. "How do we know what real is? When we dream we might believe the dream to be real. Everything we know comes to us as sound, light, touch, smell, and taste. These are all signals sent to our brains. Electrical impulses. How different is it from the symbols and codes of a computer, really?"

With a swipe of her hand, London disappeared and a landscape of destruction appeared in its place. Across the landscape of the ruined world were dotted towers. Towers where people were being held. The images shifted so Harry could see it all up close. "The world you know is an interactive collection of minds. Enslaved minds. They're held together in a network of programming that simulates the life you knew. All to keep you docile, and oblivious."

There was a sudden waver. The world shuddered and then everything went black. Harry felt the release of the metal needle that had been placed in his head. He was back in the room with the crew of the Lupin. Back in reality. It seemed… abrupt.

"What's going on?" he heard Tonks ask. Apparently, that wasn't the way the demonstration was supposed to end.

"There was an instability in the Construct program. We got some kind of strange feedback from Harry's device and the whole program started to shut down on us," Sirius said with a frown.

"What? How's that possible? The Construct program has the most safety features of any program," Remus was protesting. "There hasn't been a problem like this reported. Ever."

"I don't know," Sirius answered. "Harry, how are you feeling? Are you okay?"

Harry nodded. "Sirius. Sirius Black," he said to himself. Then he looked up with a half-hearted smile. "Well, no sudden desire to murder you. I guess I'm deprogrammed now?"

The group turned to look at him in mild surprise.

"You're taking this rather well," Eon said. "When they told me, and showed me, I nearly puked. It took an hour for me to be process it all. Are you really okay with this?"

Harry frowned. "Maybe it just hasn't hit me. You know, all the time I was with the Dursleys and all the time I wasn't at Hogwarts everything felt, you know, wrong. As if it was all just a dream. Now I know why." Suddenly, Harry's eyes widened. His body tensed.

Suddenly, Harry didn't feel quite so well adjusted. "What about Hogwarts, John," he said, reverting back to calling Eon by his old, Hogwarts name. "And Hermione, and Quidditch? What about them? They're not part of the trick too, are they?"

Lucius sneered. "Wake up kid. Time to stop believing in fairy tales. It was all a lie. All that 'special chosen boy' crap was just another way to control you. There is no such thing as magic. It's all a joke that you were weak enough to believe. Now it's time to snap out of it."

"LUCIUS!" Sirius shouted at the platinum blond man, who merely shrugged his shoulders.

"That was a lie, right, John? Hogwarts is real. And magic. I'm still a wizard, right?" Harry shook as he grabbed onto Eon, trying to cling to his identity.

"I'm sorry, Harry. Lucius was rude to talk to you like that, but it's true. There really is no such thing as magic. Hogwarts was all part of their plan to control us."

And Harry's world shattered again. Blackness claimed him and there was no hint of it being some false dream.

Author's Note: Sorry for the long delay. Life was in the way. Over the next few months I should be able to update at least bi-weekly. No promises, but I'll do my best.

Please leave a review. I like them. A lot.